Gender and Race Matter When You’re the One and Only

In 1984, I won a hotly contested Des Moines City Council election against many men. But sometimes I think, the race was really all about my hair.

Yes, after every speech, people would come up to me … a few with questions or comments about what I had said … but far too many to tell me I had “great hair.” Now what I actually have is hair so coarse that it stays put. But I learned something: there is such a thing as “political hair” … Ann Richards had it too … it just doesn’t move.

People deny that gender matters, that they even see “gender.”

They do this about race as well. To be fair…they want to be fair…acting as if ours is a meritocracy and like these differences don’t matter, that they have become “invisible.”

It ain’t so.

But what will make them “normal” is when there are numbers of women leaders vying on the Iowa planes competing for the presidency. The same goes for corporate boardrooms and executive suites, for that matter.

Until then, gender does matter.

What will move beyond gender to agenda is when women are in there in numbers large enough that it’s normal. Then and only then will we be able to focus on agenda, which is just where our attention should be.

One of The White House Project’s earliest pieces of research was a study of how the press treats women when there is one woman. We looked at the press coverage of Elizabeth Dole in the 2000 presidential primaries as well as a senate race and the races of a record number of women who ran for Governor that year.

We call these studies, affectionately, our “hair, hemlines, and husband” studies.

The results, whether male or female reporters, women candidates are consistently treated less substantively and more personally.

Why? Not because the press is monolithic or even misogynist. The press’s job is to cover what’s different and when there is one woman that’s a no-brainer—her gender as marked by appearance. The problem is that this kind of coverage, subtle as it may be, slowly erodes women’s authority.