A bunch of men telling women what’s good for them
Speaking of the Republican party…Politico points out that there are fewer Republican women in Congress than there were ten years ago.
So far this year, Republicans have nominated women in just 26 of the 308 congressional districts that have held primaries. That’s a mere 8 percent—and it’s in line with the current makeup of the House Republican Conference, which is 91 percent male and 9 percent female.
Welllll, you know, Christina Hoff Sommers would say that’s because women prefer not to go into Congress, and you can’t mess with people’s preferences. It’s not at all structural or systemic or a result of the several thousand roadblocks there are in the way of women who seek public office. The way things are is exactly how they’re supposed to be, because they’re exactly how everyone intended them to be, so relax and go back to sleep now, after sending a large donation to the American Enterprise Institute.
During the past decade, that disparity has actually grown wider, as wave elections swept out a number of established Republican members of Congress (in 2006, 2008 and 2012), and swept in a lot of new ones (in 2010 and 2014). Since 2006, the proportion of women in the House GOP caucus has dropped from 11 percent to just 9 percent today. Although there are now 247 Republicans in the House, up from 229 a decade ago, there are fewer women: 22, down from 25.
Over the same period, Democratic women took advantage of these electoral shifts, replacing men from their party’s old boys’ network with women backed by EMILY’s List and other advocacy groups seeking to increase women’s representation in office. From 2006 to today, women grew from 21 percent of the House Democratic Caucus to 33 percent. And the party isn’t about to let anyone forget it: Their new class was on display in full force when the House’s Democratic women gathered on stage behind Nancy Pelosi during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
Women cominna getcha!
This growing disparity, with Democrats electing ever more women and Republicans ever fewer, repeats at every level of government: U.S. Senate, statewide offices, upper and lower state legislatures, and municipalities. (The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University maintains useful records on this.) What that means is that there’s no sign the GOP’s current woman problem is going to get any better any time soon.
It’s almost as if the Republican party doesn’t really feel all that welcoming to women.
The decline of the Republican woman is a public relations disaster for the GOP.
It means that every time a male Republican officeholder or candidate puts his foot in his mouth about women—from former Congressman Todd “legitimate rape” Akin to Donald “blood coming out of her wherever” Trump—effectively the only Republicans who can rush to their defense are other men. Whenever Republican leaders gather to speak about welfare, abortion, the minimum wage or pay equity, they look like a bunch of men telling women what’s good for them.
Look like? Look like? They don’t look like, they are.
To be honest, though, I don’t consider this a problem, because I don’t think women should be Republicans; Republicans don’t look out for the interests of women. If the Republican party doesn’t want to fix that problem, that’s their tough luck.
From the Republicans point of view this is definitely a feature, not a bug.
No one should be a Republican.
Matthew I agree. From the other side of the world it looks as though the Democrats are, in many respects, just about as conservative as the Repubs used to be, but with more social conscience and less of the down right hateful fringe (now not so fringe). It is hard to see a rational reason why anyone with a shred of decency would bother with them. Arguably it is the economic and political left that needs a new home. One that doesn’t also involve swallowing a bucket of post-modernist woo.
Unlike you, Ophelia Benson, I do not claim to know what Christina Hoff Sommers might say on this subject, but if Christina Hoff Sommers did say that women are less well represented in the American Congress because they have, in general, less interest in being politicians she might very well be largely correct.
The dynamics of the Republican side of this election are just…weird. If one looks the platform overwhelmingly approved by the RNC at the convention, it reads like every Values Voter wet dream curdled into a heady mix of santorum, but that rhetoric was actually remarkably absent from the podium, with more than one speaker (such as Peter Thiel, a gay man himself) actually explicitly calling for the party to move past the Culture Wars. It speaks to a disconnect between the candidate and the party leadership. It’s clear that whoever organised the speaking slots and whoever wrote the party platform didn’t bother checking with each other.
One wonders if the Republican party would have gotten to this point if they hadn’t spent so much energy vigorously chasing out anyone and everyone who wasn’t a straight white Christian man…if, in effect, their misogyny and homophobia and racism hasn’t crippled them of any tools they might have had to adequately address the moral crisis they’ve thrown themselves (and the country, and the world) into. But, then again, if the Republican party had tried to become more inclusive and admiring of diversity, they would likely not have gotten to this crisis point in the first place, so perhaps that question is moot.
A more applicable question is where the party goes from here. I think the convention revealed a bifurcation that’s currently taking place, between culture warriors and nativists; both factions are driven by hateful and ignorant ideologies, but it’s probably a mistake to elide them. They’ve both been pulled into the ‘big tent’ of Republicanism, but the disconnect between the party’s platform and its public face is most neatly explained, in my opinion, as a dispute between these factions as to which has a more legitimate claim to the mantle of Republicanism. It will be interesting, perhaps even vital, to track how the nativists’ misogyny and homophobia manifests itself if they continue to gain ascendancy in the party’s leadership; will they simply subsume religious values as part of their nationalism, or will they shift the goal posts, so that (for example) abortion stops being a moral issue, but instead one of (ethno-)national security? If so, what tactics (legal and otherwise) might they try to develop to manifest their ideas, and how can those be most effectively countered?
I think Christina Hoff Summers might suggest this has something to do with the low level of women’s representation in the party. Why is that so obviously wrong?
See also, working class.
I’d suspect two forces at play here:
1: Women are just less likely to rise in the Republican Party, for obvious reasons, and those with political ambitions are less likely to be attracted to it, so there’s fewer women going on the ballot with an (R) after their name.
2: Voters who are willing to vote for a woman candidate are more likely to be independents or Democrats than Republicans, so even in cases where a woman makes it onto the Republican ticket, she’s going to get less support from her party’s base than a Democratic counterpart.
So a woman has to be able, as the old saying goes, be able to perform as well as a male candidate would’ve, but backwards and in heels, and then she’ll only have a good chance of winning in an established GOP stronghold–a purple district is likely to be lost because her base doesn’t show up, and left-leaning and moderate voters won’t support the policies she had to advocate to get there.
@Richard Paulsen
Then you should read her. Her general view on the question “Why aren’t there more women in field X?” is clear. Ophelia sums up her attitude fairly.
https://www.aei.org/publication/why-cant-a-woman-be-more-like-a-man-3/
(There are some very interesting claims in that piece. One of the weirdest is Marc Hauser’s claim that male chimpanzees are more “technologically innovative” than females; a claim I have seen nowhere else and is at odds with everything I’ve read on the subject. I am not a primatologist, but I do know that Hauser has other views that seem to contradict the data.)
And Republican women are significantly even less well represented, that’d be because of their evolved tendency to be more empathetic than systematic. Than Democratic women.
By the way, “she might very well be largely correct” is a weaselly way to put it. Of course she might be. I might very well be largely correct in thinking that Hoff Sommers is a hack and a propagandist, but I wouldn’t put it that way unless I was feeling passive-aggressive. I’d come right out and say what I think.
(Christina Hoff Sommers is a hack and a propagandist.)
No, but it might be that talented women are significantly less interested in being active in a party which is less supportive of women’s rights than another party. In other words, they are choosing. Why is that ides so incredible?
I think Christina Hoff Summers would say that we should at least accept that possibility and look at the data. otherwise we are just acting from ideology. I think she would be right.
Pinkeen, I was responding to Richard Paulsen’s remark:
I copied and pasted that so that it would be clear that that is what I was responding to. The suggestion was that women in general are less interested in being politicians than men are.
As for your comment: CHS is a conservative herself, and she is as ideological as can be. If you read the article at the link I posted, you’ll see that she supports the notion that men are more interested in the physical sciences because biology (ie, males and females evolved to have pink brains and blue brains.) According to CHS, that, not systemic sexism, is why women “choose” the careers and the career tracks they do. (Our pink brains also dispose us to want to spend more time with our families.)
Suffice it to say that the evidence is murky. Having read a number of popular books on the subject over the years, I have an opinion at odds with Hoff Sommers’,