Women emerged as winners in election contests across the US this week, with a string of primary election victories exuberantly hailed in the US media as historic breakthroughs.
Despite such claims, politics in the US remains dominated by elderly white males male.
Of the 100 Senate seats, 83 are occupied by men. In the House of Representatives, the ratio is roughly the same, with only 73 women in the 435-member chamber.
In world rankings of democracies in terms of gender balance, the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks the US 69th — between Turkmenistan and San Marino.
That imbalance helps explain media excitement on June 8 when women were triumphant in state after state.
Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay, will be the first woman to represent the Republicans in a contest for California governor after winning the party primary. Another successful businesswoman, Carly Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, will be the first woman to represent the Republicans in a US Senate race in California.
The successes were mirrored in Maine, Nevada, Arkansas, Iowa and South Carolina. The Washington Times, in a front-page headline, joined almost every US television channel in dubbing this year “The Year of the Woman.” The conservative Daily Caller Web site had the headline “Ladies Night,” while its rival, Slate, had “Women on Top.”
But it remains to be seen if this will be a breakthrough year.
Groups that promote women in politics expressed caution, noting that most of those who won primaries this week were not favorites for the elections on Nov. 2 for Congress and state governorships.
Debbie Walsh, director of the Centre for American Women and Politics, thought the headlines overstated the case, but added: “We are seeing more women running than two or four years ago and there clearly seems to be an uptick. There were serious wins in places where women have not won before. These are important.”
She reiterated the scale of the problems facing women, not only in Congress but for the governorships. At present, only six of the 50 governorships are occupied by women, and three of those are retiring.
“We need three wins just to get back to where we are,” she said.
The real story of the night may turn out to be not that so many women won but that so many Republican women won. The Democratic party, with feminists long prominent, has many more women in Congress than the GOP. Until Tuesday, Republican women struggled to get beyond the primaries.
The Republican party establishment is under pressure from Tea Party activists, many of whose leaders are women and disdainful of the “good ol’ boy network.” Sarah Palin, the main figurehead of the Tea Party, endorsed many of the women who won on Tuesday. Her backing translated into sudden jumps in poll standings, donations and an influx of volunteers. Of the 11 endorsements Palin has made so far this year, eight have won and only three lost.
Congratulating this week’s winners, she said: “It will be exciting to have these excellent candidates — especially those fearless GOP ‘mama grizzlies — take their message straight through to November and into office.”
Palin is pushing a mixture that is proving potent in the primaries: support for women candidates, anti-abortion, Christianity, small government and anti-Obama.
One of the claimants to founding the Tea Party movement is Smart Girl Politics, a Web site promoting women in the Republican party and a conservative alternative to the pro-Democrat Emily’s List.
“We look at Congress and overwhelmingly they are old males. What we are doing is showing this is not what the country wants. We are looking for fresh blood,” spokeswoman Rebecca Wales said.
She also noted that there were 14 women Republicans running for the Senate this year compared with three two years ago, and 94 for a place in the House compared with 46 in 2008.
The most important result of the night may turn out to have been Nikki Haley in South Carolina. Haley, whose parents are Sikhs from India, fell just short of the 50 percent needed to win the primary outright but is the strong favorite to win the run-off to represent the Republicans for the governorship, a contest the party will almost certainly win.
It was a staggering result for Haley, one of Palin’s endorsements, in a state that is one of the most reactionary in the US — it is ranked bottom in terms of gender balance. The 46 members of the state senate are all male. She also won in spite of a nasty smear campaign.
Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at the American University in Washington, said the importance of the primary results was that having Haley, Whitman and Fiorina on television would inspire young women to think about going into politics. But she is skeptical about “The Year of The Woman” claims.
“I do not think it will materialize. We do not have the number of women running in open seats for this to be a sea change,” she said.
Both Lawless and Walsh noted that the US applies different standards overseas, by inserting quotas for women into new constitutions. For example 25 percent of seats are reserved for women in Iraq.
“It is ironic,” said Walsh.
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