Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is getting dangerously close to suggesting male leaders are inferior to female leaders.
Speaking at the Center for American Progress’ “Ideas Festival” on Tuesday, the senator raised eyebrows for asserting, “If it wasn’t Lehman Brothers but Lehman Sisters, we might not have had the financial collapse.”
Gillibrand added: “It is the value that a woman brings to that table that she has all these different life experiences.”
What she’s trying to convey is that women have perspectives that differ naturally from their male colleagues and that bringing more women to the table will consequently lead to outcomes that better reflect their needs. This is a laudable argument Gillibrand has leaned on before, but with similarly clumsy deliveries.
Take just these two excerpts from New York magazine’s profile of Gillibrand in April of 2017.
Defending her flip-flop on gun control, Gillibrand sought to pin her shift on being a “young mother with babies and tons of hormones” during meetings with victims of gun violence, inadvertently tipping her hat to the oft-unhelpful idea that hormones impact female lawmaker’s decisions.
She doubled down on arguing for the impacts of gender differences at another point in the profile, arguing that when female legislators “do our legislation, we’re not trying to figure out how can I use this to run against you.” More females in Congress, Gillibrand contended, would result in “less partisan bickering.”
That may seem debatable to the conservative reader, but it’s outright heresy to much of the progressive base that Gillibrand is aggressively courting. The idea that natural gender differences carry significant implications when it comes to job performance is enough to make a lot of progressives’ heads explode. It surely won’t find much favor on the campaign trail in 2020, should the senator decide to run.
But worse yet, Gillibrand isn’t even articulating the argument effectively, and her clumsy takes are flirting with the position that women just plainly make better leaders than men, throwing half her constituents under the bus. I agree that female leaders bring different perspective to the table, and in good ways, but suggesting that an all-female staff at Lehman Brothers would have prevented the financial collapse implies superiority.
If she’s planning to launch a bid for the White House in 2020, Gillibrand, who focuses heavily on women’s issues, should probably tighten these thoughts up.
