WHY WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP MATTERS
WHY DOES IT matter if women hold political power? Are their countries better off when they do? What might a woman president accomplish that none of the forty-four men who have served accomplished? To put a fine point on it, why should a woman be president?
In theory, a government composed of only men could fulfill every interest, demand, and concern of the 51 percent of the population that are women. Democratic president John F. Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act, America’s first ever law banning sex discrimination in wages and salaries. Republican president Ronald Reagan nominated the first woman, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, to the Supreme Court. Vice President Joe Biden, when he was a senator, authored the landmark Violence Against Women Act. In short, men with power have at times championed the interests of women citizens and voters.
But, as John Stuart Mill, one of the first great theorists of modern democracy—and not incidentally an early champion of women’s political equality—wrote, “In the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the omitted is always in danger of being overlooked.” Or as a popular expression in Washington goes, if you are not at the table, you’re going to be on the menu.
“WHEN THE AFFORDABLE Care Act was first brought to our caucus, Senator Mikulski stood up in the meeting and said, ‘Wait a minute. This bill is not moving in its present form,’” Maryland Democratic senator Benjamin Cardin recalled. Only the day before the scheduled vote, Democratic Party leaders in the Senate had approached Barbara Mikulski to inform her that they had removed a key provision on women’s preventive health care that she had sponsored. Mikulski was furious. After all, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions had voted overwhelmingly to include the provision in health care reform, and here leadership—which did not include any women—had imperiously nixed it without consulting her or anyone else. Mikulski immediately reached out to all the Democratic women senators. She said to them they could not tolerate it, and that she was going to make a stand at the caucus meeting.
When I asked Mikulski about it, she said, “You have to know where we were.”
It was November 2009 and passage of health care reform was touch-and-go. That was the context in which party leaders tried to assure Mikulski and other supporters of the dropped provision. She told me, “They said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, when we do this you’ll be included.’ It was our position that we hear that all the time—that the bill will take care of you. My modus operandi is that often when public policy is made it means one size fits all. And that usually means we don’t take into consideration women or perhaps some minority populations.”
Democrats largely agreed that health care reform had to end gender discrimination. Health insurers often refused to cover basic women’s preventive health care, such as mammograms or contraception, and a major part of reform was to guarantee that insurers would cover essential preventive health care services without a copay. The question was how to define what made up those essential provisions. Mikulski explained, “My analysis and experience was that it never would happen unless we explicitly stated the benefit package.” The provision that was dropped put responsibility for identifying women’s preventive health in the hands of the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Mikulski went on, “I wanted to avoid a political squabble, to make sure that it wasn’t done by politicians, that it wasn’t done by special interest groups, etc.”
Mikulski recalled what happened at the caucus meeting: “I said to Harry Reid, ‘If you’re going to move this bill, you have to include the women.’ The Democratic women insisted that there had to be a women’s health amendment and we had the support of men. It wasn’t our initiative only—it wasn’t girls versus boys. In fact there was tremendous support from the men.” Making a stand within the caucus and organizing the women senators paid off. The day after Thanksgiving, Reid called Mikulski to say they were going to try to put the provision back in the bill, and promised her that it would be the first amendment to be debated and put to a full Senate vote.
Looking back, Cardin blamed the omission on “insensitivity,” that no one recognized that “too many males and not enough women were involved in developing that bill.”
A senior Senate aide who was aware of the maneuvering was more blunt: “Had there been one chairwoman of the committee, that would not have happened.”
In short, every person who held power to decide what stayed in and what was cut from the most significant legislation in a generation was a man. This episode just shows how many tables there are in Washington, and how vigilant women need to be about claiming their seats.
“On an average day you go to a Democratic chiefs of staff meeting and you’re the only woman in the room,” Tara McGuinness, at the time an executive at Center for American Progress, told me. “It’s not until you’re sitting in one of these precious seats that you realize there haven’t been many women in them. It’s these remarkable moments when you realize the leadership of women makes a huge difference.”
“I think the challenge is to educate women and convey, ‘We’re not going to change things unless we have a seat at the table,’” Republican consultant Katie Packer Gage said when I asked her about her views on the gender gap in political officeholding. “And I do think that whatever your opinions, for instance, on the issue of rape in the military, the fact that you have Republican and Democrat women on both sides of the issue debating how to address it, I love. That’s an issue that is very personal to women—even though men are often victims. And I think that there will be different solutions that are found to that because there are women working in a bipartisan way to come up with them. So, I think it’s critical, and I hope that as more people are focusing on this, that we’ll see more and more women getting into the mix.”
The impact women legislators can have on the lives of women can be monumental and, as the case of the women’s health amendment shows, women often bring a perspective to public policy that is missing when women are missing. “Sometimes women focus on issues that otherwise would not get the attention they deserve,” Maine senator Olympia Snowe said. “When I served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, I fought for gender-integrated training. It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the late ‘90s that was a major issue. Many in Congress, as well as in the military, were resisting the whole notion that women should be part of integrated basic training. It didn’t make sense. They fight as they train. Can you imagine today an all-volunteer army without women? It couldn’t happen. But I had to fight that mightily as a woman on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I was the one that led this effort as a woman, for women, and for our military. So I think women do bring a unique perspective. I think it’s critical to have representation in our government that is more reflective of the demographics of our country at large.”
Hawaii representative and Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard shared Snowe’s view. “I think it’s a travesty that we don’t have more women who’ve worn the uniform and more women who’ve served in combat representing our country at the highest levels of leadership. We need that,” Gabbard said. “What inspires me is hearing from some of our female service members in different parts of the country. People who I’ve never had the chance to meet, who’ve sent me emails saying how much they appreciate just knowing that there is someone there in our nation’s capital who understands their life and the challenges they have, and someone who they know has their back. It’s a great responsibility to be able to be a voice for our female service members in Congress.”
Likewise, women’s representation matters because diversity is an asset to any institution. “When only men are making decisions, there is a great deal of societal wisdom and experience that’s not part of the decision-making. That leads to okay, but not spectacular decisions,” Democratic consultant Mary Hughes said. And, as Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal maintained, it was fundamental to our national values. “Our life experiences are different,” she said. “We are in a representative democracy. Our life experiences should be represented. And it’s about as simple as that. Now, someday it won’t matter, because we’ll have similar experiences. But right now it definitely matters.”
AT MIDNIGHT ON October 1,2013, the United States government shut down. Raising the stakes of the crisis, the U.S. Treasury was projected to reach the limit of its borrowing authority less than two weeks later. If Congress did not act to raise the so-called debt ceiling, the nation would default on its debt and throw global markets into a tailspin.
The night before, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives had sent the Senate, controlled by Democrats, a budget bill that defunded the Affordable Care Act and delayed implementation of several key provisions. At a stalemate, Congress could not pass a budget, and with no funds yet authorized for the fiscal year, the United States government stopped paying its bills. Every nonessential function of the federal government was shuttered. Although members of Congress continued to receive their paychecks, national parks closed, benefit checks to veterans went unwritten, and no student loans were issued. The high-stakes gamble linking the budget to the Affordable Care Act had been masterminded by freshman Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, who advanced the theory that President Obama and Democrats would scrap health care reform rather than let the government shut down. When Cruz failed to persuade his fellow Republican senators to go along, in a monumental breach of Senate tradition, Cruz took his plan over to the House GOP Tea Party Caucus.
“I was sitting in my office on Saturday—it was the end of the first week of the government shutdown—and I was watching the debate on the Senate floor. The more I watched, the angrier and more frustrated I became,” Republican senator Susan Collins told me. “Those who were arguing for the shutdown claimed that if we shut down government, it would somehow lead to a defunding of Obamacare. That, of course, was a ludicrous supposition, because there was no way that the president was going to agree to repeal what to him was his signature achievement. I felt that the shutdown was a disaster. I saw how it was hurting the economy in my home state of Maine and across the nation.” Collins recounted. “In my judgment, we were not being responsible and we were failing the American people by not governing.”
Growing increasingly alarmed as she watched her colleagues deliver chest-thumping speeches to a nearly empty Senate, Collins turned on her computer, drafted a three-point plan that she hoped would jump-start discussions to reopen the government, and walked over to the Senate to deliver her speech.
“When Susan gave the speech, I was in the chamber. There happened to be a lot of women hanging around. We felt like we shouldn’t go home during the shutdown,” Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar recalled, leaving unsaid the fact that despite the crisis, most congressmen had left town for their usual weekend break.
Senator Barbara Mikulski was in the chamber too. “So there I was, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, and I stood up and said, essentially, good for Senator Collins for offering fresh ideas and a fresh approach,” she told me.
Collins’s cell phone started ringing as soon as she left the Senate floor. “The first three people I heard from were Lisa Murkowski, Kelly Ayotte, and Amy Klobuchar. I don’t think that’s a coincidence that women who heard my speech all said, ‘I want to help, count me in, what can I do?’”
As the workweek began and the shutdown continued, it was clear to journalists, pundits, and most Republican senators that the GOP was losing the battle for public opinion. (Congress’s approval rating plunged to an all-time low of 15 percent in the wake of the shutdown.) But in the House, Republican representatives escalated their demands. Obama and Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid refused to negotiate until the government reopened; they had been burned badly by the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. In the midst of what seemed to be stereotypically male behavior, Collins started working behind the scenes to organize senators—women and men—to forge a compromise.
Collins, as a member of the Senate’s minority party who was not in leadership, had limited authority to devise the final plan, but she smartly leveraged the power she had. Mikulski recalled, “People like me who chaired committees and didn’t want this shutdown—really, this was a Ted Cruz thing—we were able to say they’re building everyday, some of those ideas are pretty good, we need to pay attention to the coalition.”
The coalition of senators Collins forged presented their plan to Democratic leader Reid and Republican leader Mitch McConnell and also dropped a bombshell on them. Collins’s group would hold a televised press conference about their plan—unless the leaders worked with them. “We told them that we were going to go to the Senate press gallery to unveil our plan,” Collins said. “Needless to say, neither leader wanted that to happen, because they didn’t want to lose control.” The plan by Collins’s coalition became the framework for reopening the government. Just hours before the Treasury would no longer be able to pay America’s bills, the sixteen-day shutdown ended. Standard and Poor’s estimated that the shutdown had taken $24 billion out of the nation’s economy.
“In the Senate, a voting bloc of fourteen people is determinative,” Mikulski said. “Collins got the ball rolling, and with Senator Klobuchar, they built a coalition of fourteen members. I thought it was just fantastic.”
IN AMERICA’S POLARIZED and dysfunctional politics, getting along to get things done across party lines is a positive good in and of itself and something most Americans want. Yet what do women politicians substantively accomplish with their more collaborative style of governance? In other words, can they deliver? The resounding conclusion of the research is that they do. Congresswomen are as effective as their male colleagues, studies have shown. And they outperform men in some cases. One study found that women in Congress delivered more money to their districts—roughly 9 percent more in federal discretionary funding. Another found that women sponsored a greater number of bills. Women senators introduce more bills and win more support for them, and they successfully move more of these bills out of committee and enact them, compared to their male counterparts, according to Quorum’s analysis of Congress during the polarized Obama years.
The value women add to the process is not limited to government, but extends to the private sector as well. Women possess more of the leadership attributes valued in today’s globalized, networked economy. Although that claim might sound as if it was cooked up at the Feminist Majority Foundation, in fact, that is what McKinsey consulting discovered when it surveyed global business executives. Those executives said they believed that women more often displayed the top qualities of superior business leadership: participatory decision making; the talent for inspiring people; setting expectations; and intellectual stimulation. Various studies have found that businesses that include women in leadership perform better for their shareholders. A study by Catalyst, a respected nonprofit that conducts research on women’s leadership, concluded that corporations with the highest proportion of women board members delivered a 26 percent higher return on invested capital, compared to corporations with no female board members.
A 2012 survey on 7,280 business leaders found that women leaders were rated more effective than men on twelve of the sixteen competencies that make for “outstanding” leadership. “Most stereotypes would have us believe that female leaders excel at nurturing competencies such as developing others and building relationships, and many might put exhibiting integrity and engaging in self-development in that category as well. And in all four cases our data concurred—women did score higher than men,” Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, the study’s authors, wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “But the women’s advantages were not at all confined to traditionally women’s strengths. In fact, at every level, more women were rated by their peers, their bosses, their direct reports, and their other associates as better overall leaders than their male counterparts.”
Not only are women politicians at least as competent as men and, as we see in the resolution of the government shutdown, more collaborative. They also are more attuned to the interests, values, and concerns of women.
While men and women voters hold generally the same positions on issues involving women’s rights, women legislators are more likely to vote in favor of feminist proposals. When a woman replaces a man in a Congress, a greater number of bills on women’s interests are introduced from that district. Although men in Congress are as likely as women to support measures promoting women’s health, the more women in leadership, the more bills on women’s health are passed.
And the list of women acting on behalf of women goes on. Compared to congressmen, congresswomen sponsor more bills protecting women’s rights and LGBT rights. Democratic and moderate Republican congresswomen are more likely to advance legislation on child care and domestic violence. Even in legislatures with only a handful of women, women representatives often feel especially responsible for representing women and distinguish themselves by taking leadership on women’s issues.
Moreover, even when men and women voters agree on a so-called women’s issue, women legislators are more likely to champion it. Take recent legislation on equal pay for women. Democrats—men and women—unanimously voted in favor of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, sponsored by Mikulski. The only four Republican votes in favor came from the only four Republican women in the senate at the time, Collins, Murkowski, Snowe, and Kay Bailey Hutchison. Or consider reproductive rights. Although historically the difference in men’s and women’s opinions about the right to legal abortion has been slight, women in Congress have been more likely than men to support measures protecting access to abortion and contraception. The particular attention women legislators devote to women’s particular concerns is true generally across race and ethnicity, and, importantly, minority interests are not sacrificed in the process. African American state legislators introduce as many bills advancing African American interests and women’s interests, respectively, as their counterparts among black men and nonblack women. Similarly, when the interests of women and Latinos clash, it is Latinas who take the lead in adjudicating the conflict to forge a solution.
Similar results are found in the private sector. When women hold top leadership positions, women in their companies do better. American corporations led by women CEOs or board chairs hire more women as senior executives and pay female executives up to 20 percent more than corporations led by men. Corporate Women Directors International commissioned a study of women CEOs in thirty-six economies and found that in the companies headed by women, the percentage of women on boards and in senior executive roles was double that of their peers. The group’s head, Irene Natividad, told me, “We did the study because I would always hear, ‘Oh, women don’t help other women.’ I hate that remark.”
Of course, given the diversity among women, acting on behalf of women can put women on opposite sides. As we have seen, conflicts over issues of sexuality and reproduction sharply divide Republicans and Democrats; Republican women disagree among themselves on many of the classic women’s issues, such as equal pay and domestic violence; and many dispute the very idea of women’s issues. Likewise, the bell curve of talent applies equally to women as it does to men. “I do not subscribe to the idea that the world’s going to be a better place with women running it,” Democratic consultant Karin Johanson said. “I just think it’s a basic equity question. Some women are incredibly skilled and some women are mediocre. I suppose when I started I thought women would be better in office. I just care about basic fairness. We have a right to representative government. Why should women have to be better?”
The research on gender differences in governing is consistent and transcends national lines. Globally, women have taken the lead in making women’s issues a priority. From Canada to Argentina, New Zealand to Scandinavia, women legislators are more active than men in promoting economic measures that enable women to participate equally in the workforce, such as providing paid family leave and making it illegal to pay women less than men for similar work. Political scientist Jennifer Piscopo examined 18,700 bills introduced by lawmakers in Argentina’s lower house over a ten-year period and found that nearly three-quarters of women’s rights bills were written by women. She found a similar pattern in Mexico—77 percent of the bills in the lower house related to women’s rights were introduced by women. In both countries, most of the remaining bills were written by men in left-leaning political parties.
Women politicians have led the charge to eradicate legal discrimination in nations in which fundamentalist religion and patriarchy relegated women to subordinate roles and low status. It was women in the Rwandan legislature who won property rights for women; it was women parliamentarians in Turkey, working in concert with women’s rights groups, who reformed the criminal law to remove references to chastity, virginity, and honor that discriminated against women. In overwhelmingly Catholic Latin America, where men have been timid about crossing the Vatican, women legislators have been more likely than men to champion expanded access to contraception and abortion.
In addition, women legislators have different priorities than their male counterparts on a broad range of issues, according to a substantial though less unanimous body of research. In the Scandinavian nations, women parliamentarians have been more likely than men to champion environmental protection and social welfare. In a study of twenty-two democracies (including the United States) women legislators voted for lower defense spending and fewer military interventions compared to men. Considering that global public opinion surveys show women on average are more liberal than men, the policies advanced by women legislators suggest they are acting with their women constituents’ values in the forefront.
These aren’t just isolated cases. In a comparison of thirty-one countries, political scientists Leslie Schwindt-Bayer and William Mishler found that governments were more responsive to women’s policy concerns when more women were in the legislature. And the more women elected to political office, the greater the benefit for women specifically and gender equality in general. Even where popular opinion was strongly on the side of gender equality, the key determinant of how much got accomplished regarding women’s issues was how many women lawmakers there were.
Likewise, the more women in legislature, the more confidence ordinary women had in the legislature. Importantly, men also responded positively to women’s representation—expressing increased confidence in the legislature as women’s representation rose. Simply put, women legislators got things done for women—and men.
The scholarship is unequivocal. To make progress toward gender equality, to tackle the “unfinished business of the 21st century,” nations need women in power, and the more the better.
“WHAT I’VE FOUND almost to a surprising level is the issues that get debated are determined by the people who are making the decisions. Who is at that table decides what we are going to talk about as a nation,” Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden told me. “Occasionally, you’ll have something that grows from the bottom, like Occupy Wall Street. But if you’re thinking about what bills we’re going to pass or what the priorities of Washington are, it’s who controls that budget process, it’s who controls the State of the Union address. Who is at the table decides what are the top priorities, especially in Washington.”
Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman elected in an African nation to be head of state, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition “of the great potential for democracy and peace that women represent.” Under the leadership of Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister, Iceland outlawed strip clubs, on the logic that it “is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold.” (Sigurdardóttir had won election after promising to put an end to “the age of testosterone.”) German chancellor Angela Merkel is universally seen as Europe’s most powerful leader. Depending on your perspective, she either saved the European Union or set in motion its dissolution with her forceful response to the 2008 global financial crisis.
While it is clear from the global record that women lawmakers act with women’s interests in mind, it is harder to make generalizations about women top executives, given that the culture, political institutions, and economies of nations are so varied. Irene Natividad, head of the Global Summit of Women, has met and worked with many of the world’s women leaders. She observed that you tend to find a woman’s name attached to bills that have benefited women, but, she said, “Women as presidents of countries—it’s uneven. Kirchner for instance is not one of my favorite people,” she said. (At the time we spoke, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was presiding over a currency crisis and was the target of several investigations.)
Still, Natividad continued, “There is a group of women who never forgot that they were women who happened to be president. Michelle Bachelet is a great example. In a macho country, she was the one behind child care and pay equity.”
Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, in her first term, opened thousands of new, free nurseries for infants and toddlers, in order to give their mothers the opportunity to work; on the eve of her second term in the presidency, she promised to open thousands more. Not only did Bachelet push through an equal pay law, she appointed a parity cabinet—that is, a cabinet with equal numbers of men and women—even though many in her own political party put up resistance. She made emergency contraception universally accessible, against major opposition from parties of the right and the church. In her major reform of Chile’s pension system, she incorporated creative measures, such as child bonuses, to boost women’s retirement earnings. (In employment-based pension systems, like Chile’s and America’s social security system, women tend to retire with lower pensions because of time out of the workforce to care for children.) And that was all in her first term. (The president is not allowed to serve consecutive terms, but after sitting out one term, during which she was the head of UN Women, Bachelet easily won reelection. She was and remains the most popular politician in the nation.) In her second term, which runs from 2014 to 2018, Bachelet is pushing for electoral quotas to boost the level of women’s representation, as well as to liberalize Chile’s highly restrictive abortion laws, put in place by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. (Bachelet, it’s worth noting, had been imprisoned and tortured by the military regime; her father was tortured and killed.)
Bachelet is an example of what seems to be a solid trend: When a woman who has a prior record of advancing gender equality steps into the top post, she uses the power of her office and expends political capital to advance women’s full and equal participation in society. There is also a strong association between gender equality and women heads of government. For instance, Iceland ranked number one in 2014 on gender equality, and in twenty of the past fifty years the nation has had a woman prime minister or president. Finland and Norway ranked second and third, respectively, and in both, women were the top elected leaders for over a decade.
But of course, some women assume these top positions having had no significant past record of prioritizing gender equality. They give us perhaps an even more important insight into the question of women in power.
Consider the case of Europe during the 2015 Greek debt crisis. German chancellor Angela Merkel—arguably the most powerful European leader of the 21st century and a woman—was the single most powerful person among the leaders of Greece’s creditors. Merkel took a hardline position. Many economists and other global leaders instead called for a balanced package of reforms, including debt relief, so as to allow the Greek economy to grow. Some in this camp sharply rebuked Merkel for her intransigence. Among these critics, the individual with the greatest influence over the actual talks was International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde—arguably one of the most powerful bankers in Europe and a woman. As Bloomberg News reported, “Now that Greece is eligible again for loans from the IMF, getting any more money from the fund may hinge on a test of wills between Christine Lagarde and Angela Merkel.”
Unsurprisingly, no one suggested the world would be in better hands if men were at the helm of the high-stakes negotiations. No one said that Merkel and Lagarde were not qualified to lead. Many experts and pundits took sides, but no one thought that these women lacked the resolve or the toughness for executive leadership in a crisis in a traditionally “male” policy arena. And no one thought that the differences between Merkel and Lagarde had anything to do with their gender. Instead, observers understood that complex forces shaped the two women’s positions: their national histories, their personal political histories, the powers of their particular office, the political and financial objectives of the institutions they led, and their appraisals of the economic stakes for the Euro zone. Both the IMF and the German nation, as Greece’s largest creditors, stood to lose lots of money if they got it wrong.
This was a sign of progress. In a case in which there were no questions of gender parity or equity—except the obvious and largely irrelevant one that women make up half of all Greek citizens—women were at the head of the table of decision makers. And the gender of the key players was a nonissue. Europe, it seemed, had achieved what many people in the United States look forward to: At some point, having a woman in the top position wouldn’t be remarkable because it was no longer rare.
And yet in one important regard, an American woman president will always be remarkable, in the true meaning of the term, because of the power the United States wields on the global stage.
“Having America have a woman president—America has always been known as the land of opportunity—I think helps internationally,” Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar said. “When we look at some of these issues like Boko Haram and sex trafficking, I think having a woman as president sends a message more than anything else about that kind of treatment of women. And every single time a country improves the way it treats women, we seem to have more democracy and more progress in the country.”
That message—about a nation’s values and women’s opportunity—matters as much at home as it does abroad.
“The fundamental ideology of this country, one of the things that we bring to the world, is equality for girls and women,” Democratic consultant Celinda Lake said. “That’s going to ring hollow until our girls see a woman president.”
In other words, there are bigger philosophical questions about democracy and the American Dream at stake.