re: #53 Backwoods_Sleuth

heh

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From the April issue of the Atlantic
theatlantic.com

The Nancy Pelosi Problem
The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Gender scholars would not be surprised. For a 2010 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto showed study participants the fictional biographies of two state senators, identical except that one was named John Burr and the other Ann Burr. (I referred to this study in an October 2016 article for this magazine called Fear of a Female President.) When quotations were added that described the state senators as “ambitious” and possessing “a strong will to power,” John Burr became more popular. But the changes provoked “moral outrage” toward Ann Burr, whom both men and women became less willing to support.

Nancy Pelosi, by leading her party in Congress, has become Ann Burr. A woman can serve in Congress without being perceived as overly ambitious. By climbing to the top of the greasy pole, however, Pelosi has made her ambition visible. She has gained the power to tell her male colleagues what to do. (The pollster Celinda Lake notes that most ads attacking Pelosi show her speaking, not listening.) She has put herself, to quote the anti-Ossoff ad, “in control.”