Every Woman Noticed That Infuriating Elizabeth Warren/Joe Biden Debate Moment [View all]

[BlueMTexpat]

Well, probably not EVERY woman noticed. But MANY did! And it seems to be causing quite a stir. And raising lots of painful memories ....

https://www.vogue.com/article/elizabeth-warren-joe-biden-democratic-presidential-debate?verso=true

Remember when we knew and largely loved Joe Biden as “Uncle Joe,” Barack Obama’s trusty vice president and surrogate “brother?” I long for those days. Truly, I wish Biden had let those good feelings, and that fairly fuzzy legacy, stand. But Biden had to go and run for president, dredging up the (perfectly valid) questions of how he mishandled the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings (which he has all but refused to apologize to Hill for), his allegedly inappropriate touching, and an ever-growing number of patronizing interactions with women. The latest, at Tuesday night’s fourth Democratic debate: Biden demanded Elizabeth Warren give him credit for her spearheading the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the federal agency established after the 2008 financial crisis to regulate mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and other financial products.

This interaction contained multitudes, and virtually all of them sparked familiar frustration and infuriation in women watching. Perhaps most maddening of all was the practice of a man attempting to take credit for a woman’s work, and at a very high level no less—in this case, Biden raising his voice and practically shouting at Warren: “I went on the floor and got you votes. I got votes for that bill.” Sure, but that’s secondary to Warren’s conceiving of the CFPB itself, as even former chief Obama adviser David Axelrod noted on Twitter. The Harvard Business Review has found that women tend to get less credit than men for group work: It’s more than troubling that, if Biden had his way, this principle would hold true even when said “group work” takes place in the upper echelons of government.

Biden was among the candidates at the debate predictably coming for Warren as new polls show her sliding into front-runner status, but it didn’t serve the former VP to grab for credit on her landmark achievement. Rather, it struck a nerve with every woman who has raised an idea at work and been ignored, only to have a man reintroduce the same idea and be lauded for it. There’s even a word for the phenomenon: “hepeating”.

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[Warren's] response also felt charged, and deeply relatable to female viewers, both because of what Warren said and what she didn’t: It seemed the textbook case of having to keep cool and collected in the face of an interrupting male colleague, even if what you really want to do is go off. [emphasis mine] “Boy is Warren carefully not saying some things here,” tweeted FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver. But, of course, if Warren had said what we all imagined she might be thinking—some professorial version of “step off my resumé and stop interrupting”—she’d be crucified as sassy, hysterical, or both.
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Always the impossible standard!