There’s a lot to be said about Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s, D-N.Y., philosophy of leadership. My Washington Examiner colleague Emily Jashinsky addresses exactly that in this article, arguing that the senator has some curious thoughts about the roles that men and women in professional life.
But can we take just a moment to reflect on Gillibrand’s all-too-obvious feminist pandering? We’ve mentioned it before, that her attempt to remake herself into some sort of hard-nosed feminist icon is a bit too cute. But she has really been outdoing herself lately.
.@SenGillibrand talking up importance of women in power at CAP conference: “If it wasn’t Lehman Brothers but Lehman Sisters we might not have had the financial collapse.”
— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) May 15, 2018
On Tuesday, the senator earned much deserved mockery for this absurd bit of girl power silliness, which occurred during a panel discussion at the the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference:
This is almost as vapid a play for public support as that Fearless Girl statue, an obvious marketing ploy by the financial firm State Street Global Advisors, which oversees more than $2.4 trillion in assets.
Gillibrand added, “So it is the value that a woman brings to that table, that she has all these different life experiences, assets. And for women of color, it’s even more important, because she comes to the table with this host of experiences that are different, that will make not only the problem-solving better—because it will identify different problems—but then it will identify different solutions.”
Absent from this play for the female empowerment vote is any consideration for the fact that women are also very human, meaning they are also very susceptible to avarice. The idea that Wall Street would somehow be less corrupt and unethical merely because there are more women is both comical and potentially offensive to feminists, who react very unkindly to the idea that women are different or approach business differently.
Sure, sure, the senator’s remarks are likely a bit tongue-in-cheek fun. But as Splinter News’ Emma Roller noted, “this offhand comment reveals that Gillibrand’s personal ideology may be a bit behind where her stated policy positions are.”
Roller adds, “The idea that all women are alchemical beings who, like Glinda the Good Witch, spread good governance wherever they go is facile … It’s equally facile to think that hiring more female bankers to run the nation’s most crooked financial institutions would have changed the tides of history.”
This seems, which makes it seem all the more obvious that GIllibrand hasn’t given her positions much thought beyond, “Will this help me get votes?”
