What’s the difference between a ceiling fan and the century-long legacy of ASWSU presidents?

Exactly 14 ovaries.

Last week, I researched the history of ASWSU for a column on the heavy Greek influence in our student elections. Through this research, I found a pattern far more disturbing than the reoccurrence of Greeks in the president’s office – it was the reoccurrence of men. In fact, after checking in all 101 yearbooks since ASWSU’s founding in 1914, I found that only seven women have ever been deemed fit by the student body to serve as their leader.

Let’s take a minute to wrap our heads around the implications there.

I find my disappointment that we’re so reluctant to elect a woman into the highest office of ASWSU difficult to put into words. It’s visceral. It’s disheartening. It’s best articulated by a feminist blogger named Laurie Penny, who once described “the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you’re slowly dying of something mundane and awful.”

Because this fact isn’t just mundane and awful, my fellow Cougars – it’s downright common. We’re better than this. Or at least I thought we were.

Since my enrollment at WSU, all of the student body presidents have been male, and all have done an excellent job leading the campus and promoting student involvement. A few of them beat out female counterparts to win the ticket, and a few of them beat out other men. Several of them ran alongside female vice presidents, a role which is equal to that of the president in practice, if not in perception.

It’s easy to view the disparity between men and women in ASWSU as an anecdotal one, as coincidental, as a case-by-case situation of the male candidates simply being more qualified.

But when the woman is only considered more qualified less than 7 percent of the time, maybe we should look at the cause of the disease rather than the symptoms. The disease that affects the way our culture views women seeking power, and the way that all women view themselves.

This issue doesn’t exist within a vacuum – it exists within a culture that communicates to women in a thousand tiny ways every single day that we’re better suited to play a supporting role.

A whole lot of seemingly unrelated factors add up.  

It’s in the way that our instrumental value is enormously determined by our ornamental value. It’s in the way I feel the need to shrink- my voice, my waistline, my effect on the world around me- every time I turn on the TV. It’s in the way eyebrows rise when a woman claims she doesn’t plan to forfeit her own name for her husband’s. It’s in the psyche of the girl who gets called bossy in elementary school and a bitch in high school. It’s ingrained in the typical female troupe of childhood fairytales, where we all found out what happens to women who cast their own magic.

It’s in the way that all of these assumptions are reflected by the American population as a whole, who evidently agree that First Ladies are much better at decorating the Oval Office than they are at running it.

The issue of Greeks taking over the ASWSU elections is downright tidy compared to this one. I have no call to action, no neat solution to this symptom of the inferiority complex that’s been fed to women over the last few centuries.

All I can do is tip my hat to Jennie Mae Thomas of 1944, Doris Pierson of 1946, Linda Carlisle of 1976, Barb Gorham of 1987, Kristi Phillips of 1988, Heather Metcalf of 1993, and Brea Thompson of 2004.

All I can hope for is that our generation does a better job recognizing all the tiny little ways we make women feel small, so that we can better combat the sum of their damage. Because I don’t want to one day encourage my daughter to be the first female president. I want to encourage her to be the ninth.