what planet do you live on?
March 5, 2020 12:54 PM   Subscribe

The Guardian reports that despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights, according to a new Gender Social Norms Index that contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world’s population.

The Guardian also reports Elizabeth Warren acknowledged that sexism in the presidential primary impacted her campaign. “If you say, yeah, there was sexism in this race, everyone says, whiner. And if you say no, there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, what planet do you live on?” Warren said.

Michelle Cottle, a member of the NYT Editorial Board, writes:
For women, it is harder because of a host of unconscious biases.

As often noted, there have been reams of research on this topic, most of it discouraging. The problem goes beyond voters who hold traditional views of gender roles or admit that they wouldn’t be comfortable with a Madam President. More subtly, ambitious women are viewed more negatively than men, while women leaders are often considered less legitimate than men, in the United States, at least.

Studies also show that, whatever their particular pros and cons, women candidates are regarded as inherently less electable. You see this in polls where a high percentage of respondents claim that they are ready to elect a female president, but far fewer believe that their neighbors are.

[...] Last summer, a poll on perceived electability by Avalanche Strategies found that gender appeared to be a bigger issue than “age, race, ideology, or sexual orientation.” When voters were asked whom they’d pick if the primaries were held today, Mr. Biden came out ahead. When asked whom they would make president with the wave of a magic wand, without the candidate needing to win an election, voters went with Ms. Warren. Women were more likely than men to cite gender as a concern.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight lamented that such anxiety can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “So there are a lot of women who might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, the woman would win!”
posted by katra (29 comments total) 49 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thank you for this post. I really wanted Elizabeth Warren to be taken seriously by everyone.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:32 PM on March 5, 2020 [31 favorites]


“So there are a lot of women who might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, the woman would win!”

this Twitter thread was illuminating to me and may apply here
posted by kokaku at 1:36 PM on March 5, 2020 [9 favorites]


I really wanted Elizabeth Warren to be taken seriously by everyone

I'm hoping that if a Democrat wins the White House, they'll make her attorney general, natch, and the gutters of Wall Street will run red with all the seriousness being taken.
posted by CynicalKnight at 1:50 PM on March 5, 2020 [27 favorites]


I want her to be a senator, and also to run our treasury, and also fight against big bank(er)s, and also help fix education.

I need the Elizabeth Warren Clone Army.
posted by wenestvedt at 2:04 PM on March 5, 2020 [31 favorites]


Warren’s wrenching downfall says something terrible about 2020 (Paul Waldman, WaPo Opinion)
To be clear, sexism isn’t the only reason Warren will not be the Democratic nominee. There are many reasons. She had a few stumbles along the way, as every campaign does. There were some decisions she could have made differently.

But her campaign and the particular way it failed tell us a lot about how gender operates in presidential politics.
So 2148 was a bust. But next time a woman runs for president will be different! (Alexandra Petri, WaPo Opinion)
THE YEAR 2148 — Too bad! Look, there was, once again, a problem with the female candidate, and I am very sorry about it. We have sure had a run of bad luck with these candidates! I would have said 10 years ago that there was no way Cyborg Dave would be president before a human woman, and that Armored Bob would be president SIX TIMES, but — that just shows why I am so highly compensated as a pundit: I am always so surprised, and people love to see it.
posted by katra at 2:26 PM on March 5, 2020 [17 favorites]


"If everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president" is a huge issue that would've changed countless elections in the past, and it would also better highlight elections in which the actual votes of citizens were ignored or discounted. Like, I've never seen a Republican in my lifetime actually win because of fair and square votes, and obviously the last election and this upcoming one have far more sinister manipulations going on so as to make them entirely illegitimate.

In any case, always seems like a bad idea to cast your vote based on how you perceive others casting their vote, especially if you're already committed to voting non-Republican and have accepted the eventual potential retaliation. We do desperately need more women in government, we all have seen and felt how insufferable any authoritative framework is when staffed almost exclusively by men and why we can't trust that situation ever.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:30 PM on March 5, 2020 [2 favorites]


this Twitter thread was illuminating to me and may apply here

Yeah...I voted for HRC in both of her primaries -- I feel unbelievably guilty that I didn't vote for Warren when I think she'd make a much better president than anyone who has ever run in my lifetime. I feel just as crappy as every Warren voter today, and I didn't even get the pleasure of having voted for someone that I've admired for more than a decade. But the 2016 election...it's not just that a woman lost an election, it's that she lost to Donald Trump. And considering that I have a bunch of immigrants in my family that are from countries on Trump's shit list, I've spent a not-negligible amount of time wondering if we're going to get ethnically cleansed in a second term.

If this was a 2 person race, I still would've voted for Warren....even with the risk of a bunch of people saying "ew girl" or "ew capitalist" or "ew, pro-market regulation." But by the time super Tuesday rolled around, the polling Biden and Bernie seemed to be dominating all the polls. I voted Bernie because I'm afraid of the alternative -- that we'll nominate Biden and lose. (Of course, you could make the same argument in reverse -- maybe a bunch of potential Elizabeth Warren voters went for Biden because they were afraid of getting stuck with Bernie. But I was alive for Kerry losing an election, not Mondale, so I guess that's what influences my thinking.)

Warren is still the best communicator I've ever seen. Her answer to the sexism question is exactly right -- either someone sees it and there's no need to discuss further, or someone refuses to see it so there's nothing to say. Either way, you don't get any points by bringing it up.

Every time I click on one of those links there's a bunch of depressed women holding Warren signs, and that's a real bummer. So. Here's that twitter video of Warren's dog, Bailey, stealing a burrito.
posted by grandiloquiet at 2:45 PM on March 5, 2020 [12 favorites]


I've been wondering if Warren has two things working against her: being a woman, and being notably more intelligent than average. I remember hearing during one of the George W. Bush campaigns that people prefer to vote for someone who is a bit smarter than average, but not too much smarter - e.g. Bush, but not Gore.
posted by jb at 3:06 PM on March 5, 2020 [6 favorites]


There seems to be a real disconnect between being someone who would make an excellent President, and being someone that people are willing to vote for.

Sigh.
posted by suelac at 3:27 PM on March 5, 2020 [18 favorites]


Okay, for real: if there is any action I can take that will reasonably help ranked choice voting happen in the Democratic primaries, can someone point me in the right direction?
posted by dinty_moore at 3:36 PM on March 5, 2020 [12 favorites]


Warren dropping out made me bitterly sad and despondent in a way I haven’t felt since November 2016. I’m past tired of seeing qualified, talented, intelligent women allowed to rise to a certain point, then no further. As a guy, I get that my tiredness doesn’t compare to how tired women are of the same bullshit they live and experience on a daily basis being played out, again, in front of the entire country.

The twitter comment of “not Clinton, but I’d vote for Warren, wait, not Warren, but I’d vote for AOC, wait, no, not AOC this baby who seems perfect, wait, not the baby, some imaginary perfect ideal of a woman that doesn’t exist” hits too damn close to home.

So, now we have a primary between two flawed old white guys, and then we’ll have a presidential race between two old white guys. Again. I have a terrible feeling turnout is going to drop like a rock, and you’ll get a) four more years of trump, and b) the Democratic Party complaining that young people are unreliable. The last three years should have been a recruitment bonanza, but instead of welcoming in all of the incredibly enthusiastic young people into the party and making room for them/listening to them, it seems the party has just told them to stand in the back, don’t make waves, and wait forty years for their turn. It’s like a manual for how to alienate the youth vote.

Goddamn, I’m just so tired of this shit. I stupidly let myself imagine having the chance to vote for a good candidate that I honestly thought would be the best choice. I’m tired of the lesser of two evils.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:43 PM on March 5, 2020 [35 favorites]


Okay, for real: if there is any action I can take that will reasonably help ranked choice voting happen in the Democratic primaries, can someone point me in the right direction?

I mean, I don't know, really.

BUT! The way things change is that the party, often at the convention, votes to change them. (Ironically, this happened in 1968; it also happened last time.) So you could contact any Democratic members of Congress and/or Senate that you have. They'll be super^H^H^H^H^Hautomatic delegates, so they'll be at the convention. You can also contact the leadership of your state Democratic party (chairman, vice chair), who also are. The goal is to get the rules committee to work on this, and to try to get them some good ideas.

Given the, uh, adventures that the Iowa and Nevada caucuses had this year, there appears to be an appetite to change up the voting process at least to potentially end caucuses. And if Biden loses the first 3 states and wins anyway, it's not like his delegates will be wedded to the current state order.

You can also ask your state legislature to go for RCV in your state's primary (and maybe in your state's other primaries).
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:46 PM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted; let's aim to keep this more nuanced/engaged with the actual links than just one-liner general "fuck them" stuff that could go anywhere?
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 4:49 PM on March 5, 2020


The Fight Goes On (Team Warren, Medium)
What we have done — and the ideas we have launched into the world, the way we have fought this fight, the relationships we have built — will carry through, carry through for the rest of this election, and the one after that, and the one after that.

So think about it:

We have shown that it is possible to build a grassroots movement that is accountable to supporters and activists and not to wealthy donors — and to do it fast enough for a first-time candidate to build a viable campaign. Never again can anyone say that the only way that a newcomer can get a chance to be a plausible candidate is to take money from corporate executives and billionaires. That’s done.

We have also shown that it is possible to inspire people with big ideas, possible to call out what’s wrong and to lay out a path to make this country live up to its promise.

We have also shown that race and justice — economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, criminal justice — are not an afterthought, but are at the heart of everything that we do.

We have shown that a woman can stand up, hold her ground, and stay true to herself — no matter what.

[...] So if you leave with only one thing, it must be this: Choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough — and they will — you will know that there is only one option ahead of you: Nevertheless, you must persist.
posted by katra at 4:50 PM on March 5, 2020 [19 favorites]


Is anyone surprised by those statistics? I'm surprised that apparently nearly 10% of people aren't biased against women. Patriarchy lives in all of us.
posted by waffleriot at 5:11 PM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]


Shit, my state didn't even have its primary yet so I never got to cast a vote for her!
posted by wenestvedt at 6:13 PM on March 5, 2020 [2 favorites]


Fair Vote is working on ranked-choice voting .
posted by NotLost at 6:22 PM on March 5, 2020 [9 favorites]


Thank you for this thread. Even though I don’t have much to say at this point, other than continuing screaming into the void, it helps to know I’m not alone and others are feeling the same pain I am over all of this. Even if we are in the minority. Today was really hard. When I got the email from her campaign, I wasn’t surprised. I knew she would responsibly make this choice. But five minutes later, after walking out of my own office and into a more public space where there were TVs with the news on and people were just sitting around ignoring it and living their lives and didn’t give a fuck, it became so real, so depressing, I actually started tearing up. I had to duck into a bathroom and cry for ten minutes and get it all out before pulling myself back together and getting back to work. I didn’t see it coming at all in that moment, but now that I’ve had several hours to digest it, well, I think a lot of us were really emotionally invested in her. We wanted to believe in the farfetched fairlytale of escaping misogyny somehow. Instead we got a bucket of cold reality dumped over our hearts, and right back to work at our soul crushing sexist jobs. I need a hug. I wish I could give Liz a hug. She deserved so much more than this.
posted by robotdevil at 6:37 PM on March 5, 2020 [19 favorites]


robotdevil, she is the first candidate I ever thought was honest & competent enough to donate money to. I did it twice.

As a mediocre white guy, I so wanted this smart woman to be in charge.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:42 PM on March 5, 2020 [8 favorites]


Bookmarked to link to the next 500 times some asshole online insists we don't need feminism anymore.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:08 PM on March 5, 2020 [15 favorites]


Thank you, Ghidorah and robotdevil, for expressing my own feelings so eloquently.

The stakes here are so profound, and the consequences of business as usual so dire...the fact that, after everything, all it took was the slightest undertow for the media and voters to write off the single most capable presidential candidate that I've ever seen at a time when we needed that most, I -- it just makes me want to cry. All the time. And I look around and see everyone just going about their day as if this country didn't simultaneously suffer an incredible loss and have its rotten heart bared inescapably for all to see, and I don't know how I'm ever going to get over it. I don't know why I should.

I don't know why I should.
posted by Gadarene at 5:40 AM on March 6, 2020 [8 favorites]


I am profoundly sad: inarticulate with an unexpected grief. This week, I will sit with that grief, and then I will pick myself up and try to dream of a better world than the one in which I live.
posted by sciatrix at 9:01 AM on March 6, 2020 [5 favorites]


There's already negative reaction to Warren talking about sexism in the campaign, a la "Warren continues to snipe at Sanders" because she stated true facts about some of his most visible online supporters, which ... no, that is not "sniping".

As a white man in the US, I am honestly convinced our current society rarely if ever produces men who are not sexist in some subtle ways at least. Including me. Which is part of why I voted for Warren.
posted by freecellwizard at 9:43 AM on March 6, 2020 [8 favorites]


The UN report is 300+ pages; sampling:

- Worldwide, one in eight age-eligible girls does not attend primary or secondary school. Only 62 of 145 countries have gender parity in primary and secondary education. Despite the progress in enrolment ratios for some countries, large differences persist in learning outcomes and education quality.

- More than a third of women—and more than two-thirds in some countries—have experienced physical or sexual violence inflicted by an intimate partner or sexual violence inflicted by a nonpartner (figure S4.1.1).Some 20 percent of women have experienced sexual violence as children. Nearly a quarter of girls ages 15–19 worldwide report having been victims of violence after turning 15. And violence is typically underestimated because of stigma, denial, mistrust of authority and other barriers to women reporting an incident.

- More than 85 percent of female members of European parliaments have experienced psychological violence, and 47 percent have received threats of death, rape, beating or kidnapping (figure S4.1.2).

------
Systemic devaluation of girls and women leads to a "91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights" result.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:30 AM on March 6, 2020 [6 favorites]


I Am Burning With Fury and Grief Over Elizabeth Warren. And I Am Not Alone. (Sarah Smarsh, NYT Opinion)
Consider every moment, since the dawn of woman, when a female aspired but to no avail. She asked to attend school but was denied. She raised her hand but wasn’t called on. She applied but wasn’t hired. She enlisted but wasn’t deployed. She created but wasn’t credited. She ran but wasn’t elected.

Imagine the sadness and frustration of every such instance as a spark, their combined energy the size of many suns. That is the measure of grief and fury I felt rise inside me as I watched Elizabeth Warren’s bid for the Democratic nomination wane.

[...] A few nights before the Super Tuesday primaries that ultimately squashed Ms. Warren’s chances, I had a dream that I was in a crowd watching her onstage. She glowed like someone who has won in a way that has nothing to do with numbers. We spoke afterward. She was clearly at peace with whatever happened with the election.

Ms. Warren might not be bound for the presidency, but she has apparently lodged herself in an another powerful place: the female psyche. The countless little girls with whom she famously “pinkie swore” that women should run for president will remember.

If this supposed democracy is worth lasting, at least one of them won’t be denied.
posted by katra at 4:16 PM on March 6, 2020 [3 favorites]


'White men get to be the default': Women lament Warren's demise (Politico)
In his book, a Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump, David Plouffe asserted that “there is more resistance to a woman president then there is to any male minority group, or a male of any sexual orientation.”

“It really is the presidency now that that seems to be a harder ceiling,” Plouffe said in an interview. “Elizabeth Warren was put through a ... crucible of the electability question in a slightly different way than some of the other candidates were.”
Why is Elizabeth Warren’s departure striking such a chord within the Democratic Party? (Amber Phillips, WaPo)
Research does show that women win elections overall at the same rate as men, but they have to clear more hurdles to do so. They have to be likable, whereas men don’t necessarily. They need to strike a balance between being confident and combative, but not too aggressive. Women have a harder time winning executive office, where they would be the primary decision-maker, than legislative office, according to research from the nonpartisan Barbara Lee Family Foundation. That might help explain why Warren’s loss comes after historic gains by women in Congress.
posted by katra at 4:53 PM on March 6, 2020 [1 favorite]


Elizabeth Warren endured sexism at every step of her campaign (Moira Donegan, Guardian Opinion)
As a woman, the Massachusetts senator always faced an uphill battle of double standards and misogynist resentment. She had to be competent but not condescending, cheery but not pandering, maternal but not frumpy, smart but not haughty. As she rose in the polls last summer and fall, she came under the kind of scrutiny that male frontrunners are not subjected to, and faced skepticism about her claims and character that male candidates do not face.

This is the fate of a lot of women who come close to attaining power, and empirical data backs up the phenomenon: writing in the Washington Post, the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne cited a 2010 Harvard study that found that women are viewed more negatively simply by seeking office. “Voters view male and female politicians as equally power-seeking, but respond to them quite differently,” Manne writes. “Men who seek power were viewed as stronger and tougher, while power-seeking women provoked feelings of disgust and contempt.”

[...] The epistemic philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this tendency to disbelieve women, and to believe powerful men, “testimonial injustice”: the harm done to speakers when prejudiced listeners discount their credibility. Women face testimonial injustice in particular when they challenge or contradict men, as cultural tropes that depict women as conniving, scheming, and selfish can be mustered to make her seem less credible, him more believable. Fricker doesn’t apply her concept of testimonial injustice to gender conflict exclusively, but it is an obstacle that many women recount in their own experiences of gendered injustice: the sense that they cannot be believed, that they cannot achieve equal credibility and moral footing with men in the minds of their peers, that they will always be assumed to be either stupid or dishonest. Branded as dishonest even as she told the truth, duplicitous even as she kept her promises, Warren faced testimonial injustice on a huge scale, and it ultimately doomed her campaign.
posted by katra at 8:02 PM on March 7, 2020 [5 favorites]


The doubt of a ‘Bernie Bro’: A hard-charging Sanders supporter questions whether his tactics help or hurt (WaPo)
When he saw a video with Warren, he searched his keyboard for the snake emoji — a common trope applied to Warren after she alleged Sanders told her that a woman couldn’t beat President Trump. “Hiss,” McDowell had typed.
posted by katra at 8:33 AM on March 8, 2020


Sexism Is Other People (Megan Garber, Atlantic)
“Electability” claims to be a benign and objective concern. It is neither. It merely outsources biases, rationalizing them by appealing to the moral failings of imagined others. It talks about neighbors, and “other people,” and “what the country is ready for.” It throws up its hands and washes them at the same time. And it suggests an especially insidious strain of sexism. The sexism of the political past has often been blunt and unashamed in its expression (“Lock! Her! Up!”/ “Iron! My! Shirt!” / “She-devil”). The sexism of the political present, however, is slightly different: It knows better, even if it fails to be better. It is a little bit cannier. It has lawyered up. It is figuring out, day by day, how to maintain plausible deniability.

[...] While you’re at it, you can also point to all the studies that have highlighted the ways women politicians are punished for their ambition. You can point to the countless examples of women in public being told to be quieter, to be more accommodating, to take up less space. You can mention so much more.

And, still, you won’t be able to prove it. The thing about internalized misogyny is that it is internal. “Likability” is in a very broad sense a foundational requirement of any candidate. So is that other deeply subjective data point, “authenticity.” The plausible deniability is baked into the logic of campaigning. Sexism, like racism, is both exhausting and exhaust-like: It is so common that people sometimes forget to be indignant about its presence. “Electability” finds refuge in the fog. Instead of a woman, just not that woman, its explanation of things is I’m not sexist; other people are. Did they not vote for the woman because they have low opinions of women, or because they assume that other people do? You can litigate the question endlessly. That is, in some sense, the point.

[...] “Electability,” used in that way, suggests the politics of game theory. But it also treats the theory itself as a form of absolution. The method is familiar. “Other people” have been used to rationalize conspiracy theories. (A recent book about conspiracies in the age of Trump is titled A Lot of People Are Saying.) “Other people” have been summoned to argue that #MeToo—according to groups of unnamed others—has gone too far. Those same, spectral others now help to explain why, for the foreseeable future, Americans will be governed by a man.
posted by katra at 12:39 PM on March 8, 2020 [4 favorites]


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