Women in politics: A mixed picture

Since the movement for women’s suffrage in the mid-19th century, women have steadily become more prominent in the American political system. While much has improved in that time period, many women still regard some sociopolitical realities as unimproved.

On Thursday, a group of predominantly female students gathered in the W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts to listen to accomplished women discuss the current realities women face in Virginia and the United States. The panel of speakers included Virginia Secretary of Administration Viola Baskerville and Vanessa Kerry, best known for campaigning for her father, Sen. John Kerry, during his 2004 presidential campaign.

Delegate Jennifer McClellan and Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple arrived halfway through the discussion. Both were late as a result of an extended General Assembly special session about state transportation.

Baskerville started off the discussion by painting a worrisome picture of women and racial and ethnic minorities in public office.

Of 140 legislative seats in Virginia, women hold only 24 of them, she said. Women, however, comprise 51 percent of the state’s population.

Racial and ethnic minorities face a similar situation.

“People of color are significantly underrepresented in influential public policy leadership posts,” Baskerville said. “According to the 2000 census, women and men of color constitute 30 percent of the population, yet in 2004 they held only 16.2 percent of the top executive positions appointed by the nation’s governors.”

Kerry, on the other hand, said the record number of women in Congress-84-makes her optimistic. Seventy representatives and 14 senators are women.

“That doesn’t necessarily represent the voting population,” she added. “Of the voting population, 54 percent are actually women. And that turnout is not being represented in the national Congress.”

Afghanistan, Iraq and Rwanda have higher percentages of women in their legislative bodies than the U.S., she said. Rwanda has the highest percentage of female legislators in the world with 49 percent.

The panelists discussed why many women face adversity in politics. Kerry said perception often plays against women’s favor.

“Women tend to be the subject of armchair psychology all the time-what their hair looks like, what clothes they chose to wear, the state of their marriage,” she said, mentioning Sen. Hillary Clinton and her stepmother, Teresa Heinz Kerry. “All these things become more important necessarily than what they stand for.”

Women are often discouraged from pursuing their political ambitions, Kerry said, because “they become cold, they become calculated, they become manipulative.

“They’re hard, they’re tough as nails-they’re all these things that aren’t necessarily considered positive attributes.”

The discussion shifted toward other topics than political representation. The panelists touched upon the role of media in society and also the importance of networking.

Kerry shared anecdotes of her father’s campaign.

“I had to memorize every policy, every fact, everything I could possibly know about my father’s positions about what was going on in the world,” she said. “I found myself reading three newspapers a day. I found myself being in three newspapers a day. It was a very surreal, strange time.”

She recalled a personal moment with her father on a flight during the campaign:

“We were sitting there together, and I turned to him and said, ‘What are you going to do if this doesn’t work out?’ And he said, ‘Well, hopefully it will.’ He said, ‘I will know that I fought my hardest, that I always told the truth and that I really believed in something.’ It totally, completely reinvigorated my faith in politics.”

The panelists did not focus much on the 2006 general elections, but they did mention some of the issues surrounding them.

McClellan confronted the heated issue of same-sex marriage in Virginia.

“We need to get the conversation off of the religious aspect of it and peel down the next layer of it,” she said, adding that the issue of same-sex marriage is about benefits gays should receive, not whether the church should bless them.

Kenda Deleon, a student in the Masters of Social Work Program, said she appreciated that the general elections did not weigh down the theme of the event.

“There’s a time and place for everything,” she said. The general elections was not “the name of the forum.”

Sara Duke, president of Voices for Planned Parenthood at VCU, which sponsored the discussion with the newly formed VCU Women’s Leadership Forum and the NAACP at VCU, said the former group expects to hold similar discussions in the future.

Women’s issues are important at VCU, she said.

“Over 60 percent of the student population is female, yet the administration of this institution is largely comprised of men and particularly white men,” Duke said.

The Women’s Leadership Forum is scheduled to meet the first and third Thursdays of every month. The group will offer networking meetings and skills workshops in addition to panel discussions.