Her partner persuaded her to send an email offering to help out. She started volunteering, writing a strategy paper, and in October 2015 joined the Women’s Equality Party as Chief of Staff. ‘It was my dream job. The rest is history.’ She pauses. ‘Or not. In fact, it’s absolutely not history. It’s not even near to being history yet,’ she says.3
This chapter addresses a flurry of questions about women in politics – and about history. The United States rejected its first serious female candidate for the Presidency. What does this mean? Clinton had seemed poised to lead the charge of the 50-foot women. Instead history did that repeating-itself thing for which it’s renowned. Women have often made strides only to fall back. One lesson could not be more clear or more urgent: We must fight not only to extend gender equality but to retain those rights and protections we have.
The causes of her defeat bear more detailed unpicking. Clinton appeared part of the establishment, and in some ways she was. She had already occupied the White House, though never in her own right or on her own terms. Her story illustrates the limits of privilege-by-association and the sting in its tale. She earned her stripes, and some valid criticisms, during a career in politics spanning stints in the Senate and as Secretary of State, yet never escaped the accusation that she got where she did because of her husband. Her achievements were her own and so were her mistakes, but she was only ever permitted to own the latter. Her use of a private email server for government business was a bad misstep but in no way equivalent to the cascade of scandals and allegations surrounding Donald Trump.
During the Democratic primaries and in the main campaign, she accepted the mantle of the continuity candidate, the safe choice, the likely choice, enabling two white men, first Bernie Sanders, then Trump – the very definition of a fat cat – to present themselves as insurgents. This wasn’t just a tactical error on Clinton’s part. It reflected a profound misreading of the American people and of her own situation. Voters didn’t want continuity; they wanted change. She could have embodied that change. Certainly as a woman she was (excluding third-party candidates) the only real outsider in the race, for reasons already raised and explored here in greater detail.
She lost at least in part because she, and those around her, didn’t recognise the extent to which her gender was a disadvantage – and because many white female voters did not recognise the extent to which any privilege they enjoyed was circumscribed in the same ways. The result, the Trump presidency, is bad news for women everywhere. On his first full day in office, he signed an executive order blocking US funds to any organisation providing abortion advice or care overseas. What we cannot know is whether a Hillary Clinton presidency would have benefited women, other than by stopping Trump.
We cannot know, but we can draw conclusions, about Clinton and more widely about the impact of women in politics. The Women’s Equality Party argues that increasing the overall participation of women is necessary if women are to advance and to hold on to that progress. WE also maintain that such a change wouldn’t benefit only women, but everyone, by improving politics and the outcomes of the political system. What evidence underpins these arguments? If given a chance to head governments and fill half the seats in parliaments, might women run things not just differently but better? Does the answer depend on the individual women concerned, in the ways Crenshaw and Ensler highlighted in their reply to Steinem, or might this also be a numbers game, as Hannah’s vision of descriptive representation implies?
The next chapter tackles a huge question underlying this debate – whether what women are and how we behave is biologically hard-wired. First we’ll look at some of the Titans and at the rare examples of gender-balanced legislatures to make an assessment about the ways in which women are already shaping the future.
Let’s start with a reality check. When Theresa May took over from David Cameron, Money magazine got a little overexcited. ‘Even with all the uncertainty around the UK’s post-Brexit future, one thing is clear: Britain will soon be led by a woman, its first female prime minister since Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990,’ an article on its website declared. ‘Female heads of state have become common everywhere, it seems, but in the United States.’4
In reality, May added to a total of female world leaders – including elected heads of government, elected heads of state and women performing both roles – that for all their stature could still fit into a minibus. There are female leaders in Bangladesh, Chile, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Liberia, Lithuania, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Namibia, Nepal, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Taiwan and the UK – that’s just 17 out of the world’s 144 full or partial democracies, or 18 if we include the estimable Nicola Sturgeon who heads Scotland’s devolved government.
Female leaders are less common globally than natural redheads are in Sturgeon’s own country; and redheads in Scotland, contrary to popular imagination, are not common at all, a flame-haired cohort amounting to around 13 per cent of the total population. Redheads and female leaders stand out, so we imagine their numbers to be much higher. Fifty-three democracies elect a president and a prime minister, and in all but nine of these nations, both roles are held by men. That means female leaders still comprise just 11.8 per cent of all world leaders, 12.5 per cent with Sturgeon.
The rarity of female leaders skews any gender ranking that includes female heads of state or government as a measure of equality. Consider the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. The annual report seeks to judge the gulf between male and female citizens in each country surveyed by combining national performance scores attained in four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The health and survival category illustrates the wider danger of such rankings, taking into account just two sets of statistics: sex ratios at birth and healthy life expectancy. This provides useful information about divergent male and female health outcomes for diseases, but is a tool blunt to the point of inutility for assessing, for example, the level or impact of violence against women and girls. The last of the categories examines not only the make-ups of parliaments and governments but also ‘the ratio of women to men in terms of years in executive office (prime minister or president) for the last 50 years’. This helps to explain how in 2016 the Republic of Ireland strutted its stuff in sixth place, behind the Nordic countries and Rwanda, an unlikely feat that provoked eye-rolls among Irish women.5
When Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female President in 1990, she saluted female voters ‘who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system’. Seven years later Ireland elected a second female President, Mary McAleese. She served until 2011. Both women used the platform to promote gender equality, but Irish Presidents have severely limited executive powers and instead deploy what McAleese termed ‘moral or pastoral’ influence. The Irish system did get something of a rocking, though, and not just because of the Marys. Before Ireland’s economic miracle proved a bubble, a wash of cheap money swept away some old features of the social and political landscape and lured back to the country a diaspora with expanded ambitions for women.
Even so, this shake-up was nowhere near fierce enough to fully dislodge the intertwined legacies of the Irish uprising and Catholicism. Revolutions often follow a pattern. The French Revolution and the Arab Spring both offered hope to the women who helped to instigate them, but swiftly abandoned any goals of female emancipation. Ireland’s revolution appeared to embrace the women who fought as equals alongside men, but went on to betray them. On Easter Monday 1916, rebel leader Patrick Pearse delivered a proclamation of independence on the steps of Dublin’s post office, promising ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’, and making explicit that these rights included suffrage for women. This vision shimmered for six days only. British forces quelled the Rising and executed Pearse. The remaining independence leaders focused ever more narrowly on the goal of ditching British rule, and doled out an earthly reward to the clergy who supported their efforts, enshrining ‘the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith’ in Ireland’s 1937 constitution. As a result, Ireland didn’t permit divorce until 1995 and has yet to legalise abortion except when the mother’s life is in danger.
Ireland’s female Presidents represented not