OPINION:
Women are a puzzle to men. Ask any man. Women think men are transparent and eager to figure it out. Everybody knows that. But when Sigmund Freud posed his famous question he confessed that he didn’t have any idea what the answer was.
“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul,” he wrote to one of his precocious female students, “is, ’what does a woman want?’ “
The man who popularized psychoanalysis is not the source of answers he once was, and it’s clear to everybody that what women want now is what everybody wants. Everything. Some women have speculated that Freud was only being coy or playful, but his question lingers. This is the season when candidates for president — and every other office large and small — must ponder it. Billions of dollars ride on the answer.
Hillary Clinton is betting everything on women and their votes, and has based her campaign on pandering to “the feminist vote.” Donald Trump, ever the outlier, seems to be basing his campaign on insulting and aggravating women, and it’s not at all certain that every woman will take revenge for the Donald’s crudities aimed at the female persuasion. The well of anger that he has tapped into is shared by many women, too. People are full of surprises, which is why they’re frustrating but never boring.
Hillary’s polling gurus were surprised early on to find that many young women are not as enamored of the former first lady as they expected. They don’t like her self-centeredness and find her a flawed “role model.” The strength of Hillary’s women’s vote is concentrated in what the French call “women of a certain age.” These women are inclined to sympathy for feminism even if they don’t buy all the particulars. They learned the hard way to overcome barriers erected in politics and business. Younger women, following the pathfinders, don’t feel the constraints their mothers and grandmothers did. They’ve broken through glass ceilings in many different careers.
A new study at Harvard, however, finds disquieting implications for feminists who imagined that every woman would one day join them in a march to a common drummer. Researchers found that resistance to girl leaders in their teenage years is found not only among boys, but among teenage girls as well, and even among some mothers of daughters. “These biases,” the researchers say, “could be powerful barriers to leadership for a generation of teen girls with historically high levels of education who are key to closing our nation’s gender gap in leadership.”
The findings suggest that “much can be done to prevent and reduce gender biases in children.” Conservatives would argue that the researchers have only rediscovered something inherent in nature — that the resentments of teenage girls are the natural jealousies that begin early in life.
The results of the survey suggest that teenagers of both sexes hold biases against female leaders in powerful professions and occupations, such as politics, borne out in the answers of 20,000 boys and girls in 59 middle and high schools, chosen to reflect a diversity of economic and ethnic backgrounds. Focus groups and individual interviews followed.
“Our study points to insidious bias against girls as leaders that comes from many sources,” says Richard Weissbourd of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of the project. “Bias can be a powerful and invisible barrier to teenage girls’ leadership. Yet parents and teachers can do a great deal to stem these biases and help children manage them.”
Researchers asked students whether they wanted to give “more power” to student councils led by white girls, white boys, black girls, black boys, Latina girls or Latino boys. They were surprised to find that students were least likely to give more power to white girl-led student councils and more likely to give more power to councils led by white boys. White girls themselves were least likely to favor white girls.
It’s easy to make too much of a survey of teenagers, who have little interest in anything beyond their own concerns, usually about music, movies and other entertainment. Their opinions are often merely whims, as changeable as the weather, and the Harvard researchers found that most of the teenagers they surveyed actually had no settled opinion about the place of girls in teenage leadership. But the implications for the future, with women dropping out of the labor force in measurable numbers, are nevertheless profound. Hillary’s ultimate performance will also have a strong impact on how young women see themselves as prospective leaders.
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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