Hillary Clinton has described people’s judgment on how they think the US president should look as a barrier to seeing the first female in the role.
Speaking at a women in leadership event at Queen’s University Belfast a week after President-elect Donald Trump triumphed over Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris in the US election, Mrs Clinton spoke about why there have been more female prime ministers in parliamentary systems than presidents.
Mrs Clinton, who ran unsuccessfully to be president in 2016, said that in a parliamentary system a woman can prove her worth to colleagues and are more likely to rise to the top.
“Whether it’s Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi or Angela Merkel, you see the women who are known as women leaders who came to power in the last 50 years or so, as heading a party within a parliament,” she said.
“A presidential system is very different. You usually go through a primary to determine who the party picks to be the candidate, you have to run to the whole country, you have to raise all the money and you really are out there on your own, and it’s a very different kind of contest than rising through the parliamentary ranks,” she said.
“So it was always interesting to see how women as the head of government got to that position. Because they were the head of government, but not the head of state, there was somebody else to fill all the ceremonial roles, but when you run for president, you’re head of both. So people are judging you, not just ‘can she do the job, does she look like the head of state?’.
“That’s one of the reasons we’ve had trouble now twice breaking through to elect a woman president because there is still a mindset in our country certainly about what a president looks like and how a president acts so therefore who should be a president.”
Mrs Clinton, who is Chancellor of Queen’s, said she was very happy to be back in Belfast, quipping: “I’m thinking about applying for an asylum.”
A host of women, including Northern Ireland minister Fleur Anderson, spoke about the challenges of women moving into leadership positions and thanked Mrs Clinton for the interest she continues to take in Northern Ireland decades after she visited with her husband, then US president Bill Clinton, to encourage political leaders moving towards the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
Mrs Clinton said she sees an enormous amount of potential in the expansion of female leadership and warned against the “perfection gene”, instead urging the importance of getting involved and learning from mistakes.
She said it was a journey for women to step up for leadership, and expressed concern about leaders increasingly becoming “performers”, and said women need to learn how to respond to this.
“Young women, and not so young women, are afflicted by what I call the perfection gene – if I’m not perfect, I’m not even going to try it, and I’m certainly not going to try it in public.
“I have to be perfect before I stand up and give my first speech. I have to be perfect before I make any kind of, you know, public claim, whether it’s for a position in student government or running for office and I think this is largely a female-linked trait, and it’s impossible to overcome unless you’re aware of it and you recognise it for what it is, which is a barrier holding you back,” she said.
“You will never be perfect, no matter how hard you try. You can, however, be good enough, and you can get better, and you can keep improving.
“In today’s world, especially given social media, there seems to be a premium on leaders who are performers and you’ve always had to be a certain kind of performer… we’re seeing a different kind of leadership now where it’s a leadership that is aimed at performance, that is the purpose, and anything else is kind of a secondary asset that you are performing, and maybe you’ll get something done, but the most important thing is the performance.
“I think there’s going to have to be some real thought given as to how women stay true to ourselves and able to communicate effectively in the information eco-system in which we are living.
“It worries me a lot, since we now live so much of our lives online, we are seeing all kinds of impacts on people’s personal lives – there’s a very clear correlation between increases in anxiety, loneliness, depression, body image issues, suicide ideation and the addiction to social media.
“Remember, the algorithms are designed to keep your attention and sadly negative information keeps your attention much more than positive information.
“So if you’re fed a steady diet that questions who you are, or presents people as influencers or role models who are peddling negativity, that affects not just your personhood, it affects your community, it affects your politics so I do worry, because I think the technology has outpaced our understanding of it, the impact it is having and how we best harness it.
“And now we’re on the brink of artificial intelligence, which has many potential advantages, particularly in areas like health, but many, many dangers.
“We are in an uncharted world and if you’re a leader today, you have to understand the world in which you’re operating and the people you are communicating with are operating.”
During her address, Ms Anderson praised all-women shortlists as giving her the confidence to put herself forward to run for Parliament and increasing the number of female MPs from less than 10% in the 1990s to 40% at the last election earlier this year.
She told those gathered she worked in international development, and first became involved in politics when her local council proposed closing a child’s centre before going on to become a councillor.
But she said many women do not tend to put themselves forward.
She said she was on an all-women short list when she first ran to become an MP for Putney in 2019.
“Without that, I’m not sure if I’d have had the courage to run,” she said.
Professor Karen McCloskey, who heads up the Queen’s Gender Initiative (QGI), said no women were able to attend the university when it first opened in 1845 and that 24 years ago, when QGI started, less than 11% of professors were women and that “something had to be done”.
“Today we have near parity for many of our professional service grades and our lecturers, and 11% professors has become 33%,” she said.
“It didn’t happen by chance, it took commitment on those hard yards. The journey was led by women, often to the detriment of their academic and their research portfolios, and yes, there are wonderful male allies and supportive leaders, but we owe enormous debt to those pioneering women and everything that they’ve done.”
