Was Kamala Harris pushed over a glass cliff?
RULING THE WEEK  Vice President Kamala Harris is back in Washington, D.C. after a difficult week. Harris arrived in Guatemala on Monday, the first part of a three-day trip that also included Mexico, as part of the diplomatic task President Joe Biden assigned her in March: treating the root causes of migration at the southern border. Not great, Bob . After meeting with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei on Monday, Harris pledged to help Guatemalans find hope at home and promised millions of dollars of new American aid at a news conference. Her next line got a bit more attention, though: I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come, she said. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted that Harris comments were disappointing. Seeking asylum at any US border is a 100% legal method of arrival, AOC wrote. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to hammer the vice president for not having traveled to the border itself yet. Some saw this criticism coming from a mile away. In the spring, when reports of Harris specific portfolio emerged  immigration and voting rights  headlines called the issues politically fraught. Border issues divide our base  most Democratic voters will think she went too far or was too weak, and Republicans would love nothing more than to make this the central issue in any campaign against her, a Democratic strategist told the Washington Post, way back in March. This week, Slate called her Bidens crisis manager. USA Today asked if she was being set up for failure. While Harris reportedly asked to lead on voting rights, the origin of her migration assignment is less clear. To some spectators, though, her portfolio is typical of what often happens to women in leadership: the glass cliff. Its the idea that women tend to be appointed to leadership positions during times of crisis, ultimately setting them up to fail. The phrase was coined in 2005 by a pair of University of Exeter researchers who found in a study that companies that brought women onto their boards were more likely to have seen bad job performance in the five months before the women were added. One could certainly argue, and I would and I am, that giving her those two portfolios is very glass cliff-y, Barbara Kellerman, a lecturer in public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and founding executive director of the schools Center for Public Leadership, said of Harris. Shes been given two incredibly complex, convoluted and politically fraught domains, Kellerman said. And to succeed in one would have been miraculous. To succeed in both effectively simultaneously would have been virtually impossible.  Kellerman points out that immigration and voting rights are uniquely difficult compared with the responsibilities that are typically given to past vice presidents. President Barack Obama gave Biden a fairly general profile, Kellerman says. That portfolio included the Afghanistan drawdown and the stimulus  huge issues, to be sure, but not ones that invoke the same kinds of political passions that immigration and voting rights do. Democrats themselves have said [voting rights] is the most important issue facing not just the country but the world in terms of the survival of democracy, Kellerman says. Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a presidential historian, has written about the glass-cliff dynamics at play in Harris voting-rights assignment. She sees the heated criticism of the vice president this week as another way this trap works. There is a distinctly different approach to covering her than covering Biden. His missteps or more awkward answers are dismissed as Biden being Biden, whereas hers are treated as these huge fiascos, Chervinsky wrote in an email. After Senator Joe Manchins op-ed in which he came out against the For the People Act, voting rights is sure to become a lot trickier, too. Good afternoon and welcome to Women Rule! Let me know what you think of the newsletter at [email protected] . Follow me on Twitter here . Thank you to Maya Parthasarathy for putting together big parts of this newsletter. PHOTO OF THE WEEK: Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, speak to the media on Monday, June 7, at the National Palace in Guatemala City. | AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin  NUMBER OF THE WEEK -- $507 billion: The amount of money the U.S. economy has lost over the past 60 years as a result of the wage gap and other barriers to economic opportunity that Black women face, according to a report by financial services firm S&P Global released this week. Read the full report here . POLITICO SPECIAL REPORT -- Shes Running for New York City Council. But Newspapers Wont Publish Her Photo, by Hannah Dreyfus: In all but one way, Amber Adler is running a pretty normal campaign for New York city council. She knocks on doors and attends rallies; she campaigns outside of grocery stores and subway stations; she puts posters up across her district and places ads in local newspapers. But look for a picture of her face in one of those local papers, and youre not likely to find one. Because most of the magazines and newspapers in her neighborhood refuse to publish her photo. Adler, 37, is the first Orthodox Jewish woman to run for city council in her Brooklyn district, which includes ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods scattered throughout Borough Park and Midwood. And as she heads toward her June 22 primary, shes a victim of a fairly recent trend among Jewish media outlets in Orthodox neighborhoods in the United States: a refusal to publish photographs of women and girls for religious reasons. Which means if Adler wants campaign ads printed in the Jewish news, she cant be in most of them. For Adler, who is only the second ever Orthodox woman to run for publicly elected office in Brooklyn, the visual gag-order is yet another hurdle in an uphill campaign. She is butting up against expectations that Orthodox women dont assume positions of communal authority and should instead stick to more internal-facing roles. POLITICO Magazine  -- Women shoot to top of New York mayors race, via POLITICO  WHAT RULERS ARE READING  WOMEN AT WORK -- Senate Republicans block bill targeting gender pay gap, by Eleanor Mueller: Senate Republicans successfully blocked Democrats bill to narrow the gender wage gap Tuesday in the partys second use of the filibuster to block majority-backed legislation. The Paycheck Fairness Act would require employers to demonstrate that any gap in pay between a man and a woman was due to job performance rather than gender. It would also bar employers from retaliating against workers for sharing salary information and from inquiring into or taking into consideration an employees wage history. Another provision would authorize the creation of a grant program that would train women on salary negotiations and require public education regarding wage discrimination, among other things. We're hearing about how women are not returning to the market right now because of a number of reasons, including that they just arent getting paid enough to pay for child care and the other challenges they have, Senate HELP Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the bills Senate sponsor, told POLITICO. So if we want our economy to grow, we need to pay women what they're worth.  The bill, voted down 49-50, would have required 60 votes to advance. Most GOP lawmakers oppose the measure, which they say is redundant and a burden on employers. Gender pay discrimination is already illegal, they point out. POLITICO  IN HEALTH CARE -- Why Unwell Women Have Gone Misdiagnosed for Centuries, via The New York Times ... What My Covid-19 Vaccine Saga Taught Me About the U.S. Health Care System, via POLITICO Magazine  ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL -- Campaign-funded child care helps moms run for office  meet the woman making it happen, by Courtney Connley: In the U.S., 86% of American women will be mothers by the time they are 44 years old. Yet, just 6% of people currently in Congress are mothers with school-aged children, according to a report recently released by the Vote Mama Foundation. Allowing campaign funds to be used for child care expenses could be a gamechanger for increasing this pipeline of moms, says Grechen Shirley [a former U.S. House candidate from New York who lost her race in 2018]. ...  Since the launch of the Vote Mama Foundation, Grechen Shirley and her team have been working with legislators across the country to pass bills that will allow candidates to use campaign funds for child care. So far, she says 22 states have now approved the use of campaign funds to cover child-care needs. Her goal, she says, is for all states to pass legislation allowing candidates to use campaign funds for child-care expenses by 2023. CNBC  #METOO WATCH -- Biden Justice Department defends Trump in suit over rape denial, by Josh Gerstein: The Biden administration is pressing on with a controversial Justice Department defense of President Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit brought by a writer who accused him of raping her at a New York City department store in the 1990s. The brief filed on Monday night with a federal appeals court is an illustration of how administrations of sharply different political outlooks often flock to the same legal positions in court, even if it means seeming to excuse or immunize alleged bad conduct by their predecessors. In the filing with the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department insisted that it was not endorsing Trumps conduct toward the writer, E. Jean Carroll, even as it argued that a law governing suits against federal officials justified the governments move to take over the former presidents defense in the case.   Carroll's lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said she was disturbed by the Biden administration's decision to back Trump in the case. It is horrific that Donald Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in a New York City department store many years ago, Kaplan said. But it is truly shocking that the current Department of Justice would allow Donald Trump to get away with lying about it, thereby depriving our client of her day in court. The DOJs position is not only legally wrong, it is morally wrong since it would give federal officials free license to cover up private sexual misconduct by publicly brutalizing any woman who has the courage to come forward. POLITICO  CULTURE CLUB -- Old Women, by Jillian Steinhauer: The best way to succeed as a woman artist is to be old. Not necessarily dead yet, but with the specter of death hanging over you. Youve got to be past seventy, at least. Preferably youve been making art for a long time, and its either been gathering dust in your home, rarely if ever shown, or is exhibited mostly in alternative and educational spaces. This way, you arrive with a body of work intact: youve already found your voice and honed your craft. Your art is visionarywhich means valuableand youve resisted the odds, outlasted the forces of sexism, racism, and any other exclusionary isms that apply. Youre a safe bet at the same time as youre a discovery. ...  A fall 2019 report by the publications Artnet News and In Other Words found that despite much clamor over increased attention being paid to artists from long-marginalized groups, just 11% of all acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at 26 prominent American museums over the past decade were of work by female artists. The market is even worse: between 2008 and the first part of 2019, only 2 percent of the roughly $197 billion spent on art at auction went toward works by women. As if that werent bad enough, in the same period, more money was spent on pieces by Picasso than on those by six thousand female artists combined. On the one hand, they give the lie to the liberal narrative of progress. I think here of Carolee Schneemann, who in 1999 declined a request to nominate someone for a MacArthur fellowship. I am not the only woman artist with a distinguished history who has no way to sustain her work, nor provide for her future, she wrote in a letter explaining her own bleak financial situation. Using a phrase that has stuck indelibly in my mind, she spoke of being in dire straits while enduring a fantasy of success and achievement. The Believer  UPDATE FROM OHIO -- Ohio Republican women are running for Congress and U.S. Senate. Can they catch up to Democrats? via The Columbus Dispatch  VIDEO -- The new controversy around Rep. Ilhan Omar, in 5 minutes    WOMEN RULERS  TRANSITIONS -- Sangita Sigdyal will be president and CEO of Verified Voting. She most recently was an executive vice president at FairVote.  Stella Bugbee will be the new editor of the NYTs Styles section . Most recently, has been an editor at large at New York magazine. ....  Former Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) will be national outreach director at Utah State Universitys Center for Growth and Opportunity.  Lynda Tran is now senior adviser and director of public engagement at the Department of Transportation. Most recently, she was a partner at 270 Strategies and a CBS News political contributor. ...  Kelley Eckels Currie, former ambassador-at-large for global womens issues, has joined Center for a New American Security as a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program.  Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, a former program executive at NASA, is now assistant director for space policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. (h/t Playbook)  Follow us on Twitter Katelyn Fossett @KatelynFossett