What the past two chapters have shown is that there are substantial gender data gaps in government thinking, and the result is that governments produce male-biased policy that is harming women. These data gaps are in part a result of failing to collect data, but they are also in part a result of the male dominance of governments around the world. And while we may not think of male-dominated government as a gender data gap problem, the evidence makes it clear that female perspective matters.
Several US studies from the 1980s to the 2000s have found that women are more likely to make women’s issues a priority and more likely to sponsor women’s issues bills.1 In the UK, a recent analysis of the impact female MPs have had in Westminster since 1945 found that women are more likely to speak about women’s issues, as well as family policy, education and care.2 An analysis3 of the impact of female representation across nineteen OECD countries4 between 1960 and 2005 also found that female politicians are more likely to address issues that affect women.
The OECD study also found that women’s words translated into action. As female political representation increased in Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, these countries experienced an increase in educational investment. Conversely, as the proportion of female legislators in Ireland, Italy and Norway decreased in the late 1990s, those countries experienced ‘a comparable drop in educational expenditures as a percentage of GDP’. As little as a single percentage point rise in female legislators was found to increase the ratio of educational expenditure. Similarly, a 2004 Indian study of local councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserving one-third of the seats for women increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs.5 A 2007 paper looking at female representation in India between 1967 and 2001 also found that a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in ‘the probability that an individual attains primary education in an urban area’.6
In short, decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics makes a tangible difference to the laws that get passed. And in that case, maybe, just maybe, when Bernie Sanders said, ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”’, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s good enough. The problem is that no one does. On the other hand plenty of people seem to think that a candidate being a woman is a good enough reason not to vote for her. Shortly before the 2016 US presidential election, the Atlantic published the results of a focus group of undecided voters.7 The main takeaway was that Hillary Clinton was just too ambitious.
This is not a groundbreaking opinion. From Anne Applebaum (‘Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary, irrational, overwhelming ambition’8), to Hollywood mogul, democratic donor and ‘one-time Clinton ally’9 David Geffen (‘God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?’10), via Colin Powell (‘unbridled ambition’11), Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager (‘don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions’12), and, of course, good old Julian Assange (‘eaten alive by her ambitions’13), the one thing we all seem to be able to agree on (rare in this polarised age) is that Hillary Clinton’s ambition is unseemly. Indeed, so widespread is this trope it earned itself a piece in the Onion headlined, ‘Hillary Clinton is too Ambitious to be the First Female President’.14
Being the first woman to occupy the most powerful role in the world does take an extraordinary level of ambition. But you could also argue that it’s fairly ambitious for a failed businessman and TV celebrity who has no prior political experience to run for the top political job in the world – and yet ambition is not a dirty word when it comes to Trump.
Associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton has a cognitive explanation for why we may view Clinton’s ambition as ‘pathological’.15 She ‘was forging into a territory that is overwhelmingly associated in people’s minds with men’. As a result, he explains, voters experienced her candidacy as a norm violation. And norm violations are, Mendoza-Denton writes, ‘quite simply, aversive, and are often associated with strong negative emotion’.
There’s a very simple reason that a powerful woman is experienced as a norm violation: it’s because of the gender data gap. I personally grew up heavily buying into the myth that women are just . . . a bit rubbish. Yes, this was partly because that’s how women are represented in the media (consumerist, trivial, irrational) but it’s also because women are so under-represented. I was one of those girls being taught, via a curriculum, a news media and a popular culture that were almost entirely devoid of women, that brilliance didn’t belong to me. I wasn’t being shown women I could look up to (either past or present). I wasn’t being taught about female politicians, female activists, female writers, artists, lawyers, CEOs. All the people I was taught to admire were men, and so in my head power, influence, and ambition equated with maleness. And, if I’m being really honest, I think I experienced this norm violation as well. I was all too ready to accept the idea that female bosses were just too ambitious – which as we all know is code for bitch.
The unpalatable truth is that it is still considered unladylike for a woman to want to be president. A 2010 study found that both male and female politicians are seen as power-seeking, but that this is only a problem for female politicians.16 In a similar vein, Mendoza-Denton conducted a study which found that context determines how ‘assertive’ men and women are judged to be.17 In a stereotypically ‘male’ context (car mechanic, Wall street, president of the United States) a woman is judged to behave more assertively than a man saying exactly the same as her. And while it was OK if a bit odd for men to be assertive in a ‘female’ context (choosing curtains, planning a child’s birthday party), it was definitely not OK for a woman to be assertive in any context. Assertive women are bossy.
The social downer on women being seen to seek professional power is partly because social power (being seen as warm and caring) is women’s ‘consolation prize for renouncing competition with men,’ write psychology professors Susan Fiske and Mina Cikara.18 Social power for women is therefore intrinsically incompatible with professional power: if a woman wants to be seen as competent she has to give up being seen as warm.
But so what. So you’re disliked. So you’re seen as cold. Suck it up. If you don’t like the heat, get back to the kitchen, right?
Wrong. That would be to assume that men face the same heat for being seen as cold. They don’t. The 2010 study didn’t just find that female politicians were see as less caring. It found that this perception inspired moral outrage in both male and female study participants, who viewed such women with contempt, anger and/or disgust. This was not the case for their male counterparts. Molly Crockett, associate professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, has an explanation for this disparity: being seen as uncaring is a norm violation for women in a way that it just isn’t for men. ‘There is an expectation’, she tells me, ‘that on average women are going to be more pro-social than men.’ Any deviation by a woman from what is seen (no matter how illogically) as a ‘moral’ stance therefore shocks us more.
Given the clear significance of gender when it comes to these issues, you would hope that this might be an area of research that bucks the gender-data-gap trend. It does not. Imagine my excitement when I came across a paper published in January 2017 entitled ‘Faced with exclusion: Perceived facial warmth and competence influence moral judgments of social exclusion’.19 Given the findings of Fiske and Cikara about women’s warmth/competence trade-off this should have been an extremely useful paper. As the authors explain, ‘people’s moral judgment about social exclusion can be influenced by facial appearance, which has many implications in intergroup research’. That is, people’s decisions about whether or not it’s fair that someone is being ostracised or bullied can be influenced by what the victim looks like.
Indeed. Unfortunately, the study authors ‘used male faces only for reasons of test efficiency’, making the study absolutely worthless when it comes to the group most affected by this issue, i.e. women. Fiske and Cikara explain that gender, ‘is a salient, and perhaps the most salient, social category’, with gender stereotyping often being immediate and unconscious: ‘the mere sight of a woman can immediately elicit a specific set of associated traits and attributions, depending on the context’. Still, at least the test was efficient.
‘It’s actually kind of shocking how little attention there’s been to gender in the morality literature,’ says Crockett. But on the other hand, maybe it’s not: the study of morality, Crockett tells me, is ‘really aiming at trying to uncover human universals’. At the point she mentions ‘universals’, of course, male-default-thinking alarm bells start ringing in my head. Many academics in the field of morality subscribe to ‘very egalitarian, utilitarian, impartial views of what is right’, Crockett continues, and they perhaps impose those norms ‘onto the research that we do’. The alarm bells ring off the hook.
But the next thing she says provides something of an explanation for how male-default thinking could be so prevalent in a world that is, after all, 50% female. ‘It’s just a feature of human psychology,’ she explains, to assume that our own experiences mirror those of human beings in general. This is a concept in social psychology that is sometimes called ‘naive realism’ and sometimes called ‘projection bias’. Essentially, people tend to assume that our own way of thinking about or doing things is typical. That it’s just normal. For white men this bias is surely magnified by a culture that reflects their experience back to them, thereby making it seem even more typical. Projection bias amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men – and they are – the majority of people in power just don’t see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them. But ‘common sense’ is in fact a product of the gender data gap.
Mistaking male bias for impartial, universal, common sense means that when people (men) come across someone trying to level the playing field, it’s often all they can see (perhaps because they read it as bias). A 2017 paper found that while white male leaders are praised for promoting diversity, female and ethnic minority leaders are penalised for it.20 This is partly because by promoting diversity, women and ethnic minorities remind white men that these female ethnic-minority leaders are, in fact, women and ethnic minorities. And so all the stereotypes that go along with that become salient: bossy, assertive, cold and all the rest. Conversely, ethnic minority and female leaders ‘avoid negative stereotypes when they engage in low levels of diversity-valuing behavior’. At last, empirical proof for what most women (even if they don’t admit it to themselves) have always known, at least implicitly: playing along with patriarchy is of short-term, individual benefit to a woman. There’s just the minor issue of being on borrowed time.
The finding that engaging in ‘diversity-valuing behavior’ reminds people that a woman is in fact a woman perhaps explains how Sanders came to think that all Clinton said was ‘vote for me, I’m a woman’ – because the data shows that she certainly didn’t. A word-frequency analysis of her speeches by Vox journalist David Roberts revealed that Clinton ‘mostly talked about workers, jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 times, racism, women’s rights and abortion a few dozen times each.’ But, pointed out US writer Rebecca Solnit in her London Review of Books piece on the election, ‘she was assumed to be talking about her gender all the time, though it was everyone else who couldn’t shut up about it’.21
What all of this means on a grander scale is that democracy is not a level playing field: it is biased against electing women. This is a problem, because male and female legislators inevitably bring different perspectives to politics. Women lead different lives to men because of both their sex and their gender. They are treated differently. They experience the world differently, and this leads to different needs and different priorities. Like a male-dominated product-development team, a male-dominated legislature will therefore suffer from a gender data gap that will lead it to serve its female citizens inadequately. And most of the world’s governments are male-dominated.
As of December 2017, women made up an average of 23.5% of the world’s parliamentarians, although this figure hides significant regional variation: Nordic parliaments are on average 41.4% female while Arab parliaments are on average 18.3% female.22 Women account for 10% or less of parliamentarians in thirty-one countries, including four countries that have no female parliamentarians at all. And in most countries precious little is being done to remedy this.
In 2017 the UK’s Women and Equalities Committee produced a report with six recommendations for the government to increase female representation in Parliament.23 They were all rejected.24 One of the recommendations was for the government to allow all-women shortlists (AWS) in local as well as general elections, and to extend their legality beyond the current 2030 cut-off point. In the British system, each political party holds an internal election for every constituency to decide which candidate will stand for them in a general election. AWS are used in these internal elections if a party wants to ensure that their general-election candidate will be a woman.
AWS were first used in the UK’s 1997 elections. In January 1997, the United Kingdom tied with St Vincent & the Grenadines and Angola in the world rankings of female parliamentarians.25 With a 9.5% female House of Commons, they all sat in joint fiftieth place. But by December of the same year the UK had suddenly shot up to twentieth place, because in May it had an election. And in that election the Labour Party, the UK’s main opposition party, made use of AWS for the first time. The effect was dramatic. The number of female Labour MPs leapt from thirty-seven to 101 (the overall rise in female MPs was from sixty to 120).
In the 2017 UK general election, Labour used AWS for 50% of its winnable seats, and 41% of the candidates the party fielded were female. The Tories and the Lib Dems, neither of whom used AWS, fielded 29% each. The UK’s House of Commons is currently (2018) 32% female, which places it at thirty-ninth in the world rankings – a drop in standing which is partly a result of other countries catching up, and partly a result of the dominance of the Conservative Party which still doesn’t use AWS (43% of Labour’s MPs are female compared to 21% of the Conservatives).
It is clear that Labour’s use of AWS has driven a significant proportion of the increase in female MPs. The government’s refusal to extend their legality beyond 2030 is therefore tantamount to legislating for a resumption of male bias in British democracy. Perhaps they haven’t read the data on the impact female politicians bring to legislation. Or, perhaps they have.
The British government’s refusal to extend AWS to local elections is if anything more perplexing, because female representation is even worse in local government. Britain’s trend towards devolution was meant to be about giving power back to local communities (local government, on which Britain spends £94 billion each year, plays a vital role in providing services that women in particular depend on). But the evidence uncovered by a 2017 report commissioned by women’s charity the Fawcett Society suggests that it is mainly giving power back to men.26
The Fawcett Society report found that nine councils across England and Wales still have all-male cabinets, while only 33% of council chief executives are female. Just one in three councillors in England is a woman, up only five percentage points in two decades. All six of the newly elected metro mayors are men (in the latest Liverpool election none of the main parties even fielded a female candidate), and just 12% of cabinet members in devolved areas are women.
The Fawcett report is all the evidence we have, because the data is not being collected by government, so unless this particular charity continues to collect the data, it will be impossible to monitor progress. And yet the government’s reasoning for refusing to extend AWS to local or mayoral elections is that the ‘evidence base is as yet underdeveloped’.27 Given they also refused the committee’s most basic recommendation to force parties to collect and publish candidate-diversity data (on the basis of the ‘regulatory burden which this would impose’), this stance leaves those who would like to see a less male-biased form of democracy take hold in Britain at something of a disadvantage.
Three of the recommendations in the Women and Equalities report concerned the implementation of quotas, and it was not surprising that these were rejected: British governments have traditionally been opposed to such measures, seeing them as anti-democratic. But evidence from around the world shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women.28 In fact, in line with the LSE study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that if anything, they ‘increase the competence of the political class in general’. This being the case, gender quotas are nothing more than a corrective to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is anti-democratic.
The form of quota that is available to a country depends on the electoral system it operates. In the UK, each of the country’s 650 constituencies has a single MP. This MP is voted in using ‘first past the post’ (FPTP), which means that the candidate with the most votes gets returned to Parliament. Since there is only one candidate per constituency, in a FPTP system all-women shortlists are really the only practicable corrective to male bias.
In Sweden, a party list is used. In this system, each constituency is represented by a group of MPs allocated under proportional representation (PR). Every party draws up a list of candidates per constituency, with candidates set down in order of preference. The more votes a party receives, the more candidates from its list are elected to represent that constituency. The lower a candidate is listed, the less likely she is to win a seat.
In 1971, only 14% of Swedish parliamentarians were female.29 The Social Democratic Party (SDP) decided to try to address this discrepancy, first with a recommendation in 1972 that party districts should place ‘more women’ on electoral lists.30 By 1978, this had evolved into a recommendation that lists reflect the proportion of female party members, and in 1987 a 40% minimum target was introduced. None of these measures had a significant effect on the number of female MPs elected: you could have a 50% female list, but if all the women were down at the bottom, they weren’t likely to win a seat.
So in 1993 the SDP introduced what is known as a ‘zipper’ quota. Two lists must be produced: one of male candidates and one of female candidates. These two lists are then ‘zipped’ together, so you end up with a list that alternates male and female candidates. In the 1994 election that followed, female representation leapt eight points,31 and has never dipped below 40% since32 (although the proportion of women in parliament has been slipping as Sweden has increasingly been voting for more right-wing parties that don’t operate gender quotas).
Compare this to South Korea, which provides an instructive example of how something as seemingly unrelated to gender as an electoral system can in fact make all the difference to female representation. South Korea operates a mixed electoral system with around 18% of its seats allocated under PR,33 and the rest working in the same way as the UK Parliament: single-member districts (SMD) elected under a FPTP. Both systems operate under a quota for female representation.
When the PR system quotas were increased from 30% to 50% for the 2004 elections, female representation more than doubled in the South Korean parliament. This sounds impressive, but they were starting from a low base, because while the parties more or less stick to the quota in the PR system, it’s a different story in the SMD. Here, 30% of candidates are supposed to be women, but in a recent election women comprised only 7% of the Saenuri Party’s and 10% of the Democratic United Party’s SMD candidates. If both SMD and PR quotas were adhered to, the South Korean parliament would be around 33.6% female. As it is, female representation currently stands at 15.7%.
It’s not hard to see why there’s such a stark difference in quota compliance between the two systems: FPTP and SMD electoral systems are a zero-sum game.34 Winner takes all. And so while on a macro level all-women shortlists in such systems are a fair corrective to an unfair system, on a micro level they certainly feel less fair – particularly to the specific man who wasn’t even allowed to compete.
This was the argument of two rejected Labour candidates, Peter Jepson and Roger Dyas-Elliott. In 1996, the two men brought a legal challenge against the Labour Party in the UK, arguing that AWS fell foul of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. Given what we know about the invisible positive discrimination that operates in favour of men this was perhaps not in the spirit of the Act. It was, however, in the letter of it, and Jepson and Dyas-Elliott won their case. AWS were briefly outlawed before being brought back in via the Labour government’s 2002 Act. Originally intended to run until 2015, in 2008 Harriet Harman, then Labour’s deputy leader, announced that its run would be extended to 2030.35 Meanwhile, Dyas-Elliot was most recently to be found in court receiving a restraining order for sending a rival MP’s wife a dead bird.36
Worldwide, the countries with the highest levels of female political representation tend to use PR.37 With this in mind, and given South Korea’s and Sweden’s experiences, perhaps the UK’s Women and Equalities Committee shouldn’t have called for quotas as a first step. If they really want to see female representation increase in Parliament, perhaps their first demand should be full electoral reform. But increasing female representation is only half the battle, because it’s not much use getting women elected if they’re prevented from doing their job effectively once they’re there. And frequently, they are.
Clare Castillejo, a specialist in fragile states, writes that women’s influence in government is often limited by their exclusion from male-dominated patronage networks.38 Women may be present at formal talks, but this isn’t much good if the men are forming backroom quid pro quo networks (something Castillejo cautions is particularly common in post-conflict settings39) and going off to have the real discussion in ‘informal spaces that women cannot access’.40
The practice of excluding women from decision-making is widespread, and it is one of the most efficient ways (second only to not electing women at all) that this male-biased system has of siphoning off gendered data in the form of female life experience and perspective. In a 2011 survey of US legislators, 40% of women disagreed with the statement ‘The leaders in my legislature are as likely to consult with the women in the legislature as the men when making important decisions’ (interestingly, only 17% of men disagreed with it).41 Similarly, a 2017 report on local government in the UK referenced ‘informal networks within local government where real power lies’ and in which women are ‘less likely to be involved’.42
But male politicians don’t have to escape to all-male safe spaces to sideline women. There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men.43 During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times.44And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment45) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’,46 although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.47
Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children. That never happens when a man speaks loudly’.49 Another noted that she is ‘constantly asked – even by male colleagues in my own party – if what I want to say is very important, if I could refrain from taking the floor.’ Some tactics are more brazen. Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues use intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and when that fails, ‘The leadership cuts our microphones off’.50
Highlighting the hidden gender angle of having a single person (most often a man) in charge of speaking time in parliament, one MP from a country in sub-Saharan Africa (the report only specified regions so the women could remain anonymous) told the IPU that the Speaker had pressured one of her female colleagues for sex. Following her refusal, ‘he had never again given her the floor in parliament’. It doesn’t necessarily even take a sexual snub for a Speaker to refuse women the floor: ‘During my first term in parliament, parliamentary authorities always referred to statements by men and gave priority to men when giving the floor to speakers,’ explained one MP from a country in Asia.
The IPU report concluded that sexism, harassment and violence against female politicians was a ‘phenomenon that knew no boundaries and exists to different degrees in every country’. The report found that 66% of female parliamentarians were regularly subjected to misogynistic remarks from their male colleagues, ranging from the degrading (‘you would be even better in a porn movie’) to the threatening (‘she needs to be raped so that she knows what foreigners do’).
Political abuse is a distinctly gendered phenomenon.51 During the 2016 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton received almost twice as many abusive tweets as Bernie Sanders. The most common word associated with her was ‘bitch’. Bitch was also the most common term used in tweets about Australian ex-PM Julia Gillard, who between 2010 and 2014 was similarly the target of almost twice as many abusive messages as her political rival Kevin Rudd. One European MP told the IPU that she once received more than 500 rape threats on Twitter over a period of four days.52 Another woman had been sent information about her son – ‘his age, the school he attends, his class, etc. – threatening to kidnap him’.
Sometimes it’s not ‘just’ threats. More than one in five female parliamentarians surveyed by the IPU had been ‘subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence’, while a third had witnessed sexual violence being committed against a female colleague. During the 2010 elections in Afghanistan, nearly all of the female candidates received threatening phone calls,53 and some female MPs in the country require round-the-clock protection.54 ‘Almost every day I fear for my life,’ Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian in 2014;55 a year later one of her female colleagues died in a car bomb – the second deadly attack on a female politician in Afghanistan in the space of three months.56
The aggression seems to increase along with the proportion of female politicians. Research from around the world (including saintly Scandinavia) has shown that as female representation increases, so does hostility against female politicians.57 Especially from their male colleagues. Studies58 in the US and New Zealand have shown that men ‘become more verbally aggressive and controlling of both committee hearings and parliamentary debates following an expansion in the proportion of women in the legislature’. Another study found that as the proportion of women in US Congress increases (bear in mind Congress is only 19.4% female59), women are less likely to achieve leadership positions within their parties.60 Further research61 from the US and Argentina has shown that having large numbers of female legislators is ‘tied to both women’s diminished success in passing legislation and reduced chances of being appointed to “masculine” and “powerful” Committees’.62 In a similar vein, US analysis has found that framing human rights issues as women’s rights issues makes male politicians less likely to support legislation, and if a rights bill is mainly sponsored by women, it ends up being watered down and states are less likely to invest resources.63 It seems that democracy – in so far as it pertains to women – is broken.
Working in the context of such extreme psychological warfare inevitably affects women’s ability to do their jobs. Many women told the IPU that they had restricted their travel, made sure they went home before nightfall, or only travelled when accompanied.64 Others self-censor, particularly when it comes to speaking up about women’s issues65 (which tend to generate the most aggression66), some going as far as dispensing with social media altogether, and in this way deprive themselves ‘of a forum in which to disseminate and debate their ideas’.
Others simply stand down. Violence against female politicians in Asia and Latin America has been shown to make them less likely to stand for re-election and more likely to leave after fewer terms compared to male politicians.67 ‘I don’t know if I will be a candidate in the next elections,’ one Asian MP told the IPU, ‘because I need to think about not causing too much harm to my family.’68 Meanwhile one in three female politicians in Swedish local politics ‘reportedly considered giving up their positions as a result of threatening incidents’.69
The abuse faced by female politicians also makes women more reluctant to stand in the first place. More than 75% of British women on a programme for aspiring female leaders said that sexist abuse of female politicians online ‘was a point of concern when considering whether to pursue a role in public life’.70 In Australia, 60% of women aged eighteen to twenty-one and 80% of women over thirty-one said the way female politicians were treated by the media made them less likely to run for office.71 Nigeria experienced a ‘marked decline’ in the number of female politicians elected to the country’s congress between 2011 and 2015; a study by the US NGO the National Democratic Institute found that this could be ‘attributed to the violence and harassment that women in office face’.72 And, as we have seen, this decline in female representation will give rise to a gender data gap that in turn will result in the passing of less legislation that addresses women’s needs.
The evidence is clear: politics as it is practised today is not a female-friendly environment. This means that while technically the playing field is level, in reality women operate at a disadvantage compared to men. This is what comes of devising systems without accounting for gender.
Sheryl Sandberg’s approach for navigating hostile work environments, outlined in her book Lean In, is for women to buckle up and push through. And of course that is part of the solution. I am not a female politician, but as a woman with a public profile I get my own share of threats and abuse. And, unpopular as this opinion may be, I believe that the onus is on those of us who feel able to weather the storm, to do so. The threats come from a place of fear. In fact, a gender-data-gap-driven fear: certain men, who have grown up in a culture saturated by male voices and male faces, fear what they see as women taking away power and public space that is rightfully theirs. This fear will not dissipate until we fill in that cultural gender data gap, and, as a consequence, men no longer grow up seeing the public sphere as their rightful domain. So, to a certain extent, it is an ordeal that our generation of women needs to go through in order that the women who come after us don’t.
This is not to say that there are no structural solutions. Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased.
An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back74 – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’75 skills. But there’s a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.77
The problem isn’t that women are irrationally polite. It’s that they know – whether consciously or not – that ‘polite’ interrupting simply doesn’t exist for them. So telling women to behave more like men – as if male behaviour is a gender-neutral human default – is unhelpful, and in fact potentially damaging. What is instead called for is a political and work environment that accounts both for the fact that men interrupt more than women do, and that women are penalised if they behave in a similar way.
It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.78
But simple adjustments like monitoring interruptions79 and more formally allocating a set amount of time for each person to speak have both been shown to attenuate male dominance of debates. This is in fact what Glen Mazarra, a showrunner at FX TV drama The Shield, did when he noticed that female writers weren’t speaking up in the writer’s room – or that when they did, they were interrupted and their ideas overtaken. He instituted a no-interruption policy while writers (male or female) were pitching. It worked – and, he says, ‘it made the entire team more effective’.80
A more ambitious route would be changing the structure of governance altogether: away from majority-based, and towards unanimous decision-making. This has been shown to boost women’s speech participation and to mitigate against their minority position81 (a 2012 US study found that women only participate at an equal rate in discussions when they are in ‘a large majority’82 – interestingly while individual women speak less when they are in the minority, individual men speak the same amount no matter what the gender proportion of the group).
Some countries have attempted to legislate against the more extreme ways in which women’s voices are shut out from power. Since 2012, Bolivia has made political violence against a woman elected to or holding public office a criminal offence; in 2016 they also passed a law preventing anyone with a background of violence against women from running for political office.
But on the whole, most countries proceed as if female politicians do not operate at a systemic disadvantage. While most parliaments have codes of conduct, these are generally focused on maintaining a gender-neutral ‘decorum’. Most countries have no official procedure for settling sexual-harassment complaints, and it’s often up to whoever happens to be in charge (usually a man) to decide whether sexism is in fact indecorous and therefore against rules. Often they don’t. One female MP told the IPU that when she demanded a point of order following a sexist insult from a colleague, the Speaker had rejected her motion. ‘I cannot control what another member thinks of you,’ she was told.
The UK used to have a gender-specific code of conduct for local government, overseen by an independent body which had the power to suspend councillors. But this was discarded under the 2010 coalition government’s ‘Red Tape Challenge’. It is now up to each local authority to decide which standards to set and how to enforce them. The government’s recommendations for how this should be done included only one vague reference to promoting ‘high standards of conduct’ and did not mention non-discrimination at all.83 There is no longer any clear mechanism by which councillors can be suspended for non-criminal misconduct.84
It is unsurprising then that by 2017, when the Fawcett Society produced a report on local government, the women’s charity found ‘a harmful culture of sexism in parts of local government politics which would not be out of place in the 1970s’, where ‘sexism is tolerated, and viewed as part of political life’, and where almost four in ten women councillors have had sexist remarks directed at them by other councillors.85 One female councillor described ‘a culture of demeaning younger women and dismissing the contribution that women make’. A women’s group was described as ‘the wives club’; a dinner with a senior national political speaker ‘was promoted as an opportunity for ‘the wives’ to dress up’. When she and a fellow female colleague challenged the behaviour they were described as ‘aggressive’, and ‘referred to by demeaning, sexist nicknames’. Her emailed questions have gone ignored; she has been excluded from meeting notifications; and she described her contributions to discussions as ‘tolerated rather than welcomed’. On social media her own party colleagues told her to ‘run away little girl and let the grown-ups do their job’.
There are two central points to take away from this section. The first is that when you exclude half the population from a role in governing itself, you create a gender data gap at the very top. We have to understand that when it comes to government the ‘best’ doesn’t have to mean ‘those who have the money, the time and the unearned confidence from going to the right school and university’. The best when it comes to government means the best as a whole, as a working group. And in that context, the best means diversity. Everything we’ve seen so far in this book shows us without a doubt that perspective does matter. The data accrued from a lifetime of being a woman matters. And this data belongs at the very heart of government.
Which leads to the second point: the data we already have makes it abundantly clear that female politicians are not operating on a level playing field. The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender data gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world’s population. We have to stop wilfully closing our eyes to the positive discrimination that currently works in favour of men. We have to stop acting as if theoretical, legal equality of opportunity is the same as true equality of opportunity. And we have to implement an evidence-based electoral system that is designed to ensure that a diverse group of people is in the room when it comes to deciding on the laws that govern us all.