The White House Project

A fear of diversity is at the center of Tea Party anger, argues The White House Project’s Marie Wilson—the very quality that produces good decision-making and the innovation that is likely to pull us out of the Great Recession.

For several months Americans have watched the Tea Party movement grow and have asked, “What do these groups really want?”  When they purported to be against healthcare reform (what they called, “Obamacare”) but carried signs that read  “Get your government out of my Medicare” and “Take our country back,”  it didn’t make sense.  And the Tea Party protesters we’ve seen on the news aren’t talking about the traditional firebrand issues of abortion and gay rights either.  Actually, during the healthcare debates, they didn’t seem to have any solid policy issues at all, just anger.  But when the racial and homophobic epithets started to fly, the plot thinned.

Frank Rich nailed it in his March 28 New York Times piece, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care.”  As he said, it’s about the “real changes in America that can’t be repealed,” and he made a clear, historically based case about just what the ethnically homogeneous Tea Party members are afraid of losing: the dominance of white people in the United States.   It’s the same fear that the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights bill evoked.

Citing the folks who so visibly and recently represent this change (President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Justice Sotomayor),  Rich also argues that the issue didn’t have to be healthcare,  but that any inaugural piece of legislation would have elicited these “fears of disenfranchisement among a … dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.”  It is no surprise that those legislators who were singled out first with slurs and spit, like Representatives John Cleaver and Barney Frank and, the lion of the House, Representative John Lewis, are well-known African-American and gay leaders in Congress.  I agree with Rich in his assessment that when the Tea Party folks signal whom they “want to take the country back from,” it is representatives like Cleaver, Frank and Lewis, and their prime target, Nancy Pelosi, whom they are talking about.

Graphic by Vanessa Dennis & Cris Amico; source: Patchwork Nation

As someone who grew up in Georgia in the forties and fifties and worked in the civil rights movement in the sixties, I recognized in Sarah Palin’s terse rhetoric during the presidential campaign, as Rich did, language that served as bait and evoked cries of Obama as a “traitor” and actual calls to take Obama’s life.  This rhetoric ostensibly paved the way for the post-election Tea Party movement.  Palin’s actions then and now show that beyond her lack of knowledge about politics and policy, her lack of understanding of history and culture is more dangerous.  I truly doubt she grasps the fire she is playing with, and I pray that powerful people in her party will not follow McCain’s lead in joining her in these references, and will instead advise her to cut out her language about “reload” and the gun-related images on her website.

While I disagree with the Tea Partiers actions, I don’t want to diminish the real anger and fears that Americans who aren’t taking tea, but are suffering and need some way to participate in our democracy.   I also understand that they see very few open avenues that will permit them to constructively vent their frustrations.

Those of us who are still employed have a responsibility and a mandate to help make the needed changes.   We also have the duty to keep the intensity down by talking about the real promise this growing diversity in our country, and across every branch of our government, holds for a more prosperous union.  New research actually shows that a diverse group of people will make a better decision than a group of experts, because as one of the leading researchers, Scott Page says, “we are all stuck at different places.”  It is this variety of orientation and perspective that breeds innovation.

The paradox here is that the rich diversity of people the Tea Party fears could be the key to pulling us out of this economic slump, which was created by in large by groups of wealthy white men from very similar backgrounds.

As the leader of The White House Project, I see daily the repercussions of our failure to use the resources represented by American’s women who cross all of these diverse areas, and I know what we are missing out on.   For instance, as our recently released Benchmarks Report revealed,  women led only 3 percent of the Fortune 500 companies and hold fewer than 17 percent of the executive positions in those companies, even though research shows that profits at Fortune 500 firms that most aggressively promoted women were 34 percent higher than industry medians.

As Frank Rich noted, there are real changes in American life that cannot be repealed, but that can be used to foster a better life for all of us, if we remember what Franklin Roosevelt said long ago, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

View this online.

For another WMC Exclusive posted today, click on “The Tea Party Movement—Taking the Pulse,” a report and analysis by Peggy Simpson. The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and do not represent WMC. WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates.

The Huffington Post
Ilene Lang and Marie Wilson
April 22, 2010

Eighteen years ago, only days before the first annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day, the Ms. Foundation for Women received a call from a New York City high school teacher.

The teacher said she had lined up an internship for one of her bright female students in a downtown business. All she had to do was show up. But standing at the foot of the building, the girl was overwhelmed and went home.

With encouragement from the teacher, she tried again. This time she got inside the building, but couldn’t press the button on the elevator. Again, she left.

The teacher– sensing the depth of her discomfort– went with her. It worked. She got the internship and her “sea legs.”

This is what Take Our Daughters to Work Day is all about. Expanded to include boys in 2003, the program enables millions of children to see first-hand the possibilities afforded by a good education, experience a family-friendly work environment, and bolster self-esteem.

But despite our best efforts, new research shows that the future is not as bright for our children as we once thought. Women lag behind men in pay and promotions. And across society, especially in politics, there is a crisis in female leadership.

“Pipeline’s Broken Promise,” a new report by Catalyst, analyzed the career paths and salaries of more than 4,100 MBA graduates from around the world. It found that women start at lower positions, earn less money and receive fewer promotions than equally skilled men. Even after taking into account industry, parenthood status, and region, among other factors, women make on average $4,600 less in their initial jobs out of business school.

If this is happening to the best and the brightest of our daughters, can you imagine what is happening to others across the spectrum of workplaces and skill levels?

A new report by the White House Project, “Benchmarking Women’s Leadership,” set out to answer this question. The study looked at ten sectors across American culture and found women comprise, on average, only 18% of the top leadership positions across all ten.

The business sector, where women hold an average of 16% of the leadership positions, is one of the lowest. This is painfully ironic because Catalyst’s “Bottom Line” studies show that companies with the highest representation of women in top management outperform, on average, those with fewer.

Women working full-time still earn only 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man– an improvement of less than half a penny a year since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed. African-American women make 64% less than white men while Hispanic women earn 52% less.

Gender inequity is rife in politics too. While we make up over half of the US population, women are 12% of all governors, 15% of all mayors of large cities, 23% of state legislators and 24% of state executive officials. The ratios are equally dire on the federal level. Women comprise only 17% of the members of Congress and hold 14% of Congressional committee chairs. Women of color account for only 5% of representatives in the House and are completely absent in the Senate. And we still have not had a female president or vice president.

These ratios have remained largely unchanged over the past decade despite the fact that women have voted at increasingly higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980. And women in Congress, on average, bring home more money for their districts, attract more co-sponsors, and introduce more bills than their male colleagues.

Still, women lag behind men in business and politics. The question is: how do we fix this?

For politics, we have to recruit and train women in ever increasing numbers. Research has shown that women who choose to run for office are just as likely as their male counterparts to win. Training programs provide key support networks, tools, and inspiration for women to pursue careers in politics.

In business, managers must take hard, honest looks at their recruiting, hiring, and promotion processes. If they find a disparity about where new employees were placed, and how much they earned, it should be corrected.

And there is something we all can do today. By taking our children to work we can give them the strength to pursue their goals and inspire them to strive for the top, regardless of their gender. We should tell them they can be anything they want to be– and act on this promise to make it come true.

To view original article, click here.