What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (50 page)

So perhaps there’s just more conflict for younger women about those kinds of choices than there is for older women. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing; I think it’s a sign of the complexity of our relationship with feminism, our relationship with identity. I mean, we’ve grown up in a time when there are no fixed identities; everything is so blended. There are so many biracial people. There’s so much call among young feminists to get rid of the gender binary altogether, so there’s just a lot of nuance and complexity around identity that I think gets infused into the politics conversation. And that may be confusing to older women who say, “Come on, it’s still a time when we need to just get women into symbolic leadership.” And I’m really sympathetic to that, having not been able to see Hillary become president—I really mourn that. I think that was a sad situation and a lost opportunity, and yet I still am glad that I supported Obama. It doesn’t feel simple for me at all.

MS
: What do you think we can do as a society to encourage more women or younger women into leadership positions or into wanting to pursue political careers?

CM
: I think on a personal level, there are great Marie Wilson ideas. Every speech, she ends with, “When you leave here, please call or contact a young woman that you think should run for office and tell her.” I think there’s that really important groundwork of making sure that powerful young women with a lot of potential know that that’s how they’re perceived and hear that repeatedly, so we can kind of reverse the other societal trends that tell them otherwise. I think we can all support each other in that way. There’s also the fundamental training work which places like The White House Project do so well, which is really helping give women the keys to the kingdom in terms of how do you run for political office, what do you have to think about, what are the different codes and body language, and all these things that we just really won’t know unless we have the opportunity to have that kind of training. I really do think this question about funding of electoral campaigns and where it comes from truly is a feminist issue. I think it’s fundamental to the reason that I wouldn’t run for office, and it’s fundamental to the reason why a lot of women I know wouldn’t run for office. The financing system just seems so corrupt and influences candidates to have to focus the majority of their time on pleasing huge corporations with some sort of special interest and really wealthy people, and that’s not interesting to me. It’s not how I want to spend my energy, and I think for a lot of women it’s repellant. So, to me, the financing of campaigns is actually a deeply feminist issue and would affect who is elected in the coming decades in a massive, probably underanalyzed way.

MS
: Do you feel hopeful that you will see a woman president in your lifetime?

CM
: Absolutely. I would be shocked if in my lifetime I didn’t see a woman president.

MS
: How symbolic do you feel it would be to have a woman as president? Do you think that, in terms of its being a milestone for women and the world, it would have the same impact that electing Barack Obama had on African American people?

CM
: Oh, absolutely. I just could tear up thinking about the symbolic power of that. As we were talking about earlier, there’s this huge moment that I think we’re all experiencing because of the popularity of the “girl effect” idea—the fact that it’s totally obsequious now, and at conferences men will stand in front of big rooms of people and say, “Invest in girls, and the world changes.” That’s become totally normalized—there’s so much more awareness about all of these issues, from domestic violence to sexual assault to equal pay. I feel like there’s a real kind of tipping point happening, and so to have the crowning achievement of that tipping point be a woman in the highest office in America, I just think it would be fantastic and totally organic and make perfect sense. Which is why I really do think I will see it in my lifetime. I feel like there’s enough momentum among the feminist movement—and even those who don’t necessarily identify as feminists but are really newly aware and excited about these issues—that it just has to happen.

MS
: Is there anything that I haven’t covered that you would want to see happen, to get to that place where we would be celebrating that milestone?

CM
: One thing that occurs to me—you referenced the nutcracker comments and stuff like that—I also feel that the tenor of our media is such that it’s hard for anyone who has an authentic, open, potentially changeable leadership style to run. It feels like the media climate just pounces on people for everything—like you can’t change your mind on anything or you’re a flip-flopper, which I find totally anomalous to what real leadership looks
like to me. Real leadership is learning in public and saying, “I did think this was the best way to go here, but I’ve been educated by these people, and now I understand this is actually the best way to go.” The fact that our current media climate doesn’t allow for people to change their minds, I think, is probably another deterrent for women. I think every male or female political candidate feels their every move is being scrutinized, and that’s something women already experience with the “male gaze” and that concept of always being objectified, so it’s like that on steroids. I do think the media—beyond just the usual conversation we have, which is really overtly sexist media—I think there’s this thing about the way the media, in this 24-7 news climate, pounces on every single thing and just blows it up. That’s another thing that makes running for office feel really abhorrent to a lot of really awesome leaders who I would otherwise love to see in office but I could imagine would say, “I don’t want to expose myself to the media machine that just tears people apart, tears families apart.”

MS
: That just reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Eve Ensler about how it’s hard right now to feel really excited about the political arena as a place to make change, just because of what happens with the gridlock and all of this partisanship. You’re somebody who is an activist in other spheres. You can make change in a lot of different ways, and sometimes ways that can feel a bit more friendly or hopeful than what politics is like these days. Is that part of the problem? What can we do about the fact that right now it’s hard to feel like being in the political system is even an effective way to make change anymore? Even if you get someone inspiring in there, like Obama, it’s hard to believe that they can even enact their vision.

CM
: Yeah, I think that’s hugely at play, and I recognize that I myself have certain skills and tolerances and they push me into certain forms of
leadership—in my case, writing and speaking and those kinds of things—and other people have other skills and tolerances. And I know people who really do have what it takes to run for office in this particular political climate, as much as it deters me. So even though I think the political system is so corrupt and I believe in publicly financed elections and the media climate is terrible—all of these things—I still think there are women who totally have what it takes. And they need to do it, and we need them to do it. We need to support them in any way we can. So I don’t think we can wait until the political system feels more comfortable to those of us who don’t have a high tolerance for that kind of stuff, because we will just be waiting forever. We’ve got to just jump in. So those of us who have that capacity, I think, we really need them to take the risk and jump in, and the rest of us need to get behind them like crazy and make sure they feel supported.

RACHEL SIMMONS

“It’s our responsibility, as adults in education, not just to expect girls to do everything, but to prepare boys to be working
with
girls. I think it’s analogous to how we say to girls, ‘If you don’t wear a skirt and you don’t drink too much, you won’t get raped.’ Like you need to do everything in order to prevent yourself from getting assaulted, as opposed to saying to boys, ‘Hi, don’t assault girls.’ A closer analogy would be, in workplaces now, employers are educating themselves and other people about the presence of bias against women. I think once they do that, then it becomes a lot harder to turn down a woman who’s asking for a raise, or make her inherently less likable. So what I’m trying to say is that in adolescence we need to start asking boys to think about some of the unfair biases that women experience and also how masculinity interfaces with that.”

R
ACHEL
S
IMMONS IS
the author of the
New York Times
best-sellers
Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls
and
The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence
. As an educator, Simmons works internationally to reduce bullying and empower girls and young women.

Simmons is a Vassar graduate and Rhodes Scholar from New York. The cofounder of the Girls Leadership Institute, she is an experienced curriculum writer and educator who works with schools and organizations
around the world. She currently develops leadership programs for undergraduate women at the Center for Work and Life at Smith College. She has previously worked as a classroom teacher in Massachusetts and South Africa.

Simmons was the host of the recent PBS television special
A Girl’s Life
and is a contributing writer and advice columnist for
Teen Vogue
. Simmons has appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
and
The Today Show
, and appears regularly in the national media.
Odd Girl Out
was adapted into a highly acclaimed Lifetime television movie.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we have not yet had a woman president?

RACHEL SIMMONS
: Well, just as we often think about questions in terms of nature and nurture, I feel the same applies to answering that question. There are certain things that seem to be true to growing up female in this country that can make it challenging to become president, mainly the ways in which young women are told to limit the expression of their strongest convictions. And at the same time, the nature aspect of this is not really a clean analogy, because obviously the nurture part comes through socialization. I’m not saying there’s something inherently true about being female, but it’s the culture. There’s something about who women become growing up. And then, of course, you have a society that feels a lot of ambivalence about how powerful these women are allowed to be. So, to me, it’s that mix—it’s how young women are growing up and the habits and the skills that they learn, or don’t learn. And it’s also this society that welcomes them into positions of leadership, or doesn’t.

MS
: What conditions or factors do you think it will take to have our first woman president?

RS
: Well, it’s funny you should ask. I’ve just been thinking today about that. There was an article in
The New York Times
on Friday about Andover Academy and the fact that in its more than 100-year history, they’ve only had four female student government leaders, and so this has launched a debate and some policy changes at the school in an effort to try to get more girls to run for student government. And one of the things the article says is that there’s a perception that girls don’t possess certain leadership skills. And I think part of the implication is that—I feel like one of the things that people say, myself included, about what it takes for a woman to be a leader—is that women need to assert themselves more often and become more comfortable with their authority. Obviously, see Sheryl Sandberg. But that said, I think it’s also incumbent in a high school, for example, on boys to interrogate their own assumptions about femininity and leadership. And it’s also our responsibility, as adults in education, not just to expect girls to do everything, but to prepare boys to be working
with
girls. I think it’s analogous to how we say to girls, “If you don’t wear a skirt and you don’t drink too much, you won’t get raped.” Like you need to do everything in order to prevent yourself from getting assaulted, as opposed to saying to boys, “Hi, don’t assault girls.” A closer analogy would be, in workplaces now, employers are educating themselves and other people about the presence of bias against women. I think once they do that, then it becomes a lot harder to turn down a woman who’s asking for a raise, or make her inherently less likable. So what I’m trying to say is that in adolescence we need to start asking boys to think about some of the unfair biases that women experience and also how masculinity interfaces with that.

MS
: How do you see the cultural conditioning of gender roles in boys and girls as connected to the larger conversation? And where do you see the entry points for change?