No, women are not taking over

There was a minor dust-up in Austin, Texas, recently over a special two-hour training session for city staffers who deal with the City Council.

One of the consultants brought in to conduct the training alleged that women ask lots of questions and are reluctant to deal with “the financial argument” in favor of a proposal. Arguments must be framed “in a totally different way” to get female votes, he suggested.

This is, of course, baseless pseudoscientific nonsense, and Austin’s councilwomen were duly offended.

But there was more to this incident than the clueless ramblings of a male consultant. The current Austin City Council is the first majority-female one in Austin’s history, with seven women and, including the mayor, four men. The rationale for holding the training in the first place was, according to city spokesman David Green, the “historic change in Austin’s municipal governance, including the election of a new, majority-women City Council.”

Furthermore, the consultant who conducted the training predicted that Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy — which hadn’t yet been announced when he spoke — would usher in a new era of female leaders. “I submit to you if Hillary Clinton just runs, just runs for the office, you are going to see ... greater numbers [of women] in leadership position. If she wins, you will see even greater numbers,” he said.

Batten down the hatches, gentlemen — there’s a lady storm on the horizon!

We’ve heard this talk before. In 2013, The New York Times announced New Hampshire’s election of America’s first all-female congressional delegation with the breathless headline “From Congress to halls of state, in New Hampshire, women rule.” (This was no longer true as of January 2015, after Rep. Carol Shea Porter lost her bid for re-election.)

In 2012 big media went gaga for the wave of women elected officials that apparently swept the nation: “Big gains for women in 2012,” declared CNN; “113th Congress welcomes benches full of women,” PBS trumpeted. Salon was matter-of-fact — “Another Year of the Woman” — as was Mother Jones (“2012: The Year of the Woman Senator”). MSNBC (“Is 2012 the Year of the Woman?”) and The Washington Post (“With Senate wins for Elizabeth Warren and others, a new Year of the Woman?”) were tentative but optimistic.

The reality is that women have made few inroads in American politics in recent decades, particularly at the state and local level. Women’s representation in state legislatures has virtually flatlined in the last 20 years. Women make up more than half the U.S. population but hold only about 20 percent of elected offices in this country. The numbers are even lower when you look at governors and big-city mayors: Women hold only 12 percent of governorships and 16 percent of mayoralties in America’s 100 largest cities. Women of color make up about 18 percent of the U.S. population yet only 6 percent of members of Congress.

Yet every time there’s an anomaly such as New Hampshire’s short-lived all-female delegation or Austin’s majority-female City Council, the coverage is unjustifiably giddy. 

Admittedly, small victories feel bigger when you’re used to fighting for table scraps. But the fact that 99 percent of voters have heard of Hillary Clinton does not mean women are poised to take over government any more than the election of Barack Obamasignaled a new era of black power.

Twenty-three years ago, 1992 was dubbed the Year of the Woman when elections tripled the number of women to serve in the Senate — to six. That’s out of 100.

At the time, scrappy Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving female senator in U.S. history, expressed her irritation. She said, “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus … We’re not a fad, a fancy or a year.”

Yet in a country that seems to celebrate the Year of the Woman every time something good happens to more than two women at once (can you name three women on TV? Women must now be in charge of TV!), women are still more than 66 years away from achieving parity in the U.S. House of Representatives and 30 years from proportional representation in the Senate, assuming Americans add four women to the House and two women to the Senate every election year, as we did in 2012. (This is an unlikely scenario.)

To paraphrase Cornel West, Americans should not be confused by the occasional appearance of female, black and brown faces in high places. A cluster does not constitute a power base, and men certainly do not need to seek refuge from — or bring in consultants to help prepare them for — what The New York Times termed in 2013 the coming matriarchy.

Even if women were poised to take over — in reality, not just in the minds of headline writers and men’s rights activists — I’m not convinced that that would be in itself a social good. Writing about Abu Ghraib more than a decade ago, Barbara Ehrenreichnoted that a uterus is no substitute for a conscience. To that I would add that Joni Ernstis no substitute for Mikulski.

Unlike the author of a piece in Dame, I do not intend to “vote with my vagina” in 2016. But I do believe that women as a group deserve proportional representation in government — and that government should be run by people who don’t need special training in how to deal with women.