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Men's Club Thinking Susan Estrich In reporting on television coverage of the election in The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley wisely observed that it was almost as if the news divisions had sent out a memo that said "stag," it looked so much like "a men's club from around 1962."
Here were Nancy Pelosi, being chosen as the first woman speaker, and Hillary, anointed as the Democratic front-runner for president, and, with the exception of Katie Couric, it seemed that for most of network news the definition of "gravitas" continued to require a suit and tie. And the people putting the teams together felt no need to prove any commitment to equality, as they would have just a few years ago, by at least adding one or two women.
That isn't unusual.
I count everything and encourage others to do the same.
Story Continues Below
Counting women on opinion pages, on Sunday talk shows, in general interest magazines, the results are always depressingly the same.
Men outnumber women on average 4-to-1 in the general interest magazines as reported on www.womentk.com.
The White House Project, over a period of five years, has found little improvement in the number of women appearing on the Sunday talk shows. Five years ago, men were 89 percent of the guests, as opposed to last year, when they were 86 percent according to stats at www.whitehouseproject.org.
In my students' research on op-ed pages, it was typical to find days when there were no women and days when there was only one. Ms. Stanley's own newspaper has seven male columnists and one woman.
Gravitas is most certainly a gendered concept.
Pollsters have consistently found that women candidates start out 10 points behind on matters of toughness, among female as well as male voters. But that's not the point of this column.
I've written that column. That's nothing new.
What's new is that in virtually all of these areas, there are now women in decision-making posts. Maybe not the top position, certainly not an equal number of women, but at least a woman or two, enough to make a difference; enough to say, with a smile: "Wait a minute, let's hire a woman, let's bring on so-and-so. Enough with these 'little white boys.' We need a 'broad.'" Sometimes she's even the boss.
I can't tell you how many times I look down the roster of a show that has no women on it and see a female as executive producer.
I can't tell you how many times I go to a big conference, where being on a panel is a big deal, and there are no, or few, women on the panels, and it turns out that women put the panels together.
I don't want to point out the number of mastheads I've checked and been disappointed to find a woman's name as editor, but no women as columnists or contributors, where the glass ceiling or the concrete wall, if it isn't built by women, is at least left in place by them, by us.
When the whole idea was that this generation of women was supposed to take it down for the next.
There are, I suppose, some women who are just plain mean and don't help anyone, just like there are some men like that. But for many women who have made it, there seems to be a special problem, and that special problem unfortunately expresses itself in not helping other women.
Ask any woman and she'll tell you a story about a woman like this.
They forget that they wouldn't be where they are, were it not for the efforts of other women to open the doors.
They forget that strength comes in numbers, not in being alone.
They don't understand power. They think you have more if you save it, less if you use it. They don't like being reminded that they have a special obligation because they're women. They think helping other women will actually cost them something.
How wrong could they be?
The harm they are causing is setting us back a generation. Because if they don't feel the need to add a woman or two or three, why should the men?
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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