I recently learned this fact that completely blew my mind.
I'm at this event and I meet a woman named Laura Liswood and we're talking and I'm
like "What do you do?" and she said, "I convene elected women presidents and prime
ministers for the United Nations."
And I was like, "Wow, that's an amazing thing to do.
How long have you been doing that?"
She said, "Oh, around twenty years" and I was like, "Hmm, how many had there been
twenty years ago?" and she said, "Fifteen."
So I was like, "How many are there today?" and she said "Oh, around fifty" and I
was like, "Fifty!
How did I not know that; that there had been around fifty elected women presidents and
prime ministers?" and that made me think, 'Gosh, maybe we've been telling the story
of scarcity for so long and maybe it's time we told a new story of abundance.'
I woke up the next morning and I couldn't wait to tell Ken and our daughters about how
many women had been elected heads of state and then, I proceeded to ask everyone around
me who I thought might know the number and nobody even came close to half.
I asked friends.
I asked CEOs of big companies, feminists, people on the street.
How many elected women presidents and prime ministers in the whole world do you think there have
been?
Elected, no royalty.
Two or three.
Not many.
Five or six.
Ten I would say under five.
I don't know.
How many?
So, the answer is fifty.
Fifty, really?
Fifty.
Oh wow.
Fifty.
Oooh.
But not enough.
Yeah.
High five!
I mean I've always thought of myself as a feminist.
My great-grandmother marched, my mother marched, I've marched.
Even when I was growing up, my mom was writing her PhD thesis on the importance of mentors
and mothers on successful women and my dad wrote books about women in power.
So, I was completely disappointed in myself for not knowing and it made think 'What
else don't I know?' and this all sent me down a road to piece together a new narrative
that looks at, "Where are we really on the greater arch of history of women in power
and what's it going to take to get to a 50/50 world?" and I'm not talking just
politics and board rooms.
I am talking across all parts of society.
Truly shifting the gender balance to be better for everyone.
So, in order to think about where we are on this arch and how we're going to get to
where we want to go, let's go back to the very beginning.
It turns out the oldest hominid ever discovered is a female hominid, not a feminist but, a
feminid.
Ok, we actually know very little about who wore the pants back then, not that pants even
existed but, fast forward to the neolithic age.
Things were pretty egalitarian.
Women and men had equal social status and the earliest written laws reflected these
egalitarian societies.
Women could choose to marry and divorce.
Women were healers, shamans, religious leaders, warriors and lawmakers.
All genders were respected.
We're talking over 10,000 years ago this was happening and then like many times in
our journey, the story takes a dark turn.
The balance shifted.
My father attributed this shift to literacy rewiring our brains.
Others point to the rise of agriculture which favored physical strength, the conquest of
land.
We started seeing the development of military, political power.
Even art became more dude-centric.
Goddesses became gods and the voices of women were silenced.
In ancient Mesopotamia, one of the earliest laws stated, 'If a women speaks to a man
out of turn, her teeth will be smashed in by a burnt brick.'
Patriarchy had arrived and was literally chiseled in stone but, we know that our history has
been written mostly by men.
I want the rest of the story.
How are we supposed to know where we are on the arch of history if we don't have the
full context?
And, not just elected leaders but, the centuries of badass women that I know were there, paving
the paths and contributing to where we are today.
Let's go find them!
Here we have Hatshepsoot in Egypt, one of the first great women leaders.
Egypt thrived under her long and influential reign for 22 years but, the next pharaoh literally
chiseled her face out of history and here's Boudicca, the woman warrior who led the Britons
in a revolt against the Romans and Wu Zetian, the first and only female ruler of China who
also had her story altered by the men who followed.
There was Margaret I of Denmark who united the Scandinavian nations.
I had never seen all these women linked together like warrior queen Amina who ruled what is
now Nigeria and Queen Elizabeth first, at the time was the most powerful person in the
world, ruled for nearly fifty years.
While she was in power, an explorer brought her what he thought was the horn from a unicorn.
She liked it so much she added it to the crown jewels.
We can actually call her a unicorn.
We could call all of these women unicorns.
Not mythical or unreal but, women who stood out unique to their day.
Courageous women navigating uncharted terrain and as I learn more about these women, I kept
thinking about my mom's thesis that looked at successful women and the importance of
their female mentors.
So, mom how would you define a mentor?
Someone who helps somebody else find their own path.
One question you haven't asked me which is important is, 'Why did I study mentors?'
I never had a mentor and then I thought, 'I wonder what it's like if someone had a mentor.'
All the studies, and I had to read all the studies about men first, having a mentor made
the difference in the final push toward success.
I mean, how did my mom accomplish so much without a mentor?
And how did these women centuries ago accomplish so much?
Did they have mentors?
How did it even work back then?
There was no easy way to connect with other women leaders and no narrative over time to
link their stories together but eventually that narrative did begin.
Like with Christine de Pizan in France in the 1300's.
500 years before the word feminism was even coined, she is considered the first writer
to examine the roles of women throughout history and to weave together their experiences.
Creating a narrative of not just political leaders but, of women in all different ways
we contribute to society and over the centuries countless women would build on that narrative
as artists, storytellers, philosophers, mothers and leaders but, the mountains of imbalance
were also centuries high and for everyone climbed there was a mother to struggle with.
Room for fewer and fewer at the top with more struggling to climb, more hurdles more pushback
like it was around this time that many of the wise, independent and rebellious women
of their day were labelled witches and put on trial.
An estimated 50,000 women in Europe and the US were burned and executed.
That's a lot of powerful women to lose from our narrative and the imbalance was becoming
more and more embedded in political structures.
Even our country, which I do love, was established with the line 'All men are created equal'
and this was a time of slavery.
Clearly, they didn't mean all men and clearly they didn't mean women.
Women couldn't own property.
We had the same legal status as children.
We couldn't vote but, no mountain was going to truly hold our power back.
Women were rising in art, science and culture and pioneers were gathering, coming together
to fight for more rights.
Momentum was building in Europe, the US and dots around the globe into what we call now
the first wave of feminism.
In 1848, 300 women and a few men convened in Seneca Falls, New York and declared 'All
men and women are created equal.'
the whole suffragist fight was gruesome but, the battle was worth it.
70 years after Seneca Falls, women in the US won the right to vote but, I found this
part so haunting.
only one of the women who attended Seneca Falls was still alive.
Charlotte Woodward was 92 and she didn't make it to the polls.
She got sick on election day and this story was such a reminder for me on how long real
social change takes and that we can't take any of these hard fought rights for granted
and if we want to be alive to experience a more equal world, we have to accelerate the
pace of change and I do think that's happening.
I mean, if we look at the whole arch of history a lot has happened in the last 100 years.
Even just in my lifetime.
I was born in 1970, the heart of the women's movement.
It was an amazing surge of momentum, the second wave of feminism which like all change had
all kinds of challenges.
The national chairman of the movement to stop the so-called equal rights amendment is Mrs.
Phyllis Schlafly.
That Equal Rights Amendment, by the way, the ERA was first introduced in Congress in 1923,
was brought back in the 70's and every year after and it still hasn't passed, 100 years
later but, what I didn't fully grasp about the momentum in the 70's is that while all
the strides and struggles were happening in the US, women gathering, creating support
groups, fighting for more rights, there was also a lot of exciting things happening on
an international scale.
By 1970, three countries had elected women as heads of state and in 1975, the U.N. brought
together the first international women's conference.
Over 6000 delegates from 133 countries traveled to Mexico City and gathered in person for
two weeks to discuss the status of equal rights on a global scale.
They made a collective plan.
They'd convene again in Copenhagen in 1980.
Above all, we have learned that to achieve full justice and equality for women will require
a long and patient struggle.
And they'd meet again in Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in '95.
Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights once and for all.
It's like all these decades of global gatherings where all the first and only's, the unicorns
from all over the world coming together to build networks of support.
kind of perfect that a heard of unicorns is called a blessing.
It was also in the mid-nineties that Laura Liswood started the council of women leaders.
I was noticing some very common themes running through about power, about how women are treated.
I started asking if they wanted to meet.
They said they did and so that's how the council started.
And picture this was the 70's, 80's and 90's.
All the connecting was done with faxes, letters and plane rides just to have conversations.
It's a whole different world today.
The internet is accelerating the pace of change in so many ways.
We can connect across continents and write and share stories that aren't already there
which brings power and opportunity to far more voices but, along with that comes greater
responsibility.
Our work is not done.
Violence against women is global and systematic.
Inequality is still present throughout every facet of our lives.
In addition to that transparency and responsibility, today's world also gives us more ways to
learn from each other, person to person and country to country.
I understand one of the priorities for you was to have a cabinet that was gender-balanced.
Why was that so important to you?
Because it's 2015.
There are over 300 studies showing that making those changes from all levels, business, politics
and culture, makes life better for everyone, not just women, everyone.
Over half of the countries that rank highest in gender equality across different sectors
also rank highest on the global happiness index.
A lot of these countries pay for early childcare and high quality education.
they have national parental leave for both men and women.
So, instead of this idea of stay at home mom, they're supporting parents, period.
Because dads are being deprived of their power too.
The power of nurturing and raising the next generation.
A recent study in the US showed that 50% of men who are offered paid paternity leave feel
they can't take it.
Men have an entire history of stereotypes and expectations to wrestle with too and those
men who are equal parents, I feel like they're the next chapter of first and only's that
are paving the path to something better.
50/50 isn't just about women getting more power, its about everyone getting more power.
it's about opening up the whole idea of what power is.
Moving beyond the binaries of men and women, we're all on a continuum with different
combinations of strengths to bring to the table.
Power is leadership but, power is also love.
Power is empathy.
power is the opportunity to find your own path.
So, how do we really get there, to the world we want to see?
I turn to the person who blew my mind and set me down this path in the first place.
So Laura, how do we get to 50/50?
Well, I think the change itself goes from the unthinkable to the impossible to the inevitable
but, someone has to move it along.
I often like it to a standing ovation.
A few people jump up and say this is the best thing that they have ever seen then, another
group gets up and says 'Yes, yes.
This was just excellent.'
And then a large group gets up and says "Yeah, yeah.
This was okay.'
And then finally the last group gets up because they can't see the stage.
So, where are we on that arch of history?
I think that the generations that are alive today have the potential to reach that standing
ovation.
Although as we know, change can be very disruptive and very unsettling for people and often there
is some group of people who want to revert to a good ol' days kind of thing.
But, the rest of us? we need to stand up and keep clapping.
In the middle this journey, our daughter Odessa was getting Bat Mitzvah'ed and Ken and I
talked so much about what each us were going to say at this big rite of passage.
My favorite saying in the Talmud is when you teach your children, you teach your children's
children.
A mentor is someone who helps somebody else find their own path.
These are all the people who are going to be there for the rest of your life supporting
you.
Each of these people has a whole room of people that supported them to allow them to be in
this room supporting you.
Piecing together this history and putting it into context made me see mentorship in
a whole new way.
Mentors are all around us, younger, older, peer to peer, country to country and from
all of history and we need to keep them all right here, right next to us.
I used to think I had the full context of women in power but I was still letting the
story of scarcity guide me and then, I realized that if we really build on the centuries of
momentum, generations of courageous women that have brought us this far, we can take
this story of scarcity and turn it into a story of abundance.
When you get to the top of the mountain pull the next one up.
Then there'll be two of you, tired and proud and when the second one has finished taking
in the view, let her pull the next one up.
Room enough for all on all the mountain peaks, to pull the next woman up, pull the next man
up, pull the next up, up, up, up.
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