What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (34 page)

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: What are the factors involved in why we’ve not had a woman president so far?

NICHOLAS KRISTOF
: I think part of it goes back to the research from social psychology that shows that women can essentially be perceived as authoritative or as nice, but not as both. When people are picking politicians, they generally want somebody who is an authority figure and also somebody who’s nice, and I think that we have been socialized to think that men can be both, but that it’s harder for women to be both. So I think that is one reason why women haven’t done as well in politics and in the corporate suite as in some other areas. Of course, these are attitudes that are absorbed by women, not quite as much as by men, but the gender gap on that is not as great as one would think.

I think there’s also something to Sheryl Sandberg’s point about women sometimes not leaning forward as aggressively as they might in zero-sum contests like politics. I think that is changing to some degree, but I also think that women may be, for whatever reason, better at governing than at the political process of getting into a position to govern.

MS
: Yes, and the system itself isn’t too woman friendly. Now, what you were saying about this catch-22 for women around gender roles is interesting, because I remember when I interviewed Gloria Steinem and she was talking about how what’s needed is a redefining of gender roles for both men and women. That we also need to be educating men and boys in terms of their perception of gender roles in order to create this change. That for boys and men to see women as competent leaders and in positions of authority, on the flip side, they need to see themselves as nurturers and caretakers, so that we’re not in these very defined roles all the time.

NK
: Right. I think that changes over time. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, there was a popular kind of word puzzle that was going around. It involved a child in a car accident being taken to the hospital, and the father and the child were both injured, and the child is taken into surgery, and the surgeon says, “Oh my God, I can’t operate; it’s my child.” And the puzzle was, how could this be, since the father was injured? Now it seems to be obvious [
laughs]:
the surgeon is the mother. But I remember people being completely baffled by how this could possibly be—is the surgeon speaking metaphorically? [
laughs]
And I think that there’s reasonable evidence that these kinds of expectations change, not in one fell swoop as somebody becomes president, but bit by bit as women become mayors, become county chiefs, and probably become legislators as well, although I think it’s more important that they become executives—whether it’s a county executive, a mayor, or a governor—than [take on] a legislative role. We are beginning to see some progress at the political grassroots, but progress in politics hasn’t nearly matched the progress that women made in so many educational roles and so many other social roles—education in particular.

MS
: Why do you think that is? Why do you think that the political arena has been one of the last to have more women advancing?

NK
: In education, for example, in terms of university presidents, I think there is a premium on people who can work well with faculty, who can play very well with others, who can manage to get what they want done by giving other people credit. And universities are also maybe the places in the country where attitudes are most enlightened—and even there, the progress has been relatively recent and more focused on top-end, more liberal universities, where women become university presidents one after the other, rather than in other arenas. I think that this really deep-rooted sense that you see in surveys that a woman can be either nice or an authority figure, but not both, is much less true among highly educated people in a university environment. It’s more of an issue in politics, where you need the median voters’ support to get elected, and that is going to be a lagging indicator.

MS
: I feel like with Hillary’s run, it was an interesting experiment about this whole conversation, and certainly you could see from some of the press coverage that she was caught in this double bind on some of the things that you’re talking about in terms of being likable and also showing herself as a strong leader. What do you think were some of the most interesting observations from her candidacy? Was there anything that we can glean or learn, constructively, from what happened when she ran?

NK
: Well, I think the pioneers blaze trails for the rest of society, and that’s as true of the Oregon Trail as of the early female politicians. And it has become progressively easier for others to focus on issues, rather than on what the women are wearing, or whether they’re being snappy, this kind of thing.

There is some fascinating research from India about women as local village chiefs, and this happened randomly due to the way the Indian Constitution was changed so you could really measure pretty effectively
what the impact was of a woman becoming a village chief. The one result was that women actually seemed to do better in some respects. They were slightly less corrupt, probably because they weren’t part of the deeply embedded networks. They cared more about water supply, probably because women were traditionally the people who were collecting water. Although the women seemed to actually do slightly better as village chiefs than men did, the villagers themselves—the first time they got a woman village chief—thought she was worse. But that was only true for the first time a woman became chief. A few years later, when you had a second round of women becoming village chiefs, people seemed to be kind of socialized to think that was fine, and there was no longer this prejudice against woman village chiefs. And in the same way, I think that it’s just kind of an impossible task for those pioneers, but after a while, people get used to women in executive authority and worry less about the color of their dress or what they’ve done with their hair, and care more about their policies.

MS
: Sometimes I feel like this all gets incorrectly framed as being just about equality, as a sort of fairness argument. As a man, why do you think having more women in leadership is important?

NK
: I’m a little skeptical of the argument that women are inherently better leaders than men, which has been popular in some circles—that they’re more consensual and this kind of thing. I do think that there is very solid evidence that more diverse groups come up with better decisions, and people who study decision making have typically found that the group that comes out with the most optimal results is not the group containing the most optimal individuals, but rather the most diverse individuals. I think that if we don’t have gender diversity at the top of American politics and in corporate boards, then we’re just going to get weaker decisions, and I think that’s what we’ve been stuck with. And so I think that the great
strength that women bring when they move into senior levels of politics is not that they’re more nurturing, caring, maternal figures, but that they will bring a certain level of different perspective, a different way of thinking, and that is just really valuable for all of us. This is not something that is going to benefit the women of America; it’s something that’s going to benefit all of America.

MS
: Now, you also have a global perspective. Where does the United States fit in in terms of women in positions of leadership and the status of women? Obviously, there are other countries that have already elected female heads of state.

NK
: If you look at heads of government or heads of state, we’re laggards. A lot of countries have been way, way ahead of us. I sort of question how good a measure that is. In South Asia, for example, you’ve had women heads of government in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, in India and Pakistan, and it doesn’t seem to me that it’s really done much of anything for women in those countries. In
Half the Sky
, we tried to look at whether countries that had a female leader were doing better for girls’ education in those countries, were doing better for maternal mortality in those countries. We found no correlation. In the Philippines, for example, in recent years they’ve had two male presidents and two female presidents, and it has been the two men who have been much better on reproductive health and creating access to birth control than the two women presidents. So I’m wary of thinking this is an issue of female solidarity and that women at the top are necessarily going to make things better for women at the bottom. It’s especially true when you have the women who do become leaders, as in South Asia, who are typically coming from elite families—perhaps their father was president—and they’re sometimes treated by the system as kind of honorary men.

But, having dissed those countries [
laughs
], I think they have in some ways made real strides. There’s no question that the United States lags, not only in terms of not electing a female president, but if you just look at the number of female governors, female members of Congress, then we’re well behind. Europe, especially northern Europe, I think, has really been the place where you have seen women kind of being normalized as leaders, and a substantial share in parliaments, in executive office, and I think it is making a real difference in their societies. Often the first woman to make progress in politics has been kind of an incredibly tough, macho figure and a conservative figure. It may be that voters, when they’re suspicious of women politicians, are only willing to support somebody who is extremely against the type—and I’m thinking of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, people like that. I think that in northern Europe, you see a situation where it’s perfectly normal and routine to have a woman candidate for political office, including the top offices, and where there are enough women in meetings that nobody feels they have to be just incredibly tough with somebody because they don’t happen to have a Y chromosome.

MS
: You’re known as one of the most prolific and passionate writers and advocates for women and girls worldwide, and yet you are, of course, a man. Why has this been a special area of interest for you?

NK
: Well, I guess, for starters, I’m wary of the idea that only women should be writing about women’s issues. If that’s the case, then the issue is lost from the start. If it had been only blacks writing about civil-rights issues, it would never have gotten the kind of national attraction that it did. Likewise, gay rights really began to advance when you had more straight people saying that this is just intolerable. And so I think we have to see this as a major issue of human rights and justice and of making the
system work that affects all of us, and that men need to be a part of, as well as women.

MS
: Recently, I was telling my daughters about some of the things going on in the world that happen to girls and women, and certainly there have been some recent, very extreme cases of violent acts. But, having covered this for so many years, where do you see us in terms of where we are in the evolution of women’s rights or the oppression of women worldwide? Is the situation improving? Do you see the rising of a backlash?

NK
: I think that there’s enormous progress under way. I think this is a war that we’re winning, both abroad and at home. You look at the number of girls who are going to school, for example. Globally and traditionally, families have sent their sons but not their daughters. These days, in primary education around the world, there’s essentially no longer a gender gap. There is in secondary school, but not primary school. And these kinds of issues that used to be just invisible are now actually getting on the agenda. The outrage over the gang rape in India recently was a sign of progress, because these are things that happen all the time and it’s good that it got this kind of attention. Likewise, if you look at domestic violence, or at sexual violence in the United States—the numbers are not particularly reliable, but there’s no reason to think that they’re more unreliable now than they were before—every record we have shows that both domestic violence and rape are going down, quite sharply, over the last few decades. I think that’s because attitudes are changing, and police—I mean, there’s still a long way to go, but they are much more likely to treat somebody who was raped at a party, or by an acquaintance, more seriously than they would have twenty years ago. If you look at attitudes toward a husband beating up his wife, then it used to be that men and women are like that: “Well, he probably shouldn’t do it, but
what did she do?” In any case, it’s not for outsiders to interfere, and you used to have national magazines that showed ads of husbands spanking their wives because they made a bad cup of coffee, this kind of a thing; it was sort of a joke. And nobody thinks today that it’s a joke. So I think we are really seeing progress at home. I think that is mirrored abroad, and I just think we need to continue the momentum. Because there’s still a long way to go.