This is true, but I have a tremendous problem with âleaky pipelineâ narratives that pretend the reason why women arenât in power is because there arenât enough women in power, as if women are a kind of rare bird that only flocks to areas where they see the right kind of fruit, and can be attracted with the clever use of bird-shaped decoys. âWe just keep losing the women before they get to the top,â the Leaky Pipeline narrative says helplessly, âwe put them in the pipe but they just slither out, in a fine mist. They donât get to the top! It must be because they donât see enough pictures of women who got to the top.â
This argument is applied to women in STEM, particularly academia. âWhy arenât there more young female physics professors?â The narrative says, âclearly we need to have more cartoon characters aimed at little girls, and have early-career women burdened with the extra work of being Token Representation for their gender. They can, like, do their whole fulltime jobs AND ALSO go into schools to explain how great their lives are.â
This is clearly NOTHING to do with the fact that something like ⌠0.45% of PhD students will become professors. Thatâs less than one in 200. While that person actually has a reasonable chance of being a young woman, young women are also capable of looking at a career path that offers insecurity, low wages, and incompatibility with work/life balance, coupled with a vanishingly low chance of a small prize at the end, and simply taking their skills out of the field.
âWhy donât women stay in working relationships where they arenât valued?â The pipeline wonders, stuffing more schoolchildren into a pipe where half of them will leap for safety as soon as they gather marketable skills.
So in politics? There are plenty of young women at the lower levels in the US and UK, and plenty of young girls who are passionate about politics and changing the world. And we all saw what they did to Monica Lewinsky.
In 2016, we watched as Jo Cox, a British Labour MP known for being a nice pretty friendly young white mother who helped people and Cared, was assassinated in broad daylight by a white terrorist. She fought for refugee rights, she had two young kids, she engaged with the public and was friendly and pretty and nice, she was anti-Brexit and pro-immigration, and she was murdered brutally by a man who screamed white supremacist slogans and cut her down in an English street. We saw that. We saw how there was a flicker of performative sadness, but nothing really came of it, and Brexit stormed ahead regardless. People have largely forgotten it now. Imagine if it had been one of those loud old men, assassinated by a terrorist with darker skin. Politics would have exploded. The world would have changed. But for Jo Cox - a woman in politics who we might have identified with, a woman who seemed Relatable - thatâs what happened, she was just murdered and three years later itâs shrug.emoji and Brexit and âoh yeah⌠the husband was really cut up about it, wasnât he?â
Oh, and believe me: Hillary Clinton! You could write essays about what we learned from Hillary Clinton.
We all watched the differences between how the press handled Theresa May and the rest of her party. We saw the platform given to those jokes.
We hear about when female politicians mention how much hate mail they get. We donât pay too much attention to their security arrangements. We assume they make lots of money (most of them donât) or receive lots of validation and positive attention behind closed doors, that there must be some huge perks of the job, like feeling powerful, but lots of women donât look at the price of it and say âDream job!!!â You know??
I mean, obviously we can separate fiction from reality, but everyone watched on Game of Thrones how every female leader was ripped apart by wolves, and the wolves explained to each other, loudly and publicly, that It Made Narrative Sense, You See. We saw the platform the wolves got. The wolves got audiences of millions. The wolves get to make television shows. We are supposed to make small amounts of money and small humble strides, and be bright and brilliant and caring, and then be torn apart for the narrative. Which we will deserve. Because women who hunger for political influence and power deserve this.
We saw how Doctor Who destroyed a female prime minister with six words: âDonât you think she looks tired?â And then we giggled! because! fandom!! when people made memes with that quote over Theresa May.
We all see how AOC gets treated by the people who hate her, and the platform they get. We see how Mainstream America wants us to feel about her. We see how deliberately, violently lonely her position is made to be, how the conditions are set up for her to fail and snap so she can be picked over for easy meat. Like Monica Lewinsky. Like Jo Cox. It will make narrative sense. There will be no particular justice. Thatâs not what narrative sense means, for women in politics! The platform is for picking over the meat, not for making the woman look powerful and brave!! The platforms will do backflips to justify the actions of most men in power, but they all agree that the Most Narratively Sensible way to treat women in power is to make them walk naked through the public who hates them, while the platform chants âShame.â
(In fact, the platform explains, this is actually very narratively empowering for women in politics.)
We see that it doesnât matter if youâre pretty or nice. Or passionate and powerful. It doesnât matter if youâre relatable, or cold and distant, if you have Dignity or if you seem like someone that people could drink a beer with. We see that women who enter politics donât get to Google themselves. That theyâre subjected to threats and harassment and abuse. That this is justified constantly because they chose to become Public Figures. We see that the reward for Caring, and Trying To Be Powerful, is to be punished, publicly, forever.
We see that the punishment looks an awful lot like The Worst Nightmares for Women. Or what weâve been taught the worst nightmares should be. Loss of control. Loss of the narrative. Loss of dignity and reputation. Loss of friendship. Loss of respect and safety. In the worst cases, loss of choice and loss of a future.
âOh well,â we say, as we create this culture, as we join in the mocking of another woman on the internet who is slightly unlikeable but dared to get attention anyway, âthey get to live in big houses, donât they? Women in politics? They play the victims, yeah, but they live in big houses, we think. Which is why they grab power, because women like to live in big houses. So itâs fine. This is the fair price for them to pay for that⌠idk, big house and that sensible pantsuit.â
âOh dear,â we say, as we create this culture, as we sell the dream of power to children and then publicly crucify the ones who try to get Attention and Power and Influence with the wrong tone or the wrong gender or background. âOh dear,â we say, mercilessly twisting every image of a woman in power into a monster, whether sheâs wrong or right, real or fictional, soft or cruel, into a monster who is hated by half the population at any given time, who can be hunted down like game, whose name can be made into mud, who needs to accept the consequences of her actions, who SHOULD be forced to relive her worst moments and mistakes endlessly on television, to a background of laughtrack and millions of people racing to make the most cutting comment on social media, because she deserves it, because sheâs a public figure, because thatâs what you do to public figures, see, we do it to the men too! and itâs different but itâs not different; you see itâs okay, she WANTED this, she agreed to become public property: âmaybe,â we say, looking up from this for a moment, âitâs because kids donât see enough women on television.â
(ETA: cleared up typos and math issue spotted after posting on mobile.)
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