While March 8^th is celebrated as International Women’s Day, international women’s rights is still an area in need of much greater attention. How did we get here, and what can we expect for the future of women’s issues in the international arena?  What is the role of women’s issues in discussions of global politics and in U.S. foreign policy? 

Today on International Horizons, Ralph Bunche Institute research scholar Ellen Chesler interviews Rachel Vogelstein, the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University, about the history and current state of women’s issues in international development and what we can expect in the future, especially how they will be addressed by the Biden administration.  

You can listen to it on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or on Soundcloud below. You can also find a transcript of the interview here.       

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Transcript:

Ellen Chesler  00:04

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Ellen Chesler, and I’m a visiting research scholar at RBI this year, doing work on the historical contributions of women in shaping human rights and global development discourse and policy at the United Nations and around the world.

Ellen Chesler  00:36

Today, we are celebrating International Women’s Day with a conversation about recent developments in the emerging discipline of gender and foreign policy. I’m fortunate to have with me in conversation a distinguished expert in this field, Rachel Vogelstein, the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and director of “The Women and Foreign Policy Program” at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rachel is also a professor of gender and US foreign policy at Georgetown Law School. At CFR, her research focuses on the relationship between women’s advancement and prosperity, stability and security in the world.

Ellen Chesler  01:13

Rachel is the author of a number of books, most impressive, one on child marriage, one on women’s participation in conflict prevention and resolution, another on building inclusive economies by investing in women and forthcoming in mid 2021, a new book countering sexual violence in armed conflict. Before joining CFR, Rachel worked on these issues at the United States Department of State, under Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Thank you, Rachel, for taking the time to be with us today.

Ellen Chesler  01:53

Let me start with something of a cosmic question. We’re celebrating International Women’s Day. It’s a holiday which actually goes back almost a century, started by socialists, but it became an official global celebration in the 1970s when the United Nations decided that both, its human rights and its development policies needed the input of women and began to really invest in building infrastructure and supporting movements around the world to advance the status of women. For a long time, this was kind of seen as silly stuff, I should say. Particularly, by a male foreign policy establishment. Your presence today at the Council on Foreign Relation, a establishment friendly institution, is evidence that things have changed. Can you comment on this phenomenon and why this year we should really make a big deal about the celebration of International Women’s Day?

Rachel Vogelstein  02:53

Absolutely. Well, first of all, Ellen, thank you so much for having me on and for your leadership on these issues. It’s a pleasure to be with you. The International Women’s Day commemorated by the United Nations and by countries around the world is an opportunity to celebrate the progress that women have made. And it’s also an opportunity to take stock of where there are still significant gaps. And there’s a lot certainly to celebrate when one thinks back to the many decades ago when this holiday was first commemorated; women have made considerable strides. I will point to a few issues in particular, the issue of girls’ education; we have seen over the last two and a half decades, the gender gap in primary schooling virtually close on a global level, in an unbelievably short period of time.

Rachel Vogelstein  03:51

And so now there’s an entire generation of girls today, who have an opportunity for schooling that their mothers and grandmothers didn’t. I’d also point to the issue of women’s health; we have seen the rate of maternal mortality caused by largely preventable conditions related to pregnancy and childbirth virtually cut in half over the last 25 years. That’s remarkable progress. And in both of those instances, part of the reason for that progress was because the international community came together. Initially, through the Millennium Development Goals and set concrete targets to ensure gender parity and girls’ primary education to drop the rate of preventable conditions that caused maternal mortality.

Rachel Vogelstein  04:39

And because of that political will and the resources that were dedicated, we saw significant gains. I would also point to, in some respects, changes we’ve seen with respect to women’s legal rights. There’s still a lot of work to do, but in the early 1990s, we know there were only three countries that had laws on the books outlawing violence against women that had laws on the books. And today there’s over 150 countries that have those laws. Again, not to suggest that there isn’t a lot of work to do but these are really important gains. And I think they speak to the notion that gender discrimination is not intractable. And in fact, we can see significant progress over a relatively short period of time when we have sufficient political will.

Rachel Vogelstein  05:29

But it’s not an all good news story. We know there are significant gaps. There are structural inequalities and biases that persist –many of which have only been exacerbated in the current moment in which we find ourselves fighting a global pandemic– but these are inequalities that pre-date the pandemic. So for example, when we think about women’s participation in the economy; women have really been largely stagnant over the last two and a half decades when it comes to labor force participation. The gap between male and female labor force participation has remained virtually unchanged.

Rachel Vogelstein  06:08

And there is a gender gap in wages in every country in the world for which we have recorded data; including the country in which we sit right now, the United States. So there’s a lot of work to do when it comes to women’s participation in the economy. And we know that when the rate of labor force participation grows for women, poverty goes down, and GDP goes up. So this is important, not only to individual women and to their families, but actually to entire economies.

Rachel Vogelstein  06:40

Another issue I would point to, where we’ve seen far too little progress, is in the area of political participation. We still today, out of 193 countries, have only 22 that have a female head of state. We have not hit that threshold here in the United States, although obviously, many celebrated the historic election of our first female vice president, our first black and South Asian vice president in Vice President Kamala Harris, but we still have a lot of work to do. And parliamentary participation continues to hover at around a quarter globally. The US is despite the increases we’ve seen in the numbers of women running in 2018, and in 2020, still hovering at about 27% representation. So clearly a lot of gaps and and work to do there.

Rachel Vogelstein  07:38

And then finally, I would point to stagnation in the area of security; whether we’re defining security as individual personal security or freedom from violence, or whether we’re defining security as women’s participation in many of the fundamental peace processes existing today. In both areas, women continue to lag behind when it comes to individual security. One in three women around the world continue to face violence. And that is an epidemic that affects women of every age, every race, every ethnicity, every income in every country in the world. And when it comes to resolving the deep conflicts of our time, we see that women continue to be excluded from the peace table comprising only about 5% of participants or negotiators. Despite the really solid evidence we have that women’s participation at the peace table makes peace agreements more likely to be forged in the first instance, and more likely to last at least 15 years. So a lot of progress, a lot to celebrate this International Women’s Day, but a lot of work still to do.

Ellen Chesler  08:46

Well, you’ve certainly covered a lot of territory. Let me go back and unpack some of that a bit. As a biographer of Margaret Sanger, I want to talk about one issue that you didn’t raise before we get to focus a little bit more on the economic issues, which I think are central for a variety of reasons; not only because it’s important for women from a moral and economic standpoint to have parity with men, but but also because it’s the smart thing to do if our aim is to build economies –as you and others have pointed out– and also to secure nations and to secure democracy.

Ellen Chesler  09:23

But let’s go back. I want to talk a little bit about progress in terms of family planning and where the world stands now. It’s a mixed bag here, and certainly, in the last four years of the Trump administration, we lost some ground. But talk a little bit about where women are in terms of access to family planning, which has been a major agenda item at the United Nations since the 1970s when the United Nations Fund for Population Activities – UNFPA – was founded, when there was bipartisan support in this country for women’s full control of their own bodies. Again, not only because it was the right thing to do; the moral thing to do for women, but also because it was the smart thing to do to help achieve the kind of prosperity and security that, you know, is a central goal of our foreign policy. So just two minutes on that before we move back to these larger economic issues. Needless to say, it’s a major economic issue family planning.

Rachel Vogelstein  10:30

You know, this is such a critical issue, Ellen. So I’m grateful to you for raising it. This is certainly a human rights issue. But as you rightly point out, this is also a matter of strategic importance. We know that when women can control the timing and spacing of their children and their pregnancies, economies are stronger. We have seen evidence of the demographic dividend in countries that increase access to family planning. And we know that this is a critical fundamental element of health care for societies. So then, importance of this issue on the international development agenda on the international economic agenda is really goes without question today.

Rachel Vogelstein  11:21

What I will say is that the gaps are still significant. There are 200 million women around the world who lack access to modern methods of family planning. And those gaps cost all of us. So, I think, certainly, that your observation about the last four years, in terms of US foreign policy, were incredibly challenging because of a number of policies that inhibited access to critical reproductive health services that are so essential for health, to improve education, that really have an impact on our economy and on the global economy.

Rachel Vogelstein  12:06

I think it is heartening to see in the Biden administration, really early on, that there is a very clear signal sent through an executive order that comprehensive reproductive health care, including access to contraception, would be part of the administration’s international agenda, as well as domestic agenda. So I expect that we will see a shift in US foreign policy, based on that early action by President Biden. I also think that there are many other countries that continue to lead on this issue. And increasingly, women themselves are raising their voices and demanding access to what is truly a basic and fundamental form of health care. And I would point to the liberalization of reproductive health services across the board, which we’ve documented at the Council through a number of research projects that are available on our website at www.cfr.org. But also the recent shift in Argentina, where we saw women campaigning in the streets for their liberalisation of reproductive health services and successfully doing so.

Ellen Chesler  13:19

Yes, this this is turning out to be an issue, ironically, where the West may not be leading the way. For so long, certainly on the right, but also on the extreme left of the political spectrum, there’s been a suspicion about women’s rights on the global stage as somehow a Western project. But to the contrary, what I’m finding in my research, and also what I think you have demonstrated in some of the tremendous research that you’ve sponsored at the Council, is that there’s a global consensus. We’re kind of behind the eight ball; we don’t even reach the first half of the rankings. We’re not at 50% of the International Parliamentary Union rankings on women’s political participation in the United States. There’s many countries ahead of us, we’re just at about the 50% mark, which is kind of extraordinary.

Ellen Chesler  14:15

And on family planning in the four years of the Trump administration, specifically, many others stepped up to fill the gaps when United States withdrew its funding from UNFPA, imposed the Global Gag Rule. You had Canada, you had Australia, you had other countries in Scandinavia stepping up with funding. And also, one of the most robust, I think, partnerships between the public and the private sector of many American foundations; particularly, like the Gates Foundation. And that’s something that sometimes we don’t as advocates talk about. There’s an awful lot happening in the rest of the world that I think we need to learn from. Not to take the attitude that we’re the teachers and everybody else is our student.

Ellen Chesler  15:13

Let’s go back to these economic questions that, as you mentioned, are the hardest nut to crack. The hardest –and I think most distressing dimension of women’s situation– is the economic one. Numerous empirical studies, some of which you’ve done, others from the World Bank and the McKinsey Global Institute, showed dramatically (the data is there) that closing gender gaps in employment in both advanced as well as developing countries could add trillions of dollars to the economy to the global GDP.

Ellen Chesler  15:52

And yet, there just doesn’t seem to be as much progress as one would have hoped for, especially in the 90s, when –I’m old enough to remember– Beijing and those highly aspirational meetings that the UN held globally to bring together women around these issues. Why is this so difficult? Again, you mentioned political will. I think, political will is critical. The data tells us what we need to do. The political will isn’t always there, but there’s some of it. And yet still, there’s so many hurdles. Why and how? You’ve done a very brilliant I thought analysis of what the impediments to progress for women are internationally, and then also, some of the ways in which we can intervene. But let’s start with the impediments.

Rachel Vogelstein  16:52

So we have put together a report at CFR called “The Women’s Workplace Equality Index”, where we essentially rank how level the economic playing field is for women in 193 economies around the world. And what we find is that over 100 countries have laws on the books that inhibit women’s economic participation in significant ways. Some countries have one law, some countries have many laws that inhibit women’s economic participation. And these can range from property rights limitations that prevent women from having access to collateral and therefore starting businesses. These can include limitations on the types of jobs that women can hold; the number of hours that they can work, whether they’re allowed to work without spousal permission. These laws can include insufficient policies related to discrimination and harassment in the workplace, which we know is a problem in the world’s over.

Rachel Vogelstein  18:00

And in many countries, we see insufficient policies to create the infrastructure that’s required for full participation in the economy for women. Particularly with an eye towards the disproportionate burden they shoulder in terms of caregiving of children and elders. So this constellation of laws come together to not only inhibit the potential of individual women, but to limit the potential of individual national economies and the global economy. So several years ago, the McKinsey Global Institute put together a really compelling analysis that estimated the amount of global GDP lost because of gender gaps in the workforce at between $12 and $28 trillion.

Rachel Vogelstein  18:55

That is staggering. And we have seen that that same global institute produce a report that found that if the impact of COVID-19 on the economy were gender neutral, that we would see an additional trillion in global GDP. So we are currently suffering a worse economic situation than we otherwise would have, because of these structural inequalities.

Rachel Vogelstein  19:29

So it’s critical to elevate this issue on the foreign policy agenda on the economic agenda. And increasingly, as the number of studies documenting the very clear evidence that women’s participation in the economy is critical as that evidence grows, we are starting to see leaders take this issue more seriously. So for example, Prime Minister Abe in Japan made increasing women’s labor force participation a critical element of his economic strategy. In the United States, we have seen that a key part of the economic recovery package that is on the table for recovering from COVID-19 includes many of the structural elements that have inhibited women’s participation in the economy during this crisis. Structural impediments like the lack of childcare, and the types of policy solutions that are being discussed increasingly take into account the policy elements that need to be in place in order to maximize women’s economic potential.

Rachel Vogelstein  20:37

But there’s a lot of money at stake. And this is an issue that affects all of us. Because when the rate of labor force participation grows for women, that it fuels economic growth that all of us benefit from, so I hope that we will continue to see this issue elevated on international agenda.

Ellen Chesler  20:58

So there does seem to be a new wokeness, so to speak, that is, I like to joke with some of my feminist economist friends in the developing world, that they shouldn’t give up on feminist economics, because finally, the World Bank is paying attention. And they, of course, are pretty disdainful of that attitude. But I did say that the last time I spoke at the UN, I think, to the amusement of some of our sister advocates from Africa and Asia, “don’t give up yet”, because now we have women in charge of some of the macro economic thinking for the first time at the IMF, and the World Bank. And increasing numbers of women –as we can see right here for the first time a woman treasury secretary in the United States.

Ellen Chesler  21:51

But let’s just go back two minutes before we get there. So you’ve see legal impediments. Even though countries signed on to things like the Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women, they don’t always enforce it. We need to enforce the obligations that countries take on when they sign these international treaties; committing themselves to women’s rights.

Ellen Chesler  22:15

You point to structural issues: the over representation of women in the informal economy –in low wage sector jobs in, for example, manufacturing– although in places like China that’s actually lifted women up. I mean, the prosperity is rising in some places in the world as a result of the trade economy. One of the things you haven’t talked about, but that I wonder what you think about in terms of structural issues is that when we began talking –I should say I, because I’m much older than you– about women’s empowerment in the economy, way back in the 90s for example, we had a much more optimistic view of investment in the public sector. But in fact, in my view, neoliberal economic policies have bankrupted a lot of countries and a lot of public sectors. COVID is certainly not helping in that regard. So there’s less money to invest in building robust government sectors where women have a lot of jobs; women have often been teachers and health care workers and work in the tech sector of governments.

Ellen Chesler  23:37

But finally, there’s a third issue in your study that I think we should talk about, which is the cultural impediments and how hard it has been. How much harder than women of my generation –coming of age in the 70s 80s, and 90s of the last century– thought it would be to just break through certain cultural resistance to the idea of women’s equality. And, obviously, that cultural resistance has been manifest in a very dramatic way in this country and others in the enormous resistance and backlash to gender equality that we’ve seen in the rise of the right and authoritarian governments. Not only in our own country, but elsewhere around the world. So talk a bit more about that before we try to move on and see if we can offer our listeners some workarounds to these these big problems.

Rachel Vogelstein  24:29

Well, you’re absolutely right. There are legal barriers to women’s economic participation, there are structural barriers; the under representation of girls at the secondary level is a huge structural impediments…

Ellen Chesler  24:42

Secondary level of education, right?

Rachel Vogelstein  24:44

Exactly. The staggering rates of child marriage around the world, which essentially, often means that girls are pulled out of school and then married before the age of 18. That again, creates a significant set of challenges for women’s economic participation.

Rachel Vogelstein  25:05

But this last set of issues, cultural barriers, are really significant as well. And there are really important studies that demonstrate the persistence of cultural norms that continue to underlie the legal and structural impediments that we see still today. There’s a study that the United Nations put out that found that about half of people surveyed across 75 countries believe that men make better political leaders than women. Notwithstanding the clear evidence we have that women’s inclusion in public life makes democracies stronger, more representative, and a whole host of other benefits. About 40% of those surveyed also believe that men make better business executives, which disregards research that we have.

Ellen Chesler  26:00

Everything we know about, inclusive, how much more inclusive women are.

Rachel Vogelstein  26:06

Right. That women’s participation on corporate boards and in C suites actually improves the bottom line. So attitudes like that continue to present significant obstacles to closing many of the gaps that we’ve talked about today.

Rachel Vogelstein  26:23

And there are three in particular that I’ve highlighted in a piece I wrote in “Foreign Policy” commemorating the 25th anniversary of the historic “Beijing Women’s Conference” in the 90s that you referenced earlier, that I co authored with my colleague, Jen Klein. And there these are the following:

Rachel Vogelstein  26:40

The first is that there are often stereotypes about the motives, or so-called likability of women seeking power, that have hampered those running for elected office or those seeking to rise to leadership positions in the private sector. And the under representation of women in positions of power contributes to the failure to sufficiently address many of the policies that we’ve talked about today that still have not yet been enacted.

Rachel Vogelstein  27:12

A second set of cultural barriers relates to the the notion of women as primary caregivers and men primarily as breadwinners. Despite the shifts that we’ve seen the United States, and in so many other countries around the world, that persistent stereotype fuels the undervaluation of care work and limits women’s labor force participation; which as we’ve talked about, has negative effects not only on individual women, but entire economies.

Rachel Vogelstein  27:42

And then third, the tolerance of sexual harassment and discrimination, which is both a cause and a result of a fundamental power imbalance, has left women –in the workplace, and particularly, the most vulnerable women minorities; those low wage workers–  completely unprotected, often underpaid. And that undermines their collective potential. So there’s a lot more we need to do to address not only the legal barriers and the structural barriers to women’s economic participation, but the persistent cultural norms that underlie many of those challenges.

Ellen Chesler  28:19

But just to be a little bit more optimistic –because I keep referencing my age, which I suppose it’s not a wise thing to do. But when you’ve been around these issues as long as I have, I feel the persistent need to remark on the important changes I’ve seen. I’m lucky enough to be an advisory board member of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch has led the way negotiating international agreements, for example, governing transnational workers and setting higher standards for women in factories.

Ellen Chesler  28:57

And one of the things that I’ve learned from you is the degree to which that has now been made more realistic, in terms of enforcement, by trade policies that the United States is pursuing –and other countries– to make sure that trade is conditioned on raising wages in factories, or on protecting domestic workers and transnational domestic workers. [This is] another big issue in terms of keeping women down and keeping wages down, it took a long time in this country.

Ellen Chesler  29:36

We had a new deal in the 1930s that created minimum wage hour standards and also created a social security infrastructure. But it didn’t apply to women of color – or men of color – but particularly women. It had many, many restrictions placed on it; that’s changing now. And so I think maybe the next generation could look forward to a better world governed by some of these new agreements and the recognition of how important creating economic parity, as well as political parity for women is, in terms of the larger goals of peace and security in the world.

Ellen Chesler  30:24

Let me move on however. Having said something a little bit hopeful to a set of circumstances that we’ve confronted this year that seem to have erased some progress: the COVID-19 crisis. Talk a little bit about that before we talk more about policy infrastructure and how we can build a policy infrastructure that addresses the remaining gaps in in equality for women. But also, therein addresses our need to pursue more inclusive economic policies and democratic practices around the world.

Rachel Vogelstein  31:14

Well, I think the current moment we’re in, and contending with the global coronavirus pandemic, has brought to the fore the effect of many of these structural barriers that we’ve been talking about; the legal barriers we’ve been talking about, the cultural barriers we’ve been talking about. They have only been magnified in this moment of crisis, with particularly devastating effects for women’s economic participation. So we’ve seen an exodus of women from the labor force in the United States and in countries around the world.

Rachel Vogelstein  31:56

In the United States, the numbers are particularly dire for women of color. And we have seen also that women have been shouldering the brunt of service as frontline health care workers, and are disproportionately saddled with the growing caregiving responsibilities that have only increased as schools and childcare centers have shuttered. We also know that as nations moved to lock down countries –ostensibly to promote health and safety– many women became trapped in situations that either already were or became violent.

Rachel Vogelstein  32:38

And so it was really the opposite of safety for those who are facing an increase in gender based violence. So, many of the issues we talked about really only magnified in this moment. And the numbers bear that out. So although women make up just 39% of the global labor force, they accounted for 54% of pandemic related job losses. And we’ve seen those numbers really in countries around the world. This is a moment of great challenge. But it is also an opportunity, as countries move to rebuild their economies; to do so in a way that is more inclusive and that recognizes the critical contributions that women make to their economies.

Ellen Chesler  33:28

You’ve made some really important and interesting points about what constitutes infrastructure for women as opposed to tunnels and bridges. And what we conventionally think of infrastructure in that regard. And I’m always impressed by the way you talk about that, and how we need to build infrastructure that really addresses women’s needs and the needs of women and families. But talk a little bit more on that.

Rachel Vogelstein  33:53

I think that’s exactly right. That’s the word I was just getting to is infrastructure. And we know that we need roads, and we need electricity for computers. And we need the whole range of what we traditionally think of as basic infrastructure in order to fuel the economy. But we tend to privatize and to think about the needs that relate to caregiving and caretaking for our families as individual instead of collective responsibilities.

Rachel Vogelstein  34:25

And yet we know that when childcare policies are strong, women’s labor force participation grows. We know that when tax policies are reformed, so that they no longer penalize second earners in a household, the number of women who work outside the home goes up. And we of course, have talked about the important economic ramifications that changes like that have. We also know that there are gender gaps in digital and financial services and [that] there are many actions that governments can take to investing in digital infrastructure, particularly in emerging economies, to make sure that we’re closing gender gaps and access to technology. All of these basic pieces are critical infrastructure to ensure that women alongside men have the ability to participate on an equal footing on an equal basis in the economy.

Rachel Vogelstein  35:20

And so I think we are starting to see more economists and world leaders recognize that policies need to change in order to create the conditions in which women can return to the economy, which will of course, redound not only to the benefit of individuals, but to all of us; in terms of tax revenue and GDP.

Ellen Chesler  35:46

Well, you brought us just where I wanted to end, which is to talk a little bit about the future in very concrete ways in terms of US foreign policy –and US domestic policy, really, because the two are intertwined with respect to gender. President Biden has a robust plan to take women’s issues seriously. You’ve pointed out in a number of forums that this is the first gender equal cabinet, or government, or close to it; we don’t have a full complement of staff appointed yet, but it’s closer to gender balanced than it’s ever been before.

Ellen Chesler  36:23

The White House has also organized a council to achieve gender equity across all government programs –as staffed by your longtime colleague, another woman of your generation, whom I deeply admire, Jen Klein– let’s talk about that and the ways in which people listening to this podcast, and particularly students, can be hopeful and get involved. As you’ve said many times today and in the past, we know what the policy solutions are. The question is whether we have the political will, we certainly haven’t had it over the last four years. It’s still a challenge to gain consensus in our very divided government. But the Biden administration is taking this much more seriously. And I think that’s reason for some hope.

Rachel Vogelstein  37:18

I really agree that this is question of political will –is one we’ve talked about a number of times today. I think the signs point to strong political will to address gender equity and equality; both at home and abroad when it comes to this incoming administration.

Rachel Vogelstein  37:37

Certainly the historic nomination of a gender balanced cabinet, which was not only diverse in terms of gender, but also of race, ethnicity, and a variety of other factors, shows that this administration is mindful of the evidence that having diversity and leadership and decision-making actually improves outcomes. And there are only 14 countries in the world that have reached this threshold of gender parity in the cabinet. In the last administration, the proportion of women in the cabinet was 17%.

Rachel Vogelstein  38:12

The notion that we at least have before the Senate for confirmation an equal number of men and women is huge progress. It’s the first time in American history that that’s happened. And I hope the Senate with its advice and consent will have the good sense to ensure that we deliver on gender parity in the year 2021.

Rachel Vogelstein  38:32

The historic creation of a White House Council on Gender and Policy is also a really important signal that this administration considers issues related to gender to be not only important from the perspective of outreach and inclusion, but also policy. What’s different about this council, as opposed to what we’ve seen, in terms of White House offices that have focused on gender in prior administrations, is that this is not a council that’s located in the Office of Public Engagement. It’s not a council that’s siloed. It is actually a council that is comprised of representatives from the mainstream policy-making bodies in the White House: the National Economic Council, the Domestic Policy Council, and importantly, the National Security Council. All will be working closely with the policy experts in the White House gender policy council to ensure that issues related to gender equality are part of decision-making across the board. That’s a sea change. That’s huge opportunity to put many of the policies that we’ve talked about today squarely on the US government’s domestic and international agenda.

Ellen Chesler  39:44

Well, thank you so much, Rachel. We’ve come to the end of our podcast, but I would certainly love to have you back –or in person if we ever get to that point again– to speak to university students, especially, and faculty, because I do think that you bring a kind of practicality to this issue. And your command of the data and information as well as concept in theory is unparalleled.

Ellen Chesler  40:21

I do want to give a shout out with respect to the new gender policy council to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because she was the first one who really understood the importance of bringing gender into the White House; of making certain that there was kind of coordination among agencies on these issues. And certainly, she did it within the State Department when she was Secretary of State and it’s because of her that I know you. So a big shout out to Hillary, as well as to all of the new members of the Biden administration.

Ellen Chesler  40:56

Thank you, Rachel, for your insights to our audience. Remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on SoundCloud, Spotify and Apple podcasts. Thanks to Hristo Voynov for his technical assistance and Merrill Sovner, my former colleague at the Open Society Foundations for helping to produce this episode and to Duncan Mackay for sharing his song “International Horizons” as the scene music for the program. I’m Ellen Chesler, and thanks to all of you for joining us. We look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.

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