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This article is a bit dated, but the concept, alas, is ever current (Washington Post, 1/23/09).  It recycles the old canard that there's a "glass ceiling" in politics.  Do women "face barriers in the political arena?"  Yes they do.  Getting more votes than their opponents seems to be the major one.  And that, the article suggests is simply too much to ask.

The article goes back to when Caroline Kennedy withdrew her name from consideration to replace Hillary Clinton as U.S. Senator from New York.  The article quotes commentators who seem to think that it was Kennedy's birthright to hold public office.  That's almost true, of course, but someone had to be appointed, and in New York there are many people who are better qualified than Kennedy to hold the office.  The person who was appointed is a woman, and Kennedy was the one who withdrew her name, so what's their beef?  It's not at all clear, but to the glass ceiling crowd there must be something wrong.  I guess they'll get back to us when they figure out what. It gets loonier still, though.  The article actually cites Hillary Clinton as an example of the glass ceiling in politics.  Say what?  Here's a woman who'd never run for any public office before bidding for and winning the post of U.S. Senator from the State of New York.  The overwhelming majority of politicians never get close to that rarified air.  They start at the bottom running for small local offices and usually lose a few times before they get the name recognition to win.  Then they move up until they find their level.

But Clinton started about as close to the top as possible.  She managed that courtesy of being First Lady for eight years, which is to say, if her husband hadn't brought her into the national spotlight, she'd still be hustling lawsuits somewhere.  I'm not saying Clinton isn't qualified to be a senator or Secretary of State.  I'm saying she's the furthest thing from being a poster child for anti-woman bias in politics.  Pro-woman privilege is more like it.

The idea of a glass ceiling in politics rests solely on the fact that, at least at the federal level, women make up a fairly small percentage of office holders.  But the notion that that results from discrimination or anti-female bias strikes me as the closest thing to insanity.

To those who make the claim, here are a couple of facts: (1) female voters outnumber male voters and (2) in order to hold public office you have to get more votes than your opponent.  Admittedly, there are exceptions to #2 above, but it's true in the vast majority of cases.  So what the "glass ceiling" people are really complaining about is that women don't vote women into office.  After all, if they voted their sex, every office holder would be a woman.

But they don't.  As a case in point, I wonder how many liberal women voted for Sarah Palin last year.  My guess is, next to none.  But why not?  Don't they want more women holding office?  Of course they do, but...

And that suggests something quite sinister to the glass ceiling crowd - that women don't vote their sex, they vote their values.  That's true of men too, which is why there's vastly more overlap in men's and women's voting than not.  Although men and women tend to vote differently - with men being more conservative and women being more liberal - both sexes hew to values, not sex when voting.

Actual women have always vexed the women-as-perpetual-victims crowd.  They insist on thinking for themselves instead of in the Groupthink preferred by some, and that means they vote for what's between the candidates' ears, not what's between their legs.  Strange concept that.

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