Brazil elected its first female president, Dilma Rousseff, yesterday, but, as Jezebel writer Irin Carmon notes, it was with a heavy dose of support from her political patron, the current president Luiz Lula Ignacio da Silva, who is term-limited out.
Just about every man/woman on the street interview yielded a mention that the voter hoped it would mean another term for the wildly popular Lula. (In the AP: "If Lula ran for president 10 times, I would vote for him 10 times. ... I'm voting for Dilma, of course, but the truth is it will still be Lula who will lead us.") Rousseff has never run for office and just about every story about her refers to her lack of charisma, despite a dramatic past as a guerrilla fighting Brazil's dictatorship.
But it would be wrong to view that as a caveat to this milestone. Male politicians win office because they followed in footsteps, hung on to coattails, or served an administration loyally. In fact, if you want to increase the number of women who run for office, you have to increase the channels through which they do so. According to the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, a big barrier to women running for office in the United States is that they lack the kind of institutional support men traditionally get through political networking channels.
So there's no reason the election of a highly qualified technocrat who served in a popular president's administration should be seen as a qualified success. And the election of Rousseff, which, as Tracy Clark-Flory writes, follows the election of female presidents in other Latin American countries, just puts the United States further and further behind in making progress on gender equality. We've now seen many other countries elect women to high office and greatly increase parity in their governing bodies, and some of these countries are those we would view, from our smug perch, as culturally hostile to women. So it's time to revisit why women are being elected elsewhere and not here, despite our rhetoric about equality.
-- Monica Potts
