Gender gap at top of North American politics perplexing, pain-inducing

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/07/2024 (435 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I am reminded that neither Canada nor the United States has elected a woman to lead their respective federal governments, I often get a searing pain over my left eye.

That pain is a physical reaction to anything I read or hear that seems gratuitously stupid. And I can’t think of anything more stupid than failing to elect a woman to lead a government.

My reaction could be because my formative years were spent in a single-parent household led — in every conceivable way — by a mother of incredible resilience and courage. I don’t need to be told that a woman could lead Canada or the U.S.; I grew up with a woman who I think could have done the job.

Clearly, I’m in the minority on this issue.

The U.S. has never elected a woman president, and only once — Hillary Clinton in 2016 — has one of the two major parties put a woman presidential candidate on the ticket.

Canada has had one woman serve as prime minister — Kim Campbell in 1993 — but she led the federal government for only about four months before she was dispatched by Jean Chretien and the Liberal Red Wave.

My continued astonishment about the lack of women leaders — and another flash of pain near my left eyebrow — was triggered again this week when I read a new poll on the current U.S. presidential election campaign.

Conducted just after President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down, and Vice President Kamala Harris moved quickly to become the presumptive standard-bearer for the Democratic party, a YouGov/The Hill/SAY24 poll showed there has been a significant drop in the number of Americans who say they’re ready for a female president.

Head-to-head, Harris polls well against Republican party nominee and former president Donald Trump, with roughly half of respondents believing that both are qualified for the job. However, that’s when things start to get depressing.

Back in 2016, when Democratic candidate Clinton came within a few Electoral College votes of becoming America’s first female president, the same polling firm asked the same questions and found that 63 per cent of voters said they were ready to accept a woman as president.

The 2024 poll found support for a female president had dropped to just 54 per cent, while 30 per cent of respondents said they were dead-set against a woman taking over as leader of the free world.

Support for a woman president dropped for both Republican and Democratic voters. In 2015, 82 per cent of Democrats and 44 per cent of Republicans supported the idea of a woman in the Oval Office; in 2024, that support has dropped to 77 per cent of Democrats and only 30 per cent of Republicans.

The more insidious result comes from the finding that 41 per cent of respondents believe more than half of the electorate won’t vote for a woman running for president.

The same lack of support is really a global phenomenon. UN Women reported this year that only 27 countries have women heads of state and, at the current rate, it will take 130 years to achieve balance with men.

There is less polling data in Canada because, quite frankly, the parties with the best chances of forming government haven’t picked female leaders. But there is some data that demonstrates how Canadians suffer from some of the same underlying voter dynamics.

Just after Clinton won the Democratic party’s nomination, a 2016 Angus poll of Canadians found that 84 per cent of respondents felt that “men and women make equally good leaders.

However, 85 per cent of respondents also believed that most Canadians do not support the idea of a woman as prime minister.

How is it that in 2024, we can be so hung up on gender when assessing candidates to serve as heads of government? And perhaps more importantly, will gender become an issue in the upcoming U.S. election?

Although the role of gender in Clinton’s loss is still being debated — she did, after all, get three million more votes than Trump — there is a strong argument that being a woman did not help her.

Those who do not think gender played a role note that Clinton suffered greatly from an ultimately unfounded FBI email investigation, and still drew strong support from female voters. However, Clinton got fewer votes overall than Barack Obama over the previous two elections. So, she was still dominant in drawing votes, but it was among a slightly smaller pool of support for the Democrats.

Where does that leave us as we head to a Kamala Harris-Trump showdown in November?

Gender really shouldn’t be an issue for voters, but given the recent poll results, you can already see in the Republican campaign an appetite to directly and indirectly undermine Harris by drawing attention to the fact that she’s a woman.

At an event Wednesday, Trump repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s first name, and then claimed that for most of her life, she identified as Indian and only recently claimed she was Black. (Harris has Indian and Jamaican heritage.)

The tenor of that attack allows me to make two important predictions.

First, the presidential race will be incredibly tight. And second, I’m going to need an ice pack for my achy forehead.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com