More women prominently in the news in politics, STEM, and business
News Item: Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong represented North Korean leadership at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. It was she who communicated to the South Korean government an invitation to highest-level talks in North Korean capital Pyongyang.
News Item: the School Community Council of Salt Lake City decided to rename Andrew Jackson Elementary School to Mary Jackson Elementary School. (A poll had shown the public heavily in favor of the change.) Note this took place in the heart of Mormon country.
- President Andrew Jackson was infamous for his racism (e.g., chasing escaped black slaves into Spanish Florida) and genocidal persecution of Native Americans.
- Mary Jackson is famous for becoming NASA’s first female black engineer, whose career included 34 years at NASA, and authoring or co-authoring 12 technical papers for NASA. Her character is one of the stars of the book(s) and movie Hidden Figures, which celebrate the key role black women played in the space race.
News Item: in Virginia state elections in 2017, women won 11 of the 14 seats picked up by Democrats.
News Item: need we mention that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election (48.2% versus Trump’s 46.1%)? That’s despite being undermined by a Russian social media blitz, former FBI director James Comey throwing an anti-Hillary shade shortly before election day, and the usual pack of Hillary attackers in full cry. Throw in misogyny in general, and it’s a wonder that Hillary got over 45%.
News Item: Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, U.S. Senator from New York, gets interviewed on 60 Minutes, principally for being, as they say, “the face of the #MeToo movement.” Gillibrand, of course, is much more than that, but she has taken on the issue of sexual assault like no one else at the top of the political heap. She has risked backlash by many on the left in calling for Al Franken’s resignation. She has even, despite her friendship with, and admiration for, Hillary Clinton, declared that Bill Clinton should have resigned over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Whew!
News Item: in 2015, Fortune magazine reported that women-led companies performed three times better than the S&P 500 over a 12-year period. For details see: High performance of women-led companies
Excellence recognized in “new” fields: STEM and business.
POLITICS: Electoral gains for women are nothing new, even though they still lag far behind men in national and most state legislatures. A growing crowd of female U.S. Senators, state legislators, and state governors (notably the governorship of Nikki Haley in that deep Red bastion, South Carolina*), manifest the core strength of women in politics.
So women are rising in politics, but what about the really “hard” fields: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and business?
STEM: despite nearly equivalent test scores in STEM at the high school level in the U.S., women are not well represented in physics and computer science in college, nor in later careers. Those with a scientific bent gravitate toward environmental studies, health care, and statistics. In health care and environmental disciplines, women are attracted to a more collaborative work environment. For more on this issue, see: Women dominate in three STEM fields
Whatever the distribution of women across the STEM landscape, the tributes to women like Mary Jackson are sure to inspire more women to enter all STEM disciplines. Much of what deters women from entering physics and computer science is the existing male-dominated culture, resulting in a lack of female mentors. Women breaking through those barriers is sure to snowball into higher numbers going forward (that’s my hunch from history; I doubt they’ll get to 50% in those two disciplines). This is what is happening in politics and business.
BUSINESS: As the Fortune magazine article attests, women are not just excelling in business, they are getting applauded for it. This, as with politics and STEM, is key to encouraging more women to reach for positions where men still dominate, as cracks widen in the glass ceiling.
The idea that women make better business leaders has been bandied about for years, but the study addressed by the Fortune magazine goes a long way towards proving it. And Fortune found it fitting to publish.
Outperforming the S&P threefold? What could explain that?
There are two partial explanations, as follows.
Explanation One (by a business professional): the woman who conducted the study said: “There’s a lot of the theorizing around why the results are dramatically higher for the women, but most think it has to do with how hard women have to work to become CEO at such big companies in the first place,” Rubin says. The ones who do “really represent the cream of the crop,” she adds.
Yep, if you’re the typical female-friendly reader of this blog, you will readily say, we knew that all along. Case closed.
Explanation Two (by me, thus much weaker): technological advances, especially in communications, place more weight than ever on collaboration, respect for the views of others, and skill in listening. Those are all qualities where women unquestionably have the edge.
(BTW, collaboration is certainly on the rise in science, where the complexity of most problems dictates that one person seldom has all the answers. There’s a reason why you see more and more names attached to scientific papers. This is especially true in the medical sciences, where teamwork among biologists, chemists, biophysicists, and statisticians, is making breakthroughs possible in unexpectedly short times. (I base this on reading my weekly issues of New Scientist, usually from cover to cover.))
Culture shift? How big? How fast? Fast enough?
We’ve been experiencing a culture shift toward empowerment of women in America ever since, at the latest, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. That shift, after many fits and starts, is beginning to pick up speed. The most recent acceleration is partly in reaction to the misogynistic outrages of Donald Trump and his followers, plus the silence of most Republicans in response, and partly in reaction to the revelations of sexual predation by men in all walks of public life.
But there is something deeper and broader stirring beneath the surface: a shift toward a very different kind of social organization. It’s bigger than the women’s movement, although the women’s movement has been the major impetus.
That potential shift is the main source of what optimism I still have for the long-term future. Should it not bear fruit, humanity faces a bleak future, if not complete social disintegration.
More speculations coming in the next installment of Is It Still a Man’s World?
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* Yes, Haley is a Republican, but she had to get nominated. Sadly, she is now the Trump administration’s ambassador to the U.N., having to defend nonsense coming out of the White House. I can’t believe she’s enjoying the job. Listening to her speeches in the U.N., I detect a mechanical tone. Certainly different from her passionate tone when she argued for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse.