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Sunday, 01 February 2009 14:37 |
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Time for another thought experiment (admittedly, one not far removed from recent and present realities). Imagine if the United States were facing an unprecedented financial-social crisis, the makings of which had been brewing for years and the solutions to which were far from obvious. Suppose the mood of the country favored genuine unity. Genuine unity, of the sort that Churchill asked of the British people as they faced years of grueling warfare against Nazi Germany; deep social cooperation to solve deep problems, not just starry-eyed rhetoric penned by a twenty-seven year old. Suppose that the U.S. had a well-respected political leader available, one with a history of successfully addressing problems of social welfare, the sort of problems that the economic crisis will generate and exacerbate and which will have to be addressed if the the social - and therefore, economic- fabric of the country are to be restitched. To this point in our thought experiment it might seeem quite obvious that the U.S. would turn to this leader. But now, include these variables: this leader is 66 years old and looks and acts consistent with that age; this leader is a woman; this leader is openly gay and has listed her domestic partner on official websites since such websites have been in place; this leader is a highly ambitious politician, somebody who sought to develop and cultivate her own political following, although also has shown the ability and willingness to work with and across political dividing lines. Try to figure out which variable would most weigh against this person as the choice to lead the United States in time of such crisis.
Apparently, none of them are preventing Iceland from coalescing around Johanna Sigardardottir as the Iceland's choice for its next Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe: The almost equal gender balance of AMs in the Welsh assembly has transformed how politics in Wales is conducted, according to a new report.
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Sunday, 25 January 2009 13:53 |
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[Cross-posted at Heidi Li's Potpourri; h/t to friend M.M. for drawing my attention to the clip from This Week with George Stephanopoulos] Watch this. Set aside the matter of whether being a woman helped or hindered Ms. Kennedy's bid for Secretary of State Clinton's Senate seat. Pay attention, careful attention, to Sam Donaldson. Notice that the minute Cokie Roberts and Carly Fiorina even mention broader issues of gender parity, and more particularly, when Roberts notes that in the November general election that only 36 percent of the electorate were white men, Donaldson cuts her off, with an assist from George Stephanopoulos, and launches into a into a combination whine ("please try to continue to do it without us") and pompous bloviation (Governor Paterson has, by defying the New York powers-that-be "shot himself in both feet" by "blundering" into appointing Kirsten Gillibrand). Scared, Sam? I agree with with the commentator at The New Agenda: "The patriarchy is especially threatened by our push for equal representation...." So scared that blustery old men like Sam Donaldson cannot even hold back from a move familiar to any woman who has ever partaken in a profession "round table" or meeting. The minute a woman starts pressing a significant and weighty point that a man does not want to hear he starts talking over her. Rather than the male moderator - in this case Stephanopoulos - telling him to pipe down so Roberts could at least finish her sentence, the male moderator tries to gloss over the moment of sexist rudeness (no, not just rudeness, sexist rudeness) with a lame joke ("at least you asked [before seamlessly launching into your interruption]"). As with racist put-downs, this sort of joviality in the face of sexist rudeness compounds the problem. It certainly does not put in his place the original sexist interrupter, who could not even bear to hear out the comment being made about proportional representation. With four men (including Stephanopoulos himself) and two women at the round table, there is not even 51 percent representation on This Week, at least this week. But I would love to get a careful breakdown of the speaking time of the four men and the two women: if Stephanopoulos and his producers cannot produce a panel of 4 women and two men or at least three and three, then it would useful if Stephanopoulos careful made sure that the two women get close to 51 per cent of the air time. It would be better if this were achieved by having 3 or 4 women on the panel, because that would further the more tangible goal of 51 percent women in every public sphere, and because it would not require deviation from with ingrained norms (albeit ill-fitting in this case) about speaking time being roughly alloted per person (assuming that is the norm on talk shows like This Week). But listen again to the clip and imagine if Fiorina and Roberts had had 51 percent of the air time. Whether you agree with their specific views or not, how might the overall conversation have been different? More representative of a range of views and ideas more likely to be held by women than by men? |
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Tuesday, 20 January 2009 02:43 |
Appointing a successor to Senator Clinton: Governor Paterson's opportunity to distinguish between the end of 51 Percent and the means of affirmative action
Governor Paterson has an instructive opportunity when he appoints a successor to Senator Clinton. If he chooses, he can illustrate beautifully why moving the baseline of representation of women toward 51 percent has nothing to do with affirmative action - at least not affirmative action based on gender. Since affirmative action remains a contentious instrument of social engineering, and because shifting the baseline to 51 percent women in every sphere of public life is a contentious project, it would be useful were Governor Paterson to take the opportunity to make the distinction clear in practice, especially in such a high profile appointment. One contentious matter at a time, please.
In a world where the baseline was proportional representation of women in every sphere of civil, social, and political life, women would occupy just over half the places in public spheres. For the Senate, which has 100 members, the goal would be to have slightly more women than men overall, or consider per state, one woman and one man from each, leading to a 50/50 split. Pause here. Really picture that: a Senate with 50 women and 50 men working alongside one another. Think about how much misogyny and sexism would fall by the wayside simply because of the change in the men's club feel of one our country's most visible political institutions. Think about how strange it is that we are not already at the point where this is not the gender proportion in that institution. Think what it would mean for the women of each state if they could reliably assume that one of their Senators would naturally enough be a woman - even a woman with very different political views than some of her women constituents, a woman whose life experience would almost certainly be more representative of the women citizens in her home state in at least a few significant ways.
Even if this vision appeals to you, there might be a shadow cast over it. There is a tendency to conflate the idea of shifting the baseline of representation in public life to reflect the representation of women in the population with an endorsement of affirmative action, a term with multiple meanings. Many people have strong doubts about affirmative action under any interpretation. Some have qualms about its justness; others worry that it stigmatizes all members of a group who are perceived to have been its object.
In its strongest version, affirmative action accomplishes a particular state of representativeness in some area - a college entering class, a profession, a club, a team - by awarding positions to less qualified or competent candidates when more qualified or competent ones are available because the lesser candidates possess some feature irrelevant to qualifications or competency but because one has reasons unrelated to these considerations for seeking the desired representativeness. Strong affirmative action elicits the most discomfort and criticism even from those who urge the virtues of diversity in settings where it is a necessary means to achieve the desired outcome.
Purely on statistical grounds, strong affirmative action will be most instrumentally necessary when there are very few qualified or competent persons with the extra or additional characteristic desired or when there are simply very few persons with that characteristic. Because 51 percent of the population consists of women there is no sheer shortage of women to fill positions. Indeed because of this fact, a shortage of women will rarely be the obstacle to the baseline shift to 51 percent representation. In New York state at present, with regard to Senator Clinton's soon to be vacant Senate seat, neither is there a lack of qualified, competent women candidates. At least two women on the radar screen seem to have qualifications and competencies that would serve an appointed Senator and her or his constituents well: Carolyn Maloney and Kirsten Gillibrand, for example. For purposes of brevity, I am not going to delve deeply into the questions of which competencies and qualifications matter uniquely when a public servant - in this case the Governor - is appointing somebody to fill a position usually filled by election. Suffice it to say that while an individual voter may, arguably, reasonably cast her or his vote for any candidate on any basis, a public servant who is filling the seat in trust for the electorate must have reasons, and to be satisfactory those reasons should answer to the requirements of getting the job of the office done. Just as Andrew Cuomo or Jerrold Nadler would seem to meet this threshold so too do Maloney and Gillibrand.
So, why does the impending appointment present any question of affirmative action at all? The short answer, it does not. In these circumstances, there is no question of whether there are available qualified woman for appointment to the seat. If one accepts our starting premise - the good of shifting the baseline toward proportional representation according to gender - that, it would seem, to be that.
But life is rarely so tidy. There is another woman would-be candidate on the horizon, who IS seeking affirmative action to gain the appointment. Caroline Kennedy. Ms. Kennedy is not seeking affirmative action on grounds of her gender, though. She is seeking a form of affirmative action more usually seen in admission to elite institutions of higher education, where some applicants are favored over others because their forebears went there. In academia, these students are known as "legacies". I cannot know for sure, but I am comfortable hypothesizing that President George W. Bush was the beneficiary of some form of affirmative action, possibly strong, when he was admitted to Yale University for his undergraduate degree. George W. Bush's great great-grandfather, grandfather, and father all attended Yale, so his chances of admittance regardless of his qualifications and competencies were fairly high. Indeed at the time George W. Bush was admitted to Yale, I doubt if much consideration was given to the question of whether favoring him over a more qualified candidate even counted as any kind of affirmative action. Even now, paying attention to whether other family members have attended a particular college or university is rarely put in terms of affirmative action, even though such attention clearly counts as affirmative action if it advantages a candidate over others more qualified for the spot.
The most common minimally credible justification given for the legacy system in college or university admissions is that gaining a family's loyalty to the institution may pay off in terms of monetary contributions to the college or university. I do not take up the ultimate soundness of this justification here.
When it comes to gubernatorial selection to the U.S. Senate, one rarely hears the precisely equivalent justification offered so bluntly. Although, this argument might credibly be made if one believes that other Senators or the Obama administration would be more likely to make appropriations to New York at Ms. Kennedy's behest than they would for those Senators whose parent and uncles have not served in high federal office, let alone been victims of horrifying assassinations while in office or seeking election to it. Pundits and commentators have bandied similar justification for Ms. Kennedy's appointment, however, when they discuss "electability." If whoever is appointed to fill Senator Clinton's seat now chooses to run for it in 2010 and wins, that person will have year of seniority over non-incumbents from other states, and seniority secures benefits for a Senator and hence for her or his state. Some think that based on her family history and related ability to raise funds for election in 2010 and then again in 2012, this makes it a good idea to appoint Caroline Kennedy to the Senate now.
These arguments from potential influence or eventual seniority might seem like arguments based on qualification rather than arguments from affirmative action. The problem is that in this case the advantage of influence and possible future seniority turn on a first step based on affirmative action. If a candidate who is not a legacy is appointed now, and she or he gains influence and wins seniority on the merits of (relatively) non-accidental attributes (the family into which one is born is an accidental attribute), affirmative action plays no role in the benefits that accrue to New York state. But if the Governor appoints a legacy because he believes she or he can bring these benefits but has no other particular qualifications or competencies, especially compared to available alternatives, the Governor is rewarding an accidental attribute of birth - family - and, he is not doing so to secure the baseline of proportional representation for women, but for some of the more traditional rationales used for political exceptionalism.
I cannot take the time here to fully explore the questions surrounding affirmative action for legacy appointments to government in a democracy. Perhaps the simplest way to point out the chief problem is that a populist democracy aspires to assign political office on the basis of election not heredity. In practice, it is not so simple, but that's the ideal and outright relying on a candidate's heredity to gain a leg up for one's state runs straight up against it.
What must be made clear here is the consistency in wanting Governor Paterson to contribute to proportional representation for women while objecting to him appointing Caroline Kennedy. Governor Paterson is in the lucky position of having various qualified, competent women to consider for the appointment. He need not cloud the issue with considerations of affirmative action based either on gender or family background. Thus, he can illustrate the way in which the end of proportional representation for the 51 percent of the population that are women has nothing to do with the means of affirmative action of any kind. |
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(Cross-posted from Heidi Li's Potpourri) With 2009 now fully underway, both the ongoing development of 51 Percent, a 501(c)(3) educational organization I founded at the end of last year and the demands of life and job will probably slow the paces of posting here Heidi Li's Potpourri. I will continue to post here and to add to the Founder's Blog at 51 Percent, and as I organize where I post what, I hope those of you who take the time to read this space will stick with me as my online activism takes shape. This post, published Friday, January 9, drew a wide readership here and at the places it was cross-posted. I still have not had the chance to review all the comments sent to me, but I am grateful for the thoughtful words offered by so many, and by the sense of camaraderie that shines through so much of feedback. I am grateful as well for those who have rallied to the cause of 51 Percent, which is aiming to advertise its formation and purpose offline. Since Friday evening, slightly more than $570 has been raised for 51 Percent, to run ads and to develop the organization's first major initiative (more about this in a post to come), The Museum of Misogynistic Memorabilia. Already, one of people who powers the creative force behind 51 Percent has started to generate ideas about for the type of ad 51 Percent will run. Although it will cost considerably more than what was raised over the weekend to run an effective ad, if this pace of donations continues 51 Percent will be able to an ad sooner rather than later. The hope is to be able to run an ad that combines informing people about 51 Percent and registering an objection to the Ms. Magazine cover/inaugural poster that so many people found ridiculous, disturbing, offensive, engraging, etc. Whether that will make sense depends entirely on the ability to raise money while that cover remains relevant. To donate to the cause, one can either go here or here. As you can see, this post addresses logistical matters. Substantive posts to follow soon. |
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Heidi Li on Equality
