Women and Politics

This post was submitted by Jean Qiao, WCF communications fellow

We all knew that President Obama could potentially impact the direction of the nation’s highest court. Clearly, Supreme Court justice nominees can define a Presidency, as we saw with George W. Bush and Justices Roberts and Alito…who would overturn Roe v. Wade in a heartbeat.

Luckily, we’re now seeing the second Supreme Court retirement under President Obama (though his nominee won’t change the Court’s ideological makeup): After weeks of suggesting his departure, this morning Justice Paul Stevens announced today that he will officially retire from the bench at the end of June. Justice Stevens is the longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court and has consistently voted in favor of progressive issues.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the company of another woman on the bench?

Good news, everyone. In their article about Justice Stevens, the Washington Post listed three people that are potentially on the short-list for nominees, and two of the candidates are women: Solicitor General Elena Kagan and appellate court Judge Diane P. Wood. In addition, Kagan is the first woman ever to hold the post of Solicitor General.

So this means there’s a 75% chance that the next Supreme Court Justice will be a woman? I like those odds, but let’s hope that President Obama will make that a reality. Replacing Justice Stevens with a progressive woman will ensure that our reproductive rights are protected (barely protected…but protected).

In a year where we endured multiple efforts by our socially conservative legislators to restrict our reproductive freedoms and throw women’s health under the bus, some support from the nation’s highest Court would be nice.

Adding another woman to the bench will keep us moving toward balancing out the extreme gender inequality in public office government—because we need more women in ALL branches of government.

This post was submitted by Jean Qiao, WCF Communications Fellow

America is hungry for moderate republican women.

In her recent appearance on Fox’s America’s News HQ, WCF President/CEO Sam Bennett argued that in order for the GOP to succeed in gaining more votes the 2010 election cycle, they must recruit more women.

When talking about the special election for Massachusetts Senate, Bennett said:

“Brown took that seat again in no small part because he was in the middle of the ground and he supports, as a majority of the Americans want to see supported, an American’s right to choose their own reproductive choices and options”

Believe it or not, only 21 Republican women serve in the 111th U.S. Congress; four in the Senate and 17 in the House of Representatives. With Republican women representing only 4% of Congress, you would think that the GOP would take the hint and rally its support behind their moderate women candidates.

Apparently numbers is not enough of a wake-up-call. Let’s not forget the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional district last year. The Republican Party decided to back Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman, drastically yanking their support at the last minute for previously RNC-endorsed candidate Dede Scozzafava,  leading to the suspension of her campaign.

If the majority of the American people support women’s reproductive freedoms, isn’t it about time the GOP jump on that bandwagon as well?

Click here to see the full Fox America’s News HQ video on WCF’s YouTube channel.

Cross-posted from Women’s Media Center and Huffington Post

Women leaders have shown they know how to work together, whether it’s in the public or private sector. Women’s Campaign Forum President Sam Bennett describes a new initiative to put enough women in office this year to overcome the political impasse plaguing our nation’s lawmakers.
I know I’m not the only one to find myself watching the news in disbelief day after day. We listen to pundits, elected officials, and even the vice president call our government “broken.” This sentiment was only reinforced at last week’s White House health care summit when the partisan stalemate continued—only four women had been invited.

Who’s at fault and how do we get out of the seemingly endless deadlock? Some dare to argue that men are to blame. Somewhat earlier in the health care debate, Representative Carol Shea-Porter said of her sister House members: “We go to the ladies room, and we just roll our eyes at what’s being said out there. And the Republican women said when we were fighting over the health care bill, if we sent the men home, we could get this done this week.”

A bold statement? Yes. But studies have shown that women, who hold only 90 out of 535 seats in Congress, legislate differently—often being more collaborative and ensuring more win-win outcomes—than men. Women in the House and Senate stood together against the Nelson and Stupak amendments, just as women’s organizations banded together to ensure health care reform’s effectiveness and prevent the elimination of any existing rights.

And it’s not just women asserting that we need more women in public office. For our Women’s Campaign Forum (WCF) Parties of Your Choice Gala in New York next Thursday, we’ve gathered prominent leaders from the fields of business, media, theater, politics, fashion, and publishing. Folks like NFL Executive Vice President Jeff Pash, The View co-host Sherri Shepherd, musician/singer-songwriter Moby, former 60 Minutes Executive Editor Philip Scheffler, fashion designer Vivienne Tam, and actor Alexander Chaplin will come together to support the need to increase women’s political representation.

These WCF events have mobilized supporters from across the country for three decades now. But this year, it’s with a much greater sense of urgency. To underline the need right now to elect more women to fix our broken government, we will debut our national awareness campaign (Who Needs More Women in Government? Everyone.) via a performance piece written by and starring a broad array of female leaders. Performers—including former CEO Christie Hefner, WNBA President Donna Orender, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth “Liz” Shuler, and Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner—will be perched on ladders in the middle of Christie’s Auction House at the gala reception to command attention in a launch of a campaign designed to disturb the complacency of our nation.

Most people, when hearing that the U.S. ranks 84^th in the world, behind Afghanistan and Cuba, in the percentage of women in the national legislature, are briefly surprised—“Oh wow, I didn’t think it was that bad”—but the thought process stops there. We need everyone to realize the true weight of this disparity: That women’s political inequality isn’t just a “shame.” It’s actually halting progress and damaging our country.

As Womenomics authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman point out, research has shown the many benefits of having more women at the decision-making table—leading to a wake-up call among many U.S. companies. In addition to focusing on collaboration, women seek out long-term results and tend to take fewer risks. The positive results of women’s leadership can be demonstrated by corporations’ performance: “By all measures, more women in your company means better performance. Pepperdine [University] found that the Fortune 500 firms with the best records of putting women at the top were 18 to 69 percent more profitable than the median companies in their industries.”

Considering we’re currently at war, suffering from a severe economic recession, and unable to fix a broken health care system, I have to ask: When will our political system acknowledge women’s unique ability to enact change?

Given our current state of wheel-spinning and political gridlock, it would behoove us to make 2010 another Year of the Woman—one that this time will have staying power. (We harked back to that historic 1992 election year for the cover of our gala invitation, which shows women walking up steps on the Hill.) And yes, we need more women on both sides of the aisle. That’s why WCF works to recruit female candidates from all parties, across the country, at all levels of office. But as we’ve learned with Sarah Palin, not all women support reproductive health choices, and we acknowledge that finding a Republican candidate who will stand up for women’s health can be difficult. Yet the country is hungry for female moderate Republican candidates who will do just that.

WCF currently has more than 30 endorsed candidates for 2010—18 of whom are running for Congress. And we only expect those numbers to increase, as more applications flood in every week. But will we really move the needle on women’s unequal representation this November, or even this decade?

The Women’s Campaign Forum has been in the game for 36 years now and endorsed thousands of women. When we were founded, there were no female senators and 16 congresswomen. Since 1974, the percentage of women in Congress has gone from three to 17 percent—only a 14 percent increase. Today we have organizations all over the country working to elect more women, yet our progress has stagnated. Many estimate that at our current rate of growth, it will take more than 70 years to achieve political gender equality.

So what’s it going to be, America? Will we continue to stand agape at our broken government the way children stare at a broken toy, or will we answer the wake-up call and elect more women?

This post was submitted by Jean Qiao, WCF Communications Fellow

This month marks the end of our crazy snow-filled winter and the beginning of spring. But more importantly, March is Women’s History Month. I cannot think of a better time to address the importance of having more women in elected office.

The year 1992 was dubbed the “year of the woman” and for good reason too. A record-breaking amount of women candidates on the federal ticket motivated more than 60 million women to go to the polls and vote. The 1992 election resulted in the most women ever elected to U.S. Congress in any single election; to be precise, 24 women were elected to the house of representative and 5 women were elected to the U.S. Senate. Perhaps Americans believed that women could continue this trend of increasing more women in government with every election.

But 18 years later, women remain extremely underrepresented in Congress; only 90 out of the 535 members of Congress are women. No wonder double standards regarding women candidates still exist; Dawn Johnsen has still not been confirmed to head the Office of the Legal Counsel after a year of delays; and there was a severe under representation of women at President Obama’s Healthcare Summit.

Now, more than ever, we need another “year of the woman.” In a time in which some of the biggest reforms in America’s healthcare system are being proposed, women’s reproductive freedoms are truly in the hands of our elected officials. Only women know what best for women’s bodies, and it’s been proven again and again that it takes female elected officials to ensure our rights aren’t stripped away.

To combat the national complacency around women’s political inequality, WCF is launching its national awareness campaign, “Who Needs More Women in Government? Everyone.” This campaign will officially kickoff at the 30th Annual Parties of Your Choice Gala on Thursday March 11th.  It will begin with the premiere of a dramatic performance piece co-written and performed by a wide array of powerful female leaders such as Christie Hefner, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, and WNBC President Donna Orender.

This original performance piece will not only state the need for more women in government, but why there is this need. Women bring a whole new set of qualities and perspectives to the table, which adds a breadth of talent and wisdom to our country’s direction. Research shows that women tend to avoid risk, increase collaboration, and ensure more win-win outcomes than their male counterparts.

2010 must be the year that our entire nation gets serious about electing more women to public office. The future of our country depends on it.

This post was submitted by Jean Qiao, WCF Communications Fellow

We all expect outrageous commercials during the Super Bowl. But CBS has taken sexist advertising to a whole new level by choosing to air an anti-choice ad sponsored by Focus on the Family.

Jehmu Greene, President of the Women’s Media Center (WMC), recently wrote a piece on Huffingon Post, which challenges CBS’ use of Super Bowl Sunday to promote their socially conservative agenda:

“Super Bowl advertising has always been a showcase of overt sexism. This year the biased barrage also includes CBS’s and the NFL’s decision to air a seemingly subtle ad highlighting college football star Tim Tebow’s story, sponsored by Focus on the Family, which aggressively works to strip women of medical choices. This decision should be seen as a referendum on the status of women in the media and marks the first time the Super Bowl will be used to push a polarizing, political agenda”.

Read the rest of Jehmu’s post here.

The Women’s Media Center has also simplified the reasoning behind why CBS should remove this ad in their Top 10 Reasons the NFL Should Tell CBS to Scrap the Ad .

Jehmu and WMC echo the voice of WCF and many other organizations in demanding that CBS to pull the ad and refrain from injecting Americans with anti-choice rhetoric during the Super Bowl.

Take action: join the Women’s Media Center and add your voice now!

I know that nothing good ever comes out of the mouths of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Ever. That said, we can no longer ignore the disgusting filth and misogyny that they are spewing over their air waves.

Exactly when did it become acceptable to call a Senator a prostitute? And not just call her a whore, but go on for almost two minutes with a “metaphor” about exactly how she’s a whore?

This vile transcript of Glenn Beck and Pay Gray talking about Senator Mary Landrieu speaks for itself (click here to listen to the audio from Media Matters):

“She may be easy, but she’s not cheap. We’re with a high-class prostitute. Right. You’re not at Motel 6…you’re not in a back alley saying “what do you say, five bucks?” No no no. This one comes to your four seasons hotel room and does it right and doesn’t dress really slutty dresses nice, you might even think she’s the wife of the CEO.”

“There’s nobody that’s going to look at her and say ‘oh my god that’s a whore,’ you’re going to look at her and say ‘oh, wow, she’s classy’ and then when somebody whispers, ’she’s a prostitute’ you think OK yeah but she’s not cheap.”

“You’ll dismiss it because it’s like well yeah she’s not getting 20 bucks an hour right? Exactly. This is high class. She’s the one when you say, ‘you’re a HOOKER! You’re like you know having sex for 100 bucks,’ she says, ‘It’s not 100 bucks, it’s 5,000 bucks,’ and then you respect her.”

“Then you’re like ohhh. It’s the type of high class prostitute that actually purchases a wedding ring so that when she’s walking through the plaza, people think that she’s actually married to the person she’s walking into. That’s how classy she is. You don’t sell your principles for $50 on a street corner. No no no. $300 mil and a 3 page definition - that’s how you sell your principles.”

Not one to shy away from any opportunity to bash a woman, Limbaugh added on his show that Landrieu “may be the most expensive prostitute in the history of prostitution.”

Why were these chauvinists calling Senator Landrieu a prostitute? It doesn’t matter. This kind of blatant misogyny and disrespect are completely unacceptable. I’m shocked that these anti-woman figures are still allowed to speak in any kind of public space—let alone paid to do so.

No wonder women don’t have equality in public office, with these kind of attacks on women being launched and greeted with ambivalence and even acceptance.

Speak out against Beck and Limbaugh today:

Email Rush Limbaugh, ElRushbo@eibnet.com

Email Glenn Beck, me@glennbeck.com

Sign our petition to Limbaugh and Beck here.

This kind of misogyny against women elected officials, candidates, and public figures will not stand. If we value women in our society at all, we have a responsibility to speak out against this kind of hateful speech.

Edie Fraser and Dr. Janette Harris with Rising Stars

In an event that brought together both established and rising leaders, the Inaugural Hill’s Got Talent Happy Hour on Wednesday was a “spirited” success! Over 200 people attended to raise their glasses in a toast to the next generation of national female leaders. Chiefs of Staff on the hill recognized their female staffers as Rising Stars in the political arena.

Not only did the Hill’s Got Talent recognize the 48 young women named as Rising Stars, it connected them and other young women in attendance with elected officials, candidates, and leaders of national organizations.

Congresswoman and WCF-Endorsed Alumni, Dina Titus (D-NV), along with Congressman James McGovern (D-MA) attended, enforcing the WCF values of leaders mentoring and supporting the next generation of female talent.

Rep. Dina Titus, Ann McLane Kuster, Sam Bennett, Krystal Ball

WCF-endorsed candidates Ann McLane Kuster, (the daughter of a WCF founder) running for Congress in New Hampshire’s 2nd district, and Krystal Ball, running for Congress in Virginia’s 1st district, had the opportunity to network, support their campaigns, and inspired the young women present to seek office themselves.

Our Rising Stars also had the opportunity to met legends Alice Cohan, Political Director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and Karen Mulhauser, former NARAL and Planned Parenthood leader as well as founder of Mulhauser and Associates.

Our Special Guests and Celebrity Bartenders served up drinks and connections:

• Dr. Janette Hoston Harris, the first City Historian of Washington, DC and president of J. H. Harris & Associates.
• Edie Fraser, Chair of the Diversity Executive Search Practice and Managing Director of Diversified Search Ray & Berndtson.
• Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeever, Director of the Research, Public Policy, and Information Center for African American Women for the National Council of Negro Women.
• Dean Thomas, National Beer Wholesalers Association

In a brief but stirring speaking program, WCF President and CEO Siobhan “Sam” Bennett spoke of her own experience running for office. She explained how vital it is that those like her, who have “taken a machete to the jungle” of political leadership encourage, support, and help the next generation of women leaders.

Kalah Auchincloss, WCF Board Member and Chair of the WCF Next Generation Program emphasized that women’s leadership must be passed on, generation helping generation.

WCF Board Members also graced the room with their presence including Board Member Margaret Kavalaris. Thanks to them and our incredible partners, especially the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who so generously hosted the event at their picturesque headquarters. Without the support of the board and our partners, this incredible opportunity would not have been possible.

If you’re a young woman interested in the incredible networking and mentoring opportunities that WCF offers through programs like Hills Got Talent, please check out our Next Generation Program.

We look forward to celebrating the hard work and accomplishments of women on the Hill in the years to come!