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An article in Slate let’s Hillary know what she’s in for should she win: a nation of ungrateful fucks, regardless of how well she does.

As luck would have it, there’s new data out there about the shifts that take place when women run the world. Or at least a bunch of Indian villages.

Basically, in 1991 a law was passed stating that a certain percentage of randomly chosen Indian villages had to chose a female leader. This gave scientists a chance to study a culture’s reaction to vagina-governance. Nearly 20 years later, it turns out these girly-girl leaders spent most of their energy on projects to improve community as a whole; they are also generally less corrupt.

Duflo and Topalova found that communities with women as pradhans had larger quantities of key public services overall. Nor was quality sacrificed for quantity—facilities in the women-led villages were of at least as high quality on average as in the communities with traditional male leadership. The greatest improvement was in drinking water, the public amenity found to be most valued by women in earlier research (PDF)—with 30 percent more taps and hand pumps in the women-pradhan villages…They were also less corrupt—villagers with female-headed councils were 25 percent less likely to report having to pay bribes to access basic services like getting ration cards or receiving medical attention.

Ah, women, is there any way in which we’re not better? Of course, it doesn’t look like generations of complacent male leadership in these villages was setting a terribly high bar- “More Water, Less Bribery!” is not exactly an encouraging 21st century campaign slogan. So you’d think that the villagers are thrilled to have all these services and fewer people cockblocking them when they try to claim them, right?

Wrong.

Now, the bad news. India’s female pradhans were remarkably unappreciated for their efforts. Despite the objective upgrades in village amenities, both men and women living in villages headed by women expressed lower satisfaction with public services. This was true even for water—the level of dissatisfaction was 13 percent higher in women-led communities.

The idea that women must suck at leadership is deeply ingrained into the patriarchy, which we share heaping helpings of with India:

How was Ms. Roizen perceived by students who read of her assertive style in the case? It depends whether she was presented as a man or as a woman. In an experiment on gender perceptions, psychologists Cameron Anderson and Francis Flynn gave one group of MBA students the original Heidi Roizen case for later in-class discussion, while the other half received a copy that was identical in every way, except that “Heidi” became “Howard.”…So the decisive, assertive traits that are often valued in leaders are received very differently when observed in women than when seen in men. Howard was a go-getter. Heidi was unlikably power-hungry.

I saw this exact situation play out in Cleveland, when Mike White was replaced by Jane Campbell. Mike had enjoyed three or four mayoral terms, despite Cleveland’s steady decline and his government’s notorious corruption. Jane had one term, the most exciting part of which was when her staff discovered that some members of White’s staff had been basically making up numbers for years, and we were in worse shape than we thought. She was largely blamed for this, and I remember all the papers as being very critical. She didn’t get a second term.

So good luck to Clinton, and I hope she doesn’t take it personally.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Cock!, Politics, What Patriarchy?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.