Thank you for your very thoughtful post, Michael. You make many very good points in it.
The point I was trying to make is that it is harder for a woman to be accepted as a leader than it is for a man. You can argue that I'm wrong about this, but seeing that most leaders on all levels are in fact men, it does seem that something makes it harder for women than for men to become leaders.
One such thing might be personal inclination. It could be that more men than women actually want to become leaders, so that there is a smaller pool of interested women to choose from. At the same time, it could very well be that those women who want to become leaders are every bit as qualified as the men who strive for leadership. Still, such a situation would probably still leave us with more male leaders, simply because there are more male 'candidate leaders' available.
The point I'm really trying to make is that the public and the media are more suspicious of female leaders than of male leaders, simply because they believe, consciously or subconsciously, that a woman's gender is a liability for someone who needs to be in charge of a whole nation. I admit that this is pure guesswork. Maybe, if the 'right' woman came along and asked to be America's leader, people would flock to her the way they flocked to Barack Obama this year. How do I know that lots and lots of people wouldn't love that woman candidate partly because of her gender? I can't know that such a scenario couldn't happen.
You could argue that it happened this year, when millions of Americans would have loved to see Sarah Palin as Vice President and quite possibly as President of the United States. But the problem this year was that there was an even greater number of Americans who disapproved of her. The polls I have seen clearly suggest that Palin's disapproval rate was higher than her approval rate.
You can put a large chunk of the blame for Palin's 'diapproval rate' on the media. I have to agree that lots of what the media wrote about Palin can be described as pure sexism. For example, I myself have quoted a Washington Post column by Eugene Robinson on these boards, where Robinson said something to the effect that the Republicans had been horrible this year, and one example of that was Sarah Palin's wardrobe. Well, that's just a shocking, disgusting and unbelievably sexist thing to say. As if Sarah Palin's clothes would be some sort of threat to the American people. And I wonder if any other VP or Presidential candidate has been maligned or attacked like that because of his clothes. And please note that I said his clothes. I really think that women are attacked in ways that men are not.
I think dignity and cool is a good way to counteract attacks, if you are vulnerable because of your gender or race. I think that Barack Obama was very dignified in this campaign, which may have been an absolute prerequisite for his victory. I think Palin was less dignified. I'm not saying that she crossed any lines, absolutely not, but the way she defined herself made her vulnerable to attacks. I believe she defined herself as a hockey mom, and then she asked her audience if they knew the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull. She gave them the answer herself: lipstick. That is not very dignified. Palin used her female attributes to define who she is in a way that I think backfired. I can't see Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth or Condoleeza Rice describe themselves as pitbulls with lipstick.
I want to stress once again that the media like to make fun of female candidates. Sadly, I think that part of the reason for media's behaviour is that the mocking of women is a profitable business. Many people are prepared to pay to see the spectacle of a woman being brought low, which is of course a part of the general sexism of society.
Or maybe I'm just wrong about all of this, and 2012 will be the year that America gets its first female President.
Ann
