12 October 2007
More Women in Powerful Positions Change Public Attitudes
Scholar sees “seismic change” in assumptions about women, leadership
Washington -- There has been a “seismic change” in cultural assumptions about women and leadership, says a top scholar on politics in the United States.
In 1995, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, then dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, published a book called Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership. In it she described the “damned if you do; damned if you don’t” choices that many women faced when they ventured beyond their traditional sphere of home and family.
Jamieson documented cases in which women political figures had difficulty gaining a hearing or respect for their ideas, were tied to “female issues” and were perceived as not capable of winning elections. “The history of Western culture is riddled with evidence of traps for women that have forcefully curtailed their options,” she wrote.
Recent history, however, is much different.
“Since I wrote the book, women have increasingly held positions as heads of state” around the world, Jamieson said in an interview with USINFO. More American women are serving as governors, in the Congress, in presidential Cabinets, as heads of major philanthropic organizations and as university professors; and all have demonstrated their competencies as leaders to the public.
“All of those [women] constitute opportunities for the public to see female leadership,” Jamieson said. “Since I wrote Beyond the Double Bind, there have been a great number of changes in the culture -- most of them increase the likelihood that a woman will be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.”
She credited the women’s movement for raising public awareness that there were women with expertise who were being barred access to visible positions of authority. Jamieson, now the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said the women’s movement had a personal impact on her as well.
When Jamieson published Packaging the Presidency, the first of what eventually would be some 20 books she has written on U.S. politics, she was “invited to be in more media places than I wanted to be; I was taken aback by the attention.”
“I attribute that to the fact that the mass media were recognizing that women were in the audience and they [the networks] needed to make sure that they had women on television,” she said.
Despite fewer barriers to women entering politics, there is no evidence of increased interest in politics among either young women or young men, Jamieson said. “But there is no evidence of a drop, either. So I take that as a somewhat hopeful sign. It could be worse.”
Jamieson acknowledged that “[w]omen’s leadership doesn’t necessarily solve all of the problems. And women’s leadership doesn’t necessarily ensure that you address the problems that are unique to women. … The difference that we attribute to a difference in gender may well be the difference that gender brings in the form of life experiences. …
“There are times in which the difference that a woman makes is a difference that occurs because that woman is more likely, perhaps, to have been a mother; perhaps to have cared for elderly parents; perhaps to have experienced discrimination; perhaps to have a combination of experiences in the economic world. ... And those kinds of things do make a difference,” she said.
Jamieson said other countries have led in putting women in leadership positions higher than the highest position held by women in the United States. “In some ways, the women of the United States should look to those countries that have been led competently by women as a way of assuring themselves that the United States’ time will come as well,” she said.
But she added: “To the extent that women in other countries are struggling to gain freedoms that we take for granted in the United States, the message that I tried to convey in the book Beyond the Double Bind is, I think, still a good message: that if you look across the history of the United States, the progress that women have made has been relatively steady. The model that says women make progress and are then pushed back, doesn’t seem to fit the historical data. …
“My take on history is that progress [for women] is slower than it should be, but progress tends to be steady and sustained. And one would only hope that in many of the countries where the oppression is backbreaking and mind boggling that that progress will be faster and more strongly sustained than it has been the past.”
For related stories, see Women in the Global Community.
