Don Lemon's comment that Republican presidential nominee Nikki Haley is past her prime essentially ignores women as professionals, according to a humanities expert at Northeastern University.
Lemon, a “CNN This Morning” co-host, also said a woman is considered to be in her prime in her “20s, 30s and maybe even 40s.” Haley is 51.
“Why the hell would someone say 20, 30, 40,” he says Martha Johnson, associate professor of government at Northeastern University's Mills College and College of Social Sciences and Humanities. “That's only if you think about women and their looks or their reproductive capacity, their kind of sexuality.”
Johnson says women actually hit their stride in politics and the corporate world much later in life than men, according to research. Because of the way family responsibilities are still distributed in our society, women often have competing obligations to bear and care for children earlier in life.
“If we're talking about politics, a woman's prime is in your 50s, 60s, 70s,” she says.
The same goes for the job market, he says Alicia Modestinoassociate professor of public policy, civic affairs, and economics at Northeastern and director of research at the Dukakis Center.
Labor force participation rates, or the percentage of the civilian population that is working or actively looking for work, peaks earlier for men — between the ages of 25 and 45 — than for women (between the ages of 45 and 50), he says. Women also reach the highest levels of earnings later in their careers than men because they do not reach their prime in the labor market until their children are grown or leave for college.
During a Feb. 16 show, Lemon, 56, discussed with co-stars Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins a proposal Haley had made announcing her 2024 run for president. The next day, he said he regretted “ artless” comment by .
Haley, who previously served as governor of South Carolina and as the United States' ambassador to the United Nations, said she would support mandatory mental capacity tests for politicians over 75. Some interpreted her proposal as a criticism of President Joe Biden, 80, and former President Donald Trump, 76, who is running for office again.
“It says, people, politicians are suddenly not in their prime. Nikki Haley is not in her prime,” Lemon said on air. “A woman is considered to be in her prime [their] 20s and 30s and maybe even 40s.”
“First for what?” Harlow replied.
According to Modestino, employers promote men more easily than women, especially in “greedy jobs” that require long hours and 24-hour contact with clients such as lawyers, consultants and other managerial positions. Women are penalized for taking a lot of care of the children but not putting in as many working hours at work.
Looking at doctors, Modestino found that for men and women without children, the salary trajectories were exactly the same.
“Women only fall off when they have kids and that's really about the hours,” she says.
These reasons also make it difficult for women to get entry-level positions and find funding to advance their political careers, Johnson says.
Once female candidates have the strength of their party behind them and get a nomination, voters don't show as much gender bias as one might expect, according to voting patterns, Johnson says. But the problem is that within the parties there is this bias in the nomination process as well as in the subsequent media coverage.
While there is some variation in the survey, Johnson says, female candidates get different types of questions from the media, are biased about their stances on social and family issues, and are often questioned about their abilities. In addition, much coverage focuses on the physical characteristics of female politicians.
On average, female candidates are often more qualified than men because they need to have more on their resume to show they're fit to run for office, Johnson says.
Johnson doesn't think age itself matters in whether a politician is up to the job. What matters far more, he says, for both male and female candidates, is their ability to govern. They must have accumulated resources, i.e. experience, expertise, connections and money.
“This takes time,” Johnson says. “So that's part of why successful politicians are often older.”
On Haley supporting mental capacity tests, Johnson says it wouldn't be unprecedented because other places in the world have or had an age limit for politicians. But what is problematic, he says, is setting an age for mandatory testing.
There's no reason to specifically target older people, Johnson says, since difficulties with cognitive ability can come into play at any age for a variety of reasons.
Modestino believes age limits would make sense for positions where a person makes decisions that affect other people either in the workplace or in policy making.
He says age counts in every job. Blue-collar workers typically retire earlier because the body wears out faster than the mind, and everyone reaches the point of cognitive decline.
“There is no superman for whom this is not the case,” he says, and it is up to scientists to propose age limits.
Aging has a negative stereotype while cognitively it is the opposite, he says Christy Chung professor of psychology, associate provost for research, scholarship and collaborations, and director of the Mills Cognition Lab.
In the biological literature, the brain is fully developed and at its cognitive peak in the early 20s, but that's just one thing, Chung says. With age people develop many other abilities that may be more important for a leader.
“As you get older, you just know more things. So if you focus on that, cognitively, there's actually an increase as we get older,” he says.
In her research Chung found that although certain types of memory begin to decline with age, they are offset by the development of semantic memory.
Semantic memory is a conscious long-term memory that is responsible for storing information as well as meaning, understanding and conceptual facts about the world. That's why our knowledge base, vocabulary and wisdom grow with age.
Chung also found that older people are better at regulating their emotions. They are better at taking other people's opinions as they get older too.
In addition, Chung studied the positivity effect, which means that people who get older tend to focus on things that are meaningful to them. And important information is often positive, he says.
“If you think about healthy seniors, they have a lot to contribute to society, especially in terms of leadership,” says Chung.
Alena Kuzub is a reporter for Northeastern Global News. Email her at a.kuzub@northeastern.edu. Follow her on Twitter @AlenaKuzub.
