With perhaps the most tantalizing speech title, Dr Caroline Heldman took the stage to deliver her talk on The Sexy Lie: How Objectification Culture Harms Women Leadership 

Dr. Caroline Heldman is the chair of the Politics Department at Occidental College. She is also a political commentator for MSNBC, Fox Business News, RT America, and Al Jazeera English. Dr. Heldman’s work has been featured in the top journals in her field, including theAmerican Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, andPolitical Communications. She co-edited the popular book, Rethinking Madame President: Is the US Ready for a Woman in the White House? (2007). Dr. Heldman’s work has also been featured in popular publications, including the New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, Ms. Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast.

Andrew Crisp of Boise State’s Blue Review did a great preview piece on Caroline earlier this week where she addresses many of the barriers she discussed in today’s talk,

“There are lots of barriers to women getting into positions of leadership, which starts with the socialization of little girls. We often think of barriers to women in leadership as a glass ceiling right before women receive the top corporate position, but a better metaphor is a labyrinth: women are discouraged from being leaders at a very young age, whether it’s the careers that they’re tracked into, or their peers not supporting them being ambitious,”

Four Barriers to Women’s Leadership

Ambition Gap

People expect women to act modestly, even if they are already highly accomplished. Women are discouraged from being ambitious from a very early age. There is a lack of support for female ambition in all walks of life.

Leadership Evaluation Bias

Men are still seen as default leaders in the US and Europe (per Catalyst in 2012). Male college students are more likely to evaluate female leaders as submissive now than a decade ago.

The Double Bind

We equate leadership with male attributes. They have to perform certain attributes of masculinity to be seen as leaders. But when they do, they are evaluated poorly as not ‘properly feminine’. Women who ‘act female’ are rated negatively for being weak, but if they act ‘male’ they are rated negatively for being too tough (Belkin, 2007). Women are penalized for expressing anger in the workplace, while men are not.

The Sexy Lie

Caroline began the portion of the talk focused on her barrier of The Sexy lie by addressing our Objectification culture and sharing the Sex Object Test she has developed to help people understand what sexual objectification is.

The core of her argument – sexy is not empowering.

We have a subject/object dichotomy. And subjects act, and objects are acted upon. There are a slew of  internal effects of self-objectification

• depression
• habitual nody monitoring
• eating disorders
• body shape
• depressed cognitive functioning
• sexual dysfunction
• lower self-esteem
• lower GPA
• lower political efficacy

External effects of objectification

• female competition
• erasure of middle aged women
• lower perceptions of competence
• dehumanization

As noted by Blue Review, and stated in Caroline’s TEDx talk on The Sexy Lie:

“We raise our little boys to view their bodies as tools to master their environments,” Heldman tells the audience early in her speech. “We raise our little girls to view their bodies as projects to constantly be improved. What if women started to view their bodies as tools to master their environment? As tools to get you from one place to the next? As these amazing vehicles for moving through the world in a new way?”

Caroline left the crowd with a great call to action – a list of personal actions we can take to curb the objectification culture:

• Stop consuming toxic media
• Stop playing ‘the tapes’ (tapes in our mind about imposter syndrome, body monitoring)
• Stop seeking heterosexual male attention
• Stop competing with other women
• Start enjoying your body as a physical instrument
• Start focusing on personal development that isn’t related to beauty culture
• Start complimenting girls/women on their actions and accomplishments
• Embrace ambition and encourage it in others

Political actions to take to combat objectification culture

• A Journalist Code of Ethics for coverage of female candidates
• Blog activism – the fourth wave of feminism
• Consumer activism

(Best and most random insight from Dr Caroline Heldman…she likes to parkour – ”the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment,” can be done any time, anywhere. I especially enjoy jumping off bike racks between classes while I’m dressed in a suit.)