Reply #5: Sad, but true. A WP column and a Leonard Pitts column discuss this point: [View All]

[Captain Hilts]

First, there's this article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/11/AR2007111101204.html?nav=emailpage]

Wash Post: The Myth of the Iron Lady

The driving factor in the way women leaders are perceived, experiments show, is not that they are any more ruthless than men who get to the top, but that people have strong and often unconscious conceptions about men, women and the nature of leadership.


Experiments show that women vying for leadership roles are automatically assigned two labels. The first is to be seen as nice and warm, but incompetent; the second is to be seen as competent but unpleasant. Women stuck with Label A cannot be leaders, because the stereotype of leadership is incompatible with incompetence. Women who do become leaders get stuck with Label B, because if leadership is unconsciously associated with manliness, cognitive consistency requires that female leaders be stripped of the caring qualities normally associated with women.

Heilman proved that the reason people see a highly competent woman as less likable than a man with precisely the same qualifications is that such women are automatically perceived to have lost their feminine, caring side.

Then, there's this article from the Miami Herald:

http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/story/310595.html]

Leonard Pitts column

Nancy Pelosi, Janet Reno, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright . . . I cannot see myself -- we are speaking metaphorically here -- cuddling up to any of them. They all seem formidable, off-putting, cold.


Which suggests the problem here is not so much them as me. And, if I may be so bold, we. As in, we seem unable to synthesize the idea that a woman can be smart, businesslike, demanding, capable, in charge, and yet also, warm.


Was Bill Clinton never brusque? Does Dick Cheney always say thank you and please?


But it's different, isn't it, because she's a woman? With the men, toughness reads as leadership, authority, getting things done. With her it reads as ''bitch.'' There is a sense -- and even women buy into this -- that a woman who climbs too high in male-dominated spheres violates something fundamental to our understanding of what it means to be a woman. Indeed, that she gives up any claim upon femininity itself.


We demand certain ''feminine'' traits from women -- nurturing, caring, submission -- and the woman in whom those traits are either not present or subordinated to her drive, ambition and competence will pay a social price.