When Jessica Klein mulled over a possible run for Associated Student Government president last year, she saw her gender as just a way to attract some attention to her campaign. As a woman, she would be trying to win a position traditionally dominated by men.
“I didn’t really think that my gender would put me over the edge with another candidate,” said Klein, now a SESP senior. “You shouldn’t vote for a woman just because she’s female.”
Northwestern hasn’t elected a female student body president since Jane Lee in 2004, but female leaders have managed to achieve prominence on campus without obtaining the ASG top spot.
Klein never announced her candidacy. Instead, she opted to devote her efforts to co-chairing the alumni and university relations committee for Dance Marathon, where she felt her contributions would have more influence.
On a campus where 54 percent of students are women, the lack of female candidates in this year’s ASG election seems like an inaccurate reflection of the Northwestern University community — women currently hold six of the 14 positions on the ASG Executive Board and 18 of the 46 current senator seats.
“It’s got a positive upward trend in terms of a stronger ratio,” said outgoing ASG President Neal Sales-Griffin, adding that an increased presence may set women up to rise through the ranks in the coming years.
GAINING RECOGNITION
ASG members acknowledge a recent male dominance in the body’s most visible roles, but outgoing Treasurer Claire Lew chalks the imbalance up to perception.
Stereotypes also work in reverse, the SESP sophomore said as she rattled off the common characteristics that students associate with ASG presidents: “Male, white, wannabe lawyer, wannabe politician, just doing it to put on a résumé.”
But Eva Jefferson set an early example in 1970, assuming the presidency in the second year after ASG’s formation. According to University Archives’ records, 10 women have held the highest post in the student government’s 40-year history.
Seven years ago, the tables were turned as four women took the top offices of ASG after a run-off election in which winning candidate Rachel Lopez said gender affected the outcome.
“Specifically, I remember one of the other presidential candidates saying that I won because of my looks, though I had no campaign posters with my picture,” Lopez, Weinberg ’03, wrote in an e-mail. “I can’t help but feel like I had a lot more to prove than previous presidents and that this was partially due to my gender.”
Under her leadership, Lopez’s administration aggressively pursued solutions for improving campus safety after a number of attacks on women, a perennial issue that resonates strongly with female students.
“These perspectives and these voices need to be heard,” said political science Prof. Jaime Dominguez. “They need to be part of this dialogue.”
LEVERAGING POWER
The unintended consequence of women’s absence in government is that they appear uninterested, said Dominguez, who said his field studies course on civic engagement and leadership has only one man and several women enrolled.
“Some people would say it really doesn’t matter who’s governing,” Dominguez said. “But for women or groups that have not been represented, there is some validity to that symbolism.”
On a college campus, women tread on even ground with men, since everyone was accepted to the university under the same admissions standards, Dominguez said. Representation doesn’t need to occur proportionally, he added – all it takes is one person to get momentum started to raise confidence and mobilize minorities in an additive effect.
But ASG may be one of the few student groups on campus where women haven’t recently infiltrated the top ranks.
“You’d like to see a woman president, but it is only one organization among a lot of other ones,” said former Dance Marathon co-Chair Liz Banks, a Communication senior. “As long as it’s not all of them.”
The diversity of female leadership in other campus affairs exerts a positive influence on students’ impressions of women’s involvement, said Katherine Hadley, a Communication senior and Mayfest co-chair.
“I wouldn’t want any girl leaving here thinking they couldn’t do anything they wanted in the real world,” she said.
CHALLENGING STEREOTYPES
For Lew, who has been involved in ASG since the second week of her freshman year, the path to a prominent ASG position is still unfolding. Though she lost this month’s internal election for speaker of the senate, Sales-Griffin points to her as an up-and-comer in student government
