Joe Biden’s commitment to name a woman as his running mate has drained the boredom out of one of the more unremarkable rituals in our quadrennial election pageantry. Instead of filling the summer with coy no-comments from a predictable cast of ambitious white guys, Biden has introduced us to an ever-growing list of strong, accomplished women generally unknown outside of their states or districts.
Critics of this women-only selection process have pontificated about the evils of filling such an important job on the basis of gender. How silly is that? For the past 231 years, all of our presidents and vice presidents have been men. The argument is vanquished by its own speciousness. Biden’s veepstakes are expanding, not limiting, our notion of what presidential looks like.
Other than Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Kamala Harris (CA), who competed alongside Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, most of the potential veep names bandied about are those of female leaders whose skillsets have been hiding in the shadows of national obscurity.
They include: Senators Tammy Baldwin (WI), Tammy Duckworth (IL), Maggie Hassan (NH); Congresswomen Val Demings (FL) and Karen Bass (CA); Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico; former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano; Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms; former Georgia legislative leader and candidate for governor Stacey Abrams; and former national security advisor Susan Rice.
These candidates have been the subject of considerable news coverage these past few months. Most of them went from a Google trending flatline of zero to the top of the search metric within days of being identified as a possible vice presidential nominee. Never has there been so much focus on highly skilled women leaders. Of course, in a government dominated by white men, there hasn’t been a lot of competition for that distinction. After all, we’re talking about a country where women account for less than 25 percent of the Congress and 18 percent of the governorships.
Yet, this protracted national conversation about the comparative skills and backgrounds of a dozen or more top notch women leaders doesn’t, in itself, bend the aging arc of patriarchy into a magic wand of gender parity. But it’s a much needed start, particularly compared to where we were at the conclusion of this year’s Democratic primary process.
Only months ago, the Dems were rightly boasting about their unprecedentedly diverse cast of presidential candidates. They were male and female; young and old; gay and straight; white, black, Latino and Asian. Yet, when the dust settled, Joe Biden, a 77-year-old icon of the white male establishment, assumed the mantle of the party’s presumptive nominee.
So when Biden announced in March that “there are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow,” and that he would select one as his running mate, eyes were understandably rolling in many feminist circles. After all, the guy had just kept the glass ceiling intact by securing four more years of a “Men Only” sign for the oval office. There was no mood to break into a round of the Hallelujah Chorus for the veep consolation.
The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse perfectly captured this sentiment when she adroitly wrote: “Most feminist voters I know don’t want ‘a woman’ in the White House just because an older man announced in advance that he’d earmarked a special lady-slot for someone wearing a pantsuit.”
We are now four months past Hesse’s touché moment. Biden’s lady-slot move seems to be having a sustained positive impact on actually getting to know the strengths and skills these women bring to the table. Until recently, most of them were seen first as representatives of their gender, and secondarily – if at all – as serious thought leaders.
Social and organizational scientists have been tracking this phenomenon for decades (here and here). Those who are the demographically few among the many in any organizational setting have a difficult time freeing themselves from their gender, race, or other identity status. They find it much harder to be taken seriously by the many, typically a male majority.
For example, we knew Rep. Demings was the “black woman” named as a Trump impeachment manager. Now we know her background as a social-worker-turned-cop who served as Orlando’s police chief. We also know her ideas about dealing with the ongoing issue of police violence in the black community. The same goes for every name on Biden’s list. The news these past few months has been filled with stories about their backgrounds, including details of their accomplishments and policies they have supported.
Think back four years ago. Who were the women Hillary Clinton considered for her running mate? There was only one: Elizabeth Warren. The other eight were men. How about Barak Obama in 2008? Again, only one woman: Kathleen Sebelius, then governor of Kansas. The other seven on his short list were men. Warren and Sebelius were both the few among the many, and neither received serious or substantive attention as a possible veep pick.
As cheesy and patronizing as Biden’s no-men-allowed standard might have looked in March, the process nevertheless delivered a stunning antidote to the perverse leadership numbers game that has kept the national spotlight away from the few women among the many men. When it comes to “Joe’s List,” women have gone from the few to the only. For the first time in their careers, most of them have appeared on the Sunday talk shows and have written op eds for the New York Times. Freed from being tokens of their gender, we get to know them for their character and substance.
The openness with which these women have approached their vice presidential candidacies stands in sharp contrast to the annoying male norm of publicly feigning interest while jockeying for the job behind the scenes. Stacey Abrams captured the reason for such an assertive, straight-forward approach when she told the New York Times: “We know extrapolations are made from single moments,” she said. “Part of my directness in answering the question about V.P. is that I don’t want anyone” — whether a Southerner, an African-American, a woman, or all of the above — “to ever look at my answer and say, ‘Well, if she can’t say it, then I can’t think it.’”
The Biden project is by no means a cure-all for gender disparity in our political system. But it’s a worthy first shot at leveling the playing field. If it gets more people to completely reimagine what a president or vice president looks like, to apprehend that they don’t have to come in pin-striped power suits and red ties, it will have been a step well worth taking.