Mademoiselle from Ottawa, Parlez-vous?

The biggest story after the latest Liberal leadership debate, in Quebec City, is apparently how bad the various candidates are in French. Dion, of course, is fluent. Ignatieff and Rae are the next best. Brison got credit for improving quickly. Gerard Kennedy and Joe Volpe held their own. Ken Dryden and Carolyn Bennett were incomprehensible, and Hedy Fry and Martha Hall Findlay didn’t even, for the most part, make the effort to try.

I expect nobody else has the nerve to point out that the women are clustered at the bottom of the pack.

How come? Dion has the advantage of being raised in French, but the others have had to pick it up with deliberate effort. If they want to be prime minister of Canada, why were the women not willing, as were the men, to make this effort? This is perhaps particularly surprising because studies show women find it easier to pick up a second language than do men.

Surely there is only one explanation: though this is of course a very small statistical sample, it indicates that women are not prepared to work as hard at or for the same job as are men. This speaks rather eloquently to why there are fewer women at the top in business and politics; and why women are paid less. They work less, at least at the office. This matters more at the higher levels.

And this speaks to a sense of privilege. They apparently expect special consideration because they are women.

Now, it is true that none of the women stand much chance of winning. We are a couple of decades past the time when a woman with considerably weaker qualifications could win only because she was a woman: the days of Geraldine Ferraro and Shirley McLaughlin. Women now need to have some kind of credentials, if only because there are likely to be other women running. Nevertheless, the three women running seem to have somewhat slimmer resumes than the men.

Why are no men with similarly weak credentials running?

Assuming that the women have no better chance to win than men with the same credentials, there are, I think, two possible explanations. First, it could be that women think more highly of themselves and their capabilities than men. This speaks again to a sense of privilege. Second, it could be that women, in losing, have less to lose. If a man loses, he is blamed for it. If a woman loses, she is empathized with. The man will have his career damaged. The woman is just as likely to have hers enhanced. For example, everybody empathized with Flora Macdonald, and actually blamed the voters, when she lost the conservative leadership. Did anyone empathize with Claude Wagner? Hardly; career over. He disappeared without a trace.

Similarly, though it turned out to be a bit of a miscalculation, Sheila Copps felt she could afford to run against Paul Martin, and certainly lose, when no man dared.

We cut women much more slack than men. Women are freer to try anything. If they win, they get the credit. If they lose, they do not get the blame.