As you can see from the cool pink image on the right sidebar, the Word has been made Paper and the new issue of the American Prospect is on its way to newsstands. Ann Friedman, who's both the Prospect's deputy editor and a writer for Feministing, has the lead essay, and her point is a good one: Every so often there's a tremendous amount of attention and energy and hope around the extraordinary efforts of one woman to break a particular glass ceiling. To become CEO of a company or president of a country or leader of a legislative body. But crucial as those efforts are, the end gains are fundamentally ephemeral. A female editor does not necessarily increase the number of female bylines. A female CEO or president does not ensure a measurable uptick in female successors. A singe individual is a tenuous basis on which to build equality. As Ann puts it, "one woman at the top cannot change an entire culture. Looking at these numbers across the board, it's clear that the real ceiling is not limiting individual women's ambitions. It's keeping women as a group from breaking the 25 percent barrier."The issue is not the glass ceiling so much as the broken ladder. When evaluating equality, there's a lot of focus on individual stories, but the real question is critical mass. That's where power comes from. If women were half of Congress and half of the Senate and half of the governors -- or even just 25 percent of these bodies -- the presidency would probably come naturally. Women would be elevated to leadership positions as a matter of course, rather than a demonstration of progressivism. And just as guys tend to support each other in office, picking men as successors and mentoring men in staff positions and introducing male friends to powerful figures, women could do the same, constructing an infrastructure that sustains female achievement. So though the question of a woman president is of obvious importance, the question of female representation in Congress, and in the Senate, and in governor's mansions -- in the institutions, in other words, that house the majority of the country's national political figures -- is arguably more key, and achieving critical mass there will likely prove a better way to ensure female representation at the presidential level. THE 25 PERCENT SOLUTION.
As you can see from the cool pink image on the right sidebar, the Word has been made Paper and the new issue of the American Prospect is on its way to newsstands. Ann Friedman, who's both the Prospect's deputy editor and a writer for Feministing, has the lead essay, and her point is a good one: Every so often there's a tremendous amount of attention and energy and hope around the extraordinary efforts of one woman to break a particular glass ceiling. To become CEO of a company or president of a country or leader of a legislative body. But crucial as those efforts are, the end gains are fundamentally ephemeral. A female editor does not necessarily increase the number of female bylines. A female CEO or president does not ensure a measurable uptick in female successors. A singe individual is a tenuous basis on which to build equality. As Ann puts it, "one woman at the top cannot change an entire culture. Looking at these numbers across the board, it's clear that the real ceiling is not limiting individual women's ambitions. It's keeping women as a group from breaking the 25 percent barrier."The issue is not the glass ceiling so much as the broken ladder. When evaluating equality, there's a lot of focus on individual stories, but the real question is critical mass. That's where power comes from. If women were half of Congress and half of the Senate and half of the governors -- or even just 25 percent of these bodies -- the presidency would probably come naturally. Women would be elevated to leadership positions as a matter of course, rather than a demonstration of progressivism. And just as guys tend to support each other in office, picking men as successors and mentoring men in staff positions and introducing male friends to powerful figures, women could do the same, constructing an infrastructure that sustains female achievement. So though the question of a woman president is of obvious importance, the question of female representation in Congress, and in the Senate, and in governor's mansions -- in the institutions, in other words, that house the majority of the country's national political figures -- is arguably more key, and achieving critical mass there will likely prove a better way to ensure female representation at the presidential level. 
