Women in Politics - Just Look at the Photos

Martin Frost has been working in government and politics since 1979, and in that time among the many things he's learned is that you have only to look at the photo of a female politician appearing with an article about her to know whether she's going up or going down in the media's opinion.

Frost maintains that this phenomenon does not extend to male politicians, at least not in the same way or degree. They rarely vary much from photo to photo no matter what is going on in the article beneath.

Here's Frost on Nancy Pelosi:

The most recent example is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A very attractive woman at 71, Pelosi generally looked great in newspaper and magazine photos during her first two years as speaker, from 2007 to 2008. She was riding high after leading the Democrats back into the majority in the 2006 elections.

However, after President Barack Obama was elected, she had to do a lot of heavy lifting on his agenda during his first two years, pushing through controversial legislation in 2009 and 2010. The print photos of her then were often far less flattering. She didn’t exactly look like the Wicked Witch of the West — but they weren’t that great a good bit of the time. She appeared grim or angry, for example.

Nancy Pelosi during the health care bill battle in 2010

Pelosi pictured in 2011, the way she looked both before and after the health bill fracas.

So, as the political year heats up in preparation for the 2012 US elections, perhaps you don't need to do much reading, just look at the pictures if the subject is female, i.e. Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or other women running Congress or State Legislatures.

Read all of Frost's insightful article in Politico here, including an anecdote about a female federal judge he worked for forty years ago who had the same bitchy picture problem. 

WNL:  Another tiresome reminder that women have to do the same things as men, but do them backwards and in high heels (reference here is to the old Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire movies of the 1930s), and are endlessly vulnerable to being trivialized by images.

We've come to expect that every commercial female image we see will have been photoshopped (don't even need to capitalize the word now that it is just part of the language).  We may not be quite so aware that all this time the pictures of women we see attached to jobs in the big world are also manipulated.  

If you are interested, as I am, in the larger subject of photojournalism and the analysis of news photos, check out this marvelous blog started by clinical psychologist Michael Shaw in 2003, BagNews Notes.  You won't be disappointed.