But did either of these women, or a handful of other formidable females whose exploits were recorded by history, ever actually rule the world? That topic took center-stage before an overflow audience at a Zócalo/Getty panel discussion that roamed from pharaonic Egypt to the court of Queen Elizabeth I to the White House.

Moderated by Bettany Hughes, a historian and documentary filmmaker, the conversation drew on the expertise of UCLA archaeologist Kara Cooney, author of The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, and University of Manchester Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, author of Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt.

After confessing to her “enormous girl crush” on Cooney and Tyldesley for their exemplary scholarship, Hughes drove right into what she ironically called the “completely uncomplicated and uncontroversial question” of whether women, in fact, ever have ruled the world.

For feminists, the answer wasn’t encouraging.

“I don’t know,” Tyldesley replied. “It was always, I think, unusual for a woman to take a position of power.”

Cooney concurred definitively, “the answer is no.”

But even if there is “no mythical matriarchy to which we can return,” as one panelist put it, history offers some instructive examples of women who were able to take and hold power through a combination of brilliance, bravery, guile, beauty, gender-bending self-reinvention, and—perhaps most importantly—the ability to control and manipulate their own image.

In ancient times, as now, women seeking to rule had to contend with the constraints imposed by existing cultural traditions, political structures, patriarchal hierarchies, and male-driven religions. While earth-mother goddesses and fertility deities abounded in the ancient world, aspiring women rulers had to push back against spiritual systems dominated by male gods and male priestly castes. That may have been even truer under the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam than it was in pagan cultures. “Monotheism usually doesn’t do anybody any favors, particularly women,” Cooney observed.

Tyldesley cautioned that historians of the ancient world, like herself, must be very careful about making assumptions that often have to be based on fragmentary evidence and scraps of records.

But one powerful woman who history definitely shows to have been in charge was Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. This remarkable ruler helped establish trade networks and was a prolific builder of temples and other public works. An inscription on her tomb described her as “Mistress of Two Lands,” the type of homage that Egypt’s mightiest male potentates typically showered on themselves.

“In a way, it speaks to how the Egyptian culture allowed a female to take all those claims as her own and feminize them,” Cooney said.

Indeed, Tyldesley chimed in, the concept of “king” in ancient Egypt wasn’t necessarily gender-linked; it was quite possible for a woman to take on that role, although usually the title was bestowed on males. Over the course of her career and reign (circa 1478–1458 B.C.), Hatshepsut controlled her image in strategic ways that underscored the changing nature of her power.

To wit, early on, she was represented in a nubile, eroticized, traditionally feminine style. But as her reign progressed, she adopted a more masculine public persona and custom of dress. In one of her best-known images, a statue in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she registers as an almost androgynous being; in other representations, she’s buff and muscled like a man.

Hatshepsut’s fluid style of self-representation was matched by her flexible style of power-wielding, Tyldesley suggested. Instead of subjugating conquered peoples to try to make them part of the Egyptian empire, she preferred to engage them through trade.

“I think if you’re a woman in the ancient world, Egypt is the place to be,” Tyldesley concluded.

Cooney agreed that it may have been easier for a woman to take power in Egypt, “an authoritarian, tightly controlled society” ruled by dynasty, as opposed to democratic Greece or republican Rome. Cooney drew a parallel to Hillary Clinton, speculating about whether we associate the former Secretary of State and one-time First Lady with dynastic power, rather than judging her on the basis of her own merits.

Taking up the point, Tyldesley noted that there are examples of ancient queens who temporarily filled in as rulers for husbands who had died or were away in battle. These women often ruled on behalf of their infant sons until their offspring were old enough to assume the throne, at which point their mothers stepped back from power.

Do women rule differently from men? It’s a question that haunts Cooney, who said that, although she wavers on an answer, “the older I get, the more I read, the more I live in Trump’s America, [I believe] that women do rule differently.”

Both today and throughout the centuries, powerful women often have aroused a deep ambivalence. Hughes noted that while a goddess like Venus is generally depicted as a creature of pure, unadulterated beauty and sensuality—fairly harmless, apart from her role in starting the Trojan War—some of Venus’s counterparts, like Isis, are represented in more complex ways. They’re fighters as well as lovers, “bringers of death as well as bringers of life.”

What’s more, Cooney said, there’s “a great disconnect” between the way that some societies worshipped man-eating, ferocious goddesses while remaining deeply sexist and segregated. “That fierceness, that PMS-ing b!$©h” quality is something that certain societies had to harness and tame, and put to use in more socially acceptable ways, like protecting the king.

Perhaps few rulers embody the contradictory demands placed on women more than Nefertiti, who appears to have followed a singular trajectory from queen to co-ruler to solo ruler. In the world’s imagination, she’s the glamorous woman immortalized in a famous bust that sits in a Berlin museum. But according to Tyldesley, “We don’t even know if she was beautiful. We have this one bust and from that, this whole mythology has developed.”

Similarly, much of what we think we know about Cleopatra—from her putative powers of seduction to the manner of her suicide—comes from the writings of Roman authors, filtered through the plays of Shakespeare. Another powerful woman whose name gets short shrift and whose remarkable deeds have been obscured by time is the 6th-century empress Theodora, a humble exotic dancer who became a powerful and revered ruler-reformer—a sort of Byzantine Eva Perón.

Although the evening was devoted to examining female rulers of the pre-Christian world, one audience member during the question period raised the example of Queen Elizabeth I. The panelists agreed that she should be on the list of the world’s 10 most powerful female rulers of all time. Another audience member proposed Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving British prime minister known as the “Iron Lady” for her take-no-prisoners economic policies and steely response to Argentina’s attempted takeover of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982.

Hughes replied that although Thatcher still divides Britain as deeply as Marmite, “she definitely taught me that women can be in power.”

“Whether you like her policies or not,” Tyldesley said that Mrs. T ensured that, “girls don’t grow up in England thinking, ‘I can’t be the prime minister.’”

But, in the end, it may not be possible to assess how much women like Thatcher, Clinton, and Angela Merkel owe to their ancient female political forebears.

“I think we’re missing a whole host of powerful women,” Tyldesley said, “simply because there wasn’t someone to write down what they do.”

The post Women Rocked the Ancient World—But Ruling It Was Harder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The pay gap, one barometer of progress, hasn’t budged in a decade, according to a new study from the American Association of University Women. For every dollar earned by a man, a woman earns 79 cents. That chasm is considerably wider for black and Latino women, and for women with children.

Women who forge ahead face other challenges. In academia, in the male-dominated STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, instances of sexual harassment are being documented with increasing frequency. And if women pursue projects that primarily benefit other women, the obstacles can be particularly daunting. Recent news accounts highlight these struggles, from one entrepreneur’s Silicon Valley quest to find investors for a hiring website that would make corporate America friendlier to women, to the years of frustration an engineer and her female business partner endured while seeking funding for tampon technology that could give early warning of cancer and reproductive diseases.

Naming the problem can, in itself, mark a kind of progress: on the elite conference circuit, the ubiquity of all-male panels is being called out on social media. At this year’s World Economic Forum, more than three-quarters of the speakers and moderators were men. Despite that fact (or perhaps because of it), “women” was one of the five-day Davos gathering of global elites’ most-Tweeted topics.

One path to change is leadership—when women lead, their skills and contributions are more likely to be recognized, and they in turn are more likely to acknowledge the accomplishments of other women. In advance of an upcoming Zócalo Public Square event with Time political correspondent and New America Fellow Jay Newton-Small asking “Are Women Changing the Way Institutions Are Run?”, we posed a related question to several women leaders: What is the single biggest change we’ve seen as a result of women in leadership roles?

The post What Happens When Women Run the World? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But since October 2015, when the Wall Street Journal first showed that her company’s technology might not work and federal authorities began investigating Theranos, Holmes has looked perfectly beastly in the images illustrating savage media profiles.

In my analysis of Holmes’ declining pulchritude in the media, I find myself engaged in a squirm-inducing labor that picks apart another woman’s appearance. In her excellent book The Argonauts, memoirist and critic Maggie Nelson warns us that even while we challenge the social categories that oppress us, we may simply wind up reinforcing those oppressions; that even while we think that we are wielding crowbars that will let us out of our social and political prisons, we actually just hold keys that open into other kinds of jails. I am going to proceed, nevertheless, because Holmes’ photographic debasement is interesting, wrong, and diverts us from real issues. Even if I am looking out of my sanitarium window, I like the view.

According to my studies, Elizabeth Holmes suffers the tragedy shared by most humans over the age of 12: She must be very carefully posed in order to look pretty in photographs. Photographers have a 367 percent chance of making Elizabeth Holmes look supremely attractive if they shoot her straight on or at a slight angle. She should be shot smiling, but only slightly, and with a closed mouth. Black and white portraits, which make people appear more glamorous and younger, are preferable to color. Holmes must be heavily contoured and shot from way on high and straight on, so her cheekbones will appear. If she is not shot from a good angle, or is lit badly, or has teeth, or is in color that is not retouched, she will look ungainly, maybe slightly pudgy, jowly, or even frightened or insane.

Elizabeth Holmes started Theranos in 2003, when she was a 19-year-old Stanford University chemical engineering major. She had the idea that a wide variety of medical tests, for everything from Herpes to cholesterol, could be accomplished using an infinitesimal amount of blood and what she calls an “Edison machine.” She sold this idea to Walgreens, which began building Theranos Wellness Centers. This new model for blood tests would liberate the consumer from having to go through a physician to get a blood test approved.

Many people loved the idea. Henry Kissinger thought Holmes was onto something. George P. Shultz concurred. Oracle’s Larry Ellison glommed onto her. So did former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. So many formerly incredible men who were not life scientists thought that Elizabeth Holmes was smart that they dog-piled onto her board of directors and gave her money. In 2005, Theranos was worth $16 million, and then in 2010, it was worth $1 billion.

Everybody loved Theranos, except for intelligent people in Silicon Valley who just murmured warily and didn’t invest. In September 2015, Holmes was still on her upswing, and Forbes shot her in black and white, with her hair up, for its “400” issue ranking the richest people in America. She looks matte and resplendent with heavy lipstick on her Mona Lisa smile and a lot of mascara. She’s contoured so that she has deep cheekbones, and she’s also wearing the black turtleneck favored by Steve Jobs.

In October 2015, her troubles began: The Wall Street Journal published its first denunciation of Holmes, “Hot Start-Up Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology.” Here, reporter John Carreyrou noted that Theranos was now valued at $9 billion, but that an insider admitted that some employees were “leery about the [Edison] machine’s accuracy.” Also, according to an insider, the company had only done a paltry 15 tests using the Edison in December of 2014. But the flow of attractive Holmes covers kept multiplying on newsstands. The same month that the Journal drew its first Theranos blood, Holmes appeared on the cover of Inc. wearing the black turtleneck, smiling with Mona Lisa flair, alongside the banner, “The Next Steve Jobs.” She is shot straight on but is not short-lit, though she is contoured and wearing lipstick. That same month, Holmes appeared on a cover of T, The New York Times Style Magazine. Her three-quarters profile shot might have been ungorgeous except that her hair, which is tied back, has tendrils that sweep elegantly over the lower part of her face. Holmes is sort of squinting adventurously and appears to be standing in the Wonder Woman position, which Harvard Business School Professor Amy Cuddy has famously said can improve your confidence.

But evidence piled up in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation that Theranos testing is prone to false positives (though, blood testing technology in general seems teeth-gratingly inaccurate if you look too deeply at the statistics).

Now the knives were out, and other media gleefully began using the worst Holmes photos they could find. Business Insider illustrated one article with two images: One showed her naturally lit, wearing a turtleneck, not-smiling, scared-looking, shiny, uncontoured, and looking down in a manner that maximizes the jowls. This picture could be justified as an action shot; it’s a still frame from a disastrous interview the article dissects, where Holmes began to see her future and bright dreams slip away. However, the other image has no apparent utility except to illustrate that Holmes is not attractive or prepossessing, even when she tries to be. In this picture, she stands in a black formal gown with her hair down, but she’s stooped and tensely smiling as if she is apologizing.

This spring, the unflattering photos continued to proliferate in both the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair.

But the worst photographs came after federal authorities confirmed in March that they are investigating Theranos and Holmes for misleading investors and federal officials. New York magazine ornamented its April 2016 article on the criminal probe with a low-angled, top-lit shot of Holmes looking crazy-eyed and open-mouthed and as if she is just about to start laughing hysterically or maybe begin screaming. When you click on the magnify button helpfully placed on the photograph, you can see very clearly that Holmes is wearing heavy foundation, has moles on her cheeks and bags beneath her eyes, and is drained of all human color.

We have seen this story-told-in-pictures before, but usually it is in fairy tales involving the demonic daughters of Salem, who begin apple-cheeked and smiling but then turn froggy and old as soon as the baby-eating allegations get out. It may be true that Holmes is a masterful con artist who swindled a host of investors. But what’s more fascinating is the art of the photographer and editor who play an equally clever game by staging this circus of hate.

At first, they depict Holmes as a paragon of white female exceptionalism, a myth she doesn’t necessarily live up to. Then, she is deeply deprived of that form of affirmative action when she is revealed as more human, and portrayed as unrealistically hideous. The public appetite for beautiful white female billionaires is ravenous for about two minutes, after which it devolves quickly into a blood tide of anti-feminist jealousy and lulz. It is unclear how to divvy up Holmes’s assigned guilt: A look at the Dorian Gray-like fable told in the nation’s magazines and newspaper teach us that while we may harbor reasonable anger against Holmes for her possible negligence or deceit, we reserve the rest of our ire for her sliding cheeks and bug eyes, which I predict will get ever sweatier and more dewlap-focused as her dog days drag on.

The post Is the Media Going Too Far in Exposing the Theranos Founder’s Ugly Side? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.