I do believe that*, and I tend to think that even trying to make a group of people who looks more diverse ends up making a group of people that is more diverse, because looking different actually affects your life experience (as we all know). You put a black man in charge of something and no matter how much they have bought into the existing system, they also know what it’s like to be harassed by the police, and in leadership positions that kind of difference can make a difference.
But of course averages are averages and individuals are individuals. America has never had a female president and Canada has never had a female prime minister**, but the UK had Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes in order to get to the top a woman has to prove themselves even more ruthless and heartless than the men.
I think making a point of hiring women is a good idea, and I think it probably leads to hiring better candidates (since the alternative is inadvertently making a point of hiring men). But you can find women who will be just as awful as anyone (just usually a little better at it - Like Huckabee-Sanders compared to Spicer).
* Though I find “corrected for all other factors” a spurious phrase, that’s me quibbling
** It’s important to note that Canada has had a female Prime Minister. For 2 months before a horrific political defeat the Progressive Conservative party handed over the reins to Kim Campbell, and Campbell’s chief accomplishment was to make fun of the partial facial paralysis of the Liberal leader (I guess in the sense of making fun of disabilities Campbell was a real leader in the conservative movement). It’s a little bit like (in an alternate universe) if I said, “There’s never been a female naval captain” and someone corrected me, “What about the time that after a boat hit an iceberg they decided to hand the captaincy over to a woman while it was sinking.”
Cool, awesome, can’t wait to see what new and innovate ways they come up with to give Republicans everything they want in exchange for nothing and then have them all vote against the final product anyway.
I hope against hope that such gestures are just window dressing. Surely some members of the incoming administration realize that Republicans in general have long had zero interest in compromise and “common ground.”
I worry that Biden still believes it, but had the political sense to stop saying it out loud during the primaries once it became clear that nobody was buying it. The simple fact of this position’s existence would seem to suggest so.
Biden still might believe it, but I’m hoping alongside millie that this is window-dressing by virtue of it simply becoming window-dressing in like, the first few months of his presidency. I’m hoping that this happens and that it happens because other people in his administration decide to treat it as such and get the work that needs to get done, done.
& @anon36271483 what the study showed was not that all women in leadership adopt more progressive policies than all men; it was that, matched to a close demographic correlate, women adopt more progressive policies than their closest match man.
So your examples are all excellent, but how do they compare, for example, to their closest match male?
In other words, you might be horrified by the shittiness of a Conservative PM or Home Secretary, but are they more progressive in fact than Cummings or Rees-Mogg?
This is getting off topic, but in the most notable example I gave, the theory doesn’t hold. Thatcher was a right-wing radical in terms of the Tory party of the 1970s. She was sneeringly disparaging of the more moderate “wets” in the cabinet, and she was the one pushing for a hard line on every subject.
Look at May as well. She was the one who came up with the “hostile environment” for migrants, she was the one that pushed for a pervasive surveillance state with the “Snooper’s Charter” and she was the one responsible for the “go home” adverts targeting migrants and the Windrush scandal.
I think these studies will have made the common mistake of confusing an indicator of progress with a driver of progress. I’d certainly buy the argument that as society becomes more equal, you get more women in power, but I don’t think that more women in power automatically makes society more equal. Partly because I’ve lived through these actually existing, refutations of that theory, and partly because such a theory cannot be true without proposing some deeply dodgy gender essentialist arguments.
If we believe that men and women are truly equal, then we must be prepared to accept that women are equally capable of being nasty, regressive right-wingers.
To finally bring this back on topic, the same goes for the appointment of a member of any identity group that Biden might appoint. A corporate lobbyist dedicated to the status quo is still a bad pick, even if they do generate headlines about “firsts”.
