What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (21 page)

MS
: I’ve been hearing different kinds of assessments of where women are, some very optimistic and encouraged, some feeling very discouraged that we’re stagnating. Where do you think we are in terms of the status of women in the world today?

OS
: You know, I think it’s interesting—I think we’ve made progress in some respects, and then in other cases, I’m not so sure. If you think about the debates that have taken place, for example, on contraception—maybe it’s because I’ve been in Congress for three decades and have put some of these issues to rest, and then they’re resurrected and revived, as if we’re back in the seventies, or the fifties for that matter. So it often leaves me in a quandary, thinking,
Okay, have we made progress or where are we?
Or when you hear the debates about CEOs like Marissa Mayer talking about the focus and the attention that was paid to her when she was pregnant and the Family Medical Leave and the policies and what she was doing and so on. I think about all those questions, and the same type of attention isn’t devoted to male CEOs. So I think, yes, there’s been progress, and then on the other hand, I am not so sure what is a safe standard to use in which to measure women. The fact is that there still aren’t enough women yet, either in the political arena or in the corporate arena or in the board room, in America. I mean, you know people talk about having more women on boards, but if it’s maybe 17 percent; I think, give or take, 4 percent of CEOs of big corporations are women. And the same is true in the political arena, as well as in the legislatures. And in the U.S. Senate, we’ve made
progress, but that’s only been recent. So I guess on one hand, yes, we’ve changed many of the laws to address and remedy some of the discriminatory practices that existed in law, but on the other hand, we still have a ways to go. We still don’t earn dollar for dollar for what a man earns. We’ve made strides, but there are obviously more that have to be made. So I think there are more opportunities for women. In the 1980s, when we were talking about the discriminatory policies at the National Institutes of Health, when they excluded women from clinical study trials, there were very few women that were in medical school, and that much has changed. So I think you see the opportunities that open up for professions who no longer think of that . . . or the military in the sense that we couldn’t have an all-volunteer force without women serving in the military. I was fighting for gender integrated training in the military back in the late nineties and I was on the Armed Services Committee. . . . They have to fight the way they’re trained. They have to train alongside each other. But that was a major battle. Today women are integral to an all-volunteer force; in fact you couldn’t have a military without them.

So, yes, I think we have made significant advancements and they have opened doors for women in so many spheres of society. And that will continue, because the contributions are immeasurable, and I think that our country has benefited enormously and the value has been abundantly evident in so many realms. Title IX is a good example—and I’ve been a long-ranging and strong champion of Title IX—but think about the doors that that has opened that allows equalities when it comes to sports and education. It’s no longer a question of women in sports, and I just love it when I hear young girls and young women talking about the sports that they’re participating in and the championships that they’ve won or the teams that they’re on; it’s just second nature. In my generation, it wasn’t second nature; you had to fight for that change and that equality and that right and that access. The expenditure of dollars for women’s sports, as
well as for men, it just didn’t happen until Title IX. So many young women today now have the benefit of that competition. It’s not as much a matter of winning or losing, but the fact that you’re in the arena, you know what it takes, the ups and downs, and that you get up and you do it again and you learn from that experience, the give and take and the team playing—it all contributes to addressing all dimensions of your experiences and life’s experiences. There’s no substitute for that. So I just love hearing them talk about whatever they do, playing soccer or basketball, whatever the case is. It’s just wonderful! Those doors weren’t open, to much extent, even in my generation, but it just puts them on a level playing field with their male peers and counterparts, because those are assets and qualities that transcend in your life, for the remainder of your life. You know what it’s like—you’re down one day, and you have to get up the next. So you lose one game, but you know if you come back you can win the next time. That’s important to experience, the winning and losing. It’s the give and take in life—those things happen, and you can rebound from them and succeed. Those are irreplaceable experiences and qualities that we want for young women. [So that’s a perfect example of] how the types of policies and laws that are in place matter. There are advantages for everybody in society and advantages ultimately for the entire country. It’s that full participation in our society, and that’s why our institutions have to reflect a broader sector of our country.

GAVIN NEWSOM

“Why is it that men can’t be recognized for being outstanding advocates for women? You don’t need to be gay to be a great advocate for the LGBT community. In every aspect of life, you can maintain your empathy and your advocacy. . . . I think people are realizing that we’re not two separate tribes, we’re all in this together, and that men have a responsibility to be advocates for women, women advocates for men and boys.”

A
S A MEMBER
of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, then as mayor of San Francisco, and now as lieutenant governor of California, Gavin Newsom has been a visionary on issues of equality, the environment, homelessness, and healthcare. Policies he has initiated and implemented have been duplicated in cities across the nation.

During his seven-year tenure as mayor, he led San Francisco to an economic recovery, balancing seven consecutive budgets without laying off a single teacher, police officer, or firefighter. Thirty-six days into his first mayoral term in 2004, Newsom threw himself into one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics by allowing same-sex couples to marry in violation of state law. Newsom is the author of the recently released
Citizenville
, which explores the intersection of democracy and technology in this ever-connected world. The book has been widely accepted by both Democrats and Republicans as a blueprint to government innovation and reform. He is married to filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, writer and
director of
Miss Representation
, a documentary that examines the portrayal of women in the media.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: I always like to start by saying that this book was partially inspired by my eight-year-old daughter, Lotus. After Barack Obama was elected, we were talking about how remarkable it was that we had our first African American president, and she looked at me and asked, “Why haven’t we had a woman president?” It was this very simple, innocent question, yet it was somewhat challenging to answer. Why do you think we’ve not yet had a woman president? What do you think it will take to make that happen?

GAVIN NEWSOM
: At the peril of repeating some of the things that perhaps my wife already said, we had a similar interaction with our daughter, Montana, who’s three and a half, and this was a few weeks ago. My wife casually mentioned something about a woman being president and my daughter—after all the indoctrination from birth on down around gender equality issues—says, “A woman can never be president.” And that’s in a household where we’re trying to teach her and reinforce those opportunities. And our mouths dropped. It was to the old adage, as we heard from Pat Mitchell in
Miss Representation
, making the case that you can’t be what you can’t see. And the point being, my daughter, every time Obama comes on TV, goes “Obama, Obama, Obama!” So her image is so reinforced that it’s a man, not just an African American man—she doesn’t even get that—but it’s a boy, it’s a man. So from the earliest moments of her childhood, you can imagine how that manifests in families all across the country and it creates a limiting belief and it creates a barrier of consciousness. We all know that Roger Bannister theory of life, the guy who
broke the four-minute mile—what was fascinating about that is that no one in human history had ever broken the four-minute mile, and he didn’t listen to all the experts. He didn’t know what he didn’t know. And he broke it, and within two years, dozens and dozens of people around the world broke the four-minute mile. It turned out it was a psychological barrier, by definition; it wasn’t a physical barrier. And I think about that: the psychological barrier that exists in a lot of positions of power—police chiefs, fire chiefs, heads of Homeland Security in the past—all these dominant male figures come to mind and how so many have struggled to break those stereotypes and those limitations, in terms of consciousness, and how profoundly important those things are.

I appointed our city’s first female fire chief, and immediately—I’ll never forget—when it came out everyone said, “Oh, you’re just doing that because she’s a woman.” I said, “No, she’s the most qualified.” They said, “Okay, we’ll take you at your word.” A few weeks later, I appointed the first female police chief, and that’s when I got a call from a well-known elected official.
She
called me, saying, “I got the fire chief. Your point was made. This is getting ridiculous.” I said, “What do you mean, ridiculous?” She said, “Look, you made your point, good for you, reaching out and getting a woman in the office.” I said, “You’re missing the point. I didn’t do it because she was a woman, either one of them.” And this was from a well known, never to be named elected official who was a woman, who thought I was doing it for purely political spectacle, not for substantive reasons. It was a big eye-opener for me. But it became profound, I mean, how many events I attended with my fire chief and police chief, and all these young girls running up to them that had never seen a woman police chief or a woman fire chief, and now, all of a sudden, in their subconscious is the capacity for them to see themselves in that position. It raises their bar of expectations. Public safety now, which has sort of been that eternal daddy figure in the past, now is a maternal mother figure in the present and future
in their mind. I imagine it changes their mindset at home about all kinds of things. I think these things are incredibly important on the substance, but also the symbolism. And so when we do have a woman president, I think it will be profound, more profound than having a person of a different race in many ways.

MS
: This is often framed as being about equality for equality’s sake, but why is this important to everybody—to men and women—to have more women’s voices represented and in positions of influence?

GN
: In the broadest sense, I’m sitting here in an incubator, at my lieutenant governor’s office in San Francisco, surrounded by forty start-ups, all these young folks with their laptops. And I look around the room and see remarkable diversity, and with that diversity comes people that are forming new connections, making new distinctions—thus the innovation you see, particularly out here and other parts of our country. And it comes from people from different walks of life, sharing their unique experiences and perspectives. Women bring, frankly, likely so much more to the table. I grew up with a single mother who raised two kids, worked her tail off at two-and-a-half jobs. . . . She never complained. She never explained her lot in life as some negative. She had the ability to multitask, to be able to navigate the responsibilities at work and the responsibilities at home. And I contrast that to, frankly, a lot of the male members of my family. It’s not an indictment of my father—I’m still very close to him—but he divorced and moved away. [Men] have a remarkable incapacity at times to multitask [and] are remarkably good at complaining. . . . I don’t mean to be trivializing the point of gender diversity, but just my own experience—with my sister and certainly with my wife, Jen, and so many women in my life—it’s this remarkable capacity that women provide empathy and connection and the ability to, as that wonderful
book
Built to Last
said, to recognize the genius of “and” versus the tyranny of “or”; the ability to do this “and” that. But back to my original point—not just forming distinctions, but fixing connections in people and in opportunity.

MS
: I see a positive shift happening in the sense that now these issues are not being framed as much as “women’s issues,” that there has been lately a trend toward seeing the empowering and educating of women and girls as being something that would uplift all of humanity. Do you feel that more men are recognizing that and feeling comfortable being advocates for women?