Women Don't Like Numbers

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

Or at least that’s what some “communication experts” want the City of Austin to believe. In a historic vote last fall, women took seven of the eleven City Council seats. It’s the first time we’ve had a majority of women on the Council. This was such a radical change that the City Manager decided to seek some outside assistance.

In an post published yesterday on the Austin American-Statesman blog, City Hall reporter Lilly Rockwell covers some of the more interesting points. Here are a few lifted from her post:

• Women ask lots of questions.
• Women don’t want to deal with numbers.
• Women are taking over, Hillary Clinton will only encourage this.

The presenters – one of them being Jonathan K. Allen – have since issued a statement saying their quotes were taken out of context and the video was promptly taken offline. But luckily, I grabbed a copy before it disappeared into nothing, so let’s check on some of those “out of context” quotes.

If you want to play along, I’ve uploaded it to our “Try it Now” page so you can explore with me:

The Changing Dynamics in Governance: Women Leading in Local Government

First, let’s see if there are any useful keywords. By visiting the “Spoken Words” tab on the left at the above link, we get a good list. This list includes city (38 mentions), women (25 mentions), change (15 mentions), and a number of others. Oddly enough, Florida is on the list with 14 mentions but neither Texas nor Austin made the top 20 words.

More importantly, let’s look for the specific things Ms Rockwell mentioned by using the Search tab:

• Searching for questions, we get a bunch of hits. Starting with the one at 12:08, we get the following quote:
  • “ten questions I had to patiently respond to. And then I said ‘ah ha, that’s how I have to deal with the commission’.” where he goes on to compare a conversation with his 11 year old daughter to talking with the all woman commission.
• Searching for numbers gives some results but nothing particularly useful.
• Searching for financial tells a different story:
  • If we jump to the occurrence at 19:37, we get him quoting his female elected official, “I don’t want to hear about the financial impact. I want to know how this impacts the overall community.”
• Searching for Hillary shows a single instance but adds another quote at 22:22:
  • “If Hillary Clinton runs – just runs for the office – you’re going to see even greater numbers in leadership positions.”
• Searching for leadership exposes another quotes to ponder:
  • Starting at 9:47: “..coming to leadership positions. So when you talk about that. I think we’re in a trend where you see a lot of activists coming to government. And when you have activists coming to government – nothing wrong about it – but a lot of them don’t have a lot of experience as they move up through the process. They were the highest vote getter and the next day, they’re in the leadership seat and you have to interact with them.”

Unfortunately, the recording from the other presenter isn’t available. If you have this video, please contact me – keith@clarify.io – and I’ll dig into it.

So basically.. yes, Allen said exactly what Ms Rockwell claimed he said. And he said it in the context that she claimed.

This isn’t “he said, she said.“

This is “she said what he said.“

You can watch the video in its entirety here:

The Changing Dynamics in Governance: Women Leading in Local Government