The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Beltway and the Baseball Diamond

This guest post comes to us from Lisa Lerer, a staff writer for Politico.com. 

BBC correspondent Katty Kay has an interesting piece up on the Daily Beast complaining about the use of sports metaphors by pundits and politicians:  

Because women feel excluded from these sports discussions, our normally confident voices are subdued. To turn the tables, imagine if these public conversations were liberally sprinkled with references to fashion, or yoga. It's as if Dana Perino had compared getting out of Iraq to extracting yourself from pigeon pose, or tracking Osama to finding vintage Pucci on eBay. But she didn't. She's a woman and more inclusive than that.

As a non-fan, I frequently have to ask for a translation when the stock metaphors come out on the trail and in the briefing room. Some of my female political journalist friends make a practice of routinely reading sports pages just to be more conversant.

But I think Kay is getting at a larger problem here: The Beltway can be an incredibly chauvinistic, macho place—a fact that won't change even if the pundits and pols drop all their sports clichés. What we really need to improve political discourse is a deeper bar of up-and-coming female politicians. To that end, it’s heartening to see this article from Alexandra Starr in the New Republic about Kirsten Gillibrand and other female career politicians.

The fact that women like Gillibrand don't feel obligated to speak about how they entered politics because of their work on behalf of kids, not to mention having to toil for years as local volunteers, shows that the landscape has changed. Gillibrand's aggressiveness may have engendered Tracy Flick snickers, but her rapid political rise used to be the exclusive province of men.

But back to the baseball diamond: I know sports metaphors are common not only in politics but business and other fields. Do they annoy you, XXFactors, as much as they annoy me? And, do they cut women out of the conversation?