Donald Trump, Women and the Class Divide
Janet Babin, WNYC
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is igniting fervent debate among women in America. While many find him disrespectful and frightening, and his overall negative ratings are sky high, others believe his forthrightness is the key to a brighter future. Isenberg, the author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, says the opposing female reactions to Trump are divided along class lines. Working-class women support Trump because they are looking for an “alpha male persona,” Isenberg believes, while upper-class women avoid him entirely. “Trump may be zeroing in on how these women imagine leadership in terms of gender and class identity,” Isenberg says, “offering them an almost paternal validation in exchange for their support.”
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard Business Review
Why do men seem to rule the world? Because they have fooled everyone into thinking that confidence is competence, according to Chamorro-Premuzic. Meanwhile many women lack the hubris that might help them to woo followers, though they possess other traits that often lead to business success: communication skills, relatability and humility. And of course, women are blocked by various institutional and social obstacles that men don’t face. Chamorro-Premuzic argues that men wear the mask of superiority well, but studies have shown that women are, in many ways, better equipped to lead. He wonders: Incompetence is the norm today, but what if it wasn’t?
Boys’ Club Image Overturned by Rise of Women Currency Traders
Lananh Nguyen and Lucy Meakin, Bloomberg
The “boys’ club” image of the banking industry is diminishing as more women arrive at trading desks on Wall Street. While women rising to positions of power there aim to use their influence to narrow the gender divide, inequality persists. Notably, women continue to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less than their male counterparts. “I was never paid what I was worth,” says Charlotte DeBenedictis, a foreign-exchange trader on Wall Street in the 1980s. “The final straw was when I hired a senior trader for almost three-times what I was making.” Though change is slow, recent trading scandals have demonstrated a need for new management — and elevating women may be the best fix. “The environment they’re walking into is not the environment before, where it was all about ‘how much money can I make.’ It’s also about keeping the firm from bad decisions,” says former New York Fed employee Marya Rodriquez Valladares.
Broadway May Not Be So White, But is it Woman Enough?
Laura Collins-Hughes and Alexis Soloski, The New York Times
This season’s leading ladies on Broadway are singing for change. Roles in top musicals, though played with passion and unbelievable talent, have continued to stay within the boundaries of female stereotypes — for example, mothers, wives and waitresses. And women are hungry for more powerful roles in which they take charge, rather than take care of husbands and children. “It feels to me like more producers are getting the message female artists have been sending: that it’s not OK to exclude them and that they’ll make as much noise as necessary to get doors opened to them,” says Collins-Hughes. Both she and Soloski hope for a new type of Broadway woman, brought to us by new innovative producers and demanded by predominantly female theatergoers.
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