For the last several years, I have been asking, mostly through questionnaires,
but also in some interviews, university students about their views of powerful
people and of potentially being powerful themselves. Here is a list of what
one group of Radford University students said when I asked them to imagine
who they would be as powerful persons. [OVERHEAD: LIST OF POWERFUL PERSONS,
USA].
Obviously, these students have no shortage
of ambition, but are there differences in the visions of the women and the
men? No man expects to marry power. No woman expects to get it through sports.
The women may seem to be more helpful or people-oriented in their visions,
perhaps? If so, it is not an overwhelming impression. The differences between
the responses of women and men are not dramatic. However, I find that when
I read further, or when I have interviewed my respondents, careful reading/listening
to what the women say suggests that they have not actually made their peace
with the idea of power, that they feel a great deal of ambivalence about
powerful women in general and themselves as potentially powerful women in
particular. Before looking further at what they say, let us take some time
to look at the possible sources of this ambivalence.
The media, at least in the U.S., are a strong
source of the notion that power and femininity do not fit well together
and of the notion that there is something wrong with powerful women. One
example that appeared in my home state in the last few years is the reaction
to the opening of the new Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (which
was supposed to balance the all-male Virginia Military Institute). The headline
over an article that focused on the uniform that would be required of these
young women was a blend of leadership and femininity [OVERHEAD: Not Available].
Hillary Clinton, the woman who is by far
the most likely to be listed when I ask my students and my research participants
for the names of powerful women, has been criticized for years in the U.S.
media as too pushy, too strong, too opinionated. Only in the last year or
so, since she has become a "wronged woman" does she seem to have
found favor. Attorney General Janet Reno, who is one of the most visible
powerful women in the US, has been the butt of jokes for her "unfeminine"
appearance. The message is clear that it is dangerous to deviate from a
fairly narrow feminine script if you are a visibly powerful woman.
On the other hand, deviating too much from
a traditional "powerful person script" is risky too.
An interesting reaction was triggered a few years ago by Canadian politician
Kim Campbell when she first began receiving press as the likely front-runner
for the prime-ministership of Canada. She had allowed her photograph to
be taken, for a book about professional women, in a pose that found her
standing behind screen or partition, with only her head and the tops of
her bare shoulders showing above the screen. It was quite a dignified photograph,
but the bare shoulders earned her the title, "Madonna of Canadian politics."
In this case, "too much" femininity was used to cancel out the impression
of power.
In white North American society, and in some
other parts of the world, women leaders often seem to face a double bind:
If they appear too tough, they are labeled unfeminine; if they appear too
feminine, they are assumed to be incapable of leadership. This double bind
is presented not just by the dominant culture, but also sometimes by feminist
culture, which can fall into the trap of urging women to take on leadership
roles and then castigating them if they become too authoritative or too
successful.
The assumed contradiction between power and
femininity may be somewhat culturally specific. For example, Patricia Parker
and dt ogilvie, (1996) argue that African American women do not experience
leadership and femininity as dichotomous. Nancy Adler (1996) notes that
some elite women political leaders around the world have successfully emphasized
certain aspects of the feminine role. She notes that Turkish prime minister
Tansu Çiller asserted during her campaign that she would be the mother,
sister, and daughter for the Turkish people; that Benazir Bhutto calls herself
the sister of the Pakistani people; and Dominica's Eugenia Charles refers
to herself as "mother of the people".
In some countries, even high heels, short
skirts, and a flirtateous demeanor may not automatically keep a woman from
being taken seriously as a leader. In Argentina, prominent conservative
cabinet minister Maria Julia Alsogaray unabashedly flaunted a feminine sensuality
while overseeing the sale of the country's state-owned telephone system,
running the state-owned steel company, and serving as Minister of the Environment
(Robinson, 1992).
At first the idea that it is not appropriate
for women to be powerful may seem to stem mainly from the notion of women
as less competent, tough, or decisive than men, or that a woman who is attractive
cannot also be intelligent, clear-headed and firm. Researchers have been
showing for years, for instance, that people tend not to think of women
as "management material"-- listing the qualities necessary for a
successful manager as stereotypically masculine ones .
However, it appears that some of the negative
reactions also stem, not from negative stereotypes of women as less competent
than men, but from positive stereotypes of women as warm, caring people
-- and as people who are especially likely to be supportive of other women.
When people (and perhaps women especially) do react negatively toward powerful
women, it may well be that part of that negativity comes from dashed hopes
and unfulfilled expectations born of these positive stereotypes.
My female graduate students and colleagues
have often commented to me that they are more quickly and profoundly disappointed
when a woman physician, attorney, or professor lets them down than when
a man does the same thing. It is, they report, easier to take uncaring,
insensitive treatment from a man than from a woman.
Alice Eagly and her colleagues (Eagly, Mladinic,
& Otto, 1991) have demonstrated that people actually make more positive
evaluations of women than of men. Those evaluations may, they suggest, stem
from the ascription of positive communal qualities to women -- qualities
such as helpful, gentle, emotional, kind, understanding.
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