Authors: Marianne Schnall
CL
: It’s not the case in executive office, and what’s perceived to be a lack of ambition is actually—[based on] my experience in working these races—is more often a strategic calculation. Look at Debbie Stabenow—she ran for governor in her state and then was successful in the Senate race. Her first ambition was governor, not senator.
Now, that’s different than filling in the pipeline at the bottom level and moving on up. We’re talking about the women who have already arrived
at the top. They’re not going to be able to run from county Ed Board for governor of your state, and so we’re talking already very rarefied air and, no, I don’t find it’s the ambition. I find it often to be a strategic calculation, that it’s easier to get elected to legislative office than executive office. And you know, we have a record number of women in the Senate on the Democratic side, ever increasing, we’re electing a record number, yet we almost risked having no Democratic women governors. Where women run for Senate, they’re often followed by women senators. Where women have served as governors, they’re rarely followed by women governors. And, in fact, one of the biggest phenomena that we have is actually this twofer: you get one woman Senator and then you have a greater chance of getting a second woman senator—California, Washington, Maine. You don’t see that in the governorships. In the governorships, women are not succeeded by women.
MS
: You’re an expert in this area. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you do? What would create better conditions to have more women advancing into those types of positions? Where does the change need to be?
CL
: Well, ultimately, the easiest change would be to move to a parliamentary system. If you look at women executives worldwide, they tend to come out of parliamentary, not presidential, systems. But we’re not going to change to a parliamentary system, so putting that aside, I think it’s a three-pronged effort, and people have been working on it. One would be to change the culture in which we’re operating. We need more women CEOs, we need more women generals, we need a woman at the head of joint chiefs of staff, we need a woman to emerge as the head of intelligence, which Claudia Kennedy almost did—she was in intelligence, and our first woman general in the Army. We need women executives to be
less exceptional and more common. We need women to be the leaders—we need women executives in other arenas. It helps a lot, I think, that we have a woman head of Homeland Security right now. So we need women in non-traditional posts. When’s our first woman leader of the CIA? That kind of thing. So we need to change the culture, the popular perception of woman executive leaders and really get that socialized more.
Secondly, we need more women governors. Many groups—and this is where Barbara Lee’s [of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation] interesting to talk to—have been working hard on this for decades and there has been very incremental growth. We haven’t been able to bust through.
Third, although I think it’s getting almost no attention, we have the ability this year to elect women mayors to our top cities, New York, L.A., and Houston, the three biggest cities in this country all have women running for mayor. So if we elected three women mayors of three top cities, that would help. But we need women executives in our culture and we need women executives in our political system, which means we need more women governors and we need more women in these cultural posts, if you will. And The White House Project . . . are you talking to Marie Wilson at all?
MS
: She was my very first interview. I didn’t decide to do this book until I got her blessing.
CL
: I truly believe that she, more than anybody else, really thought about cultural change. And her theory and her activities, like trying to get screenplays done where women play the presidency. Unfortunately the show [
Commander in Chief]
failed, but having a woman president, Geena Davis, in a TV show, all of that—having that HBO show that still many people thought was really kind of pseudo-Hillary—any of that stuff helps. We need to change our perception of executive leadership in this country.
The other thing that we had—and this is changing, Barbara Lee’s research shows this—for a long time when men were good on other issues, like education and healthcare, people thought they would also be good on the economy. When women were good on education and healthcare, people loved it, but it did not increase the perception that they were good on the economy. Voters thought, No,
that’s just women’s issues. They’re good on women’s issues, that’s great. I like it. But that doesn’t mean they’re any good on the economy
. In our last round of research in 2010, for the first time, being good on healthcare and education for women, predicted to being perceived as good on the economy. Now, unfortunately we haven’t had enough races to know if that still matters or not, if that was an aberration or a pattern, but if that pattern continues, that’s a big plus.
MS
: There seem to be a lot of changing paradigms right now in our culture, even judging from the results of the last election. I was curious what shifts or changes you see emerging that interest you or that you feel hopeful about?
CL
: Well, one thing about changing paradigms, and it’s probably the Colin Powell effect, but for twenty years—this is before Barack Obama, a good ten years before Barack Obama—people always felt that we would have an African American president before we would have a woman president.
MS
: Really?
CL
: Yeah. So when you’re talking about breaking down barriers, the voters have a self-conscious awareness of their hesitation. You know, one of the most important things I think that shows the cultural barrier we have is when you ask voters, “Would you vote for a woman?”—this doesn’t even have to be president, this is senator, governor—people say, “Yeah, I would
vote for a woman, if she were qualified.” No one ever says, “I would vote for a man, if he were qualified.” So what is in that word “qualified”? And over three-quarters of voters—men and women—believe that it is more difficult for a woman to appear qualified. And a third of voters believe that their friends and neighbors—not themselves, oh God no, not themselves—but their friends and neighbors are more likely to believe that a man is qualified than a woman. So we’ve got to bust open this “qualified” piece, and we’ve got to get to a situation where voters assume a woman is qualified. I think Sarah Palin was a tremendous setback in that regard, and I think it’s too bad because actually when she was governor in Alaska, she was considered pretty qualified. And she had beaten a sitting Republican incumbent. She was a perceived expert on energy. And then she just became this cultural figure, and a kind of a stereotypic character—a caricature, really, she became a caricature in my mind—and it really hurt us in terms of perceptions of women being qualified. It was too bad because I think some of it was unfair—some of it was cultivated by her, and some of it was unfair. Some of it was what worked well in Alaska didn’t translate to the lower 48, and so that was too bad. From a long-term perspective of trying to break down these stereotypes, this most recent example probably reinforced them rather than countered them. So again, we need this cultural shift in our perceptions of women’s leadership.
In terms of cultural trends that I think are most positive, the one cultural trend that is quite positive is the percentage of unmarried Americans. Because unmarried voters are more likely to vote for women than married voters. And I think unmarried women, in particular, are more likely to see a woman as strong, because they’ve had to exude such strength in their own lives. We now have 50 percent of America unmarried, not 50 percent of voters, but 50 percent of Americans, so that is helpful. What is not helpful—you would assume younger voters would be better, that’s not true. Younger women are much more Democratic and so they appear
to vote more for women
because
they’re more Democratic and so many women who run are Democratic. But if you control for all things, it’s actually the baby boomer women who are the most pro-women candidates, not younger women who tend to say, “Well, we’ve got lots of women in office. It’s not that unusual. It’s not that special.” So the aging demographics are not particularly positive for us. In terms of race, it’s mixed. African American voters tend to be very pro-women in executive leadership, but Latino voters and Asian American voters, not necessarily. Latino voters actually hang behind. Again, they vote very Democratic, so it appears they’re supportive of women, because they’re voting for Democrats and so many women who run are Democrats. But . . . I think diversity in America is not necessarily working to the advantage of electing a woman president. It works to the advantage of being a Democrat, but not necessarily getting a woman president. College-educated voters tend to be more supportive of women executives and particularly college-educated women, so that’s a helpful trend. But there are not a lot of trends. We’re stalled, honestly. Except for Hillary—and having Hillary as president would be an enormous help for women—but having Hillary contemplated for president hasn’t particularly increased the perception that other women are qualified. And this is a common phenomenon, the phenomenon of exceptionalism. And Madeleine Kunin talks about this and wrote about this a lot. When she was one of the first women governors elected in her own right, she was treated as the exception and it didn’t create a pathway, because people said “Well, that’s Madeleine, that’s not everybody.” People say, “Well, who’s Hillary? Only Hillary is Hillary.” So if she were to serve as president, I think it would help enormously. Having her contemplated for president gives us our one shot, but it doesn’t particularly create better pathways for women because people think she’s the exception, and exceptionalism works against you, not for you. So we need Hillary Clinton for president in part because for the later baby boomers, for women in their
sixties and seventies, if not Hillary, there may not be a woman president in their lifetime, at least not a Democratic woman president. And, frankly, I think one of the best things we could do to create more women presidents is to have Hillary run and serve well. I think that would break it open, because certainly she would bring women in, in other leadership arenas.
MS
: For this book, Hillary’s name comes up in almost every interview, and I can’t help but think about the enormous pressure there must be on her to run because people say that very thing. I think it was Robin Morgan who, when I asked if she would see a woman president in her lifetime said, “If Hillary runs, yes; if not, no.” It’s that stark. I think we’re all hoping that she will run. Speaking about Hillary, and this conundrum about a woman seeming qualified or tough enough, I think about the catch-22 that women face because they can’t seem too soft, too emotional either. When Hillary ran we had that whole Hillary nutcracker thing or the commentator who said that when Hillary talks, men hear “take out the garbage.” I’m curious, because you’ve worked with so many women candidates, what is your overall advice for a strategy for a woman running for political office today?
CL
: It’s definitely true to say that nobody ever called a man a bitch. The other dilemma we have is voters will vote for a man they don’t like, if they think he’s qualified. They will
not
vote for a woman they don’t like, if they think she’s qualified. So you have to maintain your likability while you are establishing your strength and your qualifications. Now the good news is that the things that make you more qualified in voters’ minds also tend to make you more likable, and that’s going to be great for women. They always knew they had to maintain these two dimensions, but I think they thought,
What established me as effective and qualified went against my likability
. There has been a lot of work that shows perceptions of
effectiveness and strength also increase affect, so that is they’re not mutually exclusive traits, they’re not two paths. It used to be that voters thought women weren’t tough enough, and Barack Obama has changed that a little bit. It’s ironic—people facetiously say Bill Clinton was the first African American president, and in some ways Barack Obama was the first female president, because he has a lot of feminist traits in his leadership. He’s perceived by voters to be strong, but less aggressive; he’s perceived by voters to be more negotiation-oriented. So many of the aspects of his new style of leadership have some feminine qualities to them, so what we found is that while voters are less concerned now with whether women are tough enough for the job, they still want women to be strong. When you try to prove that you are tough and maintain your likability, it is very, very hard. It’s a lot easier to prove that you’re strong and be likable than it is to prove that you’re tough and be likable.
MS
: You’ve dedicated your whole career to this. Sometimes this whole conversation gets framed as just equality for equality’s sake, but why is this important? Steering away from generalizations, what qualities would women bring, do you think, to Washington or to having influence in the world that are important now?
CL
: Well, I think first off, independent of difference, if you’re wasting half your talent, if you’re not using half of your talent, if you’re tying one hand behind your back, then you have a problem. And in today’s tough world, where America’s really struggling, I think, to maintain its leadership in the world, I think you cannot afford to waste half your talent. Secondly, I think as a country and a culture—and actually Americans think that one of the things that we are unique in and believe in more than anybody, and they may think we’re more unique in it than we are—but we are very strong about equality for women, equality for girls. We can’t have true equality
for girls if they never see themselves in penultimate leadership positions. And it isn’t just a question of not seeing a woman as president. Not seeing a woman as chief of staff in the military. Not seeing a woman as the leading general or leader of any of the major branches of the military. Not seeing a woman governor in their state, ever. Not seeing a woman head of a major company in their state. Not seeing a woman mayor of the major city in their state. This really influences how they see themselves, so it has a profound impact on what girls think is possible for themselves . . . and in what, I think, is the core anchor principle of our culture and our country.