Tuesday, Nov. 8, Missouri will hold special elections in four districts. Nine candidates are running, among them, four are women. In the most recent Student Union elections on our campus, women nearly achieved parity: Women secured four of the 10 Treasury positions and three of the eight College of Arts & Sciences Senator positions. The near equality of those elections, however, does not reflect the distribution of representation in higher government positions. Women make up 51 percent of the population in the United States, yet comprise only 17 percent of Congress.

“Miss Representation” is a documentary film that investigates how the media’s portrayal of women has resulted in the underrepresentation of women in influential political positions. The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and has aired several times on OWN–the Oprah Winfrey Network.

“The media is both the message and the messenger,” Pat Mitchell, former president and CEO of PBS, explains in the film. Just look at the way Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton were criticized in the last Presidential election—news anchors across the country did not hesitate to comment on Clinton’s “haggard” appearance or inquire about whether or not Palin had breast implants.

Mona Lena Krook, an assistant professor in both the Political Science and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments, agreed that the media produces a large portion of the distorted images of women and ideas about gender. She recalls growing up with four TV channels and learning about email during her college orientation in the early ’90s. “Now, the media has gained more importance even though the messages have been confused. When people think about gender equality, they think about always moving forward, but the media today is far less radical—there is less of a social consciousness,” Krook said.

So do women possess less political ambition than men? For the answer, Krook pointed to the observation made by founding president of the White House Project, Marie Wilson, in “Miss Representation”: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” In previous generations, women formed their identities and learned about appropriate behavior from their parents and friends. Now, we watch how the media criticizes female politicians—some of the most powerful women in the country—and we see the current obsession with achieving feminine beauty and perfection, and so we question whether men are able to take any woman in America seriously.

But women are not innately less interested in holding positions of political influence. According to Krook, girls are not only equally likely, but also sometimes even more likely to run for political office and hold positions in student governments than boys. As children, girls and boys in equal number want to be president of the United States when they grow up, but by age 15 there is a huge disparity. “There is some period in your teens when women feel pressure to socialize themselves to step back and not put themselves forward,” Krook said.

Junior political science major Julia Pockros weighed in, “When looking at history, political leaders were often those who led armies and fought in wars, meaning men. That same idea exists today—women in politics have to exhibit the emotions of a fighter. But even more than that, it’s just not the historical ‘role’ of women in the same way that men are not supposed to stay at home.”

In the absence of being able to change the law, there are still ways that we, as college students, have the ability to change the concept of women’s “historical role” as well as the influence of the demeaning themes seen in the media. “Be brave on a person-to-person basis,” Krook encouraged.

It is also important to recognize that women can exercise their power by changing the way they participate in consumer culture, Krook argued. She concluded, “There isn’t a natural hierarchy, our society just teaches us that there is one.”