When Forbes came out with its 2010 listing of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World on Wednesday, Michelle Obama landed on top after coming in at #4 in 2009 (trading places with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, last year's #1 but now #4.) Almost immediately, the list has come under fire for various reasons.
Salon's Broadsheet doesn't like the fact that each woman listed also has her marital status and number of children highlighted. When Forbes compiled its world's most powerful people list last November, neither detail was included. (This, they note, was observed by NARAL's Mary Alice Karr.) I looked into this and although the claim is true, Forbes did include the marital status and number of children of each of the world's billionaires back in March. So I can't call this a case of gender discrimination.
But I do support another gripe about the Forbes list voiced by a number of critics frustrated at how it was compiled this year. As the New York Daily News explains it:
Hillary Clinton barely outranks Lady GaGa....The globe-trotting Secretary of State landed the No. 5 spot in this year's Forbes.com ratings, just two notches above the outrageous chart-topping singer....thanks to the introduction of a new process in ranking the world's 100 most powerful women...[which] mixed an earnings component with a "buzz factor," as opposed to past lists focused more on wealth and executive position.
The fact that Forbes has chosen to give significant weight to this "buzz factor" disturbs Gloria Feldt, whose recently-published book No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power offers women concrete steps to equalize gender power in politics, work, and love.
No stranger to female-empowerment events, Feldt is a past participant of the Forbes Most Powerful Women Summit and believes in celebrating women's successes. But as she told me via email:
I am getting a bit testy about the proliferation of conferences that talk about how powerful women are but do nothing in the collective to advance women who are not so powerful, or even to use their positions to bring other women through the doors we've struggled so hard to open....
The fact that Forbes ranks women in part according to the "buzz factor"...shows that they still view the little ladies as arm candy rather than leaders. And why is there a "most powerful women" list when there is no such list for men? When you look at their "most powerful people" list, you see few women and though they consider sphere of influence, that is defined very differently--more seriously, I would say--from "buzz factor."
Although in No Excuses Feldt examines women's ambivalent relationship with power, she sees that "ambivalence about women who are clearly powerful is also reflected in the way the culture attempts to define woman." The solution, according to Feldt:
[is] to redefine power on our own terms as the expansive leadership "power to" accomplish what we think needs to be done in this world, in contrast to the old male model of "power over" which presumes a finite pie and an oppressive control over others.
To Forbes' credit, they do attempt to consider female power in a manner similar to Feldt's approach in No Excuses. Writing about the process of researching and compiling the list, Meghan Casserly describes:
stumbl[ing] upon connection after connection between these extraordinary and influential women. Many worked together once upon a time, many more were rivals. Some...have given platforms to other women. Others...[have] changed the way women...run their companies....Power begets power, and with women, the effect can be viral.
They even craft a "Forbes Women Power Matrix" with the tagline, "When it comes to power, it's all about who you know," and situate Oprah Winfrey in the middle of the matrix.
But this is where the Forbes version of women's power falls apart. They again revert back to the male model Feldt describes as "power over" which assumes control over others; and although it's a more benevolent model Forbes is pitching, it still suggests that women don't claim their own power but more passively accept power passed along by others, namely Oprah. As Casserly sees it, "Power is not only shared, but traded, passed and punted."
What about power that is home grown? Self-nurtured? Power that arises from within?
The problem with an Oprah-centric matrix is that without Oprah at the center to confer power -- which in her case is her ability to bestow the "buzz factor" on those she chooses -- Forbes insinuates that these "powerful women" would not have "made it." But what about the power these women generated by themselves that put them within reach of Oprah's sphere of influence? Why is that downplayed or not mentioned?
It's a strange, disheartening sort of catch-22 and -- as Feldt sees it -- endemic to the issue of women and power:
Until women are willing to embrace their own power, we will remain stuck in our half-finished revolution. We will continue to be defined by others in ways we might not like, and we will not be able to walk with intention to lead our lives unlimited by Forbes' notion of whatever buzz factor we might possess.
Comments
The list is unbelievably useless. The fact that Lady Gaga (at 7th!) and Carla Bruni have been featured at all shows that “intellectuals” who make these lists are no better than fashion crazed teenagers across the world. Also most of these “powerful” women are powerful by association and not in their own right. Finally, one cannot call it 100 most powerful women in the “WORLD” if the list is so America-centric.
Shreya, good point about the list being America-centric. And the Lady Gaga issue also draws attention to how women’s power is defined. Having an impact on music and fashion and influencing teen girls certainly does not compare with nation-building or running a Fortune 500 company; men are judged so differently and it’s almost as if Forbes decided to lower the bar on the definition of power (as it pertains to women.)
But the underlying fact is this: Forbes wants to sell magazines and draw readers to Forbes Women. The prevailing attitude is that women will only ‘come’ if you include style and fashion in the mix. Obviously, truly substantive women aren’t seen as ‘interesting’ enough to be a selling point.