Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

In these few paragraphs Gloria Steinem summarizes the findings of social psychology of the last forty years. Including earlier on in her column where she wonders why we consider Obama black when his mother was white so we could just as easily consider him white or mixed race.

There is little controversial both about the social psychology or politics of these statements. However, the question is what conclusions we'll draw from them. There is the rationalist approach which Steinem seems to imply assuming that this condition of assymetric perception existing in that strange space between the individual and the group. The rationalist position places the problem squarely inside the individual's cognition (brain) which of course is ultimately the only place where it can live. However, the question remains whether this is a reductionism that is descriptively and theoretically fruitful. On the political side it implies that this state of 'irrationality' is an ailment that can and should be cured. However, this discards the totality of the human condition.

An alternative position, for which there is not sufficient social scientific theory or descriptive framework, is to place the locus of this situation in the collective. This, of course, can only be a descriptive convenience, because ultimately these things exist or are reflected in the individual's brain. But looking for these effects in the brain may be as foolhardy as trying to design a bridge using solely quantum mechanics or Einsteinian physics. The descriptive advantage is obvious. Not reducing collective phenomena to the individual would make it possible to take certain phenomena at their face value. The political advantage is less obvious. Taking the individualistic reductionist perspective makes it possible to appeal to individuals to change and to reflect on their inner biases. On the other hand, it does lead to the alienation of many who cannot identify with the individual position despite the collective consequence. Of course, many if not most of these biases are individual and can be brought to our attention to be challenged but is that always the case and/or is there a situation where the collective is primary and the straightforward causality from the individual to the group and from the group to the individual does not apply. Saying "male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own" simply describes a fact of logic but does "male voters are supporting their own" follow from "male voters are more likely to vote for a candidate that is also male". Perhaps it does but just because these two sentences are equivalent in terms of push-and-shove container logic they may not be the same from the perspective of social psychological description. Something that will need to be investigated more.