Why Women Matter, Part 5

Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World
by Marie C. Wilson

(Page 5 of 5)

A root of learning for them: mothering. As a leader said, "One of the best training grounds for leadership is motherhood...if you can manage a group of small children, you can manage a group of bureaucrats. It's almost the same process..." Of those who said family was both a crucial support and a source of inspiration, all describe strong parents and grandparents: "She [grandmother] had very definite opinions about people's responsibility to contributing back to family and back to the community." One told of a father who had "an ability that you don't recognize as greatness until you're without it, which is [that] he reflected greatness in whomever he was with. He made someone else feel that they were terrific." Several of the African American women spoke of parents who cared so completely that they founded whole organizations to provide experiences their children couldn't get anywhere else, such as a swim club for a girl who couldn't use the public pool.

Elected female leadership, even the little we've had, has made a tremendous difference in politics. Prominent research groups among them the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University and the Women & Politics Institute at American University have spent decades studying the values women bring to that arena, both in how issues are discussed and in the legislation that follows. Women, they discovered, tend to include diverse viewpoints in decision making, have a broader conception of public policy, and offer new solutions. Females also define "women's issues" more broadly than most of their male colleagues, and they put these issues at the top of the legislative agenda bills dealing with children, education, and health care, for instance.

Women in politics tend to be collegial and collaborative, rather than hierarchical. Female chairs, for example, used their leadership positions to encourage committee members to talk with one another rather than trying to personally control and direct the debate. We are often more responsive to constituent requests, and we follow through on them. We are also more likely to include disadvantaged groups in legislation. Strikingly, Republican women are more likely than Democratic men to work on bills benefiting women. Male politicians who were interviewed for the study agreed with the conclusions. After years of community and family involvement, women had learned to act on the "local" model, and it worked.

Maybe all those coffee klatches finally paid off. Democratic and Republican women of the Senate meet every month for dinner, often crossing party lines to pass legislation of importance to women. As Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) reminds us, "Nobody fought for homemakers to have retirement accounts until we [women] did in the Senate in 1993, for God's sake." Her Senate colleague Olympia J. Snowe (R-ME), said, "We developed the Women's Health Equity Act... created an Office of Women's Health Research at the National Institutes of Health...We did not allow our differing views on abortion or our partisan affiliations to get in the way." Other legislation critical to the health of the republic the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Child Support Enforcement Act were muscled to the top by the bipartisan Congressional Women's Caucus.

It is probably fair to say that the men in Congress, a clear majority, would not have made these issues a priority without the prodding of their few female colleagues. Senator Hutchison clarifies, "It wasn't that men were against these changes. They just hadn't considered the issue before because they hadn't experienced the problem in their own lives. As women have become a part of the system, that's changing."

Eleanor Holmes Norton, delegate to the House of Representatives from Washington, D.C., says, "Numbers matter not for numbers' sake, but for women's sake." Yes, they do, but we could also say numbers matter for everyone's sake. Recent research has shown a direct correlation between the number of women in a legislative body and the passage of bills benefiting women and children. However, we would need at least 15 percent of legislators to be women for a likelihood that family-friendly bills would pass. The U.S. Congress is currently 14 percent women.

Lessons from Abroad

Iceland, October 24, 1975. More than 90 percent of the women (mostly homemakers) went on strike, and the country was brought to its knees. It was described then as a "women's day off," and was originally meant as a marker for the beginning of the United Nations Decade for Women. In fact, it lives in legend as one of the most successful and swiftest social movements of all time. The strike resulted in quite a few world firsts, including the first equality legislation and the first woman president. Five years after the strike, in 1980, Vigdis Finnbogadottir was elected president, and she served until her retirement in 1996. Former President Finbogadottir likes to tell of boys who asked their mothers during her long term if men could be president of Iceland.

Women now hold at least 30 percent of the seats in the parliaments of fourteen countries, and twenty-two women are speakers of parliaments. There are seventeen women heads of state. Wales recently reached full parity between women and men in the legislature. Women in seven European countries have achieved critical mass of about a third in their parliaments: Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Germany. A few other things these countries have in common: almost equal enrollment between boys and girls in all levels of education, comparable rates of illiteracy between both genders in the age range from fifteen to twenty-four years, and pay that is roughly equal.

The Inter-Parliamentary Union, a worldwide organization that serves as a focal point for parliamentary discussions on a broad range of issues, researched women's involvement in government and found that it brings about shifts in political behavior and priorities. Women overseas have promoted human rights issues that directly affect their lives: violence, trafficking in women, equality in marriage and parenthood, equal pay, and reproductive choice. But they don't stop there they also raise quality-of-life issues affecting everyone, including the protection of natural resources, access to fresh water, nutrition, human rights, and protection for the destitute.

Most important, women are bringing fresh perspectives to peace building. It is not a skill new to us; it is simply not commonly acknowledged. For instance, the women of Northern Ireland have cleared the way for talks between Protestants and Catholics by bringing together key players to mediate in the strife. The women of the Sudan helped secure humanitarian aid by negotiating access directly with rebels. The women of India and Pakistan, aware of shared history amid the threat of nuclear war, have organized conventions each year to affirm their connection. As former President Bill Clinton said when the Camp David talks between the Palestinians and Israelis failed in 2000, "If we had women at Camp David, we'd have an agreement."

The United Nations is also catching on. In 2000, the Security Council issued Resolution 1325, urging the expanded role of women in field operations, "especially among military observers, civilian police, human rights workers and humanitarian personnel." Secretary-General Kofi Annan said to the council, "For generations, women have served as peace educators, both in their families and in their societies. They have proved instrumental in building bridges rather than walls."

© 2006 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Marie C. Wilson is cofounder and president of the White House Project, which she launched to advance women's leadership in all sectors. She was president of the Ms. Foundation for Women for more than twenty years, through which she cocreated Take Our Daughters to Work Day. A frequent guest speaker, she has been quoted in numerous national news outlets.