So I’m a bit late to join the “women in academia or the YPU” party (some of us have real summer jobs, you know) but as a wannabe academic-cum-YPU hack I just couldn’t restrain myself. Dara’s right to argue that we should look at “success as the field defines it”, which is why I’m surprised that no one of my fellow “Union-theory” obsessives has mentioned the political elephant on the room : that according to the obscure nature of Yale Political Union, “Union” posts are actually fairly low-status, as opposed to “Party” office. With the strength of the Parties comes an assumption that “real leadership”, charismatic and intellectual, comes through Party Chairmanship - this is seen as glamorous leadership compared to the administrative responsibilities of the elected Executive Board. So on positions occupied, the YPU no longer seems such a women-friendly place after all, when you notice that for the forthcoming semester, only 1 out of 7 Party Chairmen will be a woman (Jane Hu, of the Progs, the smallest party).
Within the YPU, the charismatic leadership to which the many aspiring politicos are taught to aspire is explicitly described as masculine. I’ve never forgotten the very semester I arrived, hearing a dear and intelligent friend state that “leadership has two main areas - administrative management, and inspiration of other people to follow a vision. Obviously, a woman can do the first, but not the second.” This past semester, the very same friend told me “when given the option, a Fall Chairman should always be a man, because he has to inspire new recruits to join his party, and obviously a man in charge will always be more inspirational than a woman”. (N.B. It’s not who you think it is, and I’m not going to tell you).
Of course, if you’re still reading this you’re enough of YPUer to know that the cult of Chairmanship is more powerful in the POR than in any other party. But I’ve heard similar sentiment in other parties (the IP, Tories and POL) - and from members of AdComm explaining that the masculine / feminine dichotomy is necessary to the very fabric of the YPU.
The argument goes like this: the YPU is defined by conflict between Parties - at its best, this is competition for intellectual supremacy which makes us all fiercer thinkers. The members of EBoard have to co-ordinate these components and weave together the different parts to make a harmony. Men are naturally more aggressive and confrontational, women more harmonious…Male Party Chairman, Female EBoard = great. Whether or not we actually buy into gendered conventions of “warrior” or “peacemaker”, as long as others around us in the YPU do, they will be part of the parlance that defines our YPU careers - even if there’s still a status inequality given that leading one’s close comrades is widely considered more significant than leading the Union.
So where does this relate to larger claims about affirmative action and academia? Well, certainly the analogy of warrior and peacemaker holds true for academia. A Yalie who graduated a few years ago and is now a PhD student in philosophy told me recently that “Academia at the highest levels is a blood sport, it really is. It’s all about whose argument you savaged last and whether anyone else has been able to tear a strip off your latest publication. When I meet academics socially, who don’t know my work, and tell them that I want to go into the field, they tell me ‘but you seem like a sweet girl, you’re probably too nice for this’.” In the other side of the field, a Yale academic who served her time on ExComm told me “they’re always trying to get women onto the pastoral and disciplinary committees, because we’re apparently more student friendly”. Anecdotal evidence, but in both cases stemming from years of experience at the hard end.
So for both our microcosm of the YPU and the only larger world that really matters, academia, affirmative action doesn’t stand a chance of succeeding unless it adapts to the subtle discourses that define and redefine success. And as both fields success is chiefly measured by the approbation of the community as a whole, the discourse has to change before anything approaching collective action, conscious or subconscious, can help anyone. Let’s face it, if communities frequently went in for affirmative action in combating their own stereotypes, affirmative action of the tangible kind we usually refer to would never have been proposed in the first place.
And because this is a late night (British time) rant to friends, rather than a structured blog post for public consumption, on that inelegant note I’m going to bed.
The argument is interesting and worthwhile but as Will said, both your and Dara’s appeals connecting the argument to the reality of the YPU rely on really insignificant small-number statistics. Really, 1 in 7 Union Chairmen this semester on its face says nothing about women in the Union in general. Last semester there were (by my count) four female Chairmen, and tiny differences in the Grand Scheme of Things (person X changing their mind, person Y never coming to Yale, etc.) could have had us see up to 4 or 5 female Chairman this semester.
Something interesting, certainly not unexpected, and slightly (slightly!) more meaningful for us math types, is the fact that even last semester (when more than half the Chairmen were women), the three parties with male Chairmen were, of course, those on the Right. It’s only one semester and other semesters have plenty of exceptions but still, there’s only a 0.03 chance of having all four female Chairmen (if four Chairmen are female) be women.
“but you seem like a sweet girl, you’re probably too nice for this”
No one has ever said that to you in your life and you know it.
In addition, I work 40 hours a week and cook dinner for three boys every night, thank you very much.
Adam: What if the “blips” like Person X changing their mind and Person Y not coming to Yale, etc., were actually caused by the same attitudes and prejudices that caused there to end up with only one female Chairman? How could you demonstrate that to your satisfaction? And if you couldn’t, does that mean it couldn’t happen, or just that its happening wouldn’t matter?
I don’t think this is a useful medium for this conversation, though you are all, of course, free to talk amongst yourselves. However, as a cautionary note, I will add that any comments I consider to be excessively rude will be summarily disemvoweled.
TKB, have you actually read the piece? The “you seem like a sweet girl” comment wasn’t about me, it was a quote from someone with a far more advanced academic career than mine (and I doubt she’d thank me for identifying her on the internet, but I’m sure plenty of people can work it out from the clues). And I’m genuinely confused as to where your comment about cooking for boys fits in?
ARS, I agree with you entirely that the sample size is too small to draw conclusions from on its own, but I’d be really interested to hear what you think about the wider perceptions in the YPU of suitable channels for masculine and feminine leadership. If my post had consisted purely of the statement that 1/7 Party Chairman will be female next semester, it would have been pretty idiotic, but how do you react to the idea that EBoard office is more suitable for female leaders than party office? Although I agree with Nicola that this probably isn’t the best place to discuss the thorny issue of whether EBoard leadership should be more about management than inspiration…
When I meet academics socially, who don’t know my work, and tell them that I want to go into the field, they tell me ‘but you seem like a sweet girl, you’re probably too nice for this’.”
That seems to imply that the statement was said to you, right? Am I insane?
As for the working/cooking thing: “So I’m a bit late to join the “women in academia or the YPU” party (some of us have real summer jobs, you know)”
I’m not making any “real” comments on this line of posts because it irritates me far too much for me to talk sensibly about it, and I don’t see much use in perpetuating the discussion anyway.
TKB - note the quotation marks earlier in the paragraph following the statement “A Yalie…told me recently”
As for the rest, I know my party has a very different view of itself from Kate’s but I certainly don’t buy the idea the EBoard office is somehow suited to women in a way that a party chairmanship isn’t. Incidentally, given the choice, in my party I would prefer the first semester chair to be female, but that’s mostly because we have a gender ratio problem and I think having a female chair could help make it easier to recruit female freshman (I mean, it’s a problem when the only really feminist party in the Union has only 4-5 solid female members).
And on the inspiration question - this isn’t quite what you mean - but think about who in the Union has most successfully articulated a vision of the Union and gotten the rest of the Union to follow it. I would say, in the last few years, the two best examples are both female - Meredith Startz and April Lawson. Sure, they did it through the vehicle of union office (which, incidentally, isn’t really less important that party office. Sure, I consider Lib chair to be the most important position in the YPU, but I consider the chairmen of all the other parties to be mostly insignificant.), but that has proved to be the only way to lead the Union, for all this talk about the “male” leadership style that takes on other forms.
It’s silly to deny that success at winning seats on E-Board has increased the influence of individual women in the Union - it has given us a Union whose most powerful figures are mostly female. What it hasn’t done is make the YPU as a whole more welcoming to women. That’s a problem, but keeping women off E-board isn’t the way to fix it.
David is right on everything he said. I’d just add that I’ve never even heard this masculine/feminine e-board/chair(man) thing before reading this post. So it’s especially important to apply it correctly.
I’d also ask if there is a noted dropoff of women from party e-boards to party chair(men). In the Libs, the problem isn’t moving from administrative positions to charismatic positions (accepting the false dichotomy for the time being), it’s starting up the pipeline at all. I have no idea if this is true or not for the POR, but it should be pointed out.
Some statistical information for the body:
Out of the last eight semesters, the chairmen have been:
F04 FXFMMMF
S05 FXMFMMM
F05 FXFMMMF
S06 MMMMMMM (!)
F06 MMMFMMF
Vis-a-vis the presidency, I would disagree with David II’s characterisations of which presidents were most successful, partially because he wasn’t here for the entirely preventable drama that arose from Meredith’s term and that continued into Roger’s–notably, an inability to say “no” when “no” just had to be said…
Nobody has been elected president since Christoforou without having had the administrative credentials to justify the vision they’ve presented, but the vice versa is also true. I’m with the other Noah when he says this dichotomy is utterly false.
So it ate several paragraphs, which I will attempt to remember:
S07 MFMMMFM
F07 MMMFFMM
S08 FFFFMMM
Granted, this was mostly an attempt to show off my utterly useless knowledge, but I think the real point here isn’t that women are less suited to leadership but that women are simply less numerous in the Union. That is to say, there seems to be something about the YPU that makes it more dominated by men simply because of quantity, not something about leadership having any sort of implication on quality.
I agree entirely with Noah, though I think he misses my point on the Presidents - it’s not about which ones were most successful, it’s about which ones made themselves into leaders of the Union who had a major effect on how the Union sees itself. Regardless of drama during Meredith’s term (and there’s certainly been some unhappiness as a result of April’s as well) they are the two recent Union members who can best claim the status of “leader.”
But yeah, your point about it being about quantity not about suitability for leadership is right on, and I say the same thing in my comment on Dara’s post.
I hate to be so predictable, but I suppose if I’m going to wade into the blog-mafia-lovefest — since I’m no longer a consultant and have a few hours a week to actually think these days — it might as well be now. Plus, Noah K gave me permission.
I agree that male/female archetypes are a useful way to think about Union leadership, but the conversation seems to have shifted a little since waaaaay back in my day when I wore a bustle and whalebone corset to debates.
We used to talk about a ‘male’ Union being one in which the dynamic of competition between parties/chairmen — political and intellectual — was predominant. This did not, however, imply that the chairmen themselves were necessarily male; instead the idea was that the federal nature of the Union with respect to the parties led to a competitive, masculine atmosphere. Under this model, Union leaders make decisions on the basis of votes or directives backed by power, and lead by winning.
The ‘female’ Union was described as a more consensus-driven place, where the result of diverse parties coming together is compromise rather than winner-takes-all. Union leaders are those who build consensus, and to make a decision by directive without full communication and consideration of all viewpoints would be frowned upon.
To interpret this as male chairmen/female Union is a too literal, and, I think, makes it less useful. It’s not that party leadership is inherently male — you could find these same differences of style in the internal leadership of a single party. (Well, some parties…) It’s just that the Union’s constitution incentivizes parties to compete so we associate chairmen (male or female) with being the driving force behind a ‘masculine’ competitive Union.
I would also caution against automatically linking the male/female styles with weak/strong or decentralized/centralized Union. The association is there, but I would argue that it’s historical, not exclusively causal. There have been times in the Union’s history when a party or coalition has been strong enough to build a centralized Union under a leader who dominated the parties in a masculine style. In recent history, however, the parties were splintered and mistrustful enough of one another that a powerful, centralized Union came about through a female style, rather than under the purview of inter-party competition.
The men inspire/women manage dichotomy seems pretty laughable to me. I suspect that the argument was made by a male member of the PoR (really going out on a limb, there, huh?), under the following train of thought: 1) I am inspired by fierce intellectual combat and warrior brotherhood; 2) women are not fierce or combative or warriors or capable of being brothers. In essence, I am inspired by masculinity, therefore women are not inspirational. I take issue with both premises of this essentially tautological argument, but particularly as a matter of Union leadership, these gentlemen might do well to remember that not all people are inspired by the same qualities.
Finally, because I can’t help myself:
I would agree completely with Noah M that I made a number of major mistakes as president that left a hangover for the next year and generally held back progress. I would take them back if I could, and I think what’s actually notable about this is that almost all cases of my personal screw-ups in the Union were failures of ‘masculine’ leadership, not ‘feminine’. That is to say, not an inability to say no, but an unwillingness to communicate fully or understand the emotional context of decision-making. I tended to get in a mess when I made or authorized decisions without discussion and consensus.
Which is not to say, for more navel gazing clarification on that last point, that I think that my leadership style was masculine. On the contrary, my point is that I screwed up any time I strayed from a very conciously feminine style.