Making a Difference in the U.S.A.

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The 16 women senators of the 110th U.S. Congress: (front row) Claire McCaskill, Dianne Feinstein, Maria Cantwell, Lisa Murkowski, and Olympia Snowe; (back row) Blanche Lincoln, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mary Landrieu, Debbie Stabenow, Susan Collins, Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Dole, Amy Klobuchar, and Patty Murray. (Courtesy U.S. Senate)

Women and Leadership: A "Seismic Change"

By Jane Morse

There's been a “seismic change” in cultural assumptions about women and leadership, says a top scholar on politics in the United States.

Professor and author Kathleen Hall Jamieson. (Courtesy University of Pennsylvania) Below, Jamieson's book, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership.

In 1995, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, then dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, published a book called Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership. In it she described the “damned if you do; damned if you don't” choices that many women faced when they ventured beyond their traditional sphere of home and family.

Jamieson documented cases in which women political figures had difficulty gaining a hearing or respect for their ideas, were tied to “female issues” and were perceived as not capable of wining elections. “The history of Western culture is riddled with evidence of traps for women that have forcefully curtailed their options,” she wrote.

Recent history, however, is a lot different.

“Since I wrote the book, women have increasingly held positions as heads of state” around the world, Jamieson says. More American women are serving as governors, in the Congress, in presidential cabinets, as heads of major philanthropies, and as university professors; and all have demonstrated their competencies as leaders to the public.

“All of those (women) constitute opportunities for the public to see female leadership,” Jamieson said. “Since I wrote Beyond the Double Bind, there have been a great number of changes in the culture – most of them increase the likelihood that a woman will be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.”

She credits the women's movement of the second half of the 20th century for raising public awareness that there were women with expertise the nation could use who were being barred access to visible positions of authority. Jamieson, now the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, says the women's movement had a personal impact on her life as well.

When Jamieson published Packaging the Presidency, the first of some 20 books she has written on U.S. politics, she was “invited to be in more media places than I wanted to be; I was taken aback by the attention. …

“I attribute that to the fact that the mass media were recognizing that women were in the audience and they (the networks) needed to make sure that they had women on television.”

Jamieson acknowledges that “women's leadership doesn't necessarily solve all of the problems. And women's leadership doesn't necessarily insure that you address the problems that are unique to women. … The difference that we attribute to a difference in gender may well be the difference that gender brings in the form of life experiences. …

“There are times in which the difference that a woman makes is a difference the occurs because that woman is more likely, perhaps, to have been a mother; perhaps to have cared for elderly parents; perhaps to have experienced discrimination; perhaps to have a combination of experiences in the economic world. … And those kinds of things do make a difference,” she says.

Jamieson notes that other countries have led in putting women in leadership positions higher than those held by women in the United States. “In some ways, the women of the United States should look to those countries that have been led competently by women as a way of assuring themselves that the United States' time will come as well,” she says.

But, she adds: “To the extent that women in other countries are struggling to gain freedoms that we take for granted in the United States, the message that I tried to convey in the book Beyond the Double Bind is, I think, still a good message: that if you look across the history of the United States, the progress that women have made has been relatively steady. The model that says women make progress and are then pushed back, doesn't seem to fit the historical data. …

“My take on history is that progress (for women) is slower than it should be, but progress tends to be steady and sustained. And one would only hope that in many of the countries where the oppression is backbreaking and mind-boggling that that progress will be faster and more strongly sustained than it has been the past.”

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