On Sept. 5, 2012, then-Senate-candidate Elizabeth Warren, during a speech at the Democratic National Convention, told attentive audience members and people watching at home an inconvenient truth. She said the people of the American middle class feel like “the game is rigged against them,” and the truth was that they were right: “The system is rigged.”
Her speech won the hearts of Americans across the nation, and it was roughly two months later that she had won something else: the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts.
It didn’t seem to be too long before she was in the Senate, asking tough questions to leaders of financial institutions and fighting for the rights of everyday, hardworking Americans. It was also not too long before Sen. Warren had become one of my favorite officials in Washington. My nerdy “favorite people in the Democratic Party” list opened up a spot near the top, a spot right next to Hillary Clinton’s. And even as politics in Washington seemed to get more dysfunctional by the day, Sen. Warren and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton still do not cease to inspire me.
It took until my recent watching of the critically acclaimed documentary “Miss Representation,” however, before I realized what I needed to take away from my “favorite politicians” list. I could have taken from it the fact that my two biggest role models were women politicians and that it is probably historically remarkable for a college-aged male interested in public service in the United States to say that. But, I did not feel like that was an adequate enough takeaway. So, I sat down and began to think long and hard. I recalled the documentary, the inequalities it revealed and Sen. Warren’s convention speech. I arrived at my takeaway.
There was not just a system in the United States rigged against the middle class as Sen. Warren described, but also one clearly rigged against women.
What else can explain the fact that despite the American population being roughly 51 percent women, women representation in Congress is at a dismal 18.3 percent? That’s neither fair, nor is it just coincidence. Despite my two biggest role models being Clinton and Warren, it is still clear to me that the system is rigged to deter women from becoming public-leadership figures. As so eloquently demonstrated in “Miss Representation,” women are still heavily objectified and degraded through American media and pop culture. This objectification works toward ensuring leadership is male-dominated by insisting that a woman’s beauty comes from her body and not her mind.
People continue to claim America is becoming more equal for women and discrimination based on sex is ending. Without discounting the progress made by women’s rights activists over the past century, the fact of the matter is that there is still so much work to do and still so many wrongs to right.
Thinking discrimination based on sex in America is over while television commercials and magazine ads continue to display impossible-to-obtain standards of beauty for women is quite foolish. This will only ensure the chips remain stacked against future women who dream of representing Americans at the city-, state- or federal-government level. The idea that our country can continue to be a beacon of democracy while women fill less than 25 percent of our country’s representative seats is equally as foolish.
I believe something needs to be done now. There will be too many intelligent, qualified and ambitious young women who decide to pass on public leadership in the future if we do not change the system right now. This is not an issue for Democrats or an issue for Republicans: This an issue for all Americans in this country who believe in fairness and equality. I believe strongly in the idea that when things get broken, they can almost always be fixed, and a problem can only occur if we refuse to admit when something is broken. Let’s admit that we need more women leaders and that we need to end the objectification of women. Let’s start here at UF by promoting equality and condemning the use of language that objectifies.
Just as Sen. Warren has worked to unrig the system stacked against the middle class, let’s start unrigging the harmful system against women. There is a distinct urgency that comes with this, and we must start today.
Troy Epstein is a UF political science sophomore. This guest column ran on page 7 on 10/2/2013 under the headline "Wake up: Another system is rigged"
