What haunted Gillard stalks Harris, and it’s not just sexism

Two weeks into the 2010 election campaign, Labor was in trouble. Partly as a circuit-breaker, Julia Gillard announced that from then on, voters would see the “real” Julia. “I’m going to discard all of that campaign advice and professional or common wisdom, and just go for it,” she said.

Gillard was slammed. If voters hadn’t been seeing the “real” her, who had they been seeing? Which was a reasonable question, except that many of those asking it had been criticising her for keeping her real self under wraps. She was damned either way. Really, these apparently contradictory criticisms were just different expressions of the same underlying suspicion: that there was something false or concealed about our first female prime minister. It’s worth noting her opponent, Tony Abbott, was subjected to some of the same complaints about restraint – though in his case it was often praised, too, as “discipline”.

Kamala Harris, like Julia Gillard, is finding that, as a woman, she is held to a different standard.Credit: AP/Alex Ellinghausen

This theme followed Gillard through her prime ministership: the idea that she was not showing herself; that something was fundamentally opaque. When she did not show “enough” emotion, she was called “wooden”; when she became either upset or angry, she was attacked for confecting such things for political gain.

In recent weeks, I’ve watched, with a rising sense of dread, as a similar strain of criticism has been attached to Kamala Harris. The New York Times reported polling in September showing “voters are unsure they know enough about where Kamala Harris stands”. This was based on the fact that “28 per cent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Ms Harris”. (Another 5 per cent of the electorate said they didn’t lean to either candidate yet.) This reporting seemed to confirm a piece the Times had published in August, headlined, “To Undecided Voters, Harris Is Famous, but Unknown. They Want to Learn More”. NBC, describing her minimisation of media interactions, said the approach “opens her to criticism that she has something to hide”. The Wall Street Journal, reporting on polling, asserted just last week that voters “still don’t seem to really understand exactly what she stands for and why”, even though its own polling found 86 per cent of voters “know enough to have a firm opinion of her”.

Law professor Patricia J. Williams has connected such calls for Harris to “define herself” to “a fervent demand for familiar boxes in which to confine her” and she says Harris herself explained this precise problem in 2019 when she said: “All of us who have become the first, part of the challenge is that people have their boxes. They have this set of boxes, and they’re trying to figure out which one you fit into. But the number of boxes they have is limited to whatever they’ve seen before.”

Harris, as a black woman, is even harder to pigeonhole than Gillard was. There is research to back this. Forbes, also connecting such calls to underlying biases, listed one study showing managers were able to judge women workers’ past performance accurately. But when managers were asked to predict the potential of those women, they tended to underestimate it. And they kept making the same mistake, even when the women proved them wrong. They literally couldn’t imagine a woman doing a job to the required standard.

In this persuasive explanation, the problem lies with voters (and media organisations). In contrast, the suggestion that if only voters knew enough they could be persuaded is that it lays the blame at the foot of the candidate, who, it is quite likely, can never satisfy such demands because there is no clear point at which “enough” is reached. Barack Obama seemed to point to this when he appealed to black male voters to stop using “excuses”, saying: “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has emphasised her middle-class roots.Credit: New York Times

Sexism is not the only factor here: as Gillard said of her own prime ministership, gender explains some of it but not all. Both Harris and Gillard took over just before an election, with little time to introduce themselves. And both women faced the muddling task of having to defend their predecessor while also distancing themselves from him. But then, you could argue these facts are a result of sexism too: that women often find themselves in power only as a last-minute afterthought, when the men chosen first have had to stand aside.

It is also true that Harris is often vague when answering questions and she has backflipped on earlier positions. But the same can be said a hundredfold of Donald Trump, just as it could be said of Abbott: female leaders continue to attract criticisms that men escape.

There is another factor, too. A crucial fact about politics in recent times is that major parties have become unmoored. It is unclear what they stand for; their ideologies are blurred at best. This has led to major parties from both left and right being either unwilling to declare what they stand for, or with broad policy approaches in which details remain ridiculously vague.

The right has found a disturbingly effective solution: the creation of atmospherics where policy positions once stood. Immigrants are demonised, strongman images are projected, the world is divided into “good” and “evil”. The left, in contrast, seems simply lost, trying not to provoke either their opponents or their base. You can see the results in Harris’ vague answers on both rights for trans people and building a wall at the Mexican border.

The Gillard years are a reminder that, if Harris wins, the criticisms based on her gender won’t stop. Ultimately, Gillard said the next female prime minister would find things easier than she had. We should hope so. But recent British prime ministers Theresa May and Liz Truss, despite not being firsts, faced similar attacks on their woodenness and opacity. As a society, we seem to like insisting that we don’t know women leaders. The more disturbing truth might be that too many of us don’t want to know them.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison; a regular columnist; and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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