Women in Politics

After Faith Winter's talk and learning about women in politics and the White House Project I definitely do support their goal of getting more women into office but there are aspects of her speech that I don't agree with and are broad generalizations on her part. Firstly, I think it sucks that there aren't more women in politics, there is an entire organization of predominately men making decisions on my behalf without having any knowledge of the female experience. I don't think men politicans should be making health care decisions that affect women and the only way that is going to change is by getting more women in office. There are more women in the US population than men so our numbers in all political venues should be at least 50 - 50 if not more women to be completely representative. I realize this will probably never happen but I think it would be ideal.

Now onto what I didn't agree with. Faith spent a lot of time talking about why it is important to have women in politics, these claims were based on stereotypes and generalizations about how women think and operate. She said that women, unlike men, "work across lines of authority." Meaning that women don't care about receiving credit for their work, they just make sure the job gets done. She used herself as an example of this point, saying she just wants things to get accomplished and it's not important to her that she receive the credit. I don't think that this can be applied to women as a whole. It seemed so outdated to say that essentially women don't need recognition and that men can get the credit for work a women did and that is a good thing.

In addition Faith said that women matter in politics because they think outside the box. I'm really not buying that only women do that. She assumes that all women think outside the box and that it is a very rare thing for a man to do the same, but I think this statement to be untrue and impossible to prove in any case.

Overall, I think Faith has the right intentions and that the work she does is great and worthwhile, but I don't think that her reasons for why we need women in politics hold any weight. We need women in politics because politicians are elected officials who are supposed to represent the views of their people and if there are no men there then that is not a successful sample and then they don't have all the resources to serve successfully.