What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (76 page)

MS
: It’s amazing to think that we didn’t have the right to vote until pretty recently.

SS
: To me that’s just so astonishing. We’re going to have our 100-year anniversary soon.

MS
: I guess the question is, where do you see the status of women today and what do you see as the call to action?

SS
: Well, I feel like it’s all bubbling right now across the country. There’s this energy that we saw in the 2012 election, which we really feel was the beginning of a mandate for women’s leadership in this country, electing historic numbers of women. You can feel this energy just bubbling around the country. And that the difference people are seeing with their women leaders, whether it’s on the legislative side or the executive side, it matters. Women bring a different perspective to these discussions and it’s a perspective that we desperately need. So my call to everybody is to get engaged now, because this is happening. And the way that we really make it happen, coast to coast, in every state, is by getting involved, whether it’s a local race, whether you’re running or you’re backing somebody up. Democracy is not something you just sit on the sidelines of—you actually have to get involved, roll up your sleeves, and help out your sisters in doing this. We can make this happen.

CAROL JENKINS

“It’s in the unladylike category to be talking about money and asking about money, but I think you won’t become president of the United States if you don’t get the money thing. You have to understand who has it. You have to convince them to give it to you. You have to feel that you’re worthy of it. . . . And I find that it’s curious that young women seem not to care as much about that as I think an older generation did. I don’t know how we get them on board to understand that the money is a piece of this machinery, unfortunately. So until they change that, this is the part that you have to learn and master. . . . The truth of the matter is that in all areas, one must conquer the money piece of it. So to go into any field that you’re going into, master the money piece.”

C
AROL
J
ENKINS IS
an award-winning writer, producer, and media consultant. She is a sought-after speaker and writer on issues relating to the media, specifically the participation of women and people of color, women’s participation in the political and economic structures in the United States, and the health of women in developing countries, particularly on the African continent.

An Emmy-winning former television journalist, she was founding president and board member of the Women’s Media Center, the groundbreaking nonprofit aimed at increasing coverage and participation of women in the media. In that role she conceived the acclaimed Progressive Women’s
Voices media leadership program, and acquired and expanded the largest portfolio of women experts in the country, SheSource. The WMC bestows The Carol Jenkins Young Journalist Award to an accomplished media professional each year.

Carol Jenkins is immediate past chair of the board of directors of AMREF USA, and now chairs its Leadership Council. She continues to serve on the Women’s Media Center board as well as on numerous other boards. She is also the coauthor of
Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire
. She was an executive producer of Eve Ensler’s Sundance award–winning documentary,
What I Want My Words to Do to You
and is a contributor to the recently published book
Secrets of Powerful Women: Leading Change for a New Generation
.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we haven’t yet had a woman president?

CAROL JENKINS
: Well, I think of the way we’ve, in recent times, elected our presidents: They’ve come from a very small group of people. A very small group of elite, mostly wealthy people, at that. Our present president excepted, I would suppose. So the general path to that is you either have to be a governor, or a senator, and having come up through those ranks, and then have a fair amount of international experience and clout, credibility and all of that. And so I think it comes back to the proverbial pipeline that has been stuffed for a very long time. I think unless we can change that operational mode of how people perceive presidents to be credible enough to run and to be elected, then I think that we’ll still have the same kind of result. Obviously, in our lifetime, I think Hillary Clinton is our best bet of having a president who is totally qualified, overqualified in fact, if one can
say that. I think she is far above and beyond any other president we’ve had in recent memory, in terms of credentials and experience, et cetera. And also understanding that there is a huge money part of this. One does not just decide to become president and run. One has to have access to millions and millions of dollars. So I think we’ve had some high-profile Republican women who have made that effort to become a senator, a governor—I’m talking about Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina—the use of private funds the way men have in the past. So I think that as women are able to establish huge caches of money, then they will be able to help foot their own runs for office that will then put them on the launchpad. But so far it’s pretty much blocked. Most people think you either have to be a senator or a governor in order to make that leap to run for president.

MS
: I interviewed Celinda Lake over the weekend, and she was saying that part of the problem is that even if enough women run, they often don’t make it there. So there are some problems in the pipeline.

CJ
: Yes, it’s a very long, complicated process. And in some ways there, more than anywhere, you have to pay your dues, so to speak. You just can’t out of the blue, even if you’ve got a hundred million dollars, successfully run for president of the United States. So I think part of the solution is encouraging women to run for office on lower levels, so that they then can get to the governorship or Senate. Governorship, I think, always seems to be the most useful way of getting there, because you’re running something, huge numbers of people and dollars and all of that. The other piece of it, though, is having an international credibility that you can exercise, as well, because certainly as we know today with the threats of nukes and all of that, you have to be really, really experienced internationally. So it’s a tough hoe. It’s not a piece of cake to say whimsically that one would love to be president of the United States. It’s almost something that you have
to plan early in your career, to make sure that you have made the right friends, the connections, that you know how to run a political campaign—and that then you’re willing to and able to put up with the rigors that the office requires.

MS
: Part of the conversation that’s come in the wake of Sheryl Sandberg’s book is about leadership and all of these studies that say that women have to really be encouraged to run for office. Do you think there is some truth to the fact that women are not naturally pursuing leadership positions and that that’s part of what’s holding women back?

CJ
: Well, any woman I know, in any conversation that we’ve had throughout the years of my career . . . for instance, this conversation about trying harder and preparing yourself more and having the bravery to go for it is always an issue, because women have not yet seen that it can be done and it can be done without a
huge
price. Obviously, women with small children have a difficult time doing politics, so it’s something that has to wait, generally, unless they’ve got super staff, until later in their careers. If you look at it realistically, that you are on the road and working 24/7, something’s got to give in that regard. Wouldn’t it be great? Yes, it would be great, but somebody has to care for the children. And so I think that, if you plan it out systematically, women who are beyond their early child-caring years can then have a great run at politics. Most politicians are older, as well, so that sort of works. The best headline that I saw—and I adore Sheryl Sandberg—but the best headline I saw after her book came out said, “Sheryl Sandberg Gives American Women a Performance Review” [
laughs]
, and the implication was that they came up wanting. So one of the important things that we have to remember is that mentoring and access to power is crucial to any kind of great movement like that. When you read her book you see that she was operating in such rare air at those levels of
power and access. So the book is great in showing how that works and how she got there and her suggestions about how other women can get there. And I think that we all, men and women, can certainly apply ourselves harder.

But I don’t think I buy into the implication that women have not been trying. I think that there are so many more complex, really hard-line barriers to women being successful, and one of them is certainly the access to powerful, at this point, men, and whatever women who are there. So that would be the piece to keep in mind: You have to build those networks if you want to be president of the United States. I remember when I was covering Bill Clinton, one of the first things I learned about him was that he kept a card file of every single person he ever met, and wrote down their wives and their children and the birth dates and the important things to remember about them—I mean, that kind of massive detail in knowing what you’re going after and that ultimately you will need those contacts, those supporters, those friends. And as many people have described, Bill Clinton could then recall that information at the drop of a hat, and “Wow, sure, here’s my check.” So that kind of detail to building your network and building your base has to start very early in your career. Many people I know, most people I know, are working so hard with their noses to the grindstone, they don’t have time to give a thought to that kind of detail—database building—but I think it has to be a part of a successful, large career.

MS
: Sometimes this gets framed as just equality for equality’s sake. Why is it important that we have more women and diversity in Washington or in the world right now?

CJ
: Well, I think because we’ve just come through an election period where seemingly hundreds of white men were talking about women’s
reproductive systems and rapes and insane things, and when you look at that picture, you understand that that is simply wrong. And I think that women and people of color need to be in the conversation. And certainly the election where Barack Obama got most of the black votes, 70-plus percent of the Latino vote, the LGBT vote—that’s a lot of people being left out of the conversation when you’re only talking about white men running everything. It’s funny, when the film
Lincoln
came out, I know that so many women friends of mine had no use for it. The reason was that we had just come out of this election where there was nothing but white men talking about everything, and that’s what the film was. Hundreds of white men talking about slavery, and a shot or two of a black person and a shot or two of a woman. So I think the country understands that that’s no longer an acceptable way for the United States to work, being the country that we are, of many ethnic groups and people with sexual orientations that don’t fit into the “marriage is between a man and a woman.” The world has changed, so that’s why. And I think that the system won’t work until there is more equality with women, people of color, and different sexual orientations having positions of power. It’s just not going to work. The democracy that we’re looking for will not work until everyone is included.

MS
: With twenty women now in Congress, we’re still far from parity, but it is history making. There was a front page article about it in
The New York Times
a couple of weeks ago, quoting a Republican male senator, Rob Portman, who said even with those low numbers it’s already changed—that women, regardless of party, “tend to be interested in finding common ground” and that they’re having a “positive impact on the Senate.” What changes would you expect to see? It seems like with all the partisanship going on where everything is in gridlock, that would be something worthwhile to bring to the table.

CJ
: Well, my wager is that part of the women that actually get into the system will not be so friendly and accommodating, and I’m not so sure that we should place a premium on that—that having women will make it a nicer place to be. That again is very sexist, you know, “bring women to the table and everybody gets along”—that’s not my idea of what should be going on in Washington. I think our government should be working to make sure that the people in this country have equal rights, they can get to a voting machine, they can have a job, we won’t have millions of starving children . . . and there are so many overwhelming problems in this country that haven’t been addressed yet. So I’m not so sure that that’s brought about by civility, but it is brought about by people seriously thinking about those issues and bringing them to the fore. So certainly we have men who can do that, certainly there will be women who can do that, but I wouldn’t count on the women who in the future are getting into these positions of power being all that sweet. They need to be smart and compassionate, and I think that is what we should judge them on.