There are times, even now, after several decades of writing about politics, when I remember that neither Canada nor the United States has elected a woman head of state and, subsequently, get a searing pain over my left eye.
That pain is a physical reaction I have to anything that seems completely counter-intuitive, shocking or gratuitously stupid. I find the inability to elect a woman to serve as prime minister or president to be all those things.
Why do I find the absence of female leaders so stupid?
ERIN SCHARR / THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vice President Kamala Harris boards Air Force Two at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. on July 30. How is it that in 2024, we can be so hung up on gender when assessing candidates to serve as heads of government, Dan Lett wonders.
My formative years were spent in a single-parent household led — in every conceivable way — by a mother of incredible resilience, skill and courage. I don’t need to be told that a woman could lead this country or the one directly to the south of us; I grew up with a woman as my leadership role model.
Partly because of that, I find it unfathomable that North Americans have such a clear aversion to electing women as leaders.
The U.S. has never elected a woman president, and only once — Hillary Clinton in 2016 — has one of the two major parties put a woman presidential candidate on the ticket.
Canada has had one woman serve as prime minister — Kim Campbell in 1993 — but she led the federal government for only about four months before she was dispatched by Jean Chretien and the Liberal Red Wave.
My continued astonishment about the lack of women leaders — and another flash of pain near my left eyebrow — was triggered again this week when I read a new poll on the current U.S. presidential election campaign.
Conducted just after President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down, and Vice President Kamala Harris moved quickly to become the presumptive standard-bearer for the Democratic party, a YouGov/The Hill/SAY24 poll showed there has been a significant drop in the number of Americans who say they’re ready for a female president.
Head-to-head, Harris polls well against Republican party nominee and former president Donald Trump, with roughly half of respondents believing that both are qualified for the job. However, that’s when things start to get depressing.
Back in 2016, when Democratic candidate Clinton came within a few Electoral College votes of becoming America’s first female president, the same polling firm asked the same questions and found that 63 per cent of voters said they were ready to accept a woman as president.
The 2024 poll found support for a female president had dropped to just 54 per cent, while 30 per cent of respondents said they were dead-set against a woman taking over as leader of the free world.
Support for a woman president dropped for both Republican and Democratic voters. In 2015, 82 per cent of Democrats and 44 per cent of Republicans supported the idea of a woman in the Oval Office; in 2024, that support has dropped to 77 per cent of Democrats and only 30 per cent of Republicans.
The more insidious result comes from the finding that 41 per cent of respondents believe more than half of the electorate won’t vote for a woman running for president.
The same lack of support is really a global phenomenon. UN Women reported this year that only 27 countries have women heads of state and, at the current rate, it will take 130 years to achieve balance with men.
There is less polling data in Canada because, quite frankly, the parties with the best chances of forming government haven’t picked female leaders. But there is some data that demonstrates how Canadians suffer from some of the same underlying voter dynamics.
Just after Clinton won the Democratic party’s nomination, a 2016 Angus poll of Canadians found that 84 per cent of respondents felt that “men and women make equally good leaders.
However, 85 per cent of respondents also believed that most Canadians do not support the idea of a woman as prime minister.
How is it that in 2024, we can be so hung up on gender when assessing candidates to serve as heads of government? And perhaps more importantly, will gender become an issue in the upcoming U.S. election?
Although the role of gender in Clinton’s loss is still being debated — she did, after all, get three million more votes than Trump — there is a strong argument that being a woman did not help her.
Those who do not think gender played a role note that Clinton suffered greatly from an ultimately unfounded FBI email investigation, and still drew strong support from female voters. However, Clinton got fewer votes overall than Barack Obama over the previous two elections. So, she was still dominant in drawing votes, but it was among a slightly smaller pool of support for the Democrats.
Where does that leave us as we head to a Kamala Harris-Trump showdown in November?
Gender really shouldn’t be an issue for voters, but given the recent poll results, you can already see in the Republican campaign an appetite to directly and indirectly undermine Harris by drawing attention to the fact that she’s a woman. That scenario alone allows me to make two important predictions.
First, the presidential race will be incredibly tight. And second, I’m going to need an ice pack for my achy forehead.
dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com
Dan Lett
Columnist
Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986. Read more about Dan.
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