During her remarks at this year's Newsweek/Daily Beast Women in the World Summit, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reiterated one of her favorite maxims: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
According to a new study, it looks like the ladies' room in hell will be quite crowded.
Just in time for International Women's Day, which was March 8, London-based company Business Environment released a study of 1,000 women, and let's just say the results didn't exactly scream, "Girl power!" The study found that 25 percent of female managers expressed reluctance to hire a woman who has children or is of child-bearing age, while 72 percent admitted to judging female coworkers for what they deemed inappropriate dress, compared with just 60 percent of men.
The findings seem to confirm earlier data, including a 2010 study from the Workplace Bullying Institute, that found that when women are accused of workplace bullying, the targets are almost always other women, in numbers that outpace the number of men accused of bullying other men.
So why should we care if a few women engage in a bit of Mean Girls behavior around the office water cooler? Because the long-term ramifications for all women are much greater than just a few hurt feelings. The bullying directed by some women in the workplace appears to rear its ugly head in the voting booth.
Though women have comprised both the majority of the population (51 percent) and the majority of the electorate (56 percent) in recent years, women have struggled to translate these numbers into any representative majority in elected offices. According to the 2012 Project at Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, the U.S. currently ranks 71st worldwide in terms of female elected officials -- just behind someplace called Turkmenistan. While there have been some high-profile successes here and there, Governors Nikki Haley and Susana Martinez being recent examples, last election cycle the number of female members of Congress dipped for the first time in more than three decades. This step backward in the House, combined with our country's inability to elect women -- of either party -- to the highest or even second-highest office in the land (something nations like Pakistan have done) begs the uncomfortable question: if women are the majority of American voters, then does the blame for the dearth of women leaders lie with women voters?
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Gov. Sarah Palin, and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann may have little in common, politically speaking, but one common bond they all share is running, and failing, at the highest level and on the biggest stage in politics -- and being a lightning rod for female voters while doing so. Though some female voters were their biggest supporters, many others were their toughest critics, with few occupying the middle ground. According to the Associated Press, these two extremes are not limited to these three women, who many consider polarizing:
An AP analysis of data from the 2006 American National Election Study Pilot Test found that when it came to selecting a candidate for president, gender matters more for women than for men. But it's a two-way street; women are more likely to vote for a candidate because she is female, and also more likely to dismiss a candidate because of her gender, according to the analysis.
While it would be easy to dismiss the opposition of these women among women as being partisan-based, it's not that simple. It was noted during the panel discussion on female leadership at the Women in the World Summit (a panel that featured Gloria Steinem and Jill Abramson of The New York Times, among others) that while Hillary Clinton enjoyed support from women over 50 during the 2008 election, she trailed behind two male opponents for the support of younger women (Barack Obama and John Edwards, respectively). Polls showed that Sarah Palin's favorability rates were always higher among men even before her personal baggage and struggle to answer questions about her reading habits came to light. At some rallies headlined by Palin during the height of the 2008 presidential campaign, the gender ratio in the crowd reportedly skewed 70-percent male to 30-percent female.
"If you look at Sarah Palin, men supported Sarah Palin more than women did," said Anne Kornblut, who covered the 2008 election for The Washington Post. She added, "Women also look at women's appearances and judge them just the way men do, and sometimes more harshly... I think women are critics across the board in ways you may even consider sexist if you didn't know who was saying it."
Tiffany Dufu, president of the White House Project, a nonprofit organization committed to increasing female leadership at the highest levels, including the White House, was more circumspect. "Yes, female voters are tougher on female candidates. Male voters are tougher on them, too. Any individual who does not fit the leadership status quo has to meet a higher bar."
Congresswoman Jackie Speier recalls being surprised by the reaction of female voters to her candidacy for Congress: "When I first ran for Congress in 1979, I was 28 years old, and I kept hearing, 'I'm not going to vote for her just because she's a woman,' and it wasn't men saying it but women." Kornblut, who also authored the book Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win, adds, "Women look at women running for office and say, 'I couldn't do that. I'm a mom with two small kids, and I couldn't be governor. How could she do that?' Or they say, 'Why is she so ambitious? Why does she want to do that when she has a family at home?'"
Rep. Speier echoes this sentiment: "For whatever reason, there's a competition that some women see when other women succeed. We've got to change that dynamic. Men see an opportunity of both rising. Women see a threat that somehow if one woman succeeds, another falls."
So how do we begin changing that dynamic? "I think we change it in part with our young girls in soccer and baseball and playing a team sport, so they recognize the power of working together," Rep. Speier said. "When I was a youngster, that wasn't available, but it is for this generation. I'm hoping it will have an impact on how they view each other as they move forward." (Click here to see my interviews with Rep. Speier, Angelina Jolie, and other speakers at the Women in the World Summit.)
In the new book INSPIRATION: Profiles of Black Women Changing Our World, CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King weighed in on the competitiveness that so often seems to rear its head among professional women. "It saddens me when women think there's not enough to go around, because there's more than enough," she said. "It's a big old pie out there. I believe that when you're good at what you do, it only makes me better."
If only more women agreed.
Keli Goff is the author of The GQ Candidate and a contributing editor for Loop21.com, where this post originally appeared.
Follow Keli Goff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/keligoff
Would you tell a man who supports Elizabeth Warren to vote for Scott Brown?
Telling women to simply vote for women is the same.
Then they go and plod on... find another job for the same reasons. and plod on.
Back in the sixties. women were Stewardesses. They were told what to wear, how to present themselves, sometimes the Airlines made them look like hookers... but women "loved" their jobs.
Then, on their thirty-second birthday they got fired because they were 'too old"
Waiting in line behind them were thousands of other women waiting for their jobs. Then they to were fired by fat old men whose guts hung over their pants down to their knees.
It's just so deliciously ironic. For all these years, Feminists have been talking about the "male backlash". But there IS no male backlash. Men, as they always have been, are largely obedient to the wishes of men.
All the backlash if from OTHER WOMEN. Ha ha ha ha!
Should we vote for people based on gender? How about race? Or what religion they are? Yes, some WILL do that, but I hope we don't get so segregated that it is all we end up seeing in a candidate.
It will be interesting to see what happens in Massachusetts. Brownie is the incumbent, and he's awfully cute, but Elizabeth Warren is a better candidate by every measure. Brownie's side seems to get the most traction by sneering the name "Professor" Warren, trying to make her intelligence a negative, but Warren's being a woman is not detrimental in the least. In fact, if Brownie were to act as though he were superior for being a male, he's surely lose.
I can't remember ever having seen a male candidate act condescendingly toward a female candidate on the basis of sex. Does that happen? Maybe it's a red-state thing.
nations where women have come to power and higher representation are the nuanced multi party electorates with parliamentary systems by and large. They are systems that generate far more turnover of electeds in office vs the 2 party monopoly system where a door opens in a district once every 12-20 years and to capitalize you need to be in the right place to have the right name recognition to have a shot at winning.
The end fault is our 2 party highly polarized system and how it functionally resists rollover of office as well as the strong ideological divide between the poles of belief.
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This is so typical of a woman and her voting. She does not realize or even think about the
the fact that there are almost six hundred people in our government in Washington , the Congress, the Senate and other positions of high power. Of these SIXTEEN are women. So from her writing we must establish that only sixteen women deserve to be where they are. This person does not even know what "equal" memans.
Women set the ground rules by which our society runs. Women have always set the ground rules. As Madonna once said "don't kid yourself. Women run the world, and they always have."
Men are dominant and violent because women have for thousands of years pushed males to become that way. During World War II, women said "go fight and die to defend your country." Men went. In the frontier days, women said go kill those Indians, they are dangerous." Men dutifully slaughtered Indians. That has been the cycle for all of human history. Women demand that men "do something". Men do their best to satisfy those demands, risking their lives while the women stay safely at home.
For most of history, women were pretty honest about all this. They treated men with honor in admission of the fact that men were doing the dirty work that women asked them to do.
Then during the 60s, a bunch of neurotic spoiled feminists decided to re-write history, shrug off their own 50% responsibility for the state of the world and built this fantasy in which "it was all the men's fault". They just lied about it, painted themselves as victims, and used men as the dupes.
Now we are seeing the result of this fact-twisting. The aritcle points it out perfectly.
Once you understand this simple reality, then the whole cloth of modern feminism unravels.
That is, assuming you are willing to actually think critically about feminist ideology, which admittedly, few people on this site are likely to do :)
you win the internet today, cause i can't stop giggling.
That being said, I would hope that a majority of women are voting with the best candidate in mind.
Who needs the College of Cardinals when women are so quick to tear down their own?
And the other side of that coin might be that women aren't taken seriously if the perception is that they don't even know how to dress appropriately for business.
I'm not sure how much impact playing team sports has for the good of either gender regarding the power of working together.
Playing team sports doesn't seem to have infused our, as you noted, mostly male government with the recognition of the power of working together.
Our government representatives seem mostly relentless in impeding the progress of any policy put forth by the other side not in working together.
And voting for women just because they are women doesn't seem like a well thought out plan to me.
Especially when our choices are the likes of the Bachmanns and Palins of the political scene.
And, for the record, my husband and I both voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Primary. At least he said he did! ;) I know I did.