"Rally at US Sen 0197 Senator Elizabeth Warren" by mdfriendofhillary is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
"U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris speaks at L.A.'s Families Belong Together March" by lukeharold is licensed under CC CC0 1.0

Less than three years after the 2016 presidential election, a pattern is already emerging. Once again, we’re seeing intelligent, qualified women candidates being snubbed by voters who can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea that a woman can be president.

In his recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson claims that though the 2020 Democratic candidates were “articulate,” “intelligent,” and “ambitious … without seeming too egotistical or ruthless,” none of them “seemed ‘presidential.’” But if not intelligence and ambition, what makes a candidate seem presidential? There are many answers, but the one that stands out in a presidential election cycle with a historical number of women candidates is gender. 

by: Gilda Geist

At a time when political tensions are high and the number of women in elected office is low, I asked Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers, the hosts of the podcast Pantsuit Politics, for their takes on how partisanship and women’s representation influence one another. With Holland on the left side of the political spectrum and Silvers on the right, the show features what their website calls, “grace-filled political conversations.” Since Holland and Silvers have been talking politics (politely) on the air since November 2015, they seemed like the perfect people to ask about where our society’s political conversations are taking us in terms of women’s representation.

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The RepresentWomen team met with a group of politically engaged women from Indonesia this week. They were visiting the United States as part of the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, which connects current and aspiring politicians abroad with their American counterparts. We were happy to sit down with these women to discuss women’s political participation and representation in our respective countries.