Michael Wolff: Fed battle is all about gender

Michael Wolff | USA TODAY

The public bake-off between the economists Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen for the job of chairman of the Federal Reserve has boiled down, practically speaking, to discriminatory hiring practices

Janet Yellen's stand-out credential is that she is a woman.

Larry Summers' main drawback — or, certainly, among his most conspicuous characteristics — is that he is not.

You would have to be a naïf or dissembler of remarkable proportions not to see every argument for or against these candidates — and you might read each of these arguments as forms of letters of recommendation by their various sponsors — as reducible to a gender debate.

And this is not just a discussion of the symbolic significance of appointing the first woman as chairman of the Fed. The almost explicit argument is about gender traits and the specific way Summers and Yellen each represent their gender advantages or disadvantages.

He's a manly man (at least as academic bureaucrat types go), and she's a gentle woman (at least as professional women go).

The gender issue often lurks behind political choices, but is seldom, if ever, as clearly defined as it is by Summers and Yellen.

In Summers, you have, according to his proponents, a forceful, assertive, decisive and independent voice.

In Yellen, according to her supporters, you have a thoughtful, reticent, fair-minded, collaborator.

In the gender wars, now being fought most astutely by the Yellenists, this reduces even further: Summers is not just a man, but such an objectionable one; Yellen is not just a woman, but such a praiseworthy sort.

In other words, on a more specific and primal level than has ever been articulated in a public debate since it became largely illegal to posit professional difference between the sexes, we are on the verge of an open argument about relative gender virtues and talents.

Of the many things that distinguish Summers, one, not unironically, is that he got thrown out of the presidency of Harvard for seeming to suggest a woman's professional goals or orientation might be different from a man's.

The sides are drawn.

Gender begins to distinguish a political point of view, too. That Summers might be more partial to banks than Yellen is pretty much billed as a gender result.

Summers, as a certain kind of dominant man, is aligned with Wall Street, and hence with money, and hence with the existing power structure. He embodies the inclinations that have gotten us into so much financial trouble.

Yellen, as an unshowy (read middle-aged) woman, is more academic and collegial in nature, and has done long and unheralded stints in government; she represents the collective self and hence a higher level of public selflessness and probity.

As it happens, both Summers and Yellen are mainstream Democrats whose relative points of view really do not seem to differ all that much. But their sensibilities do. They may have many of the same positions, but they would, in clear code, surely have different instincts.

He is, of course, an insider, she, manifestly, an outsider.

That is, men are drawn to the spotlight. They make the job about themselves. About ego. About their own advancement for the sake of their own advancement. Power, to them, is self justifying. After all, one of Summers' main claims to the job is that he has earned it.

Women, on the other hand, function happily in relative anonymity, even obscurity. They bide their time. They develop a consensus and network. They are an equanimous part of the system. They wait their turn. Yellen, in the telling, should get the job because she deserves it — actually, she doesn't say that, her supporters do.

Now you could, in fact, flip this around, and see Summers as the perennial sore thumb and outsider, always battling to enter and then never quite fitting in when he gets there, and Yellen, as the consummate bureaucrat and insider, the comfortable and ever-permanent fixture, going along to getting along.

But the narrative is fixed: Summers is boys club, Yellen not.

This gender view has also become the essential argument about the direction of the Fed and the role of its chairman.

The hyper-masculine Fed takes the leadership position on all monetary questions; it makes its leverage a central part of any discussion; it uses its considerable clout as a singular market force. It's a big foot. And its voice and its personality and its muscle, emanate, most of all, from the mouth of its chairman. This is, arguably, the role, the man's role, the Fed has taken since Paul Volcker made the Fed chairman one of the most visible and most powerful figures in government.

The more self-effacing feminine Fed is not just a better partner to other parts of government influencing economic policy, but a Fed more sensitive to broader issues, a tilt, for instance, from a monetary emphasis to greater employment concerns. A woman is a more sagacious chairman. A more listening chairman. A more sharing one. It's a more holistic Fed.

While it might have seemed very difficult to find, especially at such a pinnacle of professional accomplishment, a way back to some of the most vapid, dumbed-down and oppressive gender roles and descriptions, we have found it.