A Personal View of Women and Public Policy
By Swanee Hunt
Originally Published in "On the Issues," Fall, 1998 Change never travels in a straight line, so when asked to come to Harvard to create a new center for women and Public Policy, I was both surprised and not. Since I was a teenager, denied Radcliffe/ Harvard by a father convinced the institution was run by communists, Cambridge had been an unfulfilled goal. Now I was arriving on terms not imaginable 30 years earlier: as a woman experienced in the male world of diplomacy (the former American Ambassador to Vienna), co-creator of a women's foundation (in my adopted state of Colorado), and mother of three with a husband who had moved to follow my career (a feat of devotion his profession as a symphony conductor allowed, although with considerable sacrifice).

Since late fall of 1997, the launching of the new program has been seamless: students and staff have been welcoming; scholars are enthusiastic; and financial underpinnings are falling into place. And with good reason, for the needs are clear; and they fit the Kennedy School's mission of equipping future leaders to contribute to the solution of public problems globally. Many of the paramount global issues of the next century--intra- and international strife, environmental challenges, ethnic tensions, the gulf between rich and poor, and the exploration of cyberspace--have women right in the center. That's a good fit for the school that drafted the plan for the denuclearization of the former Soviet Union, birthed the concept of community policing, and is deep into a study of poverty and welfare reform.

That being said, a reporter called recently wanting to cover our experience in Harvard's tradition-bound culture as we create the new Women and Public Policy Program -- or "WAPPP" as it is affectionately known. In the days that followed, I heard from numerous friends and colleagues that the reporter had called, "looking for dirt."

I doubt it was dirt as much as disconnect. That reporter understood, I think, what writer Anne Roiphe describes when "the personal always slips out of the grasp of the political. It seethes and squirms, it bites and soothes in ways that make all rhetoric seem like baby talk, while real life is experiences in the parentheses, in the subclause, in the ironies."

Inscribing "real life" on Harvard blackboards more often covered with statistical macro-economic formulae is a challenge -- but the difficulty is not a surprise. Harvard's well-known orientation towards a male world view mirrors cultural and institutional barriers for women globally. Those barriers are daunting, evidenced by United Nations reports that women constitute half the world's population, perform nearly two-thirds of its work hours, receive one-tenth of the world's income, but own less than one-tenth of the world's property. If that irony is "real life," then our ultimate task at the WAPPP must not be simply to sharpen the rhetoric, but to reshape reality.

To that end, Dean Joesph S. Nye (former Undersecretary of Defense) has put his energy and imagination behind the new center, describing it as an important element in his legacy as head of the Kennedy School. In the spring of 1997, while I was still serving as ambassador, he tracked me down with an invitation to join forces in creating a new impetus for advancing women's role in the global public policy arena. I would create the program from the ground up, and develop the public profile. The faculty chair, Jane Mansbridge, author of Why We Lost the ERA, and I would be a team. It was a marriage made in heaven: Jenny, a scholar and closet activist; and I, an activist and closet scholar. Since then, the dean has been the foremost proponent of the new program, most recently directing that 50 percent of all new cases for the K-School case library (with 500 institutional subscribers) focus on women and minorities. He is calling for nothing less than a cultural shift in an institution in which 90 percent of the cases currently used for classroom instruction have male protagonists, and the overwhelming majority of the instructors are men.

That shift must also pervade the parentheses of academic life, where some 300 women (almost half the student body of the Kennedy School) learn through non-verbal cues as well as course offerings whether or not they--and their ideas-- are not only welcome but also weighed. Instructors report that in classrooms, women do not raise their hands nearly as often as men; instead, professors return to their offices to find a preponderance of E-mail messages from women students.

To inspire women students, role models and mentors are essential. Several executive programs bring women leaders to campus, such as the National Hispana Institute, the institute of politics, and the new Council of Women World Leaders, which collects the wisdom of former heads of government and heads of state. The Council's first summit held at the Kennedy School brought eight current or former premiers, presidents and prime ministers together to explore the challenges of global leadership.

That the school is home to programs like these that support the WAPPP mission (in addition to training Russian generals and Chinese business executives) is an important, if subliminal, message for men and women students.

The WAPPP is directing its earliest funding to research fellows, interns, and new curriculum addressing a tri-partite field of activity; public policies that particularly affect women (such as women and information technology, women's employment in the global economy, global trafficking of women), women's perspectives on public policies in general, and the experience of women shaping public policy. The program is based on the premise that as we help women examine the challenges and opportunities they will face in the public forum we are equipping global leaders of the next millenium. Strengthening the advocacy power of grassroots women, and advancing women as leaders will affect the shape of foreign and domestic policies in the 21st century. The question of just how women make a difference at the policy level is one we will examine through scholarly activity as well as the real life testimony of practitioners who flow through the Kennedy School in a steady stream.

But to reach across academic content into the core where self-confidence thrives or languishes, we also host a series of informal events where women of color from the school can speak honestly to white women about differences and commonalities, where men can describe their reactions to women's advancing position, and where accomplished women politicians and business executives can answer questions about their private life choices. In WAPPP's first year we've hosted numerous seminars with the likes of Vice President of the Czech Senate Jaroslava Moserova (Vice President of the Czech Senate), Koranic scholar Fatima Mersini, US Congresswoman Rosa Delauro, and former Italian Foreign Minister Suzanna Agnelli.

Add to those personal elements upcoming WAPPP-sponsored conferences, courses, seminars, and publications dealing with issues such as global trafficking of women, a project to create an international framework for legislation to protect women and children from commercial sexual exploitation. Other programs include an emphasis on women, religion and public policy and women's experience in international conflict resolution; women and the information technology revolution; women in international development; the portrayl of women and public policy in popular women's magazines; and women's experience in U.S. Foreign policy.

In a program list, the policies can seem relatively dry--until you put a human face on the half a million women lured into Western Europe annually to become prostitutes or the nine-year-old girls sold to Thai brothels by their families for $10. Adding to the urgency of the WAPPP program are Taliban rulers in Afghanistan invoking the Koran as they publicly beat women who try to leave their homes to work in offices; and women in Bosnia courageously banding together across war lines to keep their country from slipping back into violence.

The power of the upcoming new WAPPP program becomes clearer when we consider that women by the hundreds of millions are fueling economies of the developing world through unreported home-based industry; that unlike the industrial revolution, which left women in the dust, today's women have the opportunity to be at the forefront of high-tech change; that individual women's magazines are read by 24 million people worldwide each month; and that the State Department is asking for concrete practices that will help its embassies advance the status or women worldwide.

Which leads right back to that niggling mix of the personal and political described by Roiphe. For decades, girls have been trained to be preoccupied with shape. Now it's time to kiss their Barbie dolls "sweet dreams" and put their measuring tape to more expansive uses. Through the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School, hundreds of women every year will be directing their energies beyond toning tummies to constructing curricula and planning policies--taking on the broad tasks of fashioning economies and molding governments, and growing into their full capacity to shape the world.

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