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Why Don’t You Do It, Honey?

By Marie Wilson • October 28, 2009

Almost 11 years ago, when I first started The White House Project, some of the top minds in politics, business, film, and journalism came together for our inaugural meeting in Boston. Our mission was ambitious: to profoundly advance women’s leadership in the U.S., all the way to the presidency. Our nation’s most savvy journalistic scholar, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, stood before the group and advised us of the primary need to “change the conversation” if we were permanently to transform the status of women across the country.

In this weekend’s New York Times, the equally savvy journalist Joanne Lipman echoed the call to “change the conversation” if we are to make progress for women. As Lipman states, women’s progress has not only stalled, but attitudes about gender have taken “a giant leap backward.”

Lipman is right: our nation’s conversation about women has degenerated terribly. Yet she is wrong in the assumption that focusing on numbers is the wrong way to foster change. Having spent 30 years working to change the culture and conversation - from Take Our Daughters to Work to Vote, Run, Lead - I know there is only one way to permanently change the discussion: numbers of women in leadership. Or more specifically, a critical mass of women leading in each sector, with the end goal of women leading in parity alongside their male peers. As the upcoming “White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership” illustrates, adding women to the workforce won’t change much - but when we add them to corporate boardrooms and executive suites, anchor desks and political office, attitudes about women in leadership will inevitably follow suit.

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