The Washington Post has a nice long piece about the deplorable status of women's equality in the United Good Old Boyz Sexist States. It cites a study which suggests that one reason women are so rare in the top positions of the boyz hierarchy of power is simply because it is a freaking nightmare to deal with that much misogyny. Most women had rather not subject themselves and their families to the inevitable tsunami of sexist garbage. We could have told them that.
According to Marie Wilson, president and founder of the White House Project, the women of America need "a government commission to work toward gender equality in public office. Until the government makes expanding female leadership a policy goal, she said, it won't become a national priority."
And some 50 women's organizations asked President Obama for something like that. But what we got was the White House Council on Women and Girls -- "a sort of inter-agency task force with no full-time staff, no Cabinet-level leader and no set meeting schedule."
The crumbs that President Obama tossed to women made the good little women at NOW so happy that they cheered!
You probably want to read the whole thing, but here's a carefully chosen excerpt.
WaPo: Where to Now? -- By Vanessa Gezari
At the rate we're going, it could take 100 years for women to achieve equal representation in Congress. . The 2008 election season will be remembered partly for Hillary Clinton, who became the first woman to run a presidential campaign that was not just admirable, but credible, losing the Democratic nomination by a slim margin. And for Sarah Palin, the second woman in history to hold the vice presidential spot on a major party ticket and the first female Republican candidate to do so. .
Yet the election also epitomized a broad and somewhat disheartening trend: Women are making great progress everywhere but at the very top. . Nearly 89 years after they earned the right to vote, women hold 17 percent of the seats in Congress and 16 percent of governorships, and run city hall in 11 of the country's 100 largest cities. The United States ranks 69th in the world in the proportion of women in the lower house of its national legislature, behind Cuba, Uganda, Pakistan and Sudan. That's down from 39th a decade ago, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an organization of national parliaments. . .
Over the past decade, the share of women in state legislatures has crept from 22 percent to just 24.3 percent, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. A report published last spring by the Brookings Institution suggests that a key cause is simple: Women aren't as interested in running for office as men are. . Although women fare as well as men when they do compete in elections, roughly 80 percent of men and women don't believe that's the case, the study found. "If you think the electoral environment is biased against you, it might just be a rational response not to enter it," said Jennifer L. Lawless, the assistant professor of political science and public policy at Brown University who co-authored the report.
Women are less likely to be recruited to run for office than men, the study found, and although they have as much or more experience doing things that could easily transfer to politics, such as fundraising or organizing group events, they consistently view themselves as less qualified to be candidates. They are more likely to view political activities as unpleasant, and even if they don't, women are still responsible for the majority of household tasks and child care, limiting their freedom to pursue what is often a third career. "If women aren't running the world, it's probably because men aren't running the vacuum cleaners," said Rhode, the Stanford law professor.
The study also found that women are more concerned than men about losing their privacy. That may be partly because a key aspect of what defines them culturally -- childbearing and child-rearing -- is on display in a way that it isn't for men. "Voters never ask male candidates how they take care of their children. They just assume their wives do that," said Sarah E. Brewer, former associate director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. "For women, that is part of your résumé about whether you're qualified to even have the job. In no other job is that the case."
Read the whole thing. .
Misogyny Jon Favreau Hillary Clinton Feminist Politics News Gender Women's History Equal Representation Sarah Palin Feminist Trailblazers
