Leadership Quote by Shirley Chisholm

Chisholm’s line lands like a budget memo delivered as an indictment: the country is mismanaging its most valuable resource, and the leak is sexism. The phrase “tremendous amounts” is doing strategic work. It’s not sentimental, not pleading for courtesy; it’s quantifying injustice in the blunt language of waste and public cost. You can almost hear the legislative logic behind it: if we claim to be a meritocracy, why are we running the system with half the talent sidelined?

The quiet bite is in “just because.” That “just” shrinks every lofty rationale for exclusion down to the petty fact of gender presentation. And “wears a skirt” is more than a metonym for women. It’s a jab at how discrimination operates through symbols and expectations - dress codes, “proper” demeanor, the whole apparatus of respectability that polices who is allowed to be authoritative. Chisholm doesn’t even grant patriarchy the dignity of an argument; she reduces it to wardrobe prejudice.

Context matters: Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black candidate to seek a major party’s presidential nomination. She knew that barriers aren’t abstract; they show up as closed doors, condescension, and “electability” lectures that mask fear of women in power. The intent is dual: a rallying cry to women and a direct challenge to institutions that pride themselves on fairness while quietly laundering bias into “standards.” It works because it reframes liberation not as a favor to women, but as a national self-sabotage we can no longer afford.