The Glass Ceiling

Marie Cocco wants everyone to know that women are still victims:

It is time to stop kidding ourselves. This wasn't a breakthrough year for American women in politics. It was a brutal one.

The glass ceiling remains firmly in place -- not cracked, as Hillary Clinton insisted as she tried to claim rhetorical victory after her defeat in the Democratic nominating contest. It wasn't even scratched with the candidacy of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee -- unless you consider becoming an object of national ridicule to be a symbol of advancement. As divergent as these two women are ideologically and temperamentally, as different as are their resumes, they both banged their heads -- hard -- against the ceiling. Both were bruised. So was the goal of advancing women in political leadership.

Now invoking the glass ceiling implies that a woman is being held back strictly because of her gender, but can anyone really make that case with Clinton or Palin? Hell, Palin was probably picked in large part because of her gender in the first place. Which is more plausible: that she lost because she is a woman or because she was a member of the Republican ticket in a Democratic year? How many people even cast their vote based on the VP?

Clinton, meanwhile, certainly wasn't held back by her gender in becoming a Senator from a state she had little connection with -- defeating a man no less -- and came within a whisker of becoming the Democratic nominee against a political phenom. Again, which is more plausible, that she lost because she is a woman or because she was the pro-war candidate in an anti-war party? That she lost because she is a woman or because she's a polarizing figure? That she lost because she is a woman or Obama was simply a better candidate?

Continuing on in this bizarre vein Cocco seems to complain that Clinton as Secretary of State would be too...ordinary:

Even if President-elect Barack Obama chooses Clinton as secretary of state, no ground will be broken. Clinton would be the third woman to hold the post. And there is no longer anything extraordinary in a president naming women to his Cabinet. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it first, when he appointed Frances Perkins as labor secretary in 1933.

Um, isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that show how far women have come that such appointments now occur on a regular basis? Or is the new standard that every demographic is a victim until one of them has become President?

In any case she isn't happy about Congress either:

Including incumbents and newcomers, a record number of women will be serving in Congress, but still only 17 percent of its members will be female.

Given that she likes to play the percentages game I was going to respond to this fact by noting that a disproportionate number of women are enrolled in college, but she acknowledges this herself:

Yet American women are a majority of the population and a majority of the electorate. They earn more than half the bachelor's and master's degrees, a level of educational achievement far exceeding that of women in developing countries. There must be some reason we don't do any better than women in impoverished, rural regions of the world where cultural norms oppress women.

Maybe it is because our culture isn't so different after all.

Yes, perhaps it's that we belong to a wildly male chauvinist society (one, mind you, that is willing to vote for women to all offices in the land save for President thus far). Or maybe, just maybe, women don't run for political office as much as men do. Maybe more women prefer to stay at home and raised children rather than become involved in political life. Maybe what's holding women back in the political realm is...women.

Update: Actually, now that I think about it some more, Hillary Clinton was a victim of discrimination. Her problem, however, was not her gender but her skin color. If she had been black I think that her changes of receiving the nomination would have been greatly enhanced. I don't even think this is controversial.