The Speakers
Location: Mary Graydon Center 3 American University
Date: Thursday, January 13, 2011
Before we begin this evening, I would be remiss not to mention the events of last week and the tragedy in Tucson, Arizona. As we all know, a horrible thing happened last Saturday, not only to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, but also to members of her staff, concerned constituents, innocent bystanders and to the American people. Undoubtedly, we will be discussing these events throughout the course of the coming weeks, months, and years. We will debate the extent to which politically charged rhetoric has a place in American discourse. We will debate issues of gun control and the 2nd amendment, and we will revisit the need for broader mental health coverage and policies that promote mental health care.
One thing we will likely not debate however, is that something positive has to emerge from this tragedy. Otherwise, it's too difficult to figure out how to digest this and move forward. Last night, President Barack Obama put it far more beautifully and cogently than I ever could. In his words he said: “Imagine, imagine here for a moment, a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just beginning to glimpse that someday she too might play a role in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and would be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by cynicism, vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted. I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.”
In order to do that - in order to live up to our democratic ideals of the United States government, in order to ensure that our government is the best it possibly can be, in order to ensure that politics really is a noble profession, we actually need to ensure that women are also involved as key players. The 2010 midterm elections moved us in the wrong direction. Women are 52 percent of the population, more than 50 percent of voters, yet for the first time in 30 years, this election amounted to a net decrease in the percentages of women serving in the US Congress. When the 112th Congress convened last week, 83 percent of the members of the U.S. Senate and 84 percent of the members of the US House of Representatives were men. 44 of our 50 states currently have male governors in the governor's mansions, 93 of the country's 100 largest cities across the country have male mayors in City Halls, 76 percent of state legislators and 75 percent of statewide elected officials across the country are men. Moreover, 89 nations now surpass the United States in terms of the percentages of women serving in their national legislatures.
Tonight, we will discuss women's under-representation, their experiences with power, leadership, and the media, and the importance of women's presence in the political system. So, basically, we’ll start to understand how we can make our democracy better and ensure that women are included. Let me now turn to our panelists. Before I formally introduce Gloria Feldt, I should say that I met Gloria six years ago when I was a professor at Brown University and I had just launched my own campaign for Congress. Taking on a relatively popular incumbent in the democratic primary is not a way to make friends and influence people it turns out. And Gloria, despite this, was a supporter from day one, and in large part because of her endorsement and support, other people came on board. So basically, Gloria can do whatever she wants for the rest of her life and she will always be able to count on me as her number one fan.
Gloria Feldt is a nationally renowned activist for social justice and author of the books, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power (2010), The War on Choice (2004), and Behind Every Choice Is a Story (2003). She is co-author (with actress Kathleen Turner) of the New York Times bestseller Send Yourself Roses (2008). Gloria served as president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1996-2005. She currently teaches at Arizona State University, she’s taught a course through the Women & Politics Institute at American University and serves on the board of the Women's Media Center and Emerge America.
Karen Finney is an independent consultant who works with political and corporate clients in the areas of political and communication strategy, message development, media training, crisis communications, branding, leadership development, and public affairs. Karen brings more than 17 years of experience in national politics and campaigns, ranging from working for the Clinton Administration and New York State, to the Democratic National Committee. Her corporate and public sector work includes Scholastic Inc. and the New York City Board of Education.
Amanda Hess received a degree in Creative Writing in 2003. She covered the sex and gender beat for the Washington City Paper, where she wrote about sex crimes, gender bias, and sexuality on college campuses, as well as the Washington, D.C. police department. She currently blogs for TBD.com; where her posts comment on an array of topics, including LGBT issues and sexual assault.
I am Jennifer L. Lawless. I am an Associate Professor of Government and Director of the Women & Politics Institute. A nationally recognized expert on women's involvement in politics, I co-authored (with Richard L. Fox) the books, It Takes A Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office (2005) and It Still Takes A Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office (2010). My scholarly analysis and political commentary are regularly quoted in numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals. I received my Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2003.
Before we begin this evening, I would remiss without thanking Mei Lin Lee, Pamela Riis and Erica Basset, all of whom work at the Women & Politics Institute, and without whom we would not be having tonight's event. There would be no food, seats, microphone or panelists. We would have nothing. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Finally let me note that as many of you know, the Women & Politics Institute strives to close the gender gap in political leadership. We provide young women with academic training that encourages them to become involved in the political process. We facilitate faculty and student research to enhance our understanding of the challenges women face in political arenas, and we give women the skills necessary to run for public office or to work on campaigns should they choose to do so. We also convene panels that are open to the public, so we can discuss how women fare in the political process and why it's so important that they are involved. So in that vein, I am pleased to turn the microphone over to Gloria Feldt, who will moderate this evening's event.
Gloria Feldt: Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you all for being here tonight. It's really a pleasure and an honor. Jennifer, thank you. Not just for the wonderful introduction, but for making all of this possible. It’s incredibly important and I think precisely because of what happened in Tucson this past week, it's really important for us to be together. There's hardly a more important time, so I would just say take a look at whoever is next to you and give them a high five or a smile or something, because you know, we're all in this together. We're going to get out of it together; we’re going to do it together. This is women's moment. The problem is we don't always know it. We just don't always know that.
I wrote No Excuses because I believe it's women's moment, but also because of some things in part that I learned from from reading Jennifer's book, It Takes A Candidate. One of the things I wanted to do in the 2008 election was to take a look at the organizations that were helping women run for office. I wrote an article for Elle Magazine at that time, and what I really saw was that even with all of the work that was going into helping women run for office, the dial, even with those women, was barely moving. Clearly there was something going on that we really needed to really look at. The conclusion that I came to, which I hope we can discuss tonight, is in many instances women's ambivalent relationship with power, and the fact that the rest of the world is looking at us and saying, "This is women's moment," but we don't always know it ourselves. The metaphor for me happened one night as I was watching the Academy Awards, when Kathryn Bigelow won the second Oscar and became the first woman director to be so honored. She was standing there with these two Oscars in her hands looking like a deer caught in the headlights. It was like she was thinking to herself, "What am I doing here?" It felt to me like that was just the perfect metaphor for where women often are today.
Jennifer gave all the data about what's happening with women in politics, but Julie Burton is the president of the Women's Media Center and in full disclosure, I’m on the board, so it’s one of my favorite organizations in the world. It is also a co-sponsor of this event. She must not answer this question, but I’m curious to know what percentage of women do you think are at the heads in the very top positions in media companies? It's bad in politics, but in media, it's 3% of women at the top that make the decisions about what is a story and how the story gets told. We're going to hear a lot about that from several of the panelists.
There's another fact that we need to face. Do you know what percentage of the OP EDS that are published in the major newspapers in the country are written by women? It's 15 %. Do you know the percentage of OP ED submissions that come from women? It's 15 %. There is the issue. There is our problem right there. So, I think we are in an interesting place politically. Not only have we taken that step backwards that Jennifer mentioned in Congress, but I think that the 2010 elections also are making us come face to face with questions about whether it's about the gender of the candidate or the candidate’s agenda and to what extent. That's a whole dimension and nuance of the question that we haven't really had a public conversation about, so I hope we can discuss that tonight. My question to each of the panelists is, in your relationship with power, was there a moment when you knew you had the power to? You can answer that question by filling in the blank any way you want to….
Karen Finney: I’ll tell you one of the most important moments of my life. I was always tall and kind of big, which was not common when I was a kid, and one of the most important moments for me as a woman was actually during my freshman year in college, when I decided to try rowing. Here was this amazing community of strong, tall women and finally, being tall and being muscular was an asset. It was awesome. I remember part way through the year of training just thinking, my God, I'm really strong. I'm strong. I can really do cool stuff. I can run, I can run up and down these stairs and I'm in great shape, and that feeling in my physical body made such a difference in so many other areas of my life. That's how I then thought of my own power and my own competence in other parts of my life.
Amanda Hess: On my previous job, I used to write for the Washington City Paper, which is the alternative weekly here in the DC metro area, and despite being an alternative source of news, it is still very male dominated and I had this strange experience there. When I started working there, I was one of the few women in the editorial side. To me, there were not enough women's perspectives there. I wrote about women's issues and I really wanted to work with more women, but there was a part of me that also knew that part of the power I had there was because I was one of the few women who worked there. So there's this shape formed at the back of my head that was like, well, if another girl comes in, we'll see what happens then. But then what happened was, some of my editors were looking for a new person to fill a role that had been vacated in the editorial side. They were looking for female candidates but they couldn't find any. So they asked me to go into their database of resumes to try and see if there were any women in there who might be a good fit. I found one in like three minutes. It was at the top of the pile. They had seen it before and flagged it as someone who they would like to interview, but for some reason it got lost and they never did. They interviewed her for the opportunity and now she works there.
When that happened, it made me realize that there's this blindness that happens, I think, when people are looking at female candidates. It’s not just because they don't run. It's not because they don't apply for these jobs, it’s because when they do, something happens that makes them ineligible. Maybe it’s because of the style of their resume or their cover letter, but they are not always noticed. So, I realized that I had the power to help other women in this field. That’s really stuck with me, and it's something I hope to continue to do.
Congresswoman Terri Sewell: I guess the moment that I really knew that I had the power to be whatever I wanted to be, was when I was sitting in my public high school in Selma, Alabama and had a light bulb moment. I remember thinking to myself that I was definitely going to go to college because my parents had gone to college. So I was going to college, there was no need to think, but where to go was the issue. I remember literally sitting in my classroom and I get summoned to the high school guidance counselor's office. She told me that this gentlemen had read an article about me buried really deep in the lifestyle section of a Sunday paper and wanted me to come to his house to learn about Princeton University. I thought to myself, well, that's interesting. I remember thinking when I went into his hallway and he had a whole bunch of folks who were really much more qualified than I was to go to Princeton University sitting there. I remember listening to their stories about why they wanted to go to Princeton and what their life aspirations were. My life aspiration was just as comparable to theirs. Though I went to a public high school, I never thought there was anything I couldn't do. A lot of it has to do with growing up in a very small community that nurtured me and told me that I could be somebody, and I believed them.
So, I got in and go to Princeton University. I remember my freshman year roommate, literally aghast when she found out that I was from Selma, Alabama. She said, “Oh my God, how did you escape?” And I thought, Delta Airlines. I've been very blessed in my life and in some ways, I think being from the South, being from a public high school and being underestimated, was really my trump card. I'm like, underestimate me. Your expectations of me, or other people's expectations of me, or of who you are as a person may be very low, but when you exceed that expectation, it brings more confidence. I know about running for public office. This is my very first run ever. I was a partner at a law firm in Birmingham, Alabama, and I had women mentors who were very important to me all throughout my life. Having the power to hire other smart women who just needed a chance, other smart minorities who just needed a chance was very empowering for me.
I have to tell you that women all along the trail were important to me, and were very much my mentors. Even this run for Congress occurred because of that. It was an open seat in my home district. I’m back home in Alabama, and it happened in a full circle moment. The last time I lived and worked in DC was for Senator Shelby who was our Congressman from the 7th congressional district, who is now a Republican, but he was a Democrat back then. I’ve now told my age, right? I'm a child prodigy. It was being encouraged by another woman that got me in this race. It was another woman who was a member of the House of Representatives, Kirsten Gillibrand. At a time, she and I were baby lawyers together in New York. She said she was literally sitting in a meeting of other democratic congresswomen talking about bringing more women into Congress. They talked about the fact that the 7th congressional district would be open because the current congressman was going to run for Governor. She said she was sitting there eating her salad and they said the seventh congressional district includes Birmingham, Alabama, she said she kept eating, Tuscaloosa, she said she kept eating, but when they mentioned, Selma, Alabama, she said let me tell you, I know the perfect person and she called me.
The moral of that story is that each of us should teach another. Each one, teach one. Each one should bring another along. Her only requirement was that I mentor another young woman to run for public office. She helped sort of guide me through because it was definitely not the path I set out on. Well that’s not true. It was a path I set out on, but it was not the path that I thought. I thought the opportunity had passed me by because the person who was a high school and college intern for her Congressman went on to work on Wall Street for ten years. I ended up going to law school, getting all this debt and my parents were freaking out about it. So Congressman Davis ran for the office and won the seat. He and I were in law school together. He could've had this seat for a very, very long time, but he didn't. But then when he walked away from the seat to run for governor, it was a wonderful power opportunity sort of come full circle for me. I have to tell you, I was scared. I had not thought about public office in a while. It was a younger me, a person in her teens or twenties that thought about it. Not me as a person in my forties. So you just never know when life opens the door and you can either walk through or run away from it. Thank God I walked through it, but I walked through it with a whole bunch of wonderful folks holding my hand and guiding me through it.
Jennifer Lawless: Well, that's the story of someone who won her election. Now let me tell you about how you can go through it if you lose. Really, I'm like the happiest loosing camp ever. As I mentioned, in 2006, I took on a democratic incumbent in the primary. It was a district in Rhode Island that was heavily democratic, no Republican even ran in the general election. There was no risk of losing the seat, so the knee jerk reaction was to hate me, not because I was going to defeat this incumbent, but people thinking who was this little girl who thought she could get out there and actually take over our seat. It turned out that I did lose, but I got 40% of the votes, and in doing so, what happened was, I realized that I had the power to actually change the incumbent's views on a lot of issues. One of the issues that differentiated us was choice. He had voted 27 times against a woman's right to choose.
He's still largely anti-choice, however, he now supports comprehensive sex education, emergency contraception, and he also believes now and is vocal about the exceptions he's willing to make. In cases of rape, incest or the life of the mother, he’s at least willing to make these exceptions. So, that coupled with the fact that on a wide range of other issues, he also changed his mind. He had stayed with the Republicans in Washington and intervened in the Terri Schiavo case. After I started gaining traction, he apologized for doing that. He had voted against the use of medical marijuana even though Rhode Island supported it. As I started gaining traction, he too came on board. He had voted against the war in Iraq, but then he voted twelve times to stay the course. As we started calling him out for those votes, he started calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. So, it's interesting to me that you can get involved. You don't get involved because you want to change people's views on the issues; you get involved to win, but a nice fringe benefit of losing, but running a credible campaign, is that you actually have the power to change people's views, so they can better represent their constituents.
Gloria Feldt: Let me tell you a quick personal story about when I knew I had the power to, which includes a quick political angle on when I knew I had the power to also, because I think everything is both personal and political. The personal one is the birth control pill. I was a teen mom and I had had my third child by the time I was 20. At that point, the birth control pill entered into my life and speaking of light bulb moment. I was like wow! I can actually have a life. So, sometimes it’s the technology, and sometimes we also need to think about the policy that affects the particular technology and we'll be talking about this believe me when Joe Pitts who is now the chair of the subcommittee that is deciding what is going to be paid for under health reform, so I connect the personal with the political right there really quickly.
On the political level, when I knew I had the power to, was when I was the head of the Planned Parenthood affiliate of Arizona, and I got a call from someone one day who was terrified because there was going to be an anti-choice ballot initiative. I don't know what possessed me, but I said, “it will the best thing that ever happened to us.” That sort of began my lifelong devotion to the idea of the power to. In my book, No Excuses I say that women need to learn to embrace controversy. Women are often afraid, and often that's what puts women off from getting involved in the political process, or running for office or taking a strong position or writing an OP ED that might result in them getting some negative feedback. But I came to believe that we need to learn to embrace controversy because while we were terrified, here we are in one of the redder states in the country, and the fact of the matter is, once we brought the issues to people's attention, we ended up actually defeating that ballot initiative by the largest margin that had ever been in the state. 67% voted against that amendment. So the lesson for me was to embrace controversy because it's your friend. It's your teacher and it means that you're important enough or your issue is important enough that people are paying attention to it. Now, I'm sort of a little bit addicted to controversy, I must confess.
So, continuing on the media issue, let me throw a question to Amanda. I was incredibly impressed with the article you wrote in The New York Times on how gender trends are created titled
A Brief History of the New York Times' Gender Essentialist Trend Piece The media forms us, it forms how we think as well as informing us, and that particular piece really laid out how women get defined and how that actually then ends up influencing our behavior, whether we do or don't partake in the political process. Could you speak on why you wrote that article, what promoted you and what you found?
Amanda Hess: I read The New York Times and this guy who writes for Slate Magazine whose name is Jack Shafer periodically writes these take down and trend pieces in The New York Times where a writer will say these three people all bought these bold berets and now they are the greatest thing ever. They are the biggest trend. They don’t have any actual facts to say that anyone beyond these three people is actually doing this new thing. I didn’t see that there was anything to support that these weren't just zainy things that these people were doing, which I found to be more interesting because it wasn’t just something about groups of say, pet owners or people who do a particular type of exercise. It’s about women in general and what “we all do” according to The New York Times. I thought it was interesting, also, because you know beyond the fact that so few women are at the top of media companies, I think the latest figures on reporters across the media is that only like 36% are female and the same percentage are managers. It’s a little better on TV and on the internet, but also, we don’t write about women as much as we do men. The number last year was 24% of subjects in media stories were female, which is very low. So when we do write about women, we need to be writing about more women who in my view do a variety of different things. Also, when you do write about women, you stand the risk of essentializing all of us. I feel that that ties back to the political discussion about women in politics, particularly last year when the Republican party was calling this, “The year of the woman,” and they had all these political candidates who they were focusing on, when the reality was we ended up losing women in Congress because they were focusing on these few women. So, it sort of speaks to both sides where on the one hand because women are few in the media, you can make this story of like, “Man bites dog” story about them, particularly with women on the right, they’re like, isn’t this weird, women are running for Republican races and that’s strange. So they put all their focus on this and take our focus away from the actual issue which is that not as many women are running in this race, more of them are going to lose and we are going to have fewer women representatives because they found this trend they can focus on instead. In the New York Times they found that a lot of that stuff was beyond essentialzing us. They’re just not really true.
Gloria Feldt: I have a question. One of the examples I remember in your article was all about the shoes the women who were candidates were wearing. When it’s about women, it’s about shoes? They were great shoes, but when they are talking about female political candidates it's about shoes?
Amanda Hess: I feel that shoes are the greatest sort of focus people have that really detracts from the issues. Whenever I read about the footwear someone is wearing the story is immediately sexist to me. We don’t, for men’s audience think no one is going to read about his shoes ever, and they write about men’s shoes all the time. It’s infuriating. A lot of the trend pieces do trivialize women and the main thing is that they don't see us individuals; they see us as packs who always wear good shoes.
Gloria Feldt: Karen, I want to tell you when you first came to my attention. I was watching Dylan Ratigan one afternoon, and it was like he had just discovered that women were becoming equal numbers in the work place, and that one of the consequences of the recession was that women were not losing jobs in percentages as great as men were, and you kinda came back at him and said, “Yes, it’s because we don't get paid as much.” So it has been suggested that the way for women to gain more political clout is to first concentrate on getting more economic clout by making more money. I’d like you to comment on that relationship between the power of money and the power of politics and what your advice would be to women in that regard.
Karen Finney: I remember him saying that because it was some statistic that Dylan said, and I said for cheap labor, so if you’re making cuts you keep the cheap people and you fire the men, because they make more than women do. There was actually someone who told me I was wrong, but that was sort of my assumption. To the point about women in media, it’s that also. At a place like MSNBC where I’m a political analyst, it’s also about who gets to make the decisions about what gets on the air or what gets in the papers, not just how many women reporters or women correspondents you have. But at some point there’s somebody who says this is the story we are going to air or not, that that’s not an interesting story. I have to tell you that Dylan decided that that was a good story to talk about. I think we have the perception that money will give us the power and the access to sort of do whatever we want. Okay Oprah basically has proven that point, but I think to the point you make in your book, having a lot of money and power doesn't matter if you're not going to use it or you’re not going to do anything with it. I think a part of it is, what you were saying, is seeing more woman in more roles and more diversity in the roles that we play. I will tell you, that one of the most stupid arguments that I’ve ever had to recall in my life. It was when I worked for Hilary Clinton in the White House during her efforts of Healthcare reform. Reporters kept asking me for a rundown of her day. I said, well she has this meeting in the morning, this state dinner coming up, so she has a meeting on that to look at the menu and some other things. This reporter said, “Come on; Hilary Clinton didn't sit through a meeting talking about what the table ware will be. Did she?” And I said, of course she did. It’s her house; she’s got a foreign leader coming to her house. And I said, what do you think women do all day, every day? They work, they cook, they clean, they help their kids do their homework. That’s what we do. I mean he was so sort of stunned. So I think the way we think about women’s roles and the way we let ourselves be portrayed is a part of breaking through that. When we have money or not and how we use that money. Certainly if you’re someone who has money, how you use it, where you spend it, where you invest it and getting more women donors to invest in women candidates is really important. But I also think and I want to say that a lot of this is recruitment. When we talk about women in politics and women in power, it’s recruiting and giving people who are willing to take the opportunity to actually get to that place.
Gloria Feldt: You could’ve bust a trend quite a bit because in both of the primaries, as I recall and in the general election, in the runoff, you had some hurdles you had to overcome initially. You didn’t get a whole lot of support initially from the party. Is that not correct?
Congresswoman Terri Sewell: Yes, from the established, because I was perceived as an outsider. I was a lawyer by training, not a politician and I was running against the former Congressman's son who was the clear favorite in the constituency. It was like, how dare you run for the seat! But going back to your assessment that women need to recruit more women quote, we need to be recruited, that’s first and foremost. So that’s back to my old story about Kirsten Gillibrand recruiting me. But she didn't just didn't leave me alone, she gave me a road map of what I needed to do in order to be successful. At the top of that list was that with 9% name recognition, which was what I started out with, I had to raise money to raise my profile. There are no two ways about it. So, starting early and being very singularly focused on raising money and getting my message out there was a full time job. So, l left my law practice a year and a half out, and for a year and half, that's all I did, which was concentrate on campaigning. I don’t think that I would’ve done that had I not had advisors around me, telling me what I should be doing.
They were men and women advisors, but I have to tell you that the women candidates, and women office holders were the ones with the loudest voices, pushing me, prodding me, even role playing with me, because it’s not that natural to ask someone for help, let alone ask for money. It’s counter intuitive to ask for what you need. You know that you need the votes, so asking someone to vote for you and support you is one thing, but asking someone to put their money with their mouth is and actually write a check is a harder thing. So they literally role played with me, calling people, ring, ring saying I am the candidate, you’re the donor, what are you going to say? Helping me with the script, not just giving me the script. I can read a script, but helping me with the script of what I was going to say was invaluable. There are still words in my ears that still ring and resonate even now.
Gloria Feldt: You kind of belie the argument that women don't support other women, and that just thrills me. I can’t tell you, because I hear that so much and everything you say is just the opposite of that.
Congresswoman Terri Sewell: The very first groups to come out and publicly support me were women’s groups, national women’s groups. Luckily, I was really not the favorite. The favorite was the former Congressman’s son that I was running against. Then it was an open seat, so there were seven people in the race, and everybody else had been an elected official before except me and one other person. Two of us weren’t elected officials, so the hurdle I had to get over was that they didn’t know where I stood politically. I was a corporate lawyer and a democrat, so they couldn't put me in a box and they underestimated me.
Gloria Feldt: That’s going to be my 10th power tool. Going to questions, I want to ask Jennifer one quick one. What are the two top things you’d want to have happen to get women to decide to run for office. What are the two practical things you think we need to do to make that happen?
Jennifer Lawless: The first is that there's a huge qualifications gap. Women and men with the exact same resume don’t self assess the same way. I survey interviewed 4000 women and men comprising of lawyers, educators, business leaders, and political activists. They were all roughly qualified to run for office. However, 62% of the men said they were qualified, while 38% of the women said they were qualified. It gets worse though. Women who don’t think they’re qualified don’t run for office. Men who don’t think they’re qualified, run for office. You look at some of our elected officials, right? So the first thing we need to do is really let women know that whether they’re qualified or not, they’re as qualified as the men. So, if we’re going to have a bunch of unqualified people in our elected offices, women should be 50% of them. The second thing we have to do is recruit.
Here, I have good news. In the women and men I survey interviewed, women were about a third less likely than men ever to receive the suggestion to run for office. However, in 2001 when I did the initial survey, Democratic and Republican women were equally unlikely to be recruited. In 2008, we followed up with the same people, and the recruitment gap on the Democratic side had closed in half. On the Republican side, it remained unchanged. The reason it closed up in half on the Democratic side was not because the party operatives were doing anything, but because women’s organizations with relatively progressive agendas, even non-partisan women’s organizations that prioritize choice for example, were disproportionately propelling Democratic women into networks from which traditional operatives recruit. So, if we can continue to suggest to women that they run for office, and continue to lay the ground work for them that help them connect to the appropriate people, we know they’re just as responsive when they receive recruitment messages. We just need to make sure that they are receiving the messages.
Question &Answer
Q: Once a young woman receives that inquiry, and says I want to run for office. I have a message. What's the road map they should take? What’s the plan?
A: Jennifer Lawless: I’m not sure that I’m the best person to answer that question. The congresswoman might be better situated to answer that question and I’ll pass it over to her, but what our goal is, is to at least have that appear on women’s radars screens. The biggest impediment we found is that women are significantly less likely than men to even have it occur to them as an option. Once you know that you are politically interested, there are networks out there for you. There are programs out there for you that can help facilitate that interest. The problem is that before it appears on women’s radar screens, there are all these impediments that keep it from showing up. So I think it’s important to encourage girls to run for student government from a very early age. A politicized upbringing and talking about politics at home, actually substantially increases the likelihood that you think about running for office as an adult. So all these pre-adult experiences really can either put you on the path or take you far away from it. What we’re trying to do, is at least make it appear as an option the same way law school or medical school or being an astronaut now appear as options for people. Also, the political system has a responsibility to usher you along the way.
Congresswoman Terri Sewell: My experience was exactly that. I was very active in student government, both in high school, college and in law school. My mum was the first African American woman to sit on city council in Selma, so we talked around the table about politics. I saw her experience and I also saw her multi-task. She was first and foremost mum, and then wife. She had lots of balls in the air and seemed to be able to juggle them all. So, I knew that it was possible. As far as a road map and a plan, I think at an early age encouraging women to be politically engaged is right, but you have to network.
Your network, the people you meet in high school, college, at summer camp, you network with. It’s really about getting yourself out there. That network became my lifeline both politically and financially. That network really did. So, when no else believed in the thicket, in the heartland of the 7th congressional district, I had college folks who remembered “The Mouth from the South,” which was my slogan when I was in school. Don’t have a slogan you don’t want repeated 25 years later. When we called them though, those who did remember responded and were always good for at least $250. They’d say, “Oh The Mouth from the South is running for the South!” So the roadmap must be roped into being politically engaged and that is at every level.
Giving money, hosting meet and greets, registering people to vote, all of that is political engagement. I just think that really helped me. From knocking on doors as a kid with my mum to register people to vote. That whole thing is necessary and when you grow up in a place like Selma, Alabama, where the voting rights act began. It’s really the birth place of the voting rights act, where people marched so I could be the first Africa American woman to represent the state of Alabama. That was a huge motivating factor. Win, lose or draw, it was something. It was an experience I will always treasure. Win, lose or draw, and when you go into it, you have to be able to say, this is worthwhile, whether I win or lose because you do change the political climate just by running. You really do.
Karen Finney: I just want to add one thing, because I think it starts event sooner than that. I think as women and as girls, we are more likely to say, I can’t do that. We see somebody doing something, even if it’s a woman doing something, we think, oh, I could never do that, you can do that, but I could never do that. Part of it is that we need to look at how we change girls’ attitudes about what's possible. Whether it’s running for office or running a company, or running a media organization, because again, you talk about this in your book, why us? My God, half the men in this town think they’re going to be president one day. Right? And we know that’s not going to happen. Right? And most of us are smart enough to say, I would never want that to happen. But point being, I think we’ve got to encourage young girls to have that same sort of almost cockiness, and sometimes that means being called a bitch, to say, why not me? Why can't I run? Why can’t I be that person?
Guest Comment by Laura A. Liswood of Council of Women World Leaders: It might be helpful to just tell people that power is actually fun. You can actually do a lot when you have power. If you don’t like the day care system in your corporation, if you become CEO, you can change it. It’s a message that needs to get out there. In fact Former governor Earl Tomblin tells people how fun it was to be governor. And to your point earlier, which is the double mind issue that you raise. Jennifer, in your book, you so well pointed out that, the first office women are qualified for is maybe school board, but the first office a man thinks he’s qualified for with his notion plus evolution is governor. The road map I think is the notion you talk about, which is challenging authority. The double bind of that is not being liked. There’s constant double bind, so for women and other non-dominant groups, because these non-dominant groups have this issue with double bind too. For example, African American men being too angry, is a double bind issue. I call it the, terrible twos. Too aggressive, too assertive, too emotional, too etc, which is a double bind issue used to classify non-dominant groups. Q: What are the tools for that and how would one frame that?
A: Amanda Hess: One attitude adjustment thing that I see in my work place is not the women attitude of the women feeling that they are perceived as too aggressive or too assertive in positions of power, but I’ve seen women who do have positions of power, or in the media world right now it’s kinda bad, so just having positions, and a job is good, but I see a lot of women, when it comes time to hire other people, when presented with the idea of trying to recruit women, trying to bring them into the company, saying, I think we should just hire the best person for the job, and not hire a particular gender or race or whatever. To me, I think part of that is because if you’ve achieved a certain position, these women don’t want to be perceived as tokens in their jobs. They don’t want to feel that they were only hired because they are women. What I would say to that is there’s more than one best person for a job. It’s not like if someone doesn’t get the job, someone else can’t do it equally as well, possibly in a different way. The criteria that a lot of people have been using, may be gender, so I think we really need to change the way that women feel about recruiting other women, just because, the one thing that I’ve seen is that they just don’t want to be not characterized in a particular way, they don’t want to be characterized by their gender, a lot of people are not in that place yet. We’re not equal.
Q: I am a very proud Democratic Party hack in Virginia and I have a lot of chips I could call in. I know where a lot of bodies are buried, but I haven’t heard about getting involved as a party operative, to then perhaps propel yourself into office, because quite often the men that run as a nominee of a party are operatives. You need to know the folks in the party, and it’s very helpful to have that background. We have seen candidates come out of the wood work; they lose and go back into the wood work. They don’t stick around in the party. We just made you our standard bearer for the Democratic Party, we worked our asses off in the trenches and in the fields, and in the back woods for you, and now you’ve disappeared. You haven’t stuck around to then recruit further candidates, or to help out, or phone and canvass. I'm having a ball being involved in Democratic Party politics, and I’m not hearing anything about women recruiting and staying the course. Could you speak to that?
A: Jennifer Lawless: Based on the research that I talked about before, law, business, education and politics, are the four professions that are most likely to lead to a political career and it turns out that political activists, whether they are party operatives, or congressional staffers, or staffers for other political offices, both men and women in those groups, are the most likely to be politically ambitious, and most likely to run for office. That’s the good news. The bad news is, the gender gap within that group is still just as big, as it is for everybody else. So there are still a lot of people that are ripe to pull and recruit to run for office, by just being needed just as much as everybody else. The other thing I just wanted to mention is about not being liked. If you think about the professions from which candidates emerge, we are all accustomed to not being liked. Right? I mean, how many lawyers are really well liked? How many professors are really well liked? I have students in the room that I know hate me. Right? So it’s funny that when we think about entering politics, we’re so concerned about people not liking us, but the professions in which we work are by definition professions where people don’t like us. So we just have to be willing, I think, to take that punch.
Q: I was sitting here reflecting on being stopped by not being liked. I have not been stopped in my career by needing to be liked. However, reflecting on all the accusations, I had for being too aggressive, too intimidating, too overpowering. These have always come from women. That's something in our culture, as women, I think. I just made the observation and I’m interested in your comments on it.
A: Gloria Feldt: One of the most important of the ways I suggest women change our relationship with power is by defining it on our own terms. I think what you’re describing, is very now out dated, no longer functional, it may have been at one time, but no longer functional definition of power, in which it is really a male oriented, male hierarchal way of seeing power is as a finite pie. So, if I take a slice, there’s less for you. Well, the truth is and what we need to do is redefine power on our terms. I almost feel this is a spiritual thing. This is how we need to remake the world. This is how we need to transform the world. To understand that power is not a finite pie. That in fact, it’s an infinite resource. We need to begin to see power as the power to, to innovate, accomplish things, effect change, get things, heal the world or whatever; suddenly it becomes a much more positive thing. However, we shouldn't be surprised that people see it with the old paradigm of being a finite resource.
Karen Finney: Women need to believe we deserve the power we have or don't have. A lot of times we don't act on the power we have, because we don't want to be called bitches. There was a time in my life when I was having a lot of problems with the men I was working with. I was frustrated, and felt helpless but my mom had to remind me that I have power, and she told me not to give it away. She made me a list of the different types of ways I had power and told me to use it and to this day, I still look at that list to remind myself of my power. If you have power, you deserve it and you deserve to use it.
Q: Why is power worth having? Is it just a knee jerk reaction to wanting to help others? But we can do that without having so much power.
Congresswoman Terri Sewell: Public service is important in my family life. I come from a long line of preachers, teachers and other public servants, but the ability to send money home to my constituency to help a school get the equipment they need is powerful too because I'm changing lives. Controlling a budget is powerful. Resource disbursement is powerful. Power is good. However, you can choose to use it for good or evil. Everyone in power uses power the way they perceive the world. Funding equipment for schools is just as valid as funding defense missiles. We are 435 in this new congress and we all come with different world views and constituencies.
When I left being a partner at a law firm, people told me, "I can't believe you're leaving being a partner at a law firm." However, when I was at the law firm, I was giving young folks, women and minorities opportunities and scholarships especially in the South. At every level I was, I made the best of it, monetarily, and by helping people. Through giving, all of us have a place of our own to make this world a better place. I'll tell you something that happened to me to show you fate has a way of doing things. I was supposed to meet with Ms. Shirley Chisholm. Her assistant told me I could only meet with her for 45 minutes, but we were snowed in and our meeting was for four hours. Talk about fate. She told me that service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth, and we all have a role to play.
Gloria Feldt: They say you write the book you need to read and I have written this book, No Excuses, 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. With being in these circles and doing what I do, I find it easy to call attention to my causes.
Jennifer Lawless' Call for donations: We can't do this for free. I would encourage you to forgo one thing you do to support this cause so we can continue to have events like these.
Gloria Feldt's Call To An Important Issue: Virginia is reintroducing the equal right amendments. Contact your congressman. Call Governor Bob McDonnell. There are 15 southern states. Call your governors. Send emails. It will take a lot of pressure, but we can do it. The Family Research Council and others have spread money around to defeat this. Don't let them win.
Event Attendees
For more pictures from the event, visit http://www.facebook.com/album.php?fbid=10150127605870874&id=218584865873&aid=324210
For more information on author, Gloria Feldt, visit www.gloriafeldt.com
The event was sponsored by Women & Politics Institute www.american.edu/spa/wpi/ and The Women's Media Center http://www.womensmediacenter.com/
If you enjoyed reading this, you will enjoy reading Honoring Women Ambassadors and Women In Diplomacy.
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