I still can’t get the image out of my head. Newspapers keep using the picture in their serialized election retrospectives: shocked and distraught young women crying their eyes out under the glass ceiling of a New York hotel ballroom, Hillary Clinton’s election night headquarters. Like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark, this was the glass ceiling that didn’t shatter. They had gathered there, giddy and hopeful, ready to watch up close the election of America’s first woman president. It wasn’t just a loss for them; it was a dream rudely interrupted and demolished by a larger-than-life symbol of every sexist, misogynistic pig of a white male they had ever known, heard or read about.
I want to believe that those millennial women will embrace that moment of pain and anguish, and use it as a catalyst for a new wave of feminism. Thanks to trails blazed by their mothers and grandmothers, the world is a far less foreboding place to women in their 20s and 30s. Doors once closed are now open. Rampant sexism, although far from dead and buried, is no longer baked into our social norms. This generation of women never experienced the hopeless cruelty of systemic oppression that spurred giants like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, and countless others, to devote their lives to fighting for change. When things are just a little bad, most of us suck it up and soldier on.
It’s about to get much more than just a little bad. That’s not just because the glass ceiling didn’t break on November 8. America’s president-in-waiting is the embodiment of almost everything the baby boomer feminists fought against: degradation, sexual harassment, verbose inequality. It’s all crawling out from behind its rock in full daylight now. Progress comes through an accumulation of baby steps; regression through a gigantic leap backwards. The leap back has begun. To me, that’s what the tears streaming down the faces of those young Clinton supporters were all about. The fulcrum of change suddenly reversed course, and the ride back is going to be anything but pretty.
This is about so much more than the country’s failure to elect a woman president. Women are ridiculously outnumbered in the Congress ( only 19% are women), state legislatures (24%), governors’ offices(12%) and in the upper echelons of academia (26% of college presidents are women) and corporate America (4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women). Those numbers not only measure an agonizingly slow march to equality, they tell an even bleaker and pervasive story.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, formerly on the faculty at both Yale and Harvard Law School, conducted extensive studies in the 1970s on the effects of the underrepresentation of women on organizational effectiveness. Kanter found that when women were the few among the many men in a work group, their participation and effectiveness were significantly diminished simply by virtue of being outnumbered. This phenomenon held, she found, in any situation where those from a demographically identifiable group were the “few among the many” from the majority group. Simply being a “token,” Kanter discovered, meant reduced participation, status and ability to shape the group’s outcome.
I did a mini-replication of Kanter’s study 35 years ago. I tracked a number of small task groups, some dominated by men, some by women and others with a relatively equal balance. I measured the amount of time each participant spoke, interrupted others, offered solutions, among other indices of participation. In the groups dominated by one gender, those in the minority greatly limited their participation and the overall effectiveness of the group process was severely limited. In the balanced groups, however, there was a more equalized level of participation along with a desire to reach consensus and, as a result, a higher level of effectiveness.
The lesson from the research is simple: the country is losing out by continuing to have decision making bodies that don’t look anything like the rest of the country. The damage from a Congress that is 81% male isn’t just the lack of opportunity for more women to serve. The real blow comes from the kind of laws that flow out of a legislative body that resembles an Elks Club.
It’s not too hard to imagine what lies ahead for us right now. Funding for women’s health, always a battle in “good times” is in for a severe blow. Mike Pence and his ilk are already salivating about defunding Planned Parenthood. Another faction would love to put the screws to what they see as the Justice Departments’ overzealous use of Title IX to combat sex discrimination on college campuses. With Jeff Sessions as attorney general, that’s an objective easily met. Donald Trump says he will see that Row v. Wade will be overturned as soon as he puts his stamp on the Supreme Court. As a frightening foreshadow of what’s to come, a Tennessee woman is now facing criminal charges for attempting to abort her pregnancy with a coat hanger.
Still, I really do believe the sun will shine again, that we will manage to reverse the backwards retreat and start moving upward and forward, toward an America that prides itself in the values of diversity, equality and justice for all. Getting there means that those millennial tears from election night must be turned into action steps. The boomer feminists were a great opening act. But it’s your time and your move now. Don’t let those tears be in vain.