Via Matt Bors. Larger image here.
Matt also linked to this one-page history of the Iraq War by Joel Pett, which does some really cool work blending visuals from panel to panel.
When capitalized, "Sie" is the formal way to address adults of either gender in polite German. I majored in the…
If one assumes that a person is making their money, including enough money to have no incentive to "work", by…
Ob sie wirklich Deutsch spricht. Normalweise, kommt die US Soldaten nicht ins Stadt und spricht nicht so oft mit denn…
As for being a Nazi, ich spreche fliessend deutsch und wohnte in Deutschland fuer drei Jahre mit der americanishe Luftwaffe…
And of course this "incentive" only applies to poor people: Rich people who already have enough to live off of…
Can we just please move beyond the women and politics thing. Enough already. Women are being beaten, raped, stalked and denied access to birth control and abortion. Yes having a figure head would have been nice but what about the problems that the average every day woman has to deal with? I am so sick of this.
I love that history of the war cartoon. I met Joel Pett once a few years ago, and he’s pretty rad in general. He gave a great talk about style and intent in his editoral cartoons.
Wow Renee.
No this isn’t as important as rape or murder or the chipping away at our reproductive rights, but having women in politics is still important. I guess have equal access to the same jobs as men isn’t something the average every day woman has to deal with.
Renee, I thought the theory was that having more women in politics and in more important positions in politics besides (e.g.) the school board secretary would lead to more concentration on the very problems you describe.
You really think that the President of the United States is a figurehead?
In terms of having the ability to make substantive change to social relations yes POTUS is a figurehead. Politicians are beholden to those that put them in power and that means ignoring the proletarians. Change cannot come from within a corrupt system it must be rooted out and dismantled. I think that we spend so much time acknowledging the power to the top 1% we forget the power of proletarians and our ability to force a change. We are ruled because we allow it, and it is to our detriment that this system continues to thrive.
I think the President of the US is just one position (albeit an important one). I think putting women into high offices won’t really begin to matter until a critical mass of women in important government positions is reached — say, 30% or more.
[Cross-posted with Renee — I wrote this as a response to Ron.]
Even with women making up 30% of the government if the current system is not changed they will be just as beholden to corporations as the men currently in power. We will be playing the same game with different competitors that is all. When Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, what did she offer Great Britain but a war on poverty. We cannot assume that gender is going to make a change.
I agree with you about Thatcher, but that doesn’t really address my point about the “30%.” I agree that just having one powerful women doesn’t achieve much; a critical mass is needed to make a difference.
Yes, the way politicians are beholden to major corporations is a huge problem (see the telecom immunity bill this week!); but it’s not the only problem, and improvements that don’t directly address corporate power may still be worthwhile in other ways.
I agree with you about Thatcher, but that doesn’t really address my point about the “30%.” I agree that just having one powerful women doesn’t achieve much; a critical mass is needed to make a difference.
Don’t some of the Scandinavian countries have a high percentage of women in high governmental positions? I seem to think Norway was over 50% at one point. Possibly stil is. If so, does it help?
I agree entirely that Clinton’s election alone wouldn’t have changed much. I think Ted Rall’s cartoon in which a white female character talking said, “I can’t tell you how excited I am at the thought of having my needs ignored by someone who looks vaguely like me.” to a black male character who nods in agreement sums up what we can or could expect from a Clinton or Obama election. In other words, not much, at least in the way of immediate change. However, if and only if they are the trailblazers who open the door for more women and minorities to gain power then we might see the system change, eventually. So I think it is worth supporting and even getting excited about these disappointingly mainstream politicians. Symbols do have power and if that power is used correctly it might lead to better things in time.
I’m curious how you came up with that 30% number, Amp? Did you extract it from a handy bodily orifice, or are there some examples that you are aware of in other countries?
Dianne: as far as being a figurehead, the issues you raise are in part social relations, but they are also in part issues of law enforcement. As head law enforcement officer of the Federal government the President has a great deal of discretion on where priorities will be placed on law enforcement. Just ask the companies being subjected to raids by ICE these days.
There’s also the veto pen that the President wields over legislation. “Make these changes or I’ll veto this bill” is a powerful threat when neither house is likely to be able to muster an override vote. Revolutionary change is not necessarily likely (despite the illusion that Sen. Obama is attempting to weave), but evolutionary change is.
This list is ten years old, but interesting nonetheless. The US appears to have passed Amp’s threshold some time ago. (Unless he meant representation in the legislature, where AFAIK it’s about 1 in 6.)
Let’s consider that even with the threshold of 30% elected politicians are coming from a certain class of people. They are not going to act against their own interests to change the system of power that we currently have. It would be cutting of their noses despite their faces.
It would be cutting of their noses despite their faces.
That should be:
It would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
This niggling correction brought to you by the same people who brought you….
beeeeeeer milkshakes.
Diane:
…Don’t some of the Scandinavian countries have a high percentage of women in high governmental positions? I seem to think Norway was over 50% at one point. Possibly still is…
FWIW: Proportional representation and its possible influence on women’s issues outside the U.S. It’s a PDF file. Scroll down a page or two for some actual percentages.
Also, an interesting discussion over SCOTUS’ decision to strike down part of Mc Cain-Feingold. Obviously the burgeoning costs of running even a local election is going to disadvantage women, because as a class women are poorer than men.
I could care less about Clinton II. She was and is no friend of feminism so far as I’m concerned, and neither is the DP. This is the kind of stuff I’d rather see people discussing, if the goal is to make less of an obstacle course for women who want to serve in the U.S. government.
Obviously the burgeoning costs of running even a local election is going to disadvantage women, because as a class women are poorer than men.
Relatively few candidates finance their own elections, even at the local level. It is not personal wealth but access to and credibility with wealthy donors that traditionally have controlled access to the political system as a candidate. Personal wealth is a relatively poor proxy for those variables, although it might be much easier to measure.
Further, increases in personal wealth above a threshold do not translate well into increased access/credibility to the wealthy individuals who fund elections. Mitt Romney is fantastically wealthy, John McCain is modestly wealthy, Huckabee (IIRC) is barely wealthy if he is at all. All three had no difficulty in getting the baseline level of access it takes to run for national office. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama has recently had high income but is not really wealthy in the traditional sense (though he is likely to become so); Hillary Clinton is wealthy but not as rich as John McCain. Neither of them had any trouble either. So it’s really about hitting a threshold, not about how much you specifically have.
Obama (and Ron Paul), in fact, demonstrate that this entire model of thinking about election funding is completely obsolete. (So the previous two paragraphs were a complete waste of time; sorry.) In the networked age it is possible to raise far more money from semi-poor and middle-class people than it is to raise money from wealthy people. And for that, all you need are very modest levels of technical skill and a compelling message that people want to hear. Traditional fundraising remains relevant (money is money), but Internet fundraising is the new 800 lb gorilla in the room.
If a female (or male) candidate cannot raise the funds to mount a credible campaign, it is not the result of their gender or their socioeconomic position, it is a result of their failure to have a compelling message that people want to hear. Anyone with a compelling message can get the funds they need. (Hooray!)
Hmm. Without splicing what exactly they mean by “subministerial”, I think the relevant criteria – or, at least, the metric I would use – is the following:
1) The position must be at least statewide, and the position must be elected, not appointed.
2) The exception to the “statewide” rule are Congresswomen and mayors of major cities.
3) The exception to the “elected” rule are White House cabinet members and federal and state justices.
I have a feeling that figure shoots down considerably once we sift out the Submunicipal Vice-Comptrollers and Official Undersecretary of Dusty Trail, South Dakota. For my own inscrutable reasons, I’m including State Senates but not the State House (which I think represent too small a scale).
Also, I happened to come across this highly relevant article.
25% might be the “natural” high point, or fairly close to it.
Without getting into a big argument about socialization vs. nature and all that, consider this:
A lifetime focus on family issues, while by no means an absolute bar to electoral ambition, is a pretty effective roadblock for anyone who wants to run for office. (My mother has spent most of her life being the bedrock of her family; my father didn’t. Practically speaking, if my father wanted to run for Congress, he could; my mother could not.)
If 60% of American women decide to make family the focus of their life, and only 10% of men do so, then the pool of candidates is biased towards men 9:4. Those figures are obvious guesses, but they don’t seem like unreasonable guesses. A gender-neutral electoral machine where all politicians have an equal chance of being elected is going to produce a Congress that’s slightly more than 2/3 male.
There are two ways it could get more female-friendly than that. One, male politicians could voluntarily step aside in favor of women. (We’ll pause for laughter.) Two, more women could decide to become career-focused instead of family focused, and/or more men could do the converse. We’ve seen a lot of movement in that direction in the last 100 years or so – but I suspect that movement is reaching its limits. I love my kids and spend a lot more time with them than previous generations, but I have zero desire to put my career second. My wife loves her work and spends a lot more time doing it than previous generations did – but she has zero desire to put her family second. Call it socialization, call it genes, call it the oppressive patriarchy – but it seems likely to me that a lot more people are going to follow my family’s pattern of loosening the gender roles but not obviating them, than are going to completely reverse things.
I’ll bet you $2 that if you look at the countries which have higher proportions of women in the legislature, like the Scandahoovians, you’ll also find a higher rate of childless women and lower birthrates. Those birthrates aren’t going to go down any farther; they can’t. Our birthrate might go down a bit more (shifting the above calculus somewhat as more women DO choose career over family) but not a whole ton more. There are demographic limits to the process.
In feminist utopia where 50% of men choose a family focus and 50% of women choose a career focus, or where everyone chooses a perfect life-balance or something, then that could be different. But it doesn’t look like anywhere is on track to becoming a feminist utopia; the choices that have to be made for that to happen are choices that not many people seem to want to make.
I’ll bet $ to donuts that a large number of elected women are county/city/township clerks.
FWIW It’s a pretty good gig in most places.
I’ll bet you $2 that if you look at the countries which have higher proportions of women in the legislature, like the Scandahoovians, you’ll also find a higher rate of childless women and lower birthrates.
Actually what you will find is a social system that operates to allow women to have more options in their lives. We should not have to choose between family and career to be successful. Until things like socialized day care are implemented women will never truly be free.
The natural tendency of a society in which women have choices is for birthrates to decline. This isn’t something I’m scared of – on the contrary, what’s more scary is how earnestly some people think this should be avoided at any cost, because the only way to prevent it is through tyrannical means.
Furthermore, a sub-2.1% birthrate (birth rate < death rate, IOW) will not persist indefinitely (presumably, to the extinction of humanity). That’s a ridiculous fallacy. Taken to it’s logical extreme, the last tribe on Earth, perched atop the ruins of New York, would still be living the same low-fertility lifestyle as modern yuppies in Manhattan. No, the population would instead, at some point, reach an equilibrium, until at which point that equilibrium can be blissfully upset. (Say, the colonization of space.)
For what it’s worth, I think Robert’s more or less right here: the current system doesn’t allow people with child-rearing responsibilities to attain high office, and at the moment women are disproportionately taking on those childbearing responsibilities. What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t think that this is a serious problem, requiring an urgent solution. Either childbearing responsibilities have to be shared more equally, or we have to reform the way we look at work and political office to allow it to be assumed by people with caregiving responsibilities. If neither of these changes takes place, you have a society with some serious problems.
Personally, I’d advocate a combination of the two reforms I suggested above, with the emphasis on the second one. This is because I’d argue that the gender differentiation we see is largely a function of the fact that taking on childcaring responsibilities currently has a serious impact on ones ability to attain ones goals; if you could spend plenty of time looking after your kids and also progress in your career, men wouldn’t have a problem taking on the full responsibility of a family â and at the end of the day, no-one should have that kind of problem with it.
The fact is that our society was built around a family structure with a chief breadwinner and a chief carer. Even when women worked, their work was treated as less vital and more subsidiary. If we had constructed our economy on the asssumption that almost everyone would have some kind of caregiving responsibility at various points in their lives, it would look very different. We need to start moving across to a society like that, right now. Even Scandanavia hasn’t properly undertaken that vital paradigm shift.
What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t think that this is a serious problem, requiring an urgent solution.
Because life is full of tradeoffs. No fix to this tradeoff is going to come without creating new tradeoffs for other people. Perhaps those tradeoffs would be less unfair overall, but perhaps they wouldn’t be. It’s not urgent for me to push down one bubble under the wallpaper, when I know that another one will be created.
In addition, problems where people have to choose between two distinct positive goods (a fulfilling life of childrearing, a fulfilling life of exercising political authority) do not strike me as nearly as urgent as problems where people have to choose between two evils, or problems where people are forced into roles they don’t want. I love my career; my wife loves raising our daughter; neither of us would want to be forced into that role.
Historically, societies kept birthrates high by quasi-forcing women into lives of childrearing. That was less oppressive than it could have been, since lots of women wanted that anyway – but it was still pretty damn oppressive. We’re fixing that; hooray. I think the goal should be a society where people are free to pick their own life path and the outcomes fall where they fall, not a society where we decide what the outcome must be and then push people around to make it happen.
Forced equality of care responsibilities is no less oppressive than forced inequality. Let people choose.
Yes!
Yes, too!
As far as city clerks, many of them are appointed, as are many city attorneys for example (although some are elected, though that’s a minority in California for example). It’d be interesting to see the gender breakdown for city clerks based on appointment vs election. Most appointed ones in my region are women but some elected ones (and there’s not a big sample there) are men. One candidate in San Bernardino (which elects city clerks and city attorneys) had the guy that headed Save Our State running for theh position backed by the police union. He lost but he’s been hired by the police union as a consultant to do “outreach”.
Forced equality of care responsibilities is no less oppressive than forced inequality. Let people choose.
Right…male perspective there to be sure. Forced equality can only be a bad thing from a male point of view.
Forced equality can only be a bad thing from a male point of view.
Jane yearns to take care of children with the force of a thousand suns. John is indifferent to the idea. Forcing them to be equal means that Jane gets less face-time with her kids than she wants, and that John gets more. Forced equality is a bad thing from both of their points of view.
The only world in which forced equality is only bad when viewed from a male perspective, is a world where every woman wants to do exactly half the child rearing. I doubt that we live in that world.
In addition – specific outcomes aside – there are many people, male and female, who resent external control over their lives, even when that external control brings an outcome they desire. I don’t want to be forced to watch “Serenity” at gunpoint instead of doing my work this afternoon, even though watching “Serenity” would be a lot more fun.
While I agree that we do a bad job advancing the careers of people who are primary child care providers, and while I think that Robert oversimplifies it more than a bit, I agree with one part of what he is saying: the oppression engendered by an either/or choice is considerably lessened when both choices are voluntary and positive.
So forcing women into childcare = bad. Preferring men over women in politics= bad.
But saying that you can’t be a successful politician if you’re a childcare provider doesn’t seem to be a problem–IF you can avoid forcing people into childcare in the first place. My “not bad” judgment holds even if the proportion of men and women who voluntarily choose to go into politics, child care (or skydiving, or chef school, or…) is different.
Right now, i would concur that the country pressures women to go into child care, and therefore keeps them out of politics. I agree that a temporary solution could be to work out the childcare/politics dichotomy. But it seems that the much preferable solution would be to work out the ‘forced child care” problem, mostly because the dichotomy isn’t itself a matter of ethical concern.
Also, you seem to be assuming that given free choice, 50% of each sex would choose to do child care, even if it meant one could not be in politics. This may well be true, but as it is the base statistic which underlies the argument to have more women in politics, it would be good to have a better idea of this, and a more accurate number.
Sailorman, you miss one point: our country doesn’t pressure women to go into child care. It pressures women who have children to go into child care. Society exerts little pressure on my childless sister to take care of kids; it exerts quite a bit on my wife.
I make the distinction because very often in relationship situations, whether marital or nonmarital, there is a differentiation in the degree of interest each partner has in reproducing. That differentiation ends up greatly modifying the tacit or explicit negotiation about expectations, roles, etc. Speaking with huge broadness, women tend to be both more interested in reproducing, and under considerably more time pressure. (Indeed, time pressure often works in reverse for men; it almost always pays a man to wait.) Men, bluntly, can say “either you do all the work or you don’t get any babies from me”, and be somewhat credible.
The social pressure on women in essence strengthens their male partners’ hands in that negotiation; “you’re the one who will be harshly judged if you DON’T take on the bulk of this work, so maybe you should factor that into your calculations…” It also factors into the implicit level of desire; I’m sure most women would still want babies even if society was silent on the topic, but I’m also sure that most women want babies more than they “naturally” would because society tells them that’s what expected of them. So women get it in the shorts in multiple directions; they want it more, they have to have it in a much shorter timespan, and they’ll be judged harshly if they manage to “beat the system” and find a man who for whatever reason is willing to take on a larger share of the work involved.
All of these pressures and burdens ends up distorting the negotiation and the choices faced by women who want children. I think the answer is to start removing pressures, not to redirect them.
I agree with Robert… kind of. I do think there’s an asymmetry arising from men and women’s biological clocks. There’s a time in a woman’s life when anxiety about reproducing starts to snowball, and there’s also a similar time in men’s life when the same happens – but on average it’s earlier for the woman than for the man. [EDIT: I’d also like to add that it’s also only on average that this anxiety exists in the first place. I didn’t mean to sound so gosh darn heteronormative.] Things generally happen faster for women: mental development in toddlers, puberty, peak physical condition, the desire to have children… everything except the big sleep, it seems.
I don’t think that what’s literally happening is men saying “either you do all the work or you don’t get any babies from me”, because first I doubt this is a conscious process, and second it makes all the men sound like douchebags. Instead, it all starts with society in general having a love/hate relationship with the twentysomething, unattached (at least by marriage) young adult – both female and male. It venerates us, fetishizes us, makes us the star of most blockbuster movies, but at the same time is a bit afraid of us and wants us to be tied down and civilized as soon as possible. Thus when the woman wants to start having children (say, in their late 20’s) and the man does not, society, that sly fox, jumps at the opportunity and takes the woman’s side. The end result are multitudes of child-raising couples where the men are far less eager parents than women. This is taken as biological law, and is lampooned endlessly on second-rate sitcoms. But I don’t think this is a valid conclusion, any more than it is than to look at a third grade class, watch them read and write, and conclude boys are universal dummies.
Linda Hirshman, in her now infamous article Homeward Bound, a screed I am sympathetic to whatever I may think of the author, points out that women who marry men considerably older than themselves to have far more egalitarian child care practices. This has been my observation as well. She says it stems from older men having more free time, but I’m not so sure. I come from a family of doctors, and their workload peaks at late 40’s/early 50’s. I think it’s because older men are hearing their own biological clocks ringing, and want to settle down and have a family just as much as their wives do. Biological urges aren’t the only factor in child care arrangements – it’s true the partner making more money is less likely to take on more of the burden – which is why Hirshman’s claim that younger men/older women couples to be also more egalitarian seems intuitively right to me, even though I don’t personally know many such couples. What’s interesting about older men/younger women, on the scale of at least about seven years*, is that the economic bias is even stronger on the man’s side, yet the balance tips the other way. I hear this kind of gabbing all the time from my lady friends: older men make more devoted fathers**.
So what’s my point? Well I don’t really have one. I’m not saying, if this is what some of you are suspecting, that women should either go for wrinkles or accept their lot as homemakers. Culture is still a strong input variable, and while I think same age couples will always have this imbalance in parental instinct in favour of the woman (or the man, depending on how you look at it), I think this imbalance can be made considerably smaller than it is currently.
* If I had to ballpark it, I’d say in modern America the reproductive urge picks up in women in their late 20’s, and in men in their mid-to-late 30’s. This is naturally a back of the napkin estimate, and is dependent on the environment – societies with fewer options for women have lower ages for women, societies with lower life expectancies have lower ages for both, etc. But I think the general size (and direction) of the gap is fairly constant and has a biological basis.
** Of course, they cast it in terms of emotional maturity. In my mind, though, their idea of emotional maturity and my idea of reproductive instinct look, talk, and act like the same thing.