The White House Project

This month, Rwanda made global history when it became the first nation where women outnumber men in parliament. And according to a newly-released UN study, there has been a marked increase in women’s political participation worldwide.

Yet for all the advances women are making on the global front, women’s political participation is lagging far behind the times here at home. Although the high-profile candidacies of Senator Clinton and Governor Palin have called attention to the viability of women in positions of leadership, the U.S. ranks an abysmal 71st in the world for women’s political representation. And from the executive branch to the legislative wing, women are highly outnumbered as leaders by their male peers.

There’s still hope, however, for our nation to live up to its ideals as a truly representational democracy. In an op-ed in today’s Newsday, I wrote about our country’s best hope for a new cadre of leaders – the diverse array of passionate, articulate, and dedicated women who are eager to serve our communities and country and lead us to a better future. For all the tumult in our social, political, and economic landscapes, these women might just be the best and brightest hope for the leadership our country so desperately needs.

With yesterday’s ouster of Sallie Krawcheck from Citi, the prostration of Wall Street’s triad of powerful women was a mission completed. The announcement, amid a week of devastating shake-ups in the financial sector, hit a particular nerve: Krawcheck had asked that clients be paid back for Citi’s defective investments – an ethical response to the market’s downward spiral that was appreciated less by higher-ups than it was by clients. Though the details of Krawcheck’s departure are up for speculation, her story echoes the growing cultural narrative concerning our trust of women as leaders versus the support we give them – via the voting booth and board rooms – to lead us from the helm.

According to a Pew study released this August, Americans believe that women far surpass their male counterparts in the quality of their character as leaders. When it comes to honesty, intelligence, compassion, and creativity, Americans contend that women have “the right stuff.” Yet the study also reveals a disjuncture between the public’s trust of women as leaders, and their overall feeling of who makes a better leader. A mere six percent said women made better leaders, while one-fifth of respondents cited men as better leaders overall. As the study says, “Women emerge from this survey a bit like a sports team that racks up better statistics but still loses the game.”

A report to be released this fall by The White House Project’s Corporate Council resonates this finding. Across ten sectors – from business and politics to journalism and film – the report illustrates the persistent disparity between Americans’ high level of trust for women as leaders, and the dismal percentage of women who have been supported in those arenas in their leadership.

Yet the characteristics that Americans attribute to women leaders are the very traits that many would say is sorely lacking – from Wall Street to Capitol Hill. With a proposed $700 billion rescue plan that would make already-suffering American taxpayers foot the bill for corporate capriciousness, it’s near impossible to look at what has happened in the financial sector and not ask whether we would be having such devastation if more women were at the economic steering wheel.

Perhaps none had put it better than Sara Vines, in her humorous take for the The Times of London this week: “No sensible woman I know would have encouraged the selling of 120 percent mortgages to people who could barely afford their grocery bills. Such a think would be laughable, a bit like carrying of XXL condoms around in your pocket.”

Krawcheck, and the rest of her female cohort on Wall Street, seem to be paying the price for what Vines says that women innately do – “stop for a tiny moment to consider the human cost of all this.” In a country where nearly half of retirees expect to outlive their savings, where homeless shelters are brimming with families recently put out by foreclosures, and parents can’t afford to send their children to college – let alone insure their health – the human cost is exactly what we need to be considering.

The difference between public trust in women as leaders versus the ample support of women to take on that leadership is faulty policy, any way you dice it. It’s bad for our bottom line: as investors, business owners, customers, and as taxpayers.

In terms of the current economic meltdown, we would have been wise to take a hint from Sally Helgesen’s book The Female Advantage. Though both genders are oriented toward the big picture, women “relate decisions to their larger effect upon the role of the family, the American education system, the environment, even world peace.” In other words, women would have done the big-picture forecasting that might have saved Wall Street, and the rest of us, from this deepening downward spiral.

I am not an essentialist. I do not think that women, by nature, are endowed with traits that make them more compassionate, more honest, or more apt to think outside of the box. What I do know is that these traits have been largely gleaned by women through their life experiences, leading from the foot of the table. And it is exactly these foot-of-the-table characteristics that we need right now, and have for some time.

The same stale, insular, old-boys-club way of thinking is what got the rest of us into this mess. What we need now are fresh ideas and new perspectives, guided by ethical imperatives and a broader view of what prosperity, responsibility, and accountability really mean for our finances and our politics. Trusting in our nation’s women – and supporting them in their leadership – is the one solution we have yet to try.

2008 will go down in the history books as a rollercoaster of an election season, one that has highlighted at times both the strong spirit of our democracy and the divisions among our nation’s citizens.

Yet today, on the anniversary of 9/11, I’d like to remind our country of the importance of a time when we focused not on those divisions but on our unity as a nation, and our civility in the days and weeks that followed a shared national crisis.

At that time, The White House Project’s offices were on Wall Street and as the women who left our building ran for shelter or to seek loved ones, they did it together. Everyone was an American that day; everyone helped one another. We gave blood and volunteered, and never once was there a question about what party you preferred.

That was the reality. And as we regrouped, we disagreed on what should happen to see that it never happened again. Differences of opinion, in their honest and fact-driven form, are an important facet of our democratic system – especially when it comes to the fundamental rights and values of our government. The important lesson from 9/11 is the knowledge that we are capable of banding together despite difference, and that we should settle for nothing short of honest and diplomatic disagreement as we address important issues- whether in our personal politics or in our elections.

This standard is one that we envisioned for The White House Project when we founded it ten years ago. Some twenty of us gathered at philanthropist Barbara Lee’s home to hold what would become the founding meeting of the organization. We wanted to jump-start the stalled state of women’s leadership in the U.S., and decided to capture the popular imagination by setting our sights on the very pinnacle of our collective aspirations – the U.S. presidency.

My fellow visionaries were some of the most experienced folks in the business: from Sunday morning regular George Stephanopoulos and the brilliant communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson to Laura Liswood of The Council of Women World Leaders and the now-deceased playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the room was bursting with notables from the worlds of business, politics and media. Some came because they had foreseen the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2008, but most in the room came together with one goal in mind: to see, in our lifetimes, a woman president.

What was clear from our discussions, however, was that this project would not be about just one woman – that we were intent on bolstering the leadership of women across the board. And while the ambitious name of The White House Project did point to our deep desire to see a woman ascend to the highest office in the land, we were guided by the progressive values that support women and allow them to succeed. It seemed a great way to anchor the project in its true goal – the building of a representative democracy – and author Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote the inaugural piece detailing the effort which was slowly taking shape.

We never abandoned our progressive values as an organization, and have always put women from both sides of the aisle on our early ballots to show the U.S. that a variety of women across party, race, sector, and region are out there and have the ability to lead our country. When we train women to run for political office, or work with them to lead in the sectors of business and media, we make sure that women from all parties are included. The important distinction for us has always been this: being nonpartisan means transcending political affiliation, while progressive values transcend such distinctions.

My mentor in this way of working was Mary Louise Smith, Chair of the National Republican Party and the first woman to ever head a political party. Together, we lobbied the Iowa legislature on issues of choice and childcare. We created the Women’s School at Drake University that offered courses ranging from management training to dual-career families to dealing with underemployment of women by race and class. Mary Louise and I may have had our political differences, but we agreed on basic rights and resources; we were both strongly in favor of the right to privacy, the separation of church and state and other fundamental parts of the the U.S. constitution.

I’ve been thinking of Mary Louise as the conversation about Sarah Palin has raised questions about partisanship, particularly among women. Mary Louise, a woman who often worked across party lines, would have been shocked to learn what this new political development has engendered, particularly among women – that those who may honor Palin’s progress and abilities would be thought of as partisan if they disagreed with her on the issues.

It’s a strange turn of events–because as we women know (and as the media finally figured out during the 2008 primary season) women are not and never have been a monolithic voting bloc. During the primaries I wrote about the divisions among women on the democratic side in a piece that was widely circulated in both Democratic and Republican circles as a thoughtful take on the diversity of women’s views. And now, in this ever-historic election season, we continue to be presented with disagreements that rightly transcend both party and gender.

Time and legislation have shown us it is the women senators who regularly meet across party to get things done in Washington and in our home states, and that capacity to transcend party is one of our most important reasons for wanting more women in political leadership. As we commemorate the lives lost and saved on 9/11, we honor them by remembering the valued lessons born of crisis – that we are right to have our disagreements, but that we honor ourselves, each other and our nation by basing those differences in fact, and expressing them with civility and good faith. These are the tenets and the modes of playing politics that make our democracy great – and we threaten that good standing when we indulge in behavior any less dignified.

What’s amazing about Senator John McCain’s choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate on the Republican ticket has nothing to do with her family, with her possible membership in the Alaska Independence Party (a goal of which was to move the state toward secession from the U.S.), her level of experience with the domestic economy and foreign policy, or even the number of years she has served as a state and local leader. And it’s certainly not about her being a woman.  What’s amazing about the Palin choice is that a portion of the electorate has allowed the single issue of abortion to exert tremendous control over our nation’s future.

It’s clear from news reports that Senator McCain would have preferred either Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut or former homeland security chief Tom Ridge as his running mate (both of whom are pro-choice); the selection of Governor Palin was tactical, largely based on her anti-choice stance and solidifying the traditional Republican base. The votes Governor Palin would bring to the ticket, given her bona fide conservative credentials, would be votes that Senator McCain was not sure he’d hold–those of the nation’s powerful, and highly organized, Christian right.

Knowing this, it is easy to see how broken our political system truly is. It reveals a deep distrust in women to make their own decisions about their bodies, and selecting this particular woman largely based on her stance on one issue is the latest insult not just to Governor Palin, but to women as a whole—and to our democracy.

The crusade against choice pivots around the deep societal fear of women’s power to act as the authors of their own lives, the keepers of their own bodies.  As Kristin Luker wrote in “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood,” the real issue at stake is the fear that women will abandon their traditional role and decide not be mothers, if given the choice. So who better to squelch that fear than a woman who is staunchly anti-choice– even in cases of rape or incest.
Like Gov. Palin, I have five children, one of whom has special needs. I know what it takes to parent, and I deeply understand the work/family tradeoffs in the current American workplace.  But unlike the governor, I want my children and grandchildren to inherit a world where those in power cannot make choices over female bodies.  I want them to concentrate instead on the larger body politic and what best serves every woman, man and child in this country — decisions on home loss and job loss and health care loss, national security, rising food prices, our standing in the world, climate control.

That’s the way our country should “choose life” — by choosing policies that don’t condone torture or chain immigrant women to their beds while their children are taken away.  I want leaders who think before they bomb, who won’t send our sons and daughters to die in a senseless war. I don’t want any American to have to choose food over medication, or work over education.

So yes, I “choose life,” and I will choose only politicians who do the same.  It has very little to do with abortion and everything to do with the lives that follow in the wake of birth.