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Letter

Women in Politics

Credit...Tyler Comrie

To the Editor:

Re “Women’s Voice Remains Faint in Politics” (editorial, Sept. 14):

Kudos for calling out the most pervasive reason women are far from parity in public office: You can’t win if you don’t run. Though there are promising signs of surging interest, your editorial shows how progress remains stalled even in progressive New York.

But while prevailing theories say women don’t run because of less political ambition and caregiving responsibilities, my research has found that those are excuses. The underlying reasons are found in women’s culturally learned ambivalence about power. This is not to blame women but to inspire them to action.

In 2008, I embarked on a study of why despite opened doors, changed laws and dozens of groups spending millions of dollars helping women run, the dial toward parity was scarcely moving. Women have been under the heel of myriad displays of power at its worst, millenniums of implicit and explicit bias, objectification and second-class citizenship. Why would we want that kind of power? Yet if we don’t redefine power and embrace it intentionally, women’s voices will remain faint in politics and elsewhere.

GLORIA FELDT, NEW YORK

The writer is a co-founder and president of Take the Lead, a nonprofit that prepares women for leadership parity.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Women in Politics. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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