There’s a lot of ways that men can help address gender inequality: Hire more women. Pay them more. Stop taking away their rights, for a start.
But how about dumbing down your message to get through to them?
According to a US congresswoman, that’s exactly the kind of thing men should be doing to appeal to more women voters.
The GOP is making a concerted effort to appeal to female voters after losing a historic number of those votes during the 2012 US presidential elections, and North Carolina Rep. Renee Ellmers thinks there’s a pretty easy way to win them back.
It’s all about bringing complicated policy issues “down to a woman’s level”.
“Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level,” explained Ellmers during a Republican Study Committee held last week to discuss ways to appeal to women voters.
“Many of my male colleagues, when they go to the House floor, you know, they’ve got some pie chart or graph behind them and they’re talking about trillions of dollars and how, you know, the debt is awful and, you know, we all agree with that.”
Ellmers then said that women mainly want more time in their lives, for the important things like, “more time in the morning to get ready” so it’s important that men can bring their message “down to a woman’s level” to get through to them.
“The biggest need that women have is more time. We all want more time in our lives. More time in the morning to get ready. More time in the evening to spend time with our families. All of these things – more time to move up that career path.”
“It’s about time. And we have to make sure that women understand that we understand that. We need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman’s level and what everything that she is balancing in her life – that’s the way to go,” Ellmers concluded.
Ellmers has since said her comments had been taken completely out of context, telling ThinkProgress she was a victim of “gotcha journalism”.
“I am a woman, and find it both offensive and sexist to take my words and redefine them to imply that women need to be addressed at a lower level,” she wrote, blaming “certain leftist writers” for engaging in “‘gotcha’ journalism”.
Washington Examiner, the publication that originally posted Ellmers comments, has since published her entire speech. In addition to the comments, it also includes a part about how women really do agree with Republicans on most issues, they’re just not hearing the messages properly.
“Women, by and large, agree with us on all of the issues. If you go through each issue, they agree. It’s how we are able to articulate ourselves – make sure that we’re getting the point across that we care, before we do anything else. That we relate to them, understand what every woman in this country is dealing with” she said.
According to ThinkProgress, Ellmers is a staunch opponent to abortion rights and a co-sponsor of a proposal to grant “privileges of personhood” to foetuses from the time of fertilisation. She was one of 138 representatives who voted against the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 and last year argued that health insurers should be able to charge women more than men for comparable coverage.