Where The Wimminz Are

Politico has a not-bad post on the scarcity of women in Sunday morning political shows. It covers many of the issues fairly well:

How can we have more women on those shows when women are 17% in the Congress (congrats, U.S. for doing so very poorly in the international comparisons of female representation in politics)? How can we make the same small number of women work more shows just so that more women can be on television, especially when women are expected to be at home on Sundays with their famblies? Shouldn't the shows reflect reality rather than some desired world of equal representation (odd how quickly we fall back from that other world I recently wrote about, the one in which feminazis rule over everything)?

But then if we don't see any women in public roles, women will have greater difficulty running for office and people never get jostled out of their comfort with a mostly male public sector. And the rules and norms still are different for women, beginning with focus on hair (and armpit hair, too).

The reason I call it a not-bad post rather than a good post is that the focus is solely on elected women in politics. What those Sunday shows do more generally is have more men in all roles, even in roles where the percentage of women should be much greater than 17%, and the piece doesn't address that. And several of the women who do get invited regularly to some of the shows are misogynists from the conservative gals' organizations. Indeed, the representation of feminists on all those shows is pretty much at zero (despite the fact that we rule the world).

Likewise, women I've talked to have a slightly different idea of how the gate-keeping works.