Privilege and Representation: The Real Implications of Tuesday’s Women-Only Senate

After major snowstorms hit the nation’s capital city last week, the morning of Tuesday, January 29, in the Senate was unusual. Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski noted that every single person in the Senate that day, from Senators to pages, was female. The revelation sparked predictable commentary of the “girls rule, boys drool” ilk. Senator Murkowski herself suggested that the phenomenon “speaks to the hardiness of women.” CNN’s coverage ended with the reporter rhetorically asking what the story says “about if you want a job done properly.” The popular message is clear: that only women showed up to Tuesday’s senate shows that women are inherently tougher, harder working, and generally better than men.

Or perhaps it suggests something entirely different. Perhaps it suggests exactly the opposite: it is learned behavior reflective of the fact that women have been historically excluded from the political space.        

When you're already a minority in the position of "representing," you can't risk being judged as lesser. A former co-worker of mine, the only other Latino/a in our office, told me on my first day of work, “Remember, you have to do twice the work to get half the credit.” Indeed, pioneers face significant obstacles. When you’re first, you’re carrying the weight of the entire group on your shoulders, and if you fail, you’ve shown that your minority group can’t hack it. That’s just part of the inevitable cultural aftermath of breaking down barriers. Women, even at the highest levels, still need to prove themselves in ways that men do not.

And so, if you’re one of a handful of women in the Senate and you wake up to waist-high snow but find out the Senate isn’t closed, you show up. It is a manifestation of the privilege the men had that they didn't need to fear being negatively judged by staying home.

People often bristle at the word “privilege,” thinking that the assertion that male privilege exists suggests that all men spend their lives lying on lounge chairs with buxom women serving them beer and fanning them with palm fronds. That isn’t what privilege means. Privilege refers to those little niceties that one takes for granted because one never had to think about being on the other side of them.

           

It did not have to occur to the men in the Senate that their absence might speak negatively of all men, because it wouldn’t. Society simply has never considered one white man as representative of all other white men. And while the pressure of “representation” is slowly lessening as we have these dialogues and better understand the implications of our assumptions, it is very much alive and well. The risk that one misstep will serve for some as proof that women (or Latino/as) can’t do the job is enough to keep me on my toes. It would have been enough to get me to the Senate on Tuesday if I worked there.

While it’s appealing to wave a female-superiority flag because of Tuesday’s Senate phenomenon, it is dangerous. It is at least as dangerous as any other belief that you can identify an individual’s talents and strengths by what is or is not hanging between their legs. It is perhaps more dangerous because it takes a phenomenon that probably is due to weakness by oppression, and recasts it as an innate strength. This sleight-of-hand prevents us from seeing and addressing the real issues facing pioneers of all kinds.