No Constitutional protection for gender.

Says Justice Antonin Scalia. And most women probably don't realize this question is up for debate. With the current court, he might need only one more vote for that view to prevail. That could bring down several prior Court rulings barring gender discrimination. But at least he doesn't say the Constitution prohibits laws against gender discrimination.

The Flat Decade

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Decades ago, in principal at least, we committed to equal pay for women for equal work and equal representation in leadership positions. But U.S. women’s progress toward equality so far in the new century can be called the flat decade. It’s as if feminism hit a societal glass ceiling.

The average gender pay gap for workers without a four-year college degree has slightly narrowed since the mid-1990s, in part due to effects of the Great Recession that began in 2007 described below. Surprisingly, the gap has widened for those with degrees. For example, a study of doctors’ salaries in New York State in first jobs after residency eliminated the effects of inflation, hours worked, practice settings, and specialty choices. It found a $3,600 annual gap between men and women in 1999, but a much larger gap of $16,819 in 2008.

Although the aggregate effect of these opposite trends narrowed the average gender pay gap across all occupations by a few percentage points in the first decade of the new century, the median annual gender pay gap for full time workers reduced by less than one percentage point, despite much greater progress in earlier decades. The median is the income of that man or woman whose income is greater than the lowest half of those workers in his or her respective gender, and also less than the higher half. (Given that a relatively small number of those at the top of the income ladder earn very high wages, the average income is higher than the median.) One explanation for the stagnation in the median gap is that even though women made up fifty percent of the total workforce in 2010, they remained stuck at sixty percent of those in low wage jobs.

One might see some progress in the fact that while women lost the most jobs in the recession of 2001, men held more than three-quarters of the jobs lost during the Great Recession. But a New York Times’ analysis gave feminists little cause for comfort. First, it said the Great Recession hit male dominated industries such as finance and construction the hardest. The Times’ second explanation went straight to the heart of the earnings paradox: because of the wage disparity between men and women, women were in greater demand in the Great Recession because they are willing to work for less than similarly qualified men. Public sector layoffs caused by the recession subsequently increased women’s overall unemployment even as private sector jobs began to recover, because women hold a large majority of public sector jobs. In addition, opposite trends in unemployment rates by gender combined with public sector pay cuts and freezes exacerbated the wage gap rather than narrowed it.


In 2010, a General Accountability Office study examining the most recent data found that between 2000 and 2007 the percentage of women managers grew by only one percent. And growth at the top was flat in the first decade of the new century. In 2002, fewer than sixteen percent of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies were women, and women held just ten percent of the positions with direct responsibility for profit and loss. In 2008, it was the same.

Although there was some progress in the number of women on boards of directors in the first half of the decade, there was nearly none in the last half. As of 2006, women remained less than fifteen percent of the board directors for Fortune 500 companies. Nearly half of these companies had just one woman or no women on their boards. Stung by criticism for their lack of diversity, by 2008 only thirteen percent of Fortune 500 companies had no women on their boards. But the overall percentage of women on boards barely changed, so this was not progress but rather merely reshuffling the deck. The total number of board positions decreased slightly during this period, which means that for every company that added a woman, another with at least two on its board dropped one. By 2010, women broad members still were less than sixteen percent of the total.

It’s probably not a coincidence that law firm management shows similar percentages. A survey in 1999 found that only sixteen percent of the equity partners in the one hundred largest American law firms were women. Another survey in 2009 found the equity partner percentage had not changed.

Because of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s historic bids in the Presidential race, and Nancy Pelosi’s ascendency to Speaker of the House, some believe that women made significant gains in elective politics in twenty-first century America. But the sad truth is that women’s hold on political power in the U.S. seems by some measures to no longer be increasing and may even be declining. The percentage of women in elected statewide offices in 2008 shrunk to its lowest level since 1994, at twenty-three percent. It fell half a percent lower still in 2010. In 2008, women were mayors in only eleven of the one hundred largest American cities, a drop of four percentage points from just a few years before. The percentage of women mayors in American cities of at least 30,000 persons was less than sixteen percent in 2008, down five percentage points from 1999. Female representation in state legislatures basically flatlined at twenty-three percent starting in 1999.

In 1997, the U.S. ranked forty-first internationally for female representation in national legislatures. By 2008, the U.S. had fallen to seventieth. At this rate, the U.S. could be at the bottom of the rankings in just two decades.

It’s ironic that in the fourth decade of the modern women’s movement many indicators of women’s participation in government and business are flat, and some are negative. Building on prior efforts, nearly all these indicators should at this point be climbing. But they’re not. A decade from now, will we be looking back at another ten years of zero or minimal growth? Without determined national effort, it’s a distinct possibility.

What would happen if we turned our thinking upside down and:

• Oprah gave all of her billions to journalist and women’s rights crusader William Kristof to spend on projects to help women?
• Bill Gates announced that the other half of his foundations’ billions not devoted to vaccines henceforth would go to projects to help women and girls?
• Every member of the NBA making over one million dollars a year made a public service spot against domestic violence or rape and paid to air it on TV shows aimed at the young male demographic?
• The U.S. ratified the international treaty banning gender discrimination, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)?
• The Federal government and all companies and organizations receiving federal funds were required to offer flexible workplace policies and reduced schedule options to all employees?
• The U.S. went from seventy-fourth in world rankings of women’s percentages in national legislatures, where it is in the company of Albania and Turkmenistan, to fourth?

Palin may hinder electing other women.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Like many people, I’ve trying to wrap my head around McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin, Governor of the forty-eighth state (in population) for twenty months. While many theories abound, my best guess is that trying to pick up Hillary supporters with a woman may have been only one of three of his motivations. Perhaps more important is that McCain is running against what he describes as a celebrity. Regardless of your political leanings, you have to admit that Obama blows away McCain in the charisma department. Palin has a magnetic charm, according to her opponents in the Alaska gubernatorial race, that makes voters love her regardless of her positions on the issues. Unlike Mitt Romney, people tend to believe her sincerity. Also significant is that Palin’s Pentecostal and right wing views amp up McCain’s previously tepid appeal to his party’s religious right base. As more details of her public and private life and of McCain's hasty vetting of her are revealed, however, it is clear that McCain was so desperate to shake up the race that he did not conduct the rigorous investigation to which Vice-Presidential candidates normally are subjected.

Even if McCain and Palin lose, and as long as Palin doesn’t make too many mistakes, there is a potential upside to her candidacy. It may encourage party bosses to put forward more women as candidates in the future under the assumption that they will charm voters. But there are a number of downsides, including that it may set back efforts toward getting more women into elective office.

The first is that her candidacy may reinforce the popular belief that there are no women with the intellect, experience and ideological beliefs that make them qualified to be President – with the exception of Hillary Clinton. After Clinton’s run fizzled in May of 2008, The New York Times could not find a political strategist able to name anyone else likely to be the first woman President. McCain touts Palin’s executive experience, which presumes he sought that in a running mate. If wanted a sitting woman governor, he had only one real choice: Palin. The other two Republicans are in Hawaii and Connecticut. Hawaii’s Linda Lingle is a childless, twice-divorced Jew. Connecticut’s Jodi Rell signed the bill making Connecticut the first state (not acting under court order) to allow gay couples to join in civil unions giving them all the rights of married couples. Rell does not have a college degree. That left him with Governor Palin, a former beauty queen with an undergraduate degree in journalism from a mediocre university (University of Idaho), whose prior political experience was as the mayor of a small town. Her first trip outside the U.S. was last year. If she has any foreign policy expertise, she’s keeping it a secret.

The second downside would continue the popular belief that it may still be impossible for a woman to be qualified to be President and at the same time not have high negatives with half of the voters. In other words, if you’re a woman with the intellect, drive and toughness needed to be President, many voters will find you to be unfeminine and scary. Thus, the parties may conclude that the only way a woman can become President is to follow the lead of George Bush and be perceived as being a congenial sort, a person the average voter could talk to casually and not find intellectually overwhelming.

For a candidate to not appear to be too intellectual usually means the candidate can't actually be extremely smart. But picking women without the best intelligence and perspective increases the chances that the female leaders of tomorrow will be what some feminists refer to as "social males" – women who simply adopt a patriarchal view of the world and perpetuate it in their words and actions. The problem is more acute in cases such as Palin's, where the good ole boys do the picking. In this sense, Palin’s bid is for women as Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court was for African-Americans.

The third downside comes if the Grand Old Party ultimately does not succeed in dumbing down the office in voters’ minds, and through McCain’s premature death in office at the young age of 73 puts a clearly unqualified woman in the White House. If she does not do exceptionally well, this may block the pipeline for women for that office for decades to come. (The 2005-2006 series Commander in Chief may have prophesied the future of McCain’s administration. In the series, a Republican President dies and his female Vice-President, regarded by some as not qualified to serve, takes over. Too bad ABC impeached it after one season. Otherwise, we could have seen more of how TV writers would imagine a Palin Presidency.)

(Update: Somewhat ominously, in her acceptance speech Palin compared herself to Harry Truman. Less than three months after becoming Vice-President, Truman became President when Roosevelt died. He had been a US Senator for ten years before that.)

At this point we should be so past the need to question whether a woman candidate for political office is qualified. In particular, we should not have to raise this question about a woman’s candidacy for Vice-President in the twenty-first century. If McCain had wanted a female running mate, he had several experienced Republican senators to chose from. There is no excuse for putting forward a woman whose lack of qualification causes people to say that she only got the job because she's a woman, as people are saying about Palin. NY Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins hopes that in the Vice-Presidential debate Biden will say to Palin (in a reprise of the 1988 debate), "I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton."

It is insulting to women to think that just putting a woman on the ticket, no matter her positions on the issues or her qualifications, will convince women to vote for a ticket that opposes equal pay legislation and other efforts towards women’s equality. It’s especially insulting when you realize how far behind the Republican party is in putting women in office, compared to the Democratic party. There are considerably fewer than half as many Republican women in Congress and in state legislatures as there are Democratic women.

Making marriage work in the twenty-first century.

Another in a series of paradox solutions:
There is lots of press now about gay and lesbian couples marrying, but not about some of those couples breaking up instead. The availability of marriage as an option in California and Massachusetts is forcing many couples to confront their individual expectations about commitment as never before. As I have heard from a number of my gay and lesbian friends, some are finding that those expectations do not match. Painful as this process may be for those couples, it may be for the best.

But there is a bigger lesson to be learned here. If we are to decode social gender roles and eliminate their unfair limitations on individual potential, we can’t just make changes in the workplace and schools. We have to change the rules in marriage and relationships.

Gay marriage is an unprecedented opportunity to help us do this. The religious right has this all wrong. Gay marriage does not threaten heterosexual marriage, it will strengthen it. Many gay and lesbian couples are creating committed, mutually satisfying relationships without all of the Mars/Venus gender stereotypes that have defined heterosexual marriage for hundreds of years.

Gay and lesbian couples will be taking on a lot of heartache in this process, but what they learn will help all of us transform marriage in a way that will make it work for more couples in the twenty-first century and beyond. This change will hasten the emergence of matrocracy and help more heterosexual couples bond and stay together as gender equality becomes reality.

U.S. slips in gender gap rankings.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
According to the Associated Press, the U.S. scored lower in the annual Global Gender Gap Report because the percentage of female legislators, senior officials and managers fell in 2007, and the pay gap between women and men widened.

Why is the U.S. 31st in the world in gender equality and not in the top ten? In part, it's a choice voters and potential voters are making. Young single women, whose opportunities are most affected by this gap, are a group that has in the past been least likely to vote.

Is gender insulting to women leaders?

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Gender denial by women in power seems to be seems to all too common in 21st century America. Responding to a question about her gender, Drew Faust, Harvard’s first female president, replied, "I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard." N.Y. Times blogger Judith Warner agreed, arguing that attributing the newly appointed Faust’s notoriety as "a people person" to her gender "is to cut Faust off at the knees."

Yet gender is clearly an issue surrounding Dr. Faust’s appointment. It brings the number of female Ivy League Presidents to 50% - nearly to the percentage of women in the general population. Dr. Faust replaced a man who alienated many with his imperious style and his comments about gender differences. Dr. Faust, it is said, listens and makes people feel heard and included.

A N.Y. Times reporter researching an article recently found very few female CEO's willing to say anything about gender. Could it be that women executives still regard their gender as a professional liability?