51% Minority How Women Still are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It

Chapter 1 EQUAL = EQUAL "I have the right to be president and mommy" There's much speculation that we'll have a woman running for president of the United States as early as 2008. According to a Siena College Research Institute survey, 81 percent of voters across the country are ready to vote for a woman for president, 62 percent say the country is ready for a woman president, and 52 percent of voters feel that a president's gender wouldn't matter when it came to foreign affairs. In the 86 years we've been able to vote, only one woman has been on a major party ticket: Geraldine Ferraro as running mate to Walter Mondale in 1984. "Even God herself couldn't have changed that outcome with the Reagan ticket," Ferraro says, reflecting on that election. "But I'll tell you, if a woman were president today, we wouldn't be at war in Iraq. And though the administration didn't cause Hurricane Katrina, a woman would have responded differentlythe response would have been immediate, with much more empathy, and the guys who screwed up would have been fired immediately." In her book Closing the Leadership Gap, White House Project founder Marie Wilson quotes the Rev. Patricia Kitchen: "For over 200 years, the United States has been steered by male leadership who tend to lead from a self-centered, self-preservation perspective. Women around the world are inclined to lead, their families and nations, from an other-centered perspective." "For the most part women are much more collaborative and inclusive," Washington governor Christine Gregoire said. "Women won't just announce a decisionit's going to be done this way or that way. We have the attitude of 'Let's try to talk through the issues,' which avoids confrontation and controversy. That's my style and I've observed it in a lot of women." "Outsiders often bring clarity of vision, as well as a sense of discovery and innovation," Anna Quindlen wrote in her "Last Word" column for Newsweek's special report on how women lead. "Women are not the only ones capable of this. But the difficulties they've encountered while seeking representation and respect may provide the steel and strength needed to embrace change. You're less wedded to the shape of the table if you haven't been permitted to sit at it." At the table of leaders and decision makers, we remain outsiders. For every ten men in executive roles in this country there is only one woman, a number that has changed little in twenty years. As for those who sit in judgment of the cases that establish legal precedent in this country, there are 629 male federal judges, 199 female. And in the history of our country 98.25 percent of our senators have been men. What has this male dominated leadership decided? That they'll let us know what we can and can't do. Instead of making it easier on women, the Bush administration has made decisions that have made being a woman even harder. During this administration, child care programs have been underfunded and undermined, making such drastic cuts that only one out of seven children eligible for federal child care assistance receives help. By the Bush administration's own estimates, this change will result in 300,000 children losing child care assistance by 2009. This isn't helping children, this isn't helping women, and this isn't helping our society. This administration's tax cuts have also affected women and children. In addition to the drastic cuts in child care programs, pWiehl, Lis is the author of '51% Minority How Women Still are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345469212 and ISBN 0345469216.