Misogyny and Double Standards for Women in Politics and at Work

Misogyny is a difficult and important concept to understand if we are to grasp many of the challenges that women face in politics and in the workplace. One source of confusion is that misogyny is actually an umbrella term that encompasses multiple concepts such as sexism, patriarchy, gender-based oppression, and internalized oppression. Both women and men participate in perpetuating the misogynistic attitudes, behaviors, and practices motivated by hatred or distrust of women. Such concepts are largely unconscious in individuals and often institutionalized in the policies and practices of organizations and societal institutions. I wrote about some post-election examples of misogynistic behaviors in a recent article. Another way to understand misogyny is to consider examples of double standards that women regularly experience. In order to succeed, women are often evaluated against different and harsher standards than are men, as the following examples show.

  • Women are given more negative performance reviews with more negative personality criticisms.
  • Women get interrupted more and then are criticized for not talking more in meetings.
  • Women must walk a tightrope between being effective versus likeable and too feminine versus not feminine enough.
  • Women in academia receive less research funding and less tenure credit for publishing, even though they publish as much as men also on the tenure track.
  • The gender-wage gap persists in most professions in the United States, including for teachers and nurses, for female physicians, and in the financial sector. Maria Tadeo of Bloomberg News reports on a study by the World Economic Forum showing that it will take 170 years to achieve pay equity due to continuing deterioration in progress over the past twelve months.
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times writes that we must consider the double standards women face in politics, noting that women are subjected to greater scrutiny than men in politics. He asks us to imagine how Hillary Clinton would have fared in her presidential campaign if she had
  • been married three times with five children by three husbands and referred to her daughter as “a piece of ass”
  • boasted about the size of her vagina during an election debate
  • had less experience in government or the military than any person who had ever become president
  • been caught on tape referring in a degrading way to men’s genitals
  • been accused of sexual assault by more than fifteen people
  • been sued for racial discrimination and retweeted white supremacists
  • filed six bankruptcies and withheld payment from many people who worked for her
I have seen people and organizations change once leaders become aware and support each other. I recently advised an organization trying to be more fair and inclusive to white women and to people of color. After a series of awareness training sessions, the managers began to call each other out about applying double standards when making hiring or promotion decisions. Their decisions became more conscious and intentional, resulting in a significant increase over time in hires and promotions of white women and people of color. Here are actions we can take to effectively change double standards.
  • Join together with other women and men to call out misogynistic behaviors or practices when they occur so that such actions do not remain unconscious.
  • Do not allow misogynistic behavior to be seen as “normal” or “just the way men are” either within yourself or others.
  • Form study groups to read and discuss double standards applied to white women and to people of color.
  • Take action together to recommend changes in your community or organization.
Do you have success stories? Let us hear about them so we can learn from each other.   The image in this post is courtesy of Nguyen Hung Vu (CC BY 2.0)]]>

Six Reasons Why We Need More Women in Government

Decades of research show that women make a difference in elected office. Women do govern differently, yet we are losing representation in the United States. Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times, reports these results of the November 2016 election:

  • The number of female governors dropped from six to five.
  • The number of women in Congress stayed the same at 104, or 19 percent of the seats in the House and Senate. One seat was gained in the Senate and one lost in the House.
  • Thirteen states will send no women to the new 115th Congress.
Why does this matter? Miller summarizes a large body of data that shows six reasons why we need more women in government:
  1. Women are more collaborative and bipartisan than men. Miller reminds us of the time in 2013 when Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, joined with several other Senate women representing both parties to create a plan to reopen the government after a Senate-led shutdown. Research shows that women build coalitions and reach consensus more quickly because they interrupt less, listen more, pay attention to nonverbal cues, tend to be less partisan, and use democratic leadership styles instead of the autocratic styles favored by many men.
  2. Women push for more policies meant to support women, children, social welfare, and national security. Women in Congress pushed to get health-care coverage for women included when the Affordable Care Act was being passed, pushed for the enforcement of sexual harassment prevention and adjudication rules in the military, fought to get women included in medical trials, and fought for the inclusion of child-care vouchers in welfare reform.
  3. Women sponsor and cosponsor more bills. Women actually do get bills passed at the same rate as men, except when the bills affect women, health, education, and social welfare issues. In these cases, bills sponsored by women are more likely to die in committee because Congressional committees have few women chairs and fewer women’s voices.
  4. Women bring 9 percent more federal money home to their districts.
  5. Women are significantly more likely than men to sponsor bills in areas of civil rights, health, and education. Men sponsor more bills in agriculture, energy, and macroeconomics.
  6. A higher share of female legislators correlates with less military spending and decreased use of force in foreign policy. Researchers at Texas A&M University report this based on data from twenty-two established democracies gathered between 1970 and 2000. The exception is when women are in executive positions, where they seem to be more hawkish, possibly to overcome stereotypes about women being weak.
Women bring different skills and priorities to governance. Without significant numbers of women in power, though, our voices are not heard, nor are our issues prioritized, passed, and funded. I recently wrote about this as a similar challenge in the arena of public affairs. Women have been running for office in larger numbers in recent elections without making much progress in increasing our representation. We continue to need more women to run for public office. Government desperately needs our leadership style, our ability to collaborate and build coalitions, and our focus on issues of importance to women. I urge you to contact Emily’s List or your national political party to find out how to run for office in the next election. We all need you.   The image in this post is courtesy of Senator Stabenow  (CC BY-SA 2.0)]]>

The Long March to Break the Highest Glass Ceiling: The Next Step Taken

Women in the United States struggled many years to win the right to vote, and we still have not been able to win the presidency. At least fifty-two other countries in the world have had a female head of state—some countries multiple times—but we have not. Hillary Clinton’s recent run was not successful, but she took us one more step along a very long journey for women in the United States. Gail Collins of the New York Times reminds us that when women implored the men writing the US Constitution to include women’s rights, the men laughed and ignored the request. It took almost another 150 years for women to win the right to vote in 1920. Once the struggle to win the vote got underway in earnest, it took fifty-two years of nonstop campaigning to win, and the campaigns were often met with violence, arrests, and mockery. We won the vote, but we still have not gotten the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed, which would put American women into the Constitution. I marched in the streets for the ERA and cried when it failed to pass. I am still waiting. Collins notes that even after winning the vote in 1920, women did not vote as a bloc; they voted more like their husbands, “on the basis of ethnicity, economic class, and geographic location,” a pattern that was also reflected by white women voters in this election. Collins points out that, unlike in the Civil Rights Movement, “where black Americans had grown up as a separate group, victims of endless injustice and brutality,” and fought together against the white majority (and are still fighting), white women were not a separate enslaved group. Collins explains that while white women had precious few rights themselves, “they were living in the bedrooms and parlors of the male authority figures. . . . When they rebelled, they were laughed at.” As we just saw in the 2016 election, women are still not a voting bloc. In fact, Susan Chiara explains that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump. Joan C. Williams, writing in the Harvard Business Review, notes that although a majority of married women, college-educated women, minority women, and unmarried women voted for Hillary, “WWC [white working-class] women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin—62% to 34%. If they’d split 50-50, she would have won. Class trumps gender,” and it probably always has. Chiara cites Nancy Isenberg, author of the book White Trash, as saying, “class shapes gender identity.” Chiara notes that racial fears and perceived competition with African Americans and immigrants for good jobs and opportunities are a higher concern for WWC women than is sexism. This may illuminate why the release of the Access Hollywood tapes with sexist remarks by Trump about women did not turn many WWC women voters away from Trump. The fact that Hillary Clinton ran for president as the first-ever female nominee of a major political party is a step along the road for US women. Margaret Chase Smith and Shirley Chisholm were the first women to try for the nomination of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, but they did not win their party’s nomination. Now Hillary Clinton has broken that barrier. She did not win, but Sarah Lyall describes the profound moment for many women on Election Day when, carrying with them mementos of long-dead grandmothers and mothers, they finally got to vote for a woman for president! Women proudly marched to the polls in groups wearing white to symbolize the suffragists, in pantsuits or wearing “Nasty Woman” t-shirts. Groups of women put flowers on the grave of Susan B. Anthony, who fought for suffrage but died before women’s right to vote became law. Mothers drove daughters past the childhood home of Hillary Rodham Clinton in Illinois to point it out to them. Hillary Clinton did not win, but she took us the next step along the path. Thank you, Hillary.   Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire © 2016 by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0  ]]>