Women in Politics // Current

Palin: wrong woman, wrong message - Los Angeles Times

This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most... more

uppityprogressive
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Palinomaly - a nonsensical answer to a question you didn't understand.

A website devoted to the unintended (and sometimes scary) humor of Sarah Palin - and the explosion of comedy she has inspired.... more

dublinranch
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InFocus: Ann O'Leary On Women In Politics @ CalTV: UC Berkeley's Online TV Station

Ann O’Leary, former Hillary Clinton advisor and the executive director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Health, Economic... more

CalTVinfo
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What America's Smartest Women Say About Sarah Palin - Newsweek.com

Heels on, gloves off. Pitbulls with lipstick. Cleavage controversies and baby dramas. For more than a year, we've been talking about women in politics, and, still, we're not tired of it yet. Get any group of women together, of any political stripe, and Sarah Palin, with all her complexities and contradictions, becomes topic No. 1. And once you mention Palin, someone will bring up Hillary Clinton. And feminism. And whether mothers should work. And whether there will ever be a day when we don't talk about a female candidate's hair.

Even with an economic crisis on the front pages, these are irresistible topics—as evidenced by the conversations at NEWSWEEK's annual Women & Leadership conference, held this week in New York. Dee Dee Myers, White House press secretary for Bill Clinton, praised Palin's fortitude and, yes, intelligence: "I think she's both smart and resilient and optimistic and courageous and all those things. ... Her confident and completely unfazed response to being criticized is great because she didn't run from the stage crying. She sort of shrugged it off and when on to the next event, in a way that didn't seem callous, and it didn't seem unfeminine, and it didn't seem like she was acting like a guy, it was just her way."

Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway had no problem acknowledging the debt that her party owes to a Democratic star: "I don't think you could have Sarah Palin's meteoric rise without Hillary Clinton coming before her."

But these women disagreed on whether Palin belongs in the White House: "Is she ready to be vice-president? No." Myers said. "But it's not because she doesn't have these other qualities that make a great politician—things that you cannot teach as easily," such as the ability to connect with voters and deliver a speech with Reaganesque aplomb. "If she'd been allowed to work as governor of Alaska, stand for reelection, maybe be involved in something like the national governor's association, travel around the country, travel around the world a little bit, develop a world view that's more clearly thought through than the one she has now, she could have been a formidable candidate. And she may still be. But as it stands right now, to say that Barack Obama is no more qualified than Sarah Palin is laughable in my view."

Political commentator Bay Buchanan thinks Palin would have been attacked in the media no matter how much experience she had. "A woman like Sarah Palin, a socially, pro-life conservative woman who is extremely feminine, and a mother, and all of these things that one thinks about when they think about a traditional woman, was unacceptable [to the media and critics on the left]," Buchanan said. "Was totally unacceptable. It didn't matter if she had 10 years or two years [of experience]. They were going after her."

But author and editor Tina Brown said that Hillary Clinton was also subject to an unrelenting storm of criticism for everything from her cleavage to her ankles. "The moment that Hillary wept was a hugely transformative moment for women in a strange way," Brown said. "Because she was so extraordinarily abused by the media—I do feel that strongly—and she was so stalwart and she is so stalwart and so valiant, and she had this moment of breaking down, and there was a collective acknowledgement: What are we doing? I even felt sorry for Sarah Palin last night when I saw her on television, she looked so beat up, that you had to say, this process is so grueling, are we right to put our public figures and our politicians through quite such an ordeal, and what does it do to their values and their sense of themselves by the end?"

(more at the link)Heels on, gloves off. Pitbulls with lipstick. Cleavage controversies and baby dramas. For more than a year, we've been... more

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1 month ago

At 16, a champion for democracy

Keep an eye on Olena Prykhodko. At the age of seven, she joined a nationwide group for young women leaders, and by 11 she was... more

goldenways
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1 month ago

UN study finds more women in politics

Women have entered politics in greater numbers than ever in the past decade, accounting for 18.4 percent of parliament members worldwide, according to a study released Thursday by the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

The proportion of women has increased by seven percentage points since 1995. Much of the increase was driven by women realizing that they needed to attain power rather than just lobby for change, said women who spoke at a ceremony for the study's release.

"We need to convince women that the only way to really make a change is to stop complaining and just be the owner of power," said Senator Cecilia López Montaño, the speaker of the opposition Liberal Party in Colombia. "It is a huge fight because men have been controlling power for centuries."

If the rate of change holds constant, it will take until 2045 for women to reach parity in the developing world, which the study by Unifem, as the development fund is known, defined as holding 40 percent to 60 percent of elected parliamentary seats. The report also examined how women were affected by economics, the courts and crime, among other issues.

Quotas that reserve seats for women have proved instrumental in increasing their numbers. In elections held in 2007, women in countries with some form of electoral quota captured 19.3 percent of the seats, as opposed to 14.7 percent in countries without such quotas, the study said. Of the 22 countries where women constitute more than 30 percent of the national assembly, 18 have some form of quota.

Provisional election returns from Rwanda, announced in news reports on Thursday, indicated that its Parliament, which reserves 24 of 80 seats for women, will become the first in which women hold a majority, with 44 seats.

The genocide in Rwanda was also a crucial factor in galvanizing women to get more involved politically during the country's reconstruction, said Inés Alberdi, the executive director of Unifem.

"If you are in a secondary position, you can never fight for women," she said.

The study found a high correlation between the number of elected women and legislation related to women's issues, including agriculture services, day care and street lighting for security. It also cited British research that women turned out in higher numbers to vote in elections when there was a female candidate.

In addition, the study suggested that women held far fewer party leadership posts than their membership in the rank and file would suggest. A Latin American study quoted in the United Nations report said that while 47 percent of party members in Paraguay were women, they held just 19 percent of leadership positions. In Mexico, 52 percent of party members were women, compared with 31 percent of the leaders. In Panama, the numbers were 45 percent and 19 percent.

"You have to be three times more intelligent, you have to be four times more transparent, you have to have everything more than men," said Senator López, of Colombia. "We still have a male chauvinist society."

It will continue this way, she said, until the "democratic deficit" is closed, meaning equal representation for men and women.

Women have entered politics in greater numbers than ever in the past decade, accounting for 18.4 percent of parliament members... more