Women as Liars: Perpetuating the Myth of Female Deception

As Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton recently wrapped up another 11 hours at the House Select Committee for Benghazi, it has become difficult not to be skeptical of the underlying motives of Senate Republicans in their quest for what they have openly been calling their gotcha moment. After three years of unremitting questioning, what message are they really putting forth?

That message, developed since the 2012 attack in Libya, seems to be that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is lying, and inevitably the truth will out. Given enough time and enough harassment, another woman will be shown to be the untrustworthy liar that she is. Untrustworthy in her rank as one of the most powerful political figures in the world, untrustworthy in her ability to oversee difficult situations, untrustworthy in her ability to speak the truth to the American people, and untrustworthy in her ability to govern, given her candidacy in the upcoming election. The message, although cloaked in political subterfuge, is one that is all too familiar to women: women are liars that cannot be trusted.

While not all are subject to the same magnifying lens as Mrs. Clinton, we are aware of some pervasive beliefs about women as liars. Most prominently, perhaps, is the rape myth: that a large portion of women lie about sexual violence committed against them.

Hobby Lobby : Birth Control is Now Your Boss's Business

I was not going to comment on the recent US Supreme Court's deeply disappointing decision.  But then I read Penelope's piece, and although it too is long-winded, I stuck with it, because she argues what I've been thinking: People who don't actually experience what you're experiencing should refrain from giving set-in-stone decrees on how to manage your experience. No judgements, no armchair advice. Certainly no legal rulings with far-reaching negative effects.

Enter the US Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision. Is it justly conceivable that five male Justices weighed the balance accepting corporate entities to deny coverage of all forms of birth control - a ruling that will affect mainly women?

The Hobby Lobby case is the first time that a Court has allowed a corporate entity to deny employees a federal benefit, entitled to by law, (birth control - in all its forms) because of its owner's religious beliefs, embodying corporations with personhood. The ruling is steeped in a gendered outcome: negatively affecting mainly women (with men being a secondary casualty, and economic progression and access a viable third) and, as usual, will most severely affect poor and minority women. Women, who, it is widely argued, need the easiest access to consistent birth control if they are to enjoy the very basics of our first world society: access to the workplace and reproductive control. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote exactly this, powerful dissenting to a ruling she viewed as denying women their reproductive freedom and allowing commercial enterprises to "opt out of laws (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs."

Women in the Workplace, the Gender Confidence Gap and #YesAllWomen

Last week, four important studies brought conclusions relating to women in the workplace. These were not about editors Jill Abramson unceremoniously fired from the NYTimes nor Natalie Nougayrède forced out of her position at Le Monde, although they provide a perfect backdrop. Two of the studies demonstrate how, at either end of the corporate ladder, women are subjected to gender-based inequalities and punishments, these then intersect with a prevalent and detrimental gender confidence gap, and, finally, come to rest in the US government's medical research agency's (NIH) decision to erase sex bias from their biomedical studies.

The first study, from the University of Victoria and the Canadian Intern Association shows that the majority of interns in Canada are young women, who are unpaid or are making less than the minimum wage. Around 300 000 young Canadians work unpaid, and the vast majority are women - 49% in the private sector and 25/26% between the public and not for profit sector. While the Conservative government has provided funding towards "high-demand" internships in the fields of sciences, maths and computers, it has given nothing to more 'traditionally female' fields of nutritional sciences, teaching or social work.

Second Generation Gender Bias

I’ve written before that public spaces can sometimes imitate soft war zones for women. Men belong in these places while women are visiting, often without permission. Cat-calling, space-taking... women are made to feel like outsiders in a space that should be their own. We use these spaces to get to work, to do our daily outings, we use them for protest, to express ourselves but also for leisure and family time. If one sex feels pushed out of these spaces, their access to these different aspects of life also suffers. We saw in the Arab uprisings, how women were an important part of the protests, and how this pointed to a gendered reclaiming of public spaces as an important component of the female emancipation process. 

Second generation gender bias is the official term for this feeling. That feeling that as women, we don’t quite belong in certain places or in certain roles. Public transport and public spaces more broadly, but boardrooms and positions of power more significantly.