And "B" is for The Bitches Who Have It. This I have learned from the political pundits in the media.
Nevertheless, the reason why there are so few women in politics is that women lack ambition. This I learned from Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post:
As Hillary Clinton cracks her head against what she likes to call "the highest and hardest glass ceiling," there's no doubt that she craves the presidency as much as any man does.
But a new report from the Brookings Institution suggests an unexpected reason for the relative paucity of women elsewhere in political office and the dearth of credible female presidential candidates: an ambition gap.
"Somewhat surprisingly," write political scientists Jennifer Lawless of Brown University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount, women's underrepresentation "is not because of discrimination against women candidates. In fact, women perform as well as men when they do run for office. In terms of fundraising and vote totals, the consensus among researchers is the complete absence of overt gender bias."
Rather, the "fundamental reason for women's underrepresentation is that they do not run for office. There is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it, and women don't."
This wonderful new gender gap is called an "ambition gap." No, it's not that gap where testicles ought to be found in a politician. It's something women themselves cause. It's all in our little pretty heads:
Sometimes the hardest glass ceilings are the ones women impose, whether knowingly or unconsciously, on ourselves.
Yah?
That second quote is the way Ruth Marcus finishes her column, a column in which she writes about the many reasons why women might not enter political races as candidates, including this one: Women are held to very different standards in politics. A woman with children is viewed as primarily responsible for them. A man, not so much.
Just imagine the response if John Edwards was the one with cancer and Elizabeth Edwards had announced that she will run for the presidency, despite their two young children and an ailing husband. I think her ambition would have been viewed as very unseemly.
Yet all this is an "ambition gap" between the sexes, something that has somehow germinated and sprouted inside the female skulls without anyone at all feeding or watering that monster plant. Marcus wonders why fewer women than men regard themselves as well qualified for political office, and I wonder what planet she lives on. She wonders why more women than men worry about being inadequately thick-skinned for the political fights, and I wonder if the media on that faraway Marcusian home planet ever showed the treatment that ambitious women in American politics get. It's not exactly a level playing field of insults, you know. Female politicians get the usual insults and then they get the extra insults for being ambitious, selfish bitches whose children have probably died from hunger and loneliness because they have bad mothers, or for being ambitious, selfish bitches who never bothered to have any children at all.
This is kind of fun, isn't it?
Let's look at the definition of discrimination in that Brookings study:
"Somewhat surprisingly," write political scientists Jennifer Lawless of Brown University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount, women's underrepresentation "is not because of discrimination against women candidates. In fact, women perform as well as men when they do run for office. In terms of fundraising and vote totals, the consensus among researchers is the complete absence of overt gender bias."
This seems to assume that any woman can just announce tomorrow that she will run for office and that she will be supported; that there is no prior grooming of the candidates, no selection process before the actual running takes place, no networking. It's almost as if we looked at a firm with very few female employees and liked the fact that they were paid as well as the male employees for their work while ignoring the question why there were so few female employees in the first place. Or rather, not ignoring it, but deciding that the right answer was that women just didn't bother to apply in larger numbers, for whatever reason. No discussion of the corporate culture perhaps steering women away altogether, for example, no discussion in the many ways one can discourage someone from applying, by "losing" applications and so on.
My purpose here is not to argue that overt discrimination in the form of some kind of gatekeeping is the real explanation for the Brookings findings, but to point out that we can't assume the absence of this gatekeeping the way the researchers appear to have done. It's something to study, not something to assume.
Let's go back to the beginning of the alphabet: Ambition. Are women really less ambitious? Who knows. Doesn't the answer to that depend on how we define ambition? Is a mother who relentlessly drives her children to succeed not ambitious, for example? And doesn't the answer also reflect what characteristics are regarded in the "ideal woman" of this culture? Personal ambition is unlikely to be ranked very high in any list of such characteristics.
Which suggests to me that women might lie about their ambitiousness. It's truly not regarded as a good thing for girls to be. And the "ambition gap" is not a glass ceiling caused by only women themselves. That's very much like all those stories about women fretting over work-life balance, stories, which are often accompanied by a picture of a harassed-looking woman juggling a baby, a big stack of work papers and a cell phone. Note what is missing in that picture: No bosses, no husbands, no society. The woman alone, with the problems she has to solve.
Of course the real explanation is not that simple.