Young Women in Congress: Tulsi Gabbard

Congresswoman-elect Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat from the 2^nd district of Hawaii, stands out in the newly-elected Congressional class. She and Tammy Duckworth are the first female combat veterans elected to Congress. At 31, Gabbard is also among the youngest House members. 

At Harvard's Newly Elected Members of Congress Conference last week, I found her at a reception, surrounded by a tight circle of admiring, attentive students. Most of the students were women of South Asian descent. They were clearly inspired by Congresswoman Gabbard, who also happens to be the first Hindu-American elected to Congress.

She was genuinely focused on the students, and when we finally had a moment to talk, she answered my questions with the same earnestness. 

Below is a recreation of our conversation based on my notes.

When did you know you would run for office?

At 21. I had no political ambition growing up, I am an introvert and the quietest one of my siblings. But I always wanted to serve, to be part of a greater good. So at 21 I was taking a break from college and there was an open state senate seat, so I figured I could be in the classroom, talking about making a difference, or I could actually be making a difference in this position.

What did you find most challenging about the Congressional campaign? What, if anything, was easier than you anticipated?

Fundraising was the most challenging. The most fun part was being out there connecting with voters.

Even for an introvert?

*Laughs* I got better at it. But really, I love being with constituents and listening to their stories and their problems. It’s about letting them know that they are my boss – that I am working for them. One of the things we do in Hawaii, when you run for office, you have to stand on the side of the road in the early morning as people are going to work, and I loved doing that, just meeting constituents and getting to know them.

What would you tell young women considering running for office?

Anything is possible if your motivation comes from the right place. It has to come from the heart, it has to be genuine servant leadership, because if it’s not genuine then the voters will know. If you’re not connecting with them genuinely, they will see that and they will ignore you.

After we spoke, another group of students surrounded the Congresswoman-elect, and she greeted them as warmly as she greeted me, answering their questions with unflagging energy. 

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.

Year of the Woman 2.0?

In less than 48 hours, on the morning of November 7, 2012, Elizabeth Warren might become the first Massachusetts woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate, bringing women one step closer to closing the stubborn gender gap in America’s national legislature. Warren is in good company – 18 women are running for the Senate, and 166 for the House of Representatives. These are record numbers of candidates and it will be the Year of the Woman 2.0 if enough of them succeed.

The factors that shaped 1992 to become the original Year of the Woman are present again in 2012. It is the first election after redistricting, coinciding with a presidential election, and a heightened awareness of gender and related issues. The awareness this time can be attributed to events like the infamous all-male panel at a Congressional hearing on contraception and the ‘legitimate rape’ comments of Missouri Senatorial candidate Todd Akin. Incidents like these propel gender to the surface of public consciousness, albeit not in a constructive manner.  

A constructive discussion would focus on the point that more than 50 percent of the population should not rely on only 17 percent of Congress for representation. Even with record numbers of female candidates this year, we are looking at a goal of reaching just 20 percent in the House of Representatives. Only the most ambitious advocates, like Political Parity, are aspiring to more - aiming to double the number of women at the highest levels of government by 2022.

In the meantime, the 2012 Project has focused on getting the House of Representatives to that 20 percent mark this year. This non-partisan organization has worked to encourage women to consider candidacy and then connected them to campaign training programs like Emerge America or WAPPP’s From Harvard Square to the Oval Office and to relevant state and national networks.

Through its latest campaign, the 2012 Project is hoping to net 87 female Representatives of the 166 candidates. Their estimate is that 56 women incumbents are certain to win, 3 are likely to win and 10 new women candidates are almost certain to win. This leaves 27 competitive races, of which women would need to win 18.

Such a scenario seems possible, in which case November 7, 2012 will bring the Year of the Woman 2.0 and allow the US to move up from 80^th place in the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranking, breezing just past Tajikistan and Bangladesh. 

Race in Your Face

This will be uncomfortable, so try to relax. Examining our own race and gender stereotypes can be as pleasant as sitting in the dentist’s chair. But for Kerri L. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA, discovering awkward truths about people’s biases is an occupational hazard. Dr. Johnson investigates how people use physical cues to categorize other people.  Sometimes she even gets hate mail and coverage by Rush Limbaugh.

At the Social Communication Lab at UCLA, Dr. Johnson and her social psychologist colleagues do things like asking students to decide whether a point-light display figure is a man or woman and to categorize faces of different races as male, female, gay or straight. They even have a program that analyzes the relative femininity or masculinity of a person’s face.  Despite the ill-informed hate mail, the researchers persist, because understanding how biases are formed is the first step to combating unfair stereotypes and discrimination. 

In one study, Dr. Johnson demonstrated that race is gendered. For example, in the United States, there is overlap in stereotypes of Asians and women (soft-spoken, shy, family-oriented), while the stereotypes about Blacks overlap with stereotypes about men (dominant, athletic, competitive). The same pattern surfaced when the researchers measured whether respondents were more likely to misidentify the Asian men’s faces as female and Black women’s faces as male. The faces in question were digitally created so that only the race varied (see above). Sure enough, subjects more quickly and more correctly identified the Black men and Asian women than the other way around, and the respondents’ own race or gender did not seem to make a difference.   

The Social Communication Lab runs dozens of similar experiments, finding, for example, that even when information was limited to just photos of faces, subjects were better than chance at categorizing the person as “gay” or “straight.” And, as another angry-letter-provoking study demonstrated, categorizing someone, whether by race, gender or sexual orientation, has implications for how we will interact with that person given our own baggage and biases.

Yet it was a study of politicians and gender that achieved notoriety and misrepresentation by both Samantha Bee at the New York Times and Rush Limbaugh. The conclusions of the study were that Republican women in Congress had more stereotypical feminine facial features than did their Democratic counterparts; and that uninformed observers were more likely to identify the highly feminine women’s faces as Republican and the less feminine ones as Democratic.

You can take a moment to learn about the methods used in this unexpectedly controversial study, and even start another uncomfortable discussion in the comments section here. Please, just go easy on the hate mail.

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.