Women - Stereotypes Need Apply

The recent news about Congressman Weiner has lead to discussions about why this happens to men and not women. Of course many of these discussions rely on generalizations and stereotypes - and this NY Times article is no different. When I see articles like this (or in a Political Science class I took in college studying leadership in politics), I often wonder how helpful and accurate the generalizations are. A statement like this seems way too comprehensive and therefore not accurate:

"There are certain men that the more visible they get, the more bulletproof they feel," Ms. Myers said. "You just don’t see women doing that; they don’t get reckless when they’re empowered."

Really? No women get reckless? But it is the quote that I find actually harmful:

"The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. "Women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path."

The problem with generalizations is that they lead to stereotypes which then puts people into a box. Soon, we think all people in a category are a certain way or should be a certain way.

I realize that at first, this quote sounds good: women are the workhorses and men are the show-horses; women are about substance and men about style and ego. But actually it is pigeon-holing women. When you say women run for office to do something, men to becomes someone, you are essentially saying women shouldn't have ambition or ego.

And as this drives our expectations, when women do want to become someone, we bristle at that because she is acting unladylike. And as much as I didn't support Hillary Clinton's campaign (more on that in the future), I think she suffered from this.

And in fact, the reckless line creates the expectation that women won't do that and likely would make the backlash worse. And when I think back to my class on leadership, one of the articles identified differences in leadership styles between men and women where men are more commanding and women more about consensus. Again, this boxes women in.

The bottom line is that we should be very careful with generalizations and creating expectations about how people should act because of the group they are in. This way, they can be free to be who they are - women can be more interested in becoming someone or can be reckless and have only as much backlash as men get. Or they can continue to be the workhorses of government.