Highlighting Gender

From my experience “highlighting” will always happen in the media to one slant or another. In a country where suffrage is not outgrown, the gender highlight is inevitable; which leaves it up to the candidate to find a way to make their “womanhood” an asset. In order to look into this possibility, one needs to first recognize that there is a gender gap, evaluate how this gap hurts or helps their candidacy, and then how to respond as a progressive female in politics. In “Gender and Elections,” Susan Carroll and Richard Fox explore how women and men differ in the aggregate and in the election pools, which I will use to extrapolate how gender hurts and helps women.

To evaluate weather the gender gap really existed, Carroll took us back to the suffrage movement to view how women reacted to having the right to vote. The interesting part was how activists at the time marketed that women’s experiences in the home gave them special values and perspectives that would be assets in the political arena. But, when allowed to vote, not many women voted or when they did it was similar to the men’s. The irony occurred sixty years later when the “woman’s vote” emerged and part of the new gender gap came not only from independent women, but also from a change in the male political behavior. Many male votes shifted to the Republican Party while the majority of the women voted for the democrats. Although the male shift seems unstudied, there appears to be three key factors that aided women and their emerging political legs.

Primarily, women were heading many households, there were more women in professional and managerial positions, and because a contemporary women’s movement was taking hold. This coupled with moral values, more women living below the poverty line, and more women voting generated a gender gap that in a way seems to have elevated women voters political influence. So the question now raised is will this gender gap hurt or help a woman in politics?

I believe we would all agree that women’s influence in politics has not been fully realized, but to what extent does it help? I think Gloria Steinem put it well when she spoke of the “white man only sign” that is a mentally understood graphic in politics. This “sign” is a great attribute to how gender has hurt women politicians. It was very evident in the in 1972 where Shirley Chisholm, a woman of color, entered the presidential race in order to point out the sign and raise the question of “Why?” The fact that she didn’t have a chance of winning was indicative that gender highlights hurt a woman’s candidacy. But, changes have taken place in the years since and Fox calls this the “3rd evolution” where opportunities for female candidates have increased. In fact, the movement toward gender parity in political institutions progressed rapidly in the 1990’s in the historic increase of women appointed to the House and the Senate.