The subtle, sexist whispering campaign against Janet Yellen
In conversations with members of the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration, financial reporters and the broader monetary-policy community, I’ve had a surprising number of discussions that follow the same pattern: “Yellen is great,” my interlocutor will say. “But … ”
The “but” is a variation on a theme. She lacks “toughness.” She’s short on “gravitas.” Too “soft-spoken” or “passive.” Some mused that she is not as aggressively brilliant or intellectually probing as other candidates — though they hasten to say she’s clearly very knowledgeable about monetary policy. Others have wondered whether she could handle the inevitable fights with Congress.
Requests for specifics don’t yield much. It’s more a feeling. An intuition. A sense. But these airy hunches are held by powerful people who will be involved, formally and otherwise, in the selection of Bernanke’s replacement.
What the complaints share is an implicit definition of leadership based on stereotypically male qualities. They aren’t qualities that all men have, or all women lack, but they’re qualities that tend to be more rewarded in men than in women, and thus more prevalent among men than women. And because every chairman of the Federal Reserve (as well as every Treasury secretary) has been male, such qualities have steadily, perhaps subconsciously, informed the portrait etched in many minds of high-level economic policy makers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/19/the-subtle-sexist-whispering-campaign-against-janet-yellen/
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