What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (6 page)

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

PAT MITCHELL
: Because we, as women, haven’t decided that it’s time to have one and that we are going to make it happen. Truly, I don’t know where we can look outside ourselves. It is within our power to have elected a woman president.

MS
: You think so?

PM
: Absolutely within our power! We have the numbers, and we have had the numbers since we got the right to vote. And we have even more of them now, so there’s no question that if we decided, “This year we are going to have a woman president,” and we identified a candidate, got behind her, and built her campaign and made it happen and went to the polls and voted, there would be one! I just don’t look any further than ourselves to answer that question. I mean, look, there are all kinds of cultural reasons, we know all of those, but Barack Obama didn’t stop and look at it statistically or . . . he didn’t look at this historical legacy. He just said, “I’m going
to be the one.” So you need a candidate who’s willing to say, “I’m going to be the one. I’m going to break this barrier.” And then you need the women of this country to decide that it’s time, and do it.

MS
: Do you think now is the time?

PM
: I thought now is the time a long time ago! [
laughs]
I do think we haven’t had the right mix of candidate, will, and timing. But timing is the least of those in my opinion. Of those three factors, you have to take into consideration the most important two are the candidate, obviously, and then women uniting behind a woman candidate. We have the candidate with Hillary, but we didn’t unite, if you remember.

MS
: Do you think men are ready to have a woman president?

PM
: Marianne, I think men have been ready longer than women have been ready in a funny way. There are enough men who have seen or experienced the leadership of women to believe that it is absolutely within our province and that women can do it just as well, if not better, than men. There’s enough evidence now. I don’t think we’re proving the case to men. I think we’re just getting behind it ourselves in a united way.

MS
: Now, in terms of the last election, we had these record numbers of twenty women in the Senate, but that’s far from parity. Considering everything you are saying, how do you explain that? Why do you think that we’re still so underrepresented?

PM
: Well, there are many explanations, and some people have the data more readily at hand than I do, but part of it is that we just don’t run as often. There simply aren’t as many women running, choosing to do this,
and we know all the reasons why. It’s a really hard thing to do and it’s not a very attractive thing to do in this country, because of the way the press treats women candidates, number one. Number two, what it does to a woman’s family, and number three, the sacrifices that are required for a woman to choose a life in public service. But what I am loving now about this new number of women, particularly in the Senate, where there is enough that you can observe it in a new way . . . I mean, seeing that front page
New York Times
story that said that twenty women in the Senate
are
making a difference, and then to give case-by-case examples of women crossing the aisle, women collaborating, women cooperating, women initiating, and therefore making things happen. So that twenty women out of one hundred starts to be less of a daunting figure if the case you’re making is that women, whether they are Democrat or Republican, will unite their actions on the issues that matter to women. So . . . my hope is that we’re going to come out of this Senate, out of this congressional period, with some new evidence that, yes, in fact, women can and do create a different kind of legislative activity, a different kind of effectiveness, as a congressional body. And I’m hoping that those twenty women in the Senate, they have the real opportunity to be more than trailblazers of just being there. It’s nice that they’re there, but it won’t make any difference to the legacy and the history of women in this country unless they do something
differently
because they’re there. And I do believe, if what they had done when they started out is any indication, then I think we’re on our path to that number doubling. Because really what voters want, anywhere, above all, is effectiveness.

MS
: One of the things we’re saying is that women may not run enough, which is an observation I keep running into—there are a lot of studies that say that. And on the heels of Sheryl Sandberg’s book, do you think that in addition to the structural obstacles that there may be, that it is true that
women tend not to naturally want to pursue leadership positions, because of psychological obstacles?

PM
: No, I don’t think it’s a natural inclination for women not to want to lead or to go for leadership positions. I know very few women who will say, “I’m not naturally inclined to want to be a leader.” Some women might say, “I don’t want to be CEO. I don’t want that kind of job, that’s not where my values are,” I totally get that. But certainly the women I know, you show them that they can make a difference, and generally they’ll step up to that in some way or the other. But not all of us are going to be the ones who need to run. Some of us are going to be the ones who need to run the campaigns and run the media and make sure that there’s a fair and open pathway to success. But what women don’t know enough is that when women run, they win as often as men do. In spite of the obstacles—the structural obstacles that you referred to, and they are there—when they do decide, “I’m going to do this because it’s important,” they do win as often. What can we do about that? As consumers we can do one big thing: we can insist that the press cover a woman’s campaign in the same way as a man. And when they don’t, and we know they don’t—because there’s a new report out that’s just appalling, the difference in the way in which the campaigns are reported—we can insist, “I’m not reading that paper anymore, I’m not going to that website, I’m not going to listen to that newscast until you give that woman candidate the same kind of fair and accurate coverage.” So that’s one thing we can do. The second thing is to vote.

MS
: It is very true, though, that it’s a brutal thing to run these days, and you also brought up how the media can cover a woman candidate. When I interviewed Sheryl Sandberg, she talked about this whole likability correlation—that the more successful a woman leader is, the less she is
liked. On the one side, you can’t be perceived as too soft or too emotional, but if you come across as too strong, too tough, too confident or powerful, you get criticized as well. What do you think about that conundrum?

PM
: Well, that is a conundrum, and I think at the core of that conundrum is that we haven’t worked out yet the very basic relationship between men and women and how men—really at a deep, deep emotional level—feel about strong and powerful women. I think you have to start with men, because they are really conflicted about this. There’s something about strong and powerful women that many men still find fearful. And it probably goes back to their mothers [
laughs]
, so we’ve got some cultural things to unwind and unpack, there’s no question, and one of them really is that. The second thing on this likability factor—as media consumers with more power than we’ve ever had because we are actually controlling what we consume as media, in a different way—if we start to just push the bar, “lean in” as it were, and start to demand a more fair representation of, “Okay, is she bossy or is she just doing her job just like the guy standing next to her is doing?” I mean, poor Nancy Pelosi. When she led that healthcare reform . . . Now, why am I saying ‘poor Nancy Pelosi’? She’s hardly one to be pitied. She’s one of the strongest, most powerful, and most effective women leaders that I’ve ever had the experience of observing, and yet when she did exactly what she was voted into office to do, got legislation passed, she was attacked from every possible point of view. And generally, if you read through it, they were attacking her on a likability issue: She’s this. She’s that. She’s ballsy. She’s too tough. She’s too . . . all these “too” things that, as you say, if they had been applied to a man, would have been all compliments. But what I like about Leader Pelosi is that she just didn’t let any of that deter her. She understood that was part of the trade-off. Now I would love to find a day when she doesn’t have to accept it as part of a trade-off, because enough of us who were reading that
and seeing that and hearing that are objecting to it. That the reporters who are reporting it that way would stop and think,
Oh, wait a minute. Right now, is that really what I think?
and examine the basis on which they are reporting that observation. I don’t think it happens voluntarily, though. I don’t think it happens immediately, but I do think it happens through a kind of process, and we have a role in that process. We can’t just say it’s up to the editors, especially not now when we are making the decisions really on an individual basis, what we are consuming.

MS
: Now, you have the distinction of being a lot of firsts. You were the first female president of PBS and you’ve had a lot of high-level positions like that, where you’ve been a pioneer in so many ways. What is your perspective on being a first, and also being a female leader in an industry where there hasn’t already been a female at the top?

PM
: I don’t believe I ever walked into an office or a job and thought,
Hmm, now how am I going to do this as a woman? What about this am I going to get to do differently, as a woman?
I don’t remember having that conscious thought on a daily basis, but I had it as a subconscious thought . . . because the one thing you do know if you’re the first, in particular, is that you’re modeling something. Whatever you do or don’t do, it is the way women lead in that particular moment, so there would be times when I would think to myself,
Well, they’re going to look at me and go, “Well, of course . . . she’s doing that because she’s a woman.”
I decided a long, long time ago when I was one of the first women in television, that while in the beginning I went along with that—avoiding at all costs anything that brought attention to the fact that I was a woman—very quickly I learned that didn’t feel good to me, and also I thought it was really letting myself down. The other way to go on that was to just make a point: “No, this is what I want to do, as a woman.” So as a woman leader, you can’t make
every decision from that point of view, but my experience is as a mother, as a grandmother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, all those things. I tried to keep them in mind, because I know they’re a part of me, so if I’m not bringing them to the table as the CEO or the executive producer or the host or whatever it may be, then I’m denying part of who I am and that means I’m not going to be as good as I could be. I’ve been challenged on it, though, at PBS, in particular. I was challenged by the board after my first five or six hires were all women. I was challenged by a board member who said, “Looks to me like you’re running an affirmative-action program for women,” and I remember thinking,
Oh, my gosh, is he right? Have I been?
Fortunately I was able to say back, “I think I’m running an affirmative-action program for the very best candidates, but I’ll keep that in mind,” because you don’t want to ignore it completely. But here’s the thing that I did differently. It was probably the first time that a CEO of PBS had ever said to a search executive, “Don’t bring me any list unless there are women and minorities on that list.” That’s the difference. In fact, the search executive said to me, “Are you serious?” And I said, “I’m dead serious. I don’t care what the job is, I want to interview the very best women and minorities you can find.” So if you start there, then it’s quite likely that you’re going to end up with more hires that are women and minorities.

MS
: I think about how they always put women on these “most powerful lists”—I know you’ve been on more than a few of those. What does being powerful mean to you, and how do you think—not just for women, for men, too—this whole power paradigm needs to change?

PM
: Well, everything about it needs to change, because it’s been defined by one gender. I mean, one gender throughout most of our history has had power, so there’s little wonder that when we think of power, we think about it in one-gender terms. So we need to change that, and we can only
change that by changing the people who have power. So we know that, number one. A new power paradigm emerges when a different gender holds it, has it, and then uses it differently. I mean, if women get power only to be just like the guys who had it before them, then that’s not progress. I’m not for women getting power just so they can prove they can be as whatever—whatever the adjectives may be that follow. And then the second thing is to really think about power from the point of view of community and what we’re building. We know that no one in history—not many anyway, I guess the Pope just did—but very few people ever give up power voluntarily. So why is that? And yet women give it away all the time because it is a way in which women approach power: sharing it. Well, of course that’s a great way to look at power, but how do we get that to be the power paradigm, as it were, the prevailing power? By getting power and using it that way, using it in a way that shares it, that redefines it, that gives it other adjectives, other than the ones we attach to it now. There’s little wonder that young women, particularly in the generation who came up right behind the pioneers—I guess that would be me and Gloria and all the rest—that generation did move away from power because they didn’t like the way it looked. And still today, the reason forty-something percent of the women in corporate America are jumping off and taking the exit ramp before they get to CEO jobs is they look up there and they don’t like the way that looks. They don’t want that kind of power. But why don’t we stay on the road up, taking a few sisters along the way, so that when we get up there we can change it? And it does take numbers. You can’t do it one at a time. One woman at a time is just not enough to change the power paradigm. It takes more.