He’s speaking directly about leadership in China, but Matthew Yglesias hits the ball out of the park with this general observation about the roles of women in politics.
Politics is a lot like, say, higher education or advertising insofar as there’s a big difference between the people in “management” roles and the people who are respected as leaders in the field. Few students who want to go into academia say “Yeah, maybe I’ll be a famous historian, but I really want to be a college dean!”; by the same token, most kids with political aspirations want to be like Barack Obama or Sarah Palin, not Tim Kaine or — heaven forbid — Michael Steele. The fact that women are getting sorted into administration instead of leadership indicates that the dynamics that keep women underrepresented in elected office and high-profile professorships are probably more complicated and harder to fix than they seem.
It’s something to keep an eye on. It’s also something to keep reminding those who care about erasing relative opportunity, recognition, and power gaps between the (various) sexes. It’s great that Nancy Pelosi (the House of Representatives), Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State), Elana Kagan (Harvard, possibly the Supreme Court) are filling roles of real, visible leadership in politics. But it’s important to remember that, say, Margaret Thatcher also had an incredible leadership role in England without… really doing much to develop a deep bench of promising women with potential to rise not just into administration but leadership roles in the future.
We have presidential
Submitted by colorlessblue (not verified) on Sun, 2010-05-30 23:19.We have presidential elections here in Brazil and a woman, Dilma Roussef, has real chance to be elected for the first time in History. She’s been politically active her whole life, since she was a student and went underground for joining the resistance against the dictatorship government (curious fact: the second option on auto-complete on Google when I started typing her name was “Dilma Roussef terrorista”). She’s been a founding member of an important political party, but never held any elected position. It was always campaign adviser (for men), of apointed positions (Municipal Secretary of Treasury, State Secretary of Energy, then Minister of Energy, in 2003, and Chief of Staff in 2005).
It’s my experience here that most people don’t know the name of ministers. I’m reasonably educated and politically aware and I don’t even know how many ministeries we have. I’ve known her name for years, but only because she took office as Chief of Staff after a huge scandal involving the former one. And then, almost since the last election, she’s been considered the government candidate for this year’s, so the president basically started taking her along to every public function and creating situations to make her talked about in the MSM. (it’s one of the reasons I don’t know if I should vote for her, that they used the state’s structure to pre-campaign, even before it was legal to campaign without using the state’s structure)
Anyway, my point is: she was never in an elected position, always in administration and never in leadership, until The Menz decided to put her in leadership.
And then there’s the fact that after it was decided she’d be the candidate, she passed by a extreme make-over. Plastic surgeries to change her face, started using make-up, changed the haircut and the wardrobe. Apparently she looked “angry” before, not helped by the guerrilla past. Then you have things like this, and all The Menz politicians, allies and opposition, talking to the press about how she’s prettier and looks younger. My favourite quotes are “she looks like a little girl now” and “an important characteristic of the brazilian woman is the vanity and the desire to be beautiful”.
You just can’t win.
Regarding that famous
Submitted by Sungold (not verified) on Mon, 2010-05-31 22:24.Regarding that famous historian? She’s almost certainly earning less than her dean. Maybe tens of thousands less.
Also, speaking as a fully credentialed historian, I will say that in Yglesias’ comparison, there’s just one “leader,” and that’s the dean. The historian may exercise influence. But it’s oblique and subtle. Heck, even I exercise influence through my teaching, but very few people would mistake that for what the management gurus mean by the term “leadership.”
One more thing: I quake at the thought that some kids might actually want to become Sarah Palin when they grow up. EEEEiiiiiiEeeee!
[Yup. And that was of course Yglesias’s point: nobody daydreams of growing up to be a dean or even just the department head, or a party factotum, or a comptroller, or a producer, or an underwriter, bank director, or nearly any other kind of actual mover and shaker. It’s kind of understandable to want to be the rock star, or the senator, or the news anchor, but the person who signs the rock star, or endorses the senator, or hires the news anchor usually has a lot more power. And so the question is what are we doing to move women into parity in those positions and not just the high-visibility ones? Thanks, Sungold. —fl]