How Hillary Clinton is helping GOP women

Even the Hillary haters would have to agree that she’s good for one thing: getting voters to see that women can play at the highest level of government. No matter what they think about her handling of Benghazi, Clinton’s visibility is a plus in a land where a measly one out of five pols roaming the halls of Congress is female.

Whether she runs for president or not (and, of course she’s running), Clinton’s supposed fictional depiction in the new CBS drama, “Madam Secretary,” about the exploits of a newly minted secretary of State and mom of two, will most likely help all female politicians — not just the former New York senator and her Democratic counterparts — by raising awareness that hey, women can really do this stuff. (Unless, of course, you’re Shenna Bellows fighting a rare female vs. female Senate race in Maine, where incumbent Republican Susan Collins is killing it.)

Research shows that strong, highly functioning female characters serve as role models and change public perceptions of what women can accomplish. By watching shows about female politicians, voters more easily imagine a government run by women. And, the more our daughters see images of women leading our country, the more they believe that they can hold any elective office in the land.

{mosads}So the fact that the reviews for the Morgan Freeman-backed series (Sundays at 8:30pm EDT on CBS] glisten with praise: “riveting,” “splendid,” “entertaining” and “ably led by Tea Leoni,” is positive news for all women who strive to make the world a better place, no matter what their politics.

Still don’t believe it?

Let’s talk to a card-carrying Mensa actress. Academy Award-winner Geena Davis, who played a female president on ABC’s “Commander in Chief” series, advocates seeing more positive media images of powerful women as a way to change our male-dominated culture. Davis, 58, is known for (among other things) her role as Thelma in the girl-power film “Thelma and Louise.” She’s a former nationally ranked archer, and founder of the nonprofit Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. At her institute’s recent conference in Washington, she quoted a poll taken during the “Commander” that series found 68 percent of people who were familiar with the drama were more likely to vote for women.

“That’s why media images are so powerful,” Davis tells me. “Life imitates art.”

Megan Beyer, director of external affairs for EDGE Strategies, a Switzerland-based company that verifies that females are in leadership pipeline at companies — believes “it’s the time for women” to penetrate the top spots in all industries.

But whether or not that’s true, and whether positive TV and film images move the dial, there is still a paucity of female players interested in the real-life political terrain — and it’s a treacherous path once elected. The female pols who get voted in to click their heels on the marble halls of the Capitol are more likely to trade their Manolos for wing tips the higher they climb the political ladder, says Abigail Disney, a television producer who spoke at the Institute on Gender in Media. “Female politicians who get to the top have to act more like men.”

Just ask New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D), who was told by a male colleague not to “lose too much weight” because “I like my girls chubby.” Gillibrand exposed her battles with sexism on Capitol Hill in her recently released book, Off the Sidelines. Yet she decided not to name names saying, “It’s less important who they are than what they said.” (The New York Times later reported that this offender is the late Sen. Daniel Inouye [D-Hawaii], which Gillibrand will not verify.)

Female lawmakers “have to calibrate how open — as a powerful woman — they can be,” says Jill Dougherty, a former CNN correspondent who covered the White House and State Department and is now a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center. She notes that some women on Capitol Hill buck that trend and “get together socially to work up a platform or an idea” that crosses party lines, a rarity today among their male counterparts.

As a media critic, I’ll go out on a limb and say that women have a long way to go both on screen and off. The depictions of women in “Real Housewives” — of any city — are proof of that. And we don’t need to read the 2011 Davis Institute-funded study to know that there’s far more female T&A than political prowess on TV.

While Carrie Mathison, the CIA operative in “Homeland” played by Claire Danes, and Olivia Pope, the D.C. fixer in “Scandal” played by Kerry Washington, have burst onto the scene since then, it’s simply not enough.

Until we have a real female commander-in-chief — whether Hillary Clinton or a female GOP contender like South Carolina’s Nikki Haley or New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, whom Ann Romney recently said she would “love to see” run, we’ll have to settle for fictional forerunners to fight our battles.

Ashburn is a veteran Washington-based reporter and analyst covering media and politics.