Gender politics is not a vote winner

Donald Trump’s victory was not the only shocker for right-thinking people; his popularity among women voters was equally astonishing given the coarsely misogynistic nature of his campaign. But there’s an uncomfortable and depressing truth embedded in the fact that 42 per cent of women (and 53 per cent of white women) voted for a man who has openly boasted of groping and sexually assaulting women, and worse: Gender politics is not a vote winner by itself.

There are complex reasons for this, some of it inexplicable, some of it tied in with notions of gender identity and social attitudes. The first critical one is that as a group, “women” cannot be considered distinct or homogenous any more than “men” can. There are issues that concern both individually and in different ways but overall, it is fair to say that practical considerations always score over ideology. Notions of women’s rights among women alone have many differentiators across income and education levels. These positions are not always logical, of course, but like Mount Everest, they are there.

Some women, for instance, approved of Mr Trump’s extreme position against immigrants in general and Latinos and Muslims in particular; as they saw it, he really would make America Safe Again, for their families — even though it is documented that many more Americans have died from trigger-happy fellow citizens (including white ones).

And then, there is always the fact that the inherent sexism in American society has inured many women to the problem — just as it has in India. Women have become so used to negotiating their spaces within the thickets of male chauvinism that they tend not to consider gender rights an issue in electoral politics. In such societies, where many women derive their power from their men, women's rights can often be a casualty.

Hard as it is to believe, some women liked Mr Trump because they approved of his wife, Melania, as “classy” and “beautiful”. One woman crudely described Michelle Obama as an “ape in high heels,” a characterisation that manages to be racist and sexist in its offensiveness. With this woman and another who heartily “liked” the comment, Ms Obama’s dynamism and charisma independent of her husband apparently count for nothing.

That is why, the recording of Mr Trump making obscene remarks against women did not play out as catastrophically as it should have among his conservative female support base. He sort-of apologised later, saying it was “locker room talk” but on election eve, Hillary Clinton led Mr Trump by just four percentage points. Somewhat incredibly, there seemed to be an equivalence between Mr Trump’s manifest Neanderthal behaviour and Ms Clinton’s email server transgressions in voter perception, including female voters.

Ms Clinton’s problem is that she seemed to assume that her identity as the possible “first woman president” would have automatic traction among women (in contrast, Barack Obama, as the first potential African American president, was careful to reach out to white voters as well). She harped on Mr Trump’s manifest gender prejudices, which was easy to do given his record. Did she offer women anything else? Her website suggests that her stand on gender issue was replete with proforma, apple-pie statements about supporting equal pay, women’s health, pro-choice support, women’s safety and so on. But these positions were short on details. What about paid maternity leave, for instance, the single biggest reason for the gender gap in the American workplace? Nothing. This is ironic when it was her husband, Bill, who signed into law a Bill mandating maternity leave (though unpaid) in 1993.

Winning women’s voters seems to work only when politicians address specific concerns. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar understood this when he made prohibition a pre-election promise, an issue that goes to heart of a problem women, especially poor women, face on a daily basis in terms of income depletion and physical assault. Otherwise, gender politics is largely a non-issue in elections. Women politicians in India never single out women’s rights as an election issue — even though the oppression of women remains one of the worst evils of Indian society (now globally acknowledged). None of the 636 women who contested the 2014 Lok Sabha talked of empowering women in their campaigns (though Narendra Modi, with questionable views on the subject, did). The proposal some years ago to reserve seats in Parliament has — fortunately in this case — died a natural death for lack of women champions.

Not that Indian or American women are outliers. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, the Filipino president who openly boasted of sexual assault during his election campaign, garnered as much as 20 per cent of the female vote. Apparently, some women found him “irresistible”. Go figure.