It’s time for a woman president

I’ll never forget seeing a picture of President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, bending over at the waist, while a 5-year-old black boy reached up to touch Obama’s hair because the kid wanted to see if it felt like his. The image conveys a product of years of struggle for civil rights by people of color, from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King, Jr., and also serves as an inspirational icon for the progress yet to be made by people of different races, sexual orientations and genders.

Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president of the United States on Sunday, and the dialogue since has gone back and forth between those whose reasons for supporting her include pride in the fact that she’s a woman and those who would rather just talk about her qualifications. As a headline for The Guardian put it, “A female president? Nice, but not why I want Hillary Clinton.”

The “let’s only talk about qualifications” discussion is unsettling and symptomatic of some lingering assumptions about the glass ceiling, even if it isn’t meant to be. Some folks worry that people are more likely to support Hillary just because she’s a woman and in doing so, not select the best candidate for the presidency. That worry is misguided, and anyone familiar with Sarah Palin’s brief moment in the nation’s spotlight can see why.

By any stretch of the phrase, Hillary Clinton is the most qualified candidate for president. Three decades of experience, from her eight years as first lady, to her tenure as a senator, to her most recent work as secretary of state, make her about as ready for the job as they come. She carries a message of opportunity for the middle class, one desperately needed as income inequality rises. Beyond our nation’s border, she is a more reserved type of interventionist, with the cohesive and strategic worldview required to deal with a world more unstable than at any point since the Cold War (and arguably before). Clinton has also ended the Democratic primary phase before it begins and is virtually guaranteed the nomination, an unprecedented feat in modern political history that hasn’t occurred since Martin Van Buren’s landslide primary victory in 1835.

But disregarding Clinton’s identity as a woman is bothersome, and so is the notion that there is an army of Hillary supporters who are only going to vote for her because of her gender identity. Eighty-three percent of people in a Bloomberg poll said Hillary being a woman “doesn’t matter much” to them in deciding who to vote for. The tendency of Hillary’s detractors to assume her supporters are only doing so because she is a woman might reveal more about the state of gender equality than we’re comfortable hearing.

But the 12 percent of people who said Clinton’s womanhood makes them “more inclined to vote for her” do not deserve the flack they are getting. Those 12 percent of people who recognize that our nation’s storied trend of electing 43 consecutive dudes to lead the free world might be a little strange are right to feel the way they do, and those who think that Clinton’s gender shouldn’t matter at all have a misguided fear. Find me a single Republican voter who will say, “Gee, I disagree with Hilary on social issues and economic policy, but she’s a woman, so here goes,” and I’ll eat the newspaper this column is printed on.

The point everyone also seems to miss is that Clinton’s gender doesn’t just give her the potential to make history in an incredibly important way — it also gives her a remarkable sense of perspective on issues important to women everywhere. Gender does not give her an intrinsically higher value, it gives her an intrinsically better perspective on certain issues because of lived experience. In the same way that a former governor can tout experience leading a particular state as helpful for leading the nation, a woman — who has experienced discrimination that most men are unfamiliar with — can certainly make a more compelling and powerful case for women’s issues on the political stage.

Another, albeit less common, argument that gets tossed around is that the barriers women face have been lowered to the point where Clinton’s womanhood shouldn’t matter. Women still earn 78 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work, and Republicans in Congress routinely block legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act, all the while advocating for greater restrictions on abortion and access to birth control. The Economist’s “Glass Ceiling Index,” which ran last month on International Women’s Day and ranks countries according to women’s chances of being treated equally at work, puts the United States out of the top 20 in most rankings, depending on how you weigh factors like wages, higher education and costs of childcare, among other things. This country still doesn’t have paid maternity leave, something nearly all industrialized economies offer. On all of those issues and more, I can’t think of a better advocate than Hillary Clinton, in part because of her perspective and experience as a woman.

There has been some division in the feminist community over Clinton’s so-called “corporate feminism,” that is, her persistent advocacy for abortion and birth control rights while also serving on the board of companies like Walmart, which underpays workers (a majority of whom are women), and helping many American businesses like Boeing and Lockheed Martin make lucrative overseas contracts while secretary of state. It’s complicated, but the value judgement we should all make is that any form of feminism is better than no form at all. The fact is, as long as documented structural discrimination against women exists, and even after it’s gone, Emma Watson is right. We should all be feminists.

Nathaniel Haas is a junior majoring in political science and economics. His column, “State of the Union,” runs Fridays.