While women have held key positions in the US before, Joe Biden is going for increased representation
While the United States (US) is heading for the 250th anniversary of its independence from the colonial British Empire, it has taken that nation an incredibly long time to elect a woman to a very high office. It has had women in incredibly powerful positions before --- Nancy Pelosi, for example, is the Speaker of the US House of Representatives and there have been three Secretaries of State in Madeline Albright, Condaleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Yet until Kamala Harris won with Biden, none of these positions were directly elected. In that regard, the US is far behind most other large democracies such as India and the UK, where the people have voted in women to power. Perhaps that’s the reason why Biden has announced an all-woman communications team, named Janet Yellen as nominee to lead the Treasury and Neera Tanden as nominee for the Office of Management and Budget. If anything, he is normalising the gender parity discourse.
As many have predicted, given Biden’s advanced age, he may go for a single term and this tenure might well be a chance for Kamala Harris to audition for the top job after Donald Trump spectacularly beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections. It remains to be seen if and when the US will vote a woman to the top job. But Biden’s appointments are clearly a vote of confidence in women, who make up half the population. There should be more women in top political roles across the world and leaders like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern are a great inspiration for demonstrating muscularity of purpose while being empathetic. However, the fact of the matter remains that the world is still rather patriarchal and women are rarely a voting ‘bloc’ anywhere in the world. It is tragic that a woman has to prove her worth to lead a nation in a man’s world despite the dramatic success of leaders like Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Magaret Thatcher, all of whom led their nations into war and won. Can Biden’s nominees change that perception of women? That remains to be seen. After all, Biden still has over 50 days before he takes the oath of office.
