For some reason, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton was a Senator from New York, nearly won the Democratic Presidential primary and is now Secretary of State, she’s the posterwoman for losing due to sexism.
Apparently, her accomplishments are all for naught because — like many men before her and many men after her — she lost a race. Well, losing is part of politics. And not every woman loses because of sexism. But, it appears, many women think that’s the reason, according to an article in Women’s eNews by pollster Celinda Lake.
On the idea that the country is not ready to elect a woman, 56 percent of women call this a major factor versus 46 percent of men. On the idea that women are held back by men there is again a perception gender gap, with 48 percent of women holding this view compared with 37 percent of men. When it comes to discrimination against women you find 45 percent of women seeing it that way compared to 30 percent of men.
A Lifetime Television survey conducted after the November 2008 elections asked women about the requirements for male and female candidates. An overwhelming 65 percent said that men and women are held to different standards. When running for elective office, only 29 percent said requirements were the same.
Note, by the way, that there’s nothing in the way of statistics that show people saying they are not personally ready to elect a woman — it’s just people saying that they think other people aren’t ready to elect women, and that they think other people hold men and women to different standards. Perception is not always reality, and citing statistics of people’s perceptions of sexism in politics doesn’t help combat actual sexism in politics.
In fact, there’s evidence that most people think men and women make pretty good political leaders.
In the Pew study, a strong majority of respondents, 69 percent, rate women and men as equally good political leaders. Only 21 percent prefer men, while 6 percent favor women.
Few attribute the small number of women in elected office to ideas such as women not being as good as men at leadership (16 percent say it’s a major reason) or women not being tough enough for politics (that’s 14 percent).
But to counter Pew’s study, Lake continues to rely on Lifetime’s survey, which is hugely annoying because she doesn’t identify whether the study was a self-selected website survey or a methodologically rigorous study (and she doesn’t link to it).
In the Lifetime survey, when women were asked to select from a list of nine possible reasons why fewer women hold elected office, 20 percent said the perception of lack of experience could be blamed. An equal number said that women are not perceived as tough enough. Eleven percent believed women would prefer to devote their attention to their family and not to politics. The remaining answer choices were in the single digits.
Oh, and, by the way, it’s all the fault of younger women, who think that silly things like policies and experience are more important than blindly voting for the female candidate (paging the PUMAs who voted for Sarah Palin!):
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