One thing was guaranteed in Tuesday’s Student Association executive elections: the winners had to have Y chromosomes. None of this year’s four tickets featured a woman candidate, denying voters a varied slate and failing to represent the female half of the University’s population.
Although the Student Association has had women presidents in the past, the organization doesn’t have a strong track record for gender diversity. In six years, there have been 24 presidential candidates, but only 3 have been women.
“In the past, it’s typically been a male-dominated organization,” Christina Goodlander (SFS ‘07), the Student Association’s Senate Speaker, said. Goodlander pointed out that when outgoing president Twister Murchison restructured the Association, which replaced the eight member Assembly with the much larger Senate, the number of women in elected positions dropped from a quarter to a fifth.
While the Student Association doesn’t actively discriminate against female candidates, a cultural bias against women plays out in the organization. As Goodlander said, “In our society, women are expected to fill one of two archetypes to have any success: the nurturer or the bitch.”
Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m taking the Student Association too seriously, or that girls just have better things to do with their time. Mariclaire Petty (SFS ‘08), Murchison’s chief of staff, thinks so.
“We certainly have girls that are qualified in GUSA,” she said. “I really just think … it was just coincidental.”
Although no girls chose to take part in this February’s race, last year’s election revealed some interested female candidates. Gage Raley (COL ‘07), a vice-presidential candidate this year, ran for president and lost with Oxana Miliaeva (COL ‘07) as his running mate. Raley said that his choice of Miliaeva made the unequal gender balance even more apparent.
“That’s definitely a problem GUSA has,” he said. “It’s a good old boy’s club. I didn’t realize how big an issue that was until Oxana ran.”
Raley thought Miliaeva’s candidacy would inspire more women to run this year, but he said he didn’t see any at the interest meeting.
“Maybe they’re just smarter than the guys and they don’t want to get involved in GUSA,” Raley said.
What the Student Association doesn’t realize is that the organization itself will lose the most as a result of its gender imbalance.
Unless the organization embraces initiatives to increase female representation, like a proposal Goodlander has for “Women in Leadership at Georgetown,” the organization will lose what little legitimacy it has because it doesn’t reflect its constituency.
If the Student Association can’t get women involved on a politically active campus like Georgetown, it deserves to go the way of the Yard, the last failed incarnation of the University’s student government.
