Our problem with women and power
On his first day of leadership, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau performed a perfect feminist victory. Standing outside of Rideau Hall in Ottawa, a Remembrance Day poppy adorning his lapel, Trudeau announced his newly formed gender-balanced cabinet. The move vaulted Canada to fourth in the world in terms of the percentage of women in ministerial positions, up from twentieth. But it was Trudeau’s famously curt answer to a reporter who asked him why gender parity was so important to him — “Because it’s 2015” — that earned him international attention, not to mention a fair amount of gushing. Jezebel said it was “the sexiest” thing about him.12 Newsweek, The New York Times, Slate, and others all published positive coverage of Trudeau’s cabinet, focusing on the pithy comment. “Coolest thing I’ve seen in a while,” tweeted the actor and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson. “Love U Canada.”13
Of the fifteen women Trudeau named to cabinet that day, one, in particular, stood out. The new justice minister and attorney general of Canada, Jody Wilson-Raybould, a lawyer and former regional chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations, was also the first Indigenous person to hold the high-profile post. It’s unlikely that either Wilson-Raybould or Trudeau himself would ever have guessed that several years later he’d push her out of her position, or that she’d resign from cabinet altogether. Certainly, it seems difficult to fathom that, in the fallout, Trudeau’s flawless feminist image would, rightly, come under fire. Much of the ensuing controversy surrounding Trudeau, Wilson-Raybould, and, eventually, several other female Liberal Party members would be mired in conversations about corporate influence and government interference. But simmering underneath the dominant media narrative, the conflict between Trudeau and Canada’s own Squad indicated something else, too: that gender parity on its own is not enough to fix a system rooted in power imbalances. Trudeau did not get to wave his 2015 wand and then walk away like, Ta-da! The patriarchy is cancelled. No matter the good intentions, by early 2019 it was clear that the patriarchy was still thriving — even in Canada’s imagined feminist paradise.
The first public sign that something was wrong came when Trudeau shuffled his cabinet in mid-January 2019. Suddenly, Wilson-Raybould was the new minister of veteran affairs, a move that was widely seen as a demotion. Onlookers could be forgiven for being puzzled, which many were. The former attorney general had accomplished a lot in her three years in the position, much of it groundbreaking. To a letter responding to the crush of media and constituent curiosity,14 Wilson-Raybould attached an appendix that reminded everybody she’d introduced thirteen pieces of legislation, including the legalization of (and corresponding legal framework for) medically assisted death and, also, cannabis. She’d changed the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and expression to its list of prohibited grounds for discrimination, and legislated the first major change to the country’s sexual assault laws in a quarter-century. Overtly, the letter was all gratitude and grace, but it also seemed to have an underlying message: This did not happen because I was bad at my job.
Within weeks, media did, in fact, break a story that offered up another reason for the shuffle. Wilson-Raybould, reported The Globe and Mail, was booted from her post because she wouldn’t bow to Team Trudeau’s pressure to interfere in the prosecution of corporate giant SNC-Lavalin. As some Liberals attempted to control the damage and combat accusations of corruption and corporate favouritism, however, another narrative emerged — a deeply sexist one. Two days after the SNC-Lavalin story broke, The Canadian Press ran a story that deployed several anonymous Liberal sources.15 The story attempted to paint Wilson-Raybould as nothing short of a “nasty woman.” The reporter, a woman, wrote that Wilson-Raybould was neither “universally loved” nor “doing a bang-up job.” The story continued, explaining that she was known to be “a thorn in the side of the cabinet” whom some insiders called “difficult to get along with,” a person who was “known to berate fellow cabinet ministers openly,” and also a minister who “others felt they had trouble trusting.” Another anonymous source was quoted as saying, “Everything is very Jody-centric.” Whether the characterization is true or not, it’s worth noting that such traits are largely considered unremarkable in male politicians. Surely, it seems unlikely that not being “universally loved” or having an alleged big ego would be reasonable justification to turf a male politician who was simply, ethically, doing his job — even if it defied the prime minister’s wishes.
Fellow politicians, from all parties, were outraged over the article’s publication and called on Trudeau to denounce the Canadian Press story and the insiders who were interviewed for it. “When women speak up and out, they are always going to be labelled,” tweeted fellow Liberal MP Celina R. Caesar-Chavannes. “Go ahead. Label away.” Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, a person who agrees with the Liberals on very little, tweeted a furious multi-part thread, writing that “If ‘she’s in it for herself’ . . . equates to ‘she stood up and did the right thing’ then way to go.” Rempel, who also called the accusations against Wilson-Raybould “gendered af,” ended her thread with a meme that showed Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould standing side by side. She’d written “dinosaur” across Trudeau’s chest and “meteor” across Wilson-Raybould’s, captioning the image: “Angry women are free women.”16 Sure, it could have been mere politicking, but she also wasn’t wrong. Meanwhile Liberal lobbyist Lisa Kirbie (a woman who has been called difficult herself) had pinned her criticism to the top of her Twitter page: “The blatant sexism in the anonymous attacks against this powerful woman is shameful.”
But it was the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs that, at last, addressed the intersections of power, colonialism, racism, and gender. The Canadian Press story, and those sources who spoke for it, they stressed, invoked stereotypes that were particularly damning of Indigenous women. In an open letter, the union demanded Trudeau “immediately and categorically” condemn the characterization of Wilson-Raybould. Those who signed the letter called the portrayal “disingenuous,” adding that such statements “perpetuate colonial-era, sexist stereotypes that Indigenous women cannot be powerful, forthright, and steadfast in positions of power, but rather confrontational, meddling and egotistic.”17 They had a point. For a man who campaigned heavily on values of both reconciliation and feminism, Trudeau’s silence seemed incongruous at best.
In the end, Trudeau did denounce his fellow Liberals — albeit in a roundabout way, through his press secretary, who commented in an email to the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.18 That email, though, came five pointed days after the initial story. It was surely long enough for the sexist, negative portrayal of Wilson-Raybould to linger, and certainly ample time to set the stage (at least for some) for how she’d be viewed as the controversy unspooled: that is, basically, as an uncooperative, unreliable bitch. In fact, shortly after her eventual testimony on the whole SNC-Lavalin affair, one B.C.-based Liberal MP dismissed her comments as “sour grapes,” said she “lacked experience,” “couldn’t handle the stress,” and suggested her father, a prominent hereditary chief, was “pulling the strings.” (The MP later apologized.)19 There are many lessons to be gleaned from this mess, to be sure, but I found myself constantly returning to one of them, perhaps the most troubling of all: disrupting power, it would seem, is far trickier than making a token gesture, however grand or well-meaning, and calling it a day. In the end, what good is gender parity if women have no power to do their jobs?
The treatment of Wilson-Raybould was perhaps shocking, but was it surprising? If the Trump era is marked by a certain type of male leadership, it’s also marked by a very specific backlash against women and those who stand up to that leadership. Trump, after all, cannot seem to mention Hillary Clinton without calling her “crooked,” a sustained and successful effort to throw shade. Whatever he may be, Trudeau is clearly not Trump, and yet he benefits from the same systems and social climate that helped Trump rise. Those systems favour (and have perhaps always favoured) a hyper-masculine view of leadership and power: authoritative, unbending, tough. A good leader does what needs to be done, won’t be pushed around, and speaks his mind. Trump has brought these qualities into almost-cartoonish relief as he Makes America Macho Again, with many world leaders following suit, an arsenal of misogynist stereotypes at their disposal.
What’s more, whether it’s from experience or instinct, many women understand that these cherished “strongmen” qualities would not translate especially well were they to exhibit them. It seems naive to think this disparity did not factor into the belief that Trudeau could get away with pressuring Wilson-Raybould in the first place. As has been much discussed, she later testified that Trudeau and others within the party had pressured her repeatedly.20 Such experience with power also likely played a part in his apparent belief that he could quietly shuffle her out of power, an acquiescing smile on her face. This imbalance — not friendship — was further on display every time Trudeau subsequently, consistently, referred to Wilson-Raybould as Jody, not Minister, not even Ms., as she did not go silently, to his “disappointment.”21 (The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs had previously called Trudeau out for doing the same with another female Indigenous leader. Can you imagine either woman publicly referring to him as Justin?)
In so many ways, Wilson-Raybould’s push out of power was Canada’s own Clinton moment, our own attack on a Squad of powerful female politicians — one that few of us even noticed. We may be nicer about it, many people around the country realized, and we may have (some) leaders who claim feminism, but our systems work just as hard against women who try to seize more power than we think they ought to have. Here, our leaders don’t call women “nasty” and they don’t talk about grabbing her “pussy” on camera, but they still don’t want her to challenge their authority with her own thoughts, ethics, or decisions. Trudeau reportedly grew angry with Celina Caesar-Chavannes when she told him she wouldn’t be seeking re-election (she later left the Liberal caucus to sit as an Independent). “He was yelling. He was yelling that I didn’t appreciate him, that he’d given me so much,” she told The Globe and Mail, adding Trudeau was also worried about “the optics of two women of colour leaving.”22
Then, in early April 2019, after Wilson-Raybould revealed she’d secretly recorded a conversation about SNC-Lavalin with the clerk of the Privy Council, Trudeau ousted both her and Jane Philpott, who had been critical of the Liberals’ handling of the situation, from the caucus. He told media that it was the “will of the caucus” and that “the trust that previously existed between these two individuals and our team has been broken.” Condemning Wilson-Raybould’s actions, he added that he had tried to address the women’s concerns and did not want a “civil war” within his party. “If they can’t honestly say that they have confidence in this team,” Trudeau admonished, “then they cannot be part of this team.”23 He received a standing ovation.24
There’s an underlying message in all this: women are meant to be liked, supported, and celebrated only so long as they behave. Women like Wilson-Raybould, Philpott, and Caesar-Chavannes can achieve power, sure, but rise too high, get too assertive, speak your mind too often, and it will be snatched away. Fingers crossed the landing is soft when you’re pushed off the highest rung you’ve climbed to; it probably won’t be. So, ladies, play nice!
The former attorney general of Canada is far from the first example of what I like to call “be sure to play nice” syndrome — and, unless things change, far from the last. We might also turn again to Clinton, who is perhaps the most famous of the contemporary cautionary tales for women. Her stunning loss has garnered the same type of “where were you when” lore as the moon landing. We all remember that she was expected to win in a landslide. Renowned statistician Nate Silver was the most conservative of the analysts, putting her chances of winning at 71.4 percent25; the Princeton Election Consortium put it at a whopping 99 percent.26 That, we know, did not happen. Only one model, Moody’s, which had correctly predicted every president since 1980, noted a caveat in its declaration of Clinton as the eventual victor. “Given the unusual nature of the 2016 election cycle to date,” wrote Moody’s analytics economist in his report, “it is very possible that voters will react to changing economic and political conditions differently than they have in past election cycles.”27 Meaning, the model could account only for trends and numbers, not how voters felt about Clinton herself. The analyst might as well have said, “Look, we’ve never tried this thing with a lady before.”
Many women felt Clinton’s loss as their own — a stark reminder that we really hadn’t come so far at all. Like me, Amanda Kingsley Malo cried when she found out Clinton’s predicted landslide was stuck in fantasyland. The Sudbury, Ontario, kindergarten teacher told me that she didn’t even like Clinton all that much to start with, but when Clinton lost she felt broken. It was a weird feeling; it wasn’t even her country. But as she reflected on those moments, she realized her feelings of devastation ran deep. Kingsley Malo was twenty-nine years old, and Clinton was the first woman she’d seen run for the top spot in government as a candidate representing a major party. She started to think more keenly about the ways in which being a woman had affected her life, and the job and political opportunities she’d missed out on. A past Liberal Party community team organizer, Kingsley Malo decided to create Politics Now, an organization dedicated to training and supporting women candidates in Northern Ontario’s municipal elections.
Politics Now launched in March 2017, to coincide with International Women’s Day. To prepare for the launch, Kingsley Malo gathered some statistics. The nine cities in Northern Ontario had eighty-five available council positions. Women held only eighteen of those seats, and at the time none of the cities had a woman mayor. North Bay, Ontario, had never elected a woman mayor, and the town was founded in 1891. Of the few female mayors who had ever held office, many (though certainly not all) served only one term. The numbers didn’t surprise Kingsley Malo at all. She thought back to being a student in the 1990s, when her teacher would tell everybody, “The sky is the limit,” but she only had to look at the row of photos depicting every prime minister of Canada to know that wasn’t true. When she later learned that Kim Campbell, Canada’s only woman prime minister (June 25, 1993 to November 4, 1993), had lost in the general election, that wall looked even more depressing.
“I had to learn there were more men named John than there were women who had ever been prime minister of our country,” she said. “Men have heard the same messaging as us and they tell us we’re equal now. Yeah, we say that. But when I was a kid growing up and people said, ‘Amanda, you can be anything, even prime minister,’ it felt very much like there was an asterisk next to it.” The message girls and women hear, she added, is more like, You can be prime minister, but look what happened to Kim Campbell. Or, You can run for office, but look at Elizabeth May. An asterisk will reveal that in August 1993, before she went on to lose, Campbell was the most popular Canadian prime minister in thirty years,28 and she was still leading the polls in mid-October.29 It will reveal that Campbell went on to lead the Conservative Party’s worst defeat in Canadian political history, in which she also lost her seat.30 And it will also show that Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May was blocked from three federal campaigns’ worth of national leader debates before the rules were changed for 2019’s election.31
It can be tough to watch the slow progress. Kingsley Malo helped ten women get elected in Northern Ontario’s 2018 municipal elections. She spent a lot more time, though, thinking about the sixteen women she worked with who did not get elected. Did she really make a difference? A lot of people, she told me, assume her end goal is gender-equal councils or cabinets. But that’s only the beginning. Truly inclusive politics, she stressed, strikes down barriers for everyone: people of colour, those with disabilities, those with low income, Indigenous people, and so on. The problem, she added, is that everybody is still treating politics like a man’s game. They’re playing by the rules — often changing themselves, but rarely changing the game. Candidates are expected to fit into a diversity model that’s not really built for them, to adapt to the Old Boys’ Club and somehow succeed that way, triumphing over the very people the game was built to favour. Kingsley Malo is prone to punctuating her sentences with incredulous laughter, and she did so as she said this, thinking about the absurdity of it all.
The new-old brand of testosterone-fuelled leadership is not, needless to say, universally beloved. There are many Canadians, a lot of them young ones, who believe in a feminist government. In September 2018, the MATCH International Women’s Fund released the findings of a cross-country survey of Canadians aged eighteen to thirty-seven, focusing on what role people believed the government should play in achieving gender equality. Nearly three-quarters of respondents expressed the belief that it was the government’s responsibility to invest in gender equality worldwide, and roughly half of them wanted Canada to play a big or a leading role — including through funding.32 I asked Jess Tomlin, the organization’s president and CEO, about the motivation for commissioning the study. “Transparently,” she said “[we wanted to know] can we make this an election issue? Can we not make this an issue at the margins? Can we actually use this momentum — use this fever pitch moment — to accelerate an agenda in this country for gender equality?”
When I asked Tomlin if anything surprised her about the survey’s findings, which also delved into whether people believed gender equality was achievable within their lifetime, she paused and then answered in the opposite direction. “I’ll tell you what didn’t surprise me,” she said, speaking of the survey’s female respondents. “What didn’t surprise me was that the older she gets, the less optimistic she is that she’ll see gender equality in her lifetime.” The survey found that 84 percent of men and women between eighteen and twenty-three said they were optimistic the Western world would reach gender equality within their lifetimes. With age, that optimism waned, dropping to 70 percent among those between twenty-nine and thirty-three years old. That wasn’t surprising, Tomlin said, because the older we get, the more we have to live in the world. “We teach our girls that they can be anything and they can do anything and there’s nothing standing in their way, but that’s bullshit. Right?” she emphasized. “She can believe that up until she has her first experience where she’s sexually assaulted.” She can believe it until “somebody decides to follow her home from work, or she realizes there’s a boys’ club, or she’s passed up for a promotion, or she suddenly gets a glimpse of what he’s making versus what she’s making.”
This reality made her wonder about what she could confidently teach her nine-year-old daughter, what dreams of the future she could instill in her. “I am feeding her the lines,” she said. “If you want to be a taxi driver, if you want to be a CEO, if you want to be the prime minister of Canada, there’s nothing that’s going to stand in your way.” Tomlin was, in fact, unknowingly echoing the same messaging Kingsley Malo heard as a child — messaging that she grew up to believe was, indeed, bunk. Tomlin knew it too, just as I know it, just as those older women who answered the MATCH survey knew it. The “you can be anything” lie is something we have long wished we could whisper into truth. “But it’s like death by a thousand cuts,” said Tomlin. “The older you get and the more experiences that you have, the more you are worn down. And that breaks my heart. I do not want [my daughter] growing up without hope and resetting her expectations of what she can achieve because she happens to be on the wrong side of the gender equation.”
Still, she found the results of the MATCH survey encouraging — a sign that her daughter’s generation would encounter a less restrictive world. Laughing with the admission that the research firm itself would possibly not agree, Tomlin told me that she chose to interpret the optimism of the younger generation as action. Every day, ordinary people, she said, were becoming activists in a way she’d seen spark global transformation. Fundamentally, she added, that’s how change happens: when people hold their local government systems, policies, customs, norms, attitudes, and beliefs to account. When they demand a new way. That is different, she said, from methods by which mainstream populations in countries like Canada traditionally approach social advancement. “[It] has been, ‘You elect a great person, you trust these establishments to do right by you,’ and now people are saying, ‘Hell no.’” They may believe the government needs to help push for change, but they also don’t want to wait for it. “People are saying, ‘We’re going to completely disrupt the system, we’re going to completely disrupt the status quo, and we’re going to rebuild it for ourselves.’”
Or, some of us are. A day after Trudeau booted Wilson-Raybould and Philpott from caucus, roughly fifty delegates from the political leadership program, Daughters of the Vote, participated in an event in which they were to sit in their own MPs’ seats in the House of Commons to be addressed by the national leaders. When the prime minister arrived to speak to them, some of the delegates, all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, turned their backs on him.33 On the whole, though, it took longer than I expected for the SNC-Lavalin fallout to develop into skepticism about Trudeau’s feminism. Expectedly, when it did happen, Conservative Party opportunism drove much of it, leading the charge to call Trudeau a “fake feminist.”34 The conversation quickly devolved into who was a better option for young women: Trudeau or then Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer. “If the leader of the Opposition wants to be a better feminist than me, I wish him good luck,” Trudeau quipped. “That would be a great thing.” On Twitter, former deputy prime minister Sheila Copps toed a similar line: “Trudeau has not said bitch to anyone. Even though it may apply. The Feminist rumblings from the media are certainly questionable. Who is more feminist than Trudeau? Andrew Scheer?”35 Soon, people were ridiculing both Trudeau’s avowed feminism and the women who questioned Trudeau’s avowed feminism. If feminists now took down Trudeau, the logic went, they had better be prepared for what they would get: a supposedly far-worse option.
That many people still seemed to believe the future of equality hinged on the choice between two privileged white men says a lot about our perceptions of women and power. It tells us exactly what we think about the possibility of a woman in power. Until we can interrupt that bland, hegemonic narrative — until we can finally see a diverse collection of women as our own best hope for equity — we’ll keep replicating those same iterations of power endlessly. It’s as though we’re making a paper-doll chain of paper white men, one that might as well be titanium for how unbreakable it sometimes feels. It’s time we grabbed some scissors.
I’m worried Alice Eagly is telling me to be patient. I’d contacted the social psychologist after seeing her open the Behavioural Approaches to Diversity conference at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. The blatantly feminist event was held in a very masculine space, and invited participants to ponder whether everything they knew about promoting diversity in organizations was, in fact, wrong. (The spirit of rebellion carried on to organizers who seemed delighted that the acronym spelled out BAD, branding it on everything from notebooks to portable chargers.) I’d called Eagly because I wanted to know why we still had such difficulty seeing women as leaders, and what, if anything, it had to do with our perceptions of power. As a much-lauded professor at Northwestern University, the author of several books and more than two hundred articles (her work has been cited 90,000 times!), Eagly is one of North America’s leading researchers on women and leadership — and the stereotypes that help and harm us on our way there.
She began studying leadership, she told me, because she believes that, out of all the factors that might shift gender equality, leadership is the most important one. Yes, it would be “nice,” she added, if 50 percent of physicists were women, but she doubted that parity would immediately change the fundamental nature of science. There would be no guarantee that parity in science would, as a matter of fact, lead to new frontiers. (I’m less sure of that, but we’ll look more closely at how women are upending the bro-filled tech world in chapter 8.) Leadership, on the other hand, would affect everything. “Because leaders,” as Eagly put it, “control resources.”
Things were already changing, she added, and had been changing for a while. Slowly. Eagly had spent a lot of time looking at the past half-century’s worth of U.S. public opinion polls. Those polls assessed the ways in which people viewed men and women — or, essentially, the public’s changing gender stereotypes. And gender stereotypes had changed, just not in the ways one might have expected, considering the country’s enduring inequality. Perhaps surprisingly, as of 2018, men and women were generally viewed to be equally competent, she said. In cases where people did not view them as equal, women were seen as being more competent. Women were also seen as being more communal. All of which explained why women were seeing improvements in the workplace, generally, and also in education.
However, women were also still in an “agency deficit,” with men consistently surpassing them. Unfortunately, agency — that is, the ability to be assertive, competitive, and confident in your competence — is also seen as synonymous with leadership. Women, added Eagly, are in a double bind, of the same sort we’ve seen with Clinton, Wilson-Raybould, and countless others. They are often punished for acting agentic — that is, not playing nice. At the same time, the belief persists that women should be selfless, modest, and communal, but that those same women lack agency. In other words: women are seen either as pushovers or as monsters, neither of which are fit for leadership. So while women are rising, they are not consistently rising to leadership. We are advancing, but not necessarily to positions where we can make the most change in organizations. Our competence can open only so many doors.
As someone who’s often been called “too nice for leadership,” I feel this deeply. Navigating workplaces with kindness and a willingness to hear others’ opinions has, repeatedly, been misconstrued as a sign of my weakness and an inability to take charge of a team. I’ve been chastised for refusing to yell at colleagues, and I’ve been coached not to ask for feedback. Bosses have told me not to offer mentorship, even as they’ve acknowledged that advancing in the workplace is still easier for men in my industry. They’ve told me I cannot “make friends” with everybody, even though it’s painfully clear I’m very far from being the office social butterfly. At the same time, it seems unlikely that screaming at my co-workers, refusing to listen to them, and using silly admonishments like “that’s my final word” would get me anywhere, either. So people are surprised when they can’t steamroll over me, but they keep trying and trying.
The really sticky part, explained Eagly, is that stereotypes are not arbitrary, as much as we’d like to believe they have no grounding. To believe women can be agentic, we need to see more women being agentic, and doing so successfully. Or, put another way: many people don’t believe women can be agentic — that they can be leaders — because they don’t see enough women in those positions. “It’s very much a step-by-step process,” said Eagly. “How did women get to be considered so competent? Well, we started all going to college. Right? And sticking in there and getting those degrees.” This, she stressed to me, happened over a period of decades. It was a gradual escalation of the widespread public perception of women’s competence. The same slow process needs to take place for women to achieve equal representation in positions of power, whether it be in government, business, or elsewhere. Her voice rose to a mock pout as she insisted, “We can’t just say, ‘Stop thinking women aren’t agentic, that’s not fair!’” She continued, “You have to see it. To get there, women have to work against the grain. Social change is not easy.”
There’s another way of approaching the power gap, though. Rather than accepting the solution of a slow, long haul to equality, we can work to divorce agency — and its corresponding qualities of aggression and competitiveness — from our definition of good leadership. During her Rotman keynote, Eagly floated this idea, noting that one way to shift the perception of female leadership is for groups and organizations to decrease the value of agency. In doing so, they become less hierarchical and foster co-operative relations, elevating democratic and collaborative leadership styles. Such a structure would no longer default to an aggressive, alpha, Type-A personality at the top, but instead would allow for many expressions of leadership — or even no leader at all. She was less enthusiastic about that option when I spoke with her, clarifying that leadership (and, by extension, power) will always require that someone have a dash of agentic qualities. A woman cannot just walk into a room, she explained, and let those in the room decide for her. She cannot run a company or a country by consensus alone.
So while Eagly seemed to agree that feminists can work toward bending leadership models, she also stressed that alternate modes won’t fully close the power gap. To her mind, there will always need to be agentic leaders in power, and the toughest, most urgent goal will be getting people to see women as naturally agentic — fully capable of, and suited for, making decisions and leading others. The good news is that women don’t necessarily have to win elections for perceptions to change. Speaking of the then-approaching 2020 U.S. presidential election, Eagly, who joked that she’s “old,” was hopeful. Many women had tossed their hats into the ring for presidential nomination after seeing so many women run for the 116th U.S. Congress and a record number of them win. It was the biggest jump in women Congress members since the 1990s, and it happened after women saw Clinton run for president and lose.36
By this logic, the way we talk about women and leadership also has to change, argued Eagly. Both feminists and the media in general often focus on the worst statistics, the ones that seem the grimmest. But why don’t we ever talk about the areas in which women have made gains? She cited one statistic that she was particularly sick of hearing: that women make up only 5 percent of the CEOs of companies on the S&P 500. If you look instead at CEOs across all organizations, 28 percent are women.37 That isn’t wonderful either, but it’s a whole lot better than 5 percent. Ignoring these women only perpetuates the myth that women can’t lead. It ignores all the women who have climbed to power in universities, in non-profits. It makes people say — Eagly’s mockingly plaintive voice returned here — “Oh, there are so few women leaders. Come on now!” she shouted. “Don’t you live in the world?” She had a point: the very way we talk about leadership, and power, often excludes women, and the areas in which they’ve already made so much progress in flipping power dynamics.
It’s for these reasons that Eagly also believes it’s time to retire the “glass ceiling” metaphor. Like me, she sees women’s route to leadership as a labyrinth — although hers isn’t quite so dire as the one I envisioned. The glass ceiling has a hopelessness to it, she said, because it is by definition a solid barrier. The labyrinth metaphor does not deny that women have challenges men don’t. “It presents a challenge with the spirit of go! GO! Figure it out,” she told me. “Get through your labyrinth.”
I understand what she’s saying, and it’s something I’ve heard others say for what feels like my whole life. It boils down to this: just keep going. Still, I cannot help but wonder if there are better ways to achieve access to institutional power, ones that don’t culminate in offering up potential leaders like sacrificial feminist lambs. And I cannot help but wonder if Eagly and others have too quickly dismissed alternative power models. Why do we have to keep playing (and losing) the same game to get ahead? Solutions that shuttle women through old systems — albeit hoping that women will change the system themselves once they, fingers crossed, get to the top — don’t only seem to reward the most privileged, the most able to lean in, or the luckiest, they also seem to be taking forever. It’s possible to view these results as encouraging, as Eagly does, and for good reason, but the process itself is exhausting — and even more so for women of colour, Indigenous women, and those who are LGBTQ+.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. We were looking at centuries of ongoing struggle for political and economic equality ahead! Hope was just fine, I said, but wasn’t this gradual change making a lot of us justifiably impatient?
Eagly blinked at me. “Right,” she said. “Social movements are supposed to make people angry.”
Ontario MPP Jill Andrew was running late. It was mid-October 2018, and the politician, body positive activist, and community co-owner of Glad Day Bookshop, the world’s oldest LGBTQ+ bookstore, was set to open Toronto’s annual G Day. The one-day event, which started in Vancouver, is meant to help girls aged ten to twelve prepare for the next phase of their lives: adolescence. In many ways, it’s also meant to reclaim the term “rite of passage” and mitigate the onslaught of BS that is, already, bearing down on them as they go from “girl” to “woman.” There were about a hundred girls gathered that day in the Toronto Public Reference Library, and the delayed opening gave them a chance to chat excitedly as they waited. How often did these girls get to attend something that was all about them? They were practically fizzing. A teenage volunteer buzzed past me. “I’m sorry. I’m very hyped,” she said, smiling broadly. “I’ve been talking to girls all morning!”
Eventually, Andrew rushed in. The organizers encouraged everybody to take three deep breaths for “Jill and ourselves.”
Andrew turned to the group. “The first lesson,” she joked, referring to the city’s transit system, which had unexpectedly closed for maintenance that morning, “is always be prepared.” Andrew went on to explain what a member of provincial parliament does, exactly, and mentioned her newly earned doctoral degree. The encouraging and also uncomfortable truth is that Andrew, as a Black, queer woman in power, brings a presence that often upends the status quo — a vital “see me, be me” moment for the girls, who hung on to her every word. Andrew’s prepared speech was both engaging and inspiring. She talked about being different as a source of power; she told the girls they were good enough just the way they were. But it was her unprepared commentary, offered in between the other speakers’ talks, that struck me most deeply.
“We’re allowed to cry,” she told the group. “We’re allowed to be happy.” She took a breath, and when her voice came out it was booming. “But can I also say we’re allowed to be angry.” The girls started cheering. Their parents and guardians began cheering too, voices roaring. Andrew repeated herself: “We’re allowed to be angry!” We don’t have to smile, she added. Dozens of little heads nodded. “Every day we’re told to smile. Smile. Smile. We don’t have to!” Cries of “Yeah!” echoed around the room. I wanted to shout with them. I cannot imagine anyone ever having told me that when I was a little girl; I cannot imagine being brave enough to believe it.
Much has been made of women’s renewed fury in recent years, a lot of it called forth in the wake of Trump’s win. Several books came out on the subject in 2018 alone, and I heard from many women I interviewed that year that they’d never been angrier. As Jess Tomlin put it: “I’m hearing and feeling a lot of rage. It’s this idea that you can’t unsee things.” She went on: “And because there is this global sort of mass awakening right now, we’re seeing establishments crumble, we’re seeing celebrities crumble, we’re seeing traditional power structures be questioned. It’s all so much.” You can’t ignore it anymore. Certainly, many people don’t want to.
Tomlin’s right. We have a lot to be angry about. The wrath of the #MeToo movement alone has made it strikingly clear that many claims about equality come littered with the same asterisks Amanda Kingsley Malo saw when she looked at her classroom wall. Clinton’s loss — or Trump’s win — has often been marked as the spark that ignited the calls to burn it all down. It’s worth remembering, though, that our current rage is happening against a backdrop of inequity that has lasted my lifetime and more. Too often the semblance of success and power for some has obscured a deeper truth: these systems were never built for us to succeed. I mean, it took until 2018 for us to stop singing “sons” in our national anthem, a change that prompted much backlash and a vow from some politicians, including former Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, to never use the new gender-neutral language.38
Of course, it’s more than these fairly superficial things. Unless there is monumental change (or one of Twilight’s vampires takes me as their lover), I will not be around to see the global gender gap close. As of 2018, that was expected to happen in 108 years across the 106 countries the World Economic Forum has covered since the first edition of its report (it now ranks 149 countries).39 To measure the gap, the WEF looks at four different aspects — economic participation, political empowerment, health and survival, and educational attainment — and can, in doing so, unfortunately “mask important differences in performance.” Among the four categories, the economic participation and political empowerment chasms — and they are chasms — will be the most challenging to shrink, according to the report, at a mind-bending 202 and 107 years respectively. That’s almost more frustrating when the education gap is taken into account, which is set to close in a scant fourteen years. If women are just as qualified, then what the hell is happening? The political gap, the report notes, looks especially bad, representing a “particularly sporadic presence of women among heads of state.” In the 149 countries studied, the average tenure of a woman as head of state or prime minister in the past half-century has been just over two years. Cool.
For the record, as of 2018, Canada sat at number sixteen on the global gender gap index; the United States was at fifty-one. Before Canadians get too braggy, though, consider that the political and economic gender gaps grow wider in Canada the closer a woman gets to power, just as they do elsewhere. And things don’t always look so great beyond traditional methods of measuring power, either. The #MeToo movement exposed the pervasive, pernicious sexual harassment and violence women face every day. At the height of the movement, in 2017, a record number of people in Canada, the vast majority of them women, reported sexual assaults to the police. While it’s often assumed (or outright stated by those leading the backlash against #MeToo) that most complainants came forward to report old incidents, it’s simply not true. As was the case before #MeToo, the majority of complainants reported an assault that had taken place recently, usually on the day of their report.40 The uptick in complainants coming forward to police resulted in an average of seventy-four reports per day in 2017. But even that gut-churning number does not account for the sheer volume of assaults that are not reported, which, we know, is most of them.41
What’s more, in Canada, half of all women have experienced at least one incident of either sexual assault or physical violence since age sixteen. Women of colour, women with disabilities, transgender women, and Indigenous women all face significantly higher rates of violence; Indigenous women are killed at six times the rate of non-Indigenous women. About every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner.42 I could go on and on with the bad news; the statistics that catalogue the disparate experience of women in Canada and the general shittiness they face are both bleak and relentless. Cataloguing such numbers is exhausting and sickening — a reminder, if we even need it, that progress does not equal equality. We’ve been fighting forever and we still have a long way to go. No wonder women are fed up.
Which is all to say that the anger that rose up after the U.S. presidential election in 2016 built on decades of feminist rage; it has sometimes guttered but never been completely snuffed out. It did not come out of nowhere. The questions we’re faced with now are What makes it any different this time? and, more pressing, What do we do with all this anger? In many ways, the response to both questions is the same. This new urge to act has a very specific target: a re-emergent and toxic brand of power that has the potential to rewrite an entire country’s democracy — and send any progress we have made plunging back into history. So that’s what feminists are doing. They’re fighting that. To do so, women are attacking from all sides. They are changing the face and path of power, as they also change the judicial, political, social, and economic systems it governs. They’re working outside those systems, forming new ones, not even bothering to play by the old rules. We’re done adapting, I heard over and over again from the women I spoke with. Let them adapt to us.
It was no doubt this undercurrent that prompted a Maclean’s writer to hypothesize what Trudeau must have thought as he watched the SNC-Lavalin controversy brewing: “Is Jody Wilson-Raybould going to burn my government to the ground?”43 The answer is yes. And many women don’t want to stop there.
Women have often imagined equality within the confines of a patriarchal structure in which we were never meant to succeed. We’ve been striving for victory in a game we were never meant to win, or even to play. Think of it this way: we’ve been stuck trying to make blockbuster gold with movies like Ghostbusters or Ocean’s 8, with too little attention focused on figuring out which stories we might want to tell for ourselves. But what would happen if we stopped casting other people in roles written first for men? Burning it all down does not necessarily mean anarchy, or a future that’s plunged into chaos. Burning it down means looking beyond parity as a simple solution for equality. It means looking at representation and why it isn’t a blanket guarantee of power or change. It means asking how power really works for women, and how we interact with it, and why it seems so slippery for anyone who isn’t an old white dude. It means asking if it’s time to change the essential demands of feminism.
We have been told that we will all achieve equality when we have what affluent white men have. But maybe it’s time to question whether that’s what we really want. When it comes to women and power, nothing is simple or straightforward. There are the solutions researchers posit, and then there are the things we feel from experience to be true. There is the need for parity and gender balance in our governments, in our businesses and organizations, in our schools and museums, and in our everyday lives. But there’s also a need to recognize that unless we overhaul the power structures of our institutions and our societies — unless we give women equal power and respect to go along with equal access — achieving parity might not fundamentally change a damn thing. Without deep change, women might be on the team, but they’ll be sitting on the sidelines. Perhaps this volatile, angry time offers an opportunity, too: a chance to create a new definition of power, and with it, a new vision for equity.
Of course, it’s one thing to say that and another to actually figure out what power would look like if it weren’t, as Kingsley Malo described it, a man’s game. If we decided to stop playing by the rules, or even playing altogether, what would we play instead?
If I wanted a model for a new way, perhaps I might actually find cues from the past. Or maybe I wouldn’t have to look so far at all. Maybe it was just a matter of asking how two little words were able to upend the world.
12. Rothkopf, Joanna. “The Sexiest Thing About Justin Trudeau Is His Cabinet’s Gender Parity.” Jezebel. November 4, 2015. https://theslot.jezebel.com/the-sexiest-thing-about-justin-trudeau-is-his-cabinets-1740585053.
13. Chartrand, Fred. “Trudeau’s ‘Because it’s 2015’ retort draws international attention.” Globe and Mail. November 5, 2015. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/trudeaus-because-its-2015-retort-draws-international-cheers/article27119856/.
14. Wilson-Raybould, Jody. “Statement from the Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould.” https://web.archive.org/web/20190114231051/https://jwilson-raybould.liberal.ca/news-nouvelles/statement-from-the-honourable-jody-wilson-raybould-minister-of-veteransaffairs-and-associate-minister-of-national-defence-and-member-ofparliament-for-vancouver-granville/.
15. Rabson, Mia. “Jody Wilson-Raybould became thorn in Liberals’ side before SNC-Lavalin case.” Global News. February 9, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190209181837/https://globalnews.ca/news/4943451/jody-wilson-raybould-place-in-liberals/.
16. Rempel, Michelle. Twitter post. February 9, 2019. https://twitter.com/MichelleRempel/status/1094260757582118912; Syed, Fatima. “Politicians denounce Trudeau government for sexist treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybould.” Canada’s National Observer. February 11, 2019. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/11/news/politicians-denounce-trudeau-government-sexist-treatment-jody-wilson-raybould.
17. Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. “Open Letter: The discriminatory, sexist comments about Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould being spread by government officials and staff are appalling and condemnable.” February 2019. https://www.ubcic.bc.ca/discriminatory_sexist_comments_about_minister_jody_wilson.
18. Brake, Justin. “PMO calls comments about Jody Wilson-Raybould ‘unacceptable.’” aptn National News. February 14, 2019. https://aptnnews.ca/2019/02/14/pmo-calls-comments-about-jody-wilson-raybould-unacceptable/.
19. Olsen, Tyler. “Abbotsford-area MP apologizes for ‘inappropriate’ comments.” Abbotsford News. February 28, 2019. https://www.abbynews.com/news/wilson-raybould-testimony-sour-grapes-abbotsf0rd-area-mp-says/.
20. Global News. “Jody Wilson-Raybould’s testimony — read the full transcript of her opening remarks.” February 27, 2019. https://globalnews.ca/news/5006450/jody-wilson-raybould-testimony-transcript/.
21. Tunney, Catharine, and Peter Zimonjic. “Trudeau pushes back on SNC-Lavalin, says he was ‘surprised and disappointed’ by Wilson-Raybould’s resignation.” cbc News. February 12, 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wilson-raybould-snc-lavalin-1.5015755.
22. Stone, Laura. “Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes says she was met with ‘hostility, anger’ in private Trudeau talks.” Globe and Mail. March 8, 2019. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-liberal-mp-celina-caesar-chavannes-says-she-was-met-with-hostility/.
23. Kalvapalle, Rahul, and Amanda Connolly. “Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott kicked out of Liberal Party caucus.” Global News. April 2, 2019. https://globalnews.ca/news/5123526/liberal-caucus-wilson-raybould-jane-philpott/; Aiello, Rachel. “Wilson-Raybould, Philpott ‘disappointed’ by ouster from Liberal caucus, PM on defensive.” ctv News. April 3, 2019. https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/wilson-raybould-philpott-disappointed-by-ouster-from-liberal-caucus-pm-on-defensive-1.4363910.
24. Harris, Kathleen. “Trudeau ejects Wilson-Raybould, Philpott from Liberal caucus.” cbc News. April 2, 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberals-wilson-raybould-philpott-caucus-1.5080880.
25. FiveThirtyEight. “2016 General Election Forecast.” November 8, 2016. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/.
26. Wang, Sam. “All estimates point toward HRC>50% probability. What determines the exact number?” Princeton Election Consortium. November 2016. http://election.princeton.edu/2016/11/06/is-99-a-reasonable_probability/.
27. Reuters. “Moody’s Analytics election model predicts Clinton win.” November 1, 2016. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-research-moody-s-idUSKBN12W56J.
28. Orlando Sentinel. “Female leader of Canada is the most popular in 30 years.” August 17, 1993. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1993-08-17-9308170734-story.html.
29. Farnsworth, Clyde H. “Campbell, Though Liked, May Not Win in Canada.” New York Times. October 15, 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/15/world/campbell-though-liked-may-not-win-in-canada.html.
30. The Canadian Encyclopedia. “Kim Campbell.” February 2008. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/kim-campbell.
31. Green Party of Canada. “Liberals set up new debate commission with fair rules: Elizabeth May will be in the 2019 leaders’ debates.” October 30, 2018. https://www.greenparty.ca/en/media-release/2018-10-30/liberals-set-new-debate-commission-fair-rules-elizabeth-may-will-be-2019; CBC Player. “May pleased that Greens allowed in federal leaders debates.” October 30, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1356818499651.
32. Coletto, David. “Only 1 in 5 Canadian millennials believe they will see global gender equality in their lifetimes.” Abacus Data. September 2018. https://abacusdata.ca/only-1-in-5-canadian-millennials-believe-they-will-see-global-gender-equality-in-their-lifetimes/.
33. Maloney, Ryan, and Zi-Ann Lum. “Trudeau’s Speech To Daughters Of The Vote Spurs Roughly 50 Delegates To Turn Their Backs.” HuffPost. April 3, 2019. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/04/03/trudeau-daughters-of-the-vote_a_23705757/.
34. Harris, Kathleen. “MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes quits Liberal caucus.” cbc News. March 20, 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-mp-caesar-chavannes-caucus-1.5064544.
35. Kappler, Maija. “Sheila Copps Stands By Controversial Twitter Statements About Jody Wilson-Raybould.” HuffPost. March 10, 2019. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/03/10/sheila-copps-jody-wilson-raybould-snc-lavalin_a_23689089/.
36. Desilver, Drew. “A record number of women will be serving in the new Congress.” Pew Research Center. December 2018. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/18/record-number-women-in-congress/.
37. Interview with Alice Eagly, February 20, 2019.
38. Government of Canada. “Full history of ‘O Canada.’” https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/anthems-canada/history-o-canada.html; Vomiero, Jessica. “‘O Canada’ lyric change sparks debate, but the anthem was originally gender neutral.” Global News. February 2, 2018. https://globalnews.ca/news/4002268/oh-canada-originally-gender-neutral/.
39. World Economic Forum. The Global Gender Gap Report 2018. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf.
40. Rotenberg, Cristine, and Adam Cotter. “Police-reported sexual assaults in Canada before and after #MeToo, 2016 and 2017.” Statistics Canada. November 8, 2018. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2018001/article/54979-eng.htm.
41. RAINN. “The Criminal Justice System: Statistics.” https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system.
42. Canadian Women’s Foundation. “The Facts about Gender-Based Violence.” April 2016. https://www.canadianwomen.org/the-facts/gender-based-violence/.
43. MacDougall, Andrew. “Jody Wilson-Raybould has Trudeau in checkmate.” Maclean’s. February 24, 2019. https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/jody-wilson-raybould-has-trudeau-in-checkmate/.