Year of the Woman Part 2? Not So Much.

There are many adjectives that could be used to describe the results of the 2010 election.  It was historic in a number of ways but not so much from a gender standpoint.  There were women running for re-election who lost, those who won, and newcomers who were elected… some of those women were white and some of those women were women of color.  A few women in high profile races in senatorial and gubernatorial races lost, particularly on the Republican side of the political aisle.  The pundits can spin the results but the bottomline is what is important in the final analysis and the bottomline is this:

In 2011 there will be 17 women in the U.S. Senate, unchanged from 2010.  There will be 70 women in the House of Representatives in 2011, down from 73 in 2010.  There will be six women governors, down from a high of nine in 2007.  The good news is the increased number of women candidates running for office.  The bad news is that a significant number of those female candidates – on both sides of the political aisle – not only had to defend their record or platform but their ability to execute the office to which they aspired because of their gender. 

The 2010 election may have been the nastiest yet because the stakes were so high for both parties.  The politics of personal destruction were front and center for all candidates – male and female – but, as has been pointed out, women suffer greater damage to their reputations and their candidacies when gender-biased attacks are employed by their opponents.  For all of the talk from both sides about a “new tone” to political rhetoric, it’s the same childish sandbox campaigning when it counts.  Whoever is the least biggest “poopyhead” is the one who will be elected.  The gender-biased attacks only further bring to the fore in society the differences in acceptable perception of behavior for each gender i.e. men are assertive while women are bit**es.  As Vivian Valien noted in her book “Why So Slow” anything that accentuates male behavior results in a “plus sign” to people’s minds, while anything accentuates female behavior results in a “minus sign”.  There was no holding back in the types and number of attacks between candidates in the 2010 election.     In that regard, there was equality between the genders.  Women were treated as harshly – if not moreso in some instances – as their male opponents.

The difference, however, is that the attacks devalue the women more.  As long as that is the case, women will be on the receiving end of the minus mark and their progress toward equal representation in our government will be diminished as well.

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