“The end of ‘fair’ comes the day you graduate.”

That’s the tough reality I deliver on campuses in speeches to college women.  Most shake their head in agreement.  They know what lies ahead.

Yes, in 2011, for the first time in history, women surpassed men as recipients of college degrees.  But, once they’re in the workforce, women have vastly different career and pay trajectories.  In fields like corporate management and politics, men still occupy 84% and 83% of leadership roles, and women’s progress has stalled or is moving backwards.   For wages, even though young women enter the workforce on a par with their male-counterparts, by their mid-20s a gender wage gap develops and over the years, it widens.

Why?  Because men enter the workforce with a powerful network of connections — his fraternity, his lacrosse team, his dad’s golfing foursome.  These connections lead young men down profitable career paths, and pull them up the ladder.

Not so for women – for us, building our network is unfinished business.  As I explained to host Bonnie Erbe, on her PBS show To the Contrary:

“One of greatest gifts of that the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us, was for women to enter the workforce.  But it was like giving us a car, without driving lessons.”

Here’s the required lessons:

Lesson 1:  It’s the Economy, Girlfriend
The central issue for today’s women is economic empowerment.  With money comes control – not dependency, the root cause for so many of the evils impacting today’s women.  Thankfully, women have recently started to grasp the importance of their finances as reflected in a pronounced shift in voting patterns to prioritizing economics over social issues.

Lesson 2:  It’s Okay to Make Money
Career choices are the major culprit in wage disparity.  Young women are bombarded with messaging, not only from the media and popular culture, but also from college faculty, that they should play nice:  help people; don’t be greedy by seeking power or financial gain.  A Princeton University student told The Daily Beast:  “People, including faculty, are turned off if we seem over-zealous.“  Women now hold 80% of psychology degrees, 90% of social worker jobs and 88% of home health care jobs.  Meanwhile, the number of college women entering Wall Street has declined by 22% in the past decade.

These are words I repeat on campus, in the media, and now here again:  “There’s nothing wrong with making money!”

Lesson 3:  Build Your Brand; Make Yourself Indispensable
Think of your brand as the sum of who you know.  What you are worth today – and what you will be worth to future employees is in large part related to your contacts, your good connections.  It’s a mistake to think that the only people who matter are your superiors.  Colleagues your own age are just as important.  As you move up the ranks together in your careers, your peer group will bring you business – or revenue, which gives your brand value and makes you indispensable.

Lesson 4:  #Mentor_Up!
Building connections does not naturally occur for women.  Last spring, a Barnard College junior told me:  “Mentorship is really important because I have a lot of opposition going on.”

Which got me thinking:  what if we harnessed the tools of social media to modernize mentoring?!  To help young women to move forward again.

We approached the Staples Foundation with our vision:   The Mentor Exchange — an inclusive, futuristic approach to multifaceted mentoring.   Our plan is to use the tools of social media to enable young women to find mentors, forge connections with their peers and have a place to share advice and suggestions.

Lesson 5:  Good Girls DO Ask
Even as we were preparing to launch The Mentor Exchange in January as part of National Mentoring Month, getting young women to step forward as mentees was more challenging than finding mentors!

Every one of our 20 Pioneer Mentors – highly accomplished women in their respective career fields – readily admits that mentoring is a key to their success.  Barbara Buono, the first woman to serve as Senate Majority Leader in New Jersey, said:

“Mentorship matters, because behind every great woman is another woman who took the time to care.”

The truth is we women must unapologetically seek out connections.  The Mentor Exchange can help:  forging bonds with both mentors and peers who can lend support and give advice (watch this introductory video).

With our five lessons behind us, it’s finally time:  Girlfriend, Build that Network!

The media that morning described a Westchester home so bloody, that it was not possible to discern, who murdered who. Big mystery, right? Even if I hadn’t known Amy, I could have made a very educated guessed. Women account for 85% of the victims of intimate partner violence. Roughly 70-80% of intimate partner homicides who are murdered are killed by a boyfriend or husband (as opposed to 3% of men). In 70-80% of intimate partner homicides, there is a prior incident, and so it was hardly surprising when media stories circulating that afternoon revealed that police had been summoned to the Friedlander Home as far back as 2006!

Cookie cutter domestic violence. A murder which should have been viewed under the lens of a public health issue, because violence against women, so pervasive that it impacts 1 in 4 women, is hardly a private matter. But not for our media, which immediately launched a campaign of victim blame — Blaming Amy.

Starting the very first night, the media began its exploration of what Amy could have done to cause the gentle, unassuming, mellow Sam Friedlander to sedate his children, walk down to hall to the master bedroom and bludgeon Amy with a wooden instrument over her entire body with such force that an autopsy was needed to confirm her identity, walk back down the hall and shoot the children in their bedrooms, and then shoot himself.

The first perpetrator of victim blame was the local media, The Journal News (owned by Gannett). That first night, as the national and international news outlets were looking to local media for insights, here’s the top search engine result: “Cross-River murder-suicide described: friends suggest wife’s ‘belittling’ of husband played a role.”

For this thoroughly unprofessional piece of ‘journalism’, The Journal News interviewed two of Sam’s law school friends — and none of the victim’s friends — for a story line exploring why Amy was responsible for her own death. Feminist website Jezebel, which captured the contents of the article before it was pulled offline, described The Journal News piece as:

…an article that should go down in the annals of victim blaming.

Then, Mr. McDonald just stopped responding to complaints altogether.

By then, it was too late. The Journal News had given Sam’s two law school friends, David Pine and Michael Borg, a springboard and the two would go on to be quoted in The New York Times, The New York Post and The NY Daily News, the latter of which wisely amend its story to remove this line by Borg (emphasis added):

He said if Friedlander had only killed his wife “I would have baked him a cake with a file in it” but he could not imagine why his “gentle” law-school buddy killed the kids.

Borg’s atrocious quote would be memorialized on picket signs at a rally held by local domestic abuse shelters in White Plains, New York on Monday, October 24th: No ‘files’ in a cake for mass murderers; alongside: Stop Blaming Amy.

Public comments by Sam’s second friend, David Pine, are even more troubling given his circumstances. Pine said of Sam: “He was showing all the classic signs of being emotionally abused…” (The Journal News) and “…was exhibiting signs of being emotionally abused.” (The New York Post).

David Pine also bragged: “I knew that an incident would happen in that household.” (The New York Post) and observed of Sam: “He went into his own cocoon.” (The New York Times).

David Pine’s statements go from troubling to startling because of this: Mr. Pine is, of all things, a county prosecutor for the Passaic County Prosecutors Office — an office charged with holding offenders in domestic violence cases accountable for breaking the law! We will never know what could have happened if Sam’s so-called friends had sought mental health support for him instead of blaming Amy. New York does in fact have one of the most progressive court-order treatment laws in the country. (Please see The New Agenda’s online petition to NJ Governor Chris Christie and NJ Attorney General Paula Dow regarding David Pine’s media statements here.)

A full week would pass before the media would seek out the other side of the story and interview a friend of Amy Friedlander. A woman reporter, Tara Rosenblum of News12, interviewed me — and for the first time in the New York media market, a voice was given to the victim.

Around the time Tara aired our interview, when Pine and Borg were done sucking up all the oxygen in the media, the facts also started to come out. Sam bought the gun he used to kill the children and himself back in April. Sam bludgeoned Amy to death with a wooden rolling pin, which The Journal News noted was: “initially mistaken by police for a broken-off furniture leg because it was covered in blood.” Sam was prescribed anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. And so on.

Whatever happened, here’s the bottom line: there is no excuse for violence against women. The media’s fruitless search to find cause belies a belief that “if” certain circumstances occur, “then” violence against women is okay. The media is wrong. Violence against women is never okay. We teach our children in nursery school to ‘use your words‘, and failing that, ‘walk away and find a grown-up.’ Advice that serves us well, still, as adults.

Until our media stops victim blaming women and girls who are murdered, raped or beaten up, we will never make progress inholding offenders accountable for their actions. In the end, here’s the simple truth: the victim is never to blame, but the perpetrator is always to blame. The only battles my friend Amy waged on this earth — despite being brilliant, beautiful, gentle, kind, generous and loyal to a fault — was with her weight and self-esteem. Our media’s attempt to Blame Amy is nothing short of shameful.

The media that morning described a Westchester home so bloody, that it was not possible to discern, who murdered who. Big mystery, right?   Even if I hadn’t known Amy, I could have made a very educated guessed.  Women account for 85% of the victims of intimate partner violence.  Roughly 1 in 3 women who are murdered are killed by a boyfriend or husband (as opposed to 3% of men).  In 70-80% of intimate partner homicides, there is a prior incident, and so it was hardly surprising when media stories circulating that afternoon revealed that police had been summoned to the Friedlander Home as far back as 2006!

Cookie cutter domestic violence.  A murder that should have been viewed under the lens of a public health issue, because violence against women, so pervasive that it impacts 1 in 4 women, is hardly a private matter.  But not for our media, which immediately launched a campaign of victim blame – Blaming Amy.

Starting the very first night, the media began its exploration of what Amy could have done to cause the gentle, unassuming, mellow Sam Friedlander to sedate his children; walk down to hall to the master bedroom and bludgeon Amy with a wooden instrument over her entire body with such force that an autopsy was needed to confirm her identity; walk back down the hall and shoot the children in their bedrooms; and then shoot himself.

The first perpetrator of victim blame was the local media, The Journal News (owned by Gannett).  That first night, as the national and international news outlets were looking to local media for insights, here’s the top search engine result:  “Cross-River murder-suicide described: friends suggest wife’s ‘belittling’ of husband played a role.”

For this thoroughly unprofessional piece of ‘journalism’,  The Journal News interviewed two of Sam’s law school friends – and none of the victim’s friends – for a story line exploring why Amy was responsible for her own death.  Feminist website Jezebel, which captured the contents the article before it was pulled offline, described The Journal News piece as:

…an article that should go down in the annals of victim blaming.

That same evening, I received scores of emails from people around the country concerned about The Journal News article and victim blaming.  The next morning, I called the local editor, Joe McDonald, to express my concern and to request that a statement be placed on their website to the effect that they did not intend to blame the victim.  He refused (well, belligerently refused to be precise) and informed me that no reasonable person would view their piece as blaming the victim.  A sentiment he echoed in his canned email responses to many of the initial ‘unreasonable’ citizens who emailed him (several of whom were kind enough to share his response with me):

“…in my view, no reasonable person could conclude from our reporting that the killings were justified.”

Then, Mr. McDonald just stopped responding to complaints altogether.

By then, it was too late. The Journal News had given Sam’s two law school friends, David Pine and Michael Borg, a springboard and the two would go on to be quoted in The New York Times, The New York Post and The NY Daily News, the latter of which wisely amend its story to remove this line by Borg (emphasis added):

He said if Friedlander had only killed his wife “I would have baked him a cake with a file in it” but he could not imagine why his “gentle” law-school buddy killed the kids.

Borg’s atrocious quote would be memorialized on picket signs at a rally held by local domestic abuse shelters in White Plains, New York on Monday, October 24th: No ‘files’ in a cake for mass murderers; alongside:  Stop Blaming Amy.

Public comments by Sam’s second friend, David Pine, are even more troubling given his circumstances. Pine said of Sam:   “He was showing all the classic signs of being emotionally abused…” (The Journal News) and “…was exhibiting signs of being emotionally abused.” (The New York Post).  David Pine also bragged: “I knew that an incident would happen in that household.” (The New York Post) and observed of Sam:  “He went into his own cocoon.” (The New York Times).

David Pine’s statements go from troubling to startling because of this:   Mr. Pine is, of all things, a county prosecutor for the Passaic County Prosecutors Office – an office charged with holding offenders in domestic violence cases accountable for breaking the law!  We will never know what could have happened if Sam’s so-called friends had sought mental health support for him instead of blaming Amy.  New York does in fact have one of the most progressive court-order treatment laws in the country.  (Please see The New Agenda’s online petition to NJ Governor Chris Christie and NJ Attorney General Paula Dow regarding David Pine’s media statements here.)

The above is one of several images in the information section of Merck's Web site for its product Gardasil. Click the image to browse the site, or enter this URL: gardasil.com.

But the waging war in the GOP is not the only battle being fought over Gardasil. The media blitz which ensued after the GOP debate has opened the door for dialogue on school yards and social media amongst parents wrestling with what is best for their own daughter.

Many of my friends and colleagues are still struggling with the decision on whether to vaccinate their daughters. The reasons vary, but the primary are risks, necessity and advice. Since Gardasil was recommended by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in 2006, we still do not know if there are long-term effects. As recently as 2009 (2 years after Perry’s executive order), Gardasil was linked to a nerve disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

One friend wrote: Gardisil has too many open questions for me… and cervical cancer, while very very terrible, is rare. Others feel that their daughters are not sexually active as young teens, so there is no need to expose them to possible side effects. And finally, and perhaps most alarmingly, is the conflicting professional advice being given to parents. One mother wrote: My ob-gyn told me NOT to vaccinate –, but I wonder if that is the best advice. Her pediatrician was on the fence.

As we as parents wrestle with our demons, it’s clear one person who did not: Rick Perry.

Under the Public Information Act, POLITICO requested and received 700 pages of email correspondence which reveal that Perry was mostly absent from discussions on the vaccination and its consequences.

Here’s what we also know: The Center for Disease Control approved the Gardasil vaccine in June 2006. In October 2006, Perry’s Chief of Staff met with the governor’s budget director and three members of his office for an HPV vaccine briefing. On that same day, Merck’s PAC donated $5, 000 to Perry. In February 2007, Perry was the first governor to sign an executive order mandating Gardasil.

An image of Mike Toomey from the Houston Chronicle's blog on the Perry presidential candidacy. The post is titled "Maybe Rick Perry can’t be bought for $5,000, but Merck gave much more." Mike Toomey is Rick Perry's former chief of staff and is now a major lobbyist for Merck. Click the above image to read the Houston Chronicle's report.

But that’s not all.

At the time of Perry’s executive order, the governor had other ties to Merck as the drug company doubled its lobbying budget in Texas. One of the drug company’s three lobbyists in Texas was Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. Further, Merck funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group whose state director was Rep. Dianne White Delisi, the mother-in-law of Perry’s chief of staff at the time the executive order was signed.

In case you still have lingering questions about just how disinterested Rick Perry is in the welfare of young girls, you have to watch this: a recent interview of Perry by a local station on why Texas has the 3rd highest rate of teenage pregnancies. His non-command of facts and inability to answer the most basic of questions on the welfare of young girls in his state is both startling and appalling (skip to 1:30)

As an important side note, it is the women of the GOP — columnist Michelle Malkin, Rep Michele Bachmann and Gov. Sarah Palin, all of whom are mothers — who have spoken out about Perry and Gardasil. Their frame of reference as conservatives may be different than those of progressives, but interestingly here, we find common ground: the welfare of our daughters.

While conservatives and progressives will clearly disagree on the government’s role in mandating vaccines, here’s what we can agree on: Rick Perry did not have the best interest of our daughter’s in mind at the time of his executive order.

And perhaps a solution we can agree on was one implemented by Palin who was governor of Alaska at the time Perry was signing his executive order. As an op-ed last Friday in The New York Times noted: Some of Sarah Palin’s Ideas Cross the Political Divide. At that time, Palin did not mandate the vaccine, but did make it available to girls ages 9-18 at no cost. While the medical profession sorts out the benefits and risks of Gardasil, this solution at the very least has the best interest of our daughters in mind.

We go behind enemy lines for the real story.

It’s back-to-school time, which is exciting for the kids except for, oh yeah, all their anxiety over schedules, books, classes and clothing.  Yet those pale in comparison to what moms face coming back this week—another year on the PTA battlefield.

I’m a PTA mom in transition. I spent 19 years working on Wall Street. Three years ago, I left to raise my kids and became more involved with the PTA. Wall Street was easier. Hands down.

Having been behind enemy lines on both sides, I can say with assurance that both working mothers and their stay-at-home counterparts experience a heavy dose of fear and misunderstanding.

The women with jobs feel deliberately excluded and looked down upon by what they see as an at-home clique that’s running everything.

The PTA coffees are scheduled during office working hours, the important PTA jobs are already taken, the teachers prefer having fulltime moms as class parents.

On the other side, some on the stay-at-home side feel as if working moms dismiss them for having given up their careers, and don’t appreciate all the time they put in year after year to better the schools—work for which they receive no pay or material reward.

As my friend Cynthia from Ohio puts it: Women spent the sixties and seventies fighting for the right to work.  Now that we have it, we use it as wedge issue to make enemies. Why can’t we value and celebrate the choices we make for ourselves?  Why do we allow ourselves to see women who’ve made different choices as the enemy?

Yet to form the battle lines strictly on the basis of who goes to an office and who stays home is too simplistic—there’s something bigger at play. Are we as women simply raised to be mean to one another? Have we allowed this to become acceptable behavior? And there’s something else to consider: All of our daughters are watching! We’ve all read books like Odd Girl Out which detail the hideous ways our girls treat one another. Is this what we really want for the next generation?

This story can have a happy ending. We can start to become aware of the way we treat and judge other women. We can re-engineer our behavior. We can break the cycle.

One year ago, I co-founded a national organization called The New Agenda, which is part of what many believe is a re-emerging movement towards gender equality. There are many impediments to achieving that equality: the pay gap; women’s very slow movement into top management ranks; the escalating rate of violence against women; and of course teen dating violence.  One obstacle that is seldom discussed is what we’re talking about here: women’s treatment of other women.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Women are 52 percent of the population and if we could work together on the issues that unite us, the impediments listed above would be on their way to disappearing.

If women weren’t so hard on other women, we could mentor each other into management (which we seldom do now) and collectively choose female leaders who could work on issues affecting women. We wouldn’t find ourselves with women so underrepresented in government—right now they constitute only 17 percent of elected officials in the U.S. (In this respect, by the way, our country ranks an embarrassing 71st in the world.) And women who identify as feminists have their problems too. If you read histories of the women’s rights movement, you’ll find that infighting among women often stopped progress.

Discouraging, yes. But as women we can change that, whenever we choose to. So as our kids go back to school, let’s go back to work on this issue. It is at the same time melancholy and empowering that the keys to equality are in our very own hands.

Nora will be missed immensely.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family.

Her family put the following note on her Facebook page:

Last summer, I wrote an article here at HuffPost, Why the ‘Pro-Women’ Movement Should and Will Replace Feminism.   Sarah Palin had just declared herself a ‘conservative feminist,’ while endorsing a slew of diverse women candidates and working to get them elected.  I found her efforts to get more women into leadership, admirable.  The women who apparently own the term “feminist” vehemently disagreed with me.  Rather than welcome Palin with a sisterly embrace, they pursued her with machetes of words for daring to utter their sacred “F word.”

The vitriolic reaction by the coterie of women who have anointed themselves (some might say, hijacked) the voice of feminism defies both logic and common sense.   Put another way, it’s simply bad business.  A stated goal of feminism is gender equality.  Yet, how can feminism get us there while excluding half the gender?  Gender equality is impossible to achieve within a framework in which some women are viewed as less worthy, less equal.  Until and unless feminism is willing to meaningfully address this incongruity,  feminism may be headed for extinction.  Feminism will be replaced by the  Pro-Women Movement, which is following a simple business ethos:  provide the customer with what she wants.  And as with most start-up brands, the Pro-Women was spurred by an unfilled need.

The feminists so eager to exclude conservative women from their clique won the battle, Palin backed off; but, sadly, they lost the war.  GOP women decided they didn’t need to be “feminists” after all.  Yesterday, Rep Michelle Bachmann told The Daily Beast that she does not consider herself a feminist, but she is “pro-woman.” 

Last week, Rep Kristi Noem told Greta Van Susteren (1:50) she too is not a feminist, but is “pro-woman.”  In fact, Noem took to the House floor with other GOP congresswomen to let women to know that her party is “Pro-Women” and will fight for women on today’s women’s issues.  Noem welcomed all women to join her:  a very appealing and positive message which could attract even more women voters in 2012.  This after the shocking 16 point migration of women voters to the GOP from 2008 to 2010.

Where did feminism go so terribly wrong?

Post the 2008 Presidential Election, 20% of women considered themselves feminists. At the same time, there was a historic opportunity to harness the depth of women’s anger in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s and Sarah Palin’s campaigns. To rally all women around their awakening to gender bias in the media, in the workplace and in our society generally.  Tina Brown challenged:    So passe is “feminism” that the bi-partisan woman’s activist group New Agenda, formed by Amy Siskind in August after Hillary’s defeat, is canvassing for new names to re-invigorate the cause (suggestions gratefully received).

Changing the F-word alone would not save feminism.  But changing its framework to be inclusive of all women looking for help would have been fruitful for increasing participation in feminism.   Legions of women were stark raving mad at the biased treatment Clinton and Palin received not only in the media, but also by the boys’ club establishment in the DNC and RNC.   Women’s anger and passion for change provided fertile ground for social change.  Palin supporters took the opportunity to act out their outrage by becoming activists in the Tea Party Movement and bucking the establishment.  As so, 2010 became The Year of GOP Women, with a possible follow up bang in 2012 with a female GOP candidate for president.  As Chris Matthews (of all people) noted:  Rep. Bachmann is going to make a real bang in this coming election season… Bet on the pitchforks to take it from the country clubbers. Those pitchforks are Pro-Women.

And what of Clinton supporters?  The legions of women who felt they no longer had a home in their party.  Among Clinton supporters, there was a rather widely held view that women’s groups (and many feminist) were either ineffectual or complicit in Clinton’s demise, preferring candidate Obama.   The women claiming the mantle of feminism did little to heal these wounds, excoriating Clinton supporters for their criticism of President Obama.  One particularly spiteful Obama supporting feminist coined the term “Clinton dead-enders” for those loyal to Clinton, leading the charge for more Clinton supporter bashing and exclusion.

Since most Clinton supporters were silenced and had no means to act out, they chose instead to act in.  More like a raft afloat.  Each wave washing them further from political ideology.   2010 was the first year since exit polling was taken that women went GOP.  But a closer peek, reveals a truth:  Women, 60 and Over, the largest and most reliable voting block, shifted from +6 D in 2008 to +12 R in 2010.  The second largest voting block, Women, 45-59 went from +10 D in 2008, to tie.   These are Hillary’s women.

There is one place that is making a home for all women, and that is the Pro-Women Movement.  It’s last call for feminism:  go inclusive or go extinct.

Yes, that’s right.  Rove’s American Crossroads is fawning over the House Minority Leader.  Extolling, via mouthpiece America Crossroads president Steven Law, Nancy Pelosi’s “charm.”

Flattery will get you nowhere, Karl.  Your real agenda is to demonize a woman leader, yet again.

Yes the Pelosi-pander is just a prelude to take a swipe at DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.   According to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads,  Wasserman Schultz is negative.   You heard that right.  Coming from Karl Rove, the supreme king of positivity, whose group claims:  “She’s got all the grace of a punch in the face.”

But hey, Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz, don’t take it personally.  Rove’s disdain for women is hardly partisan.

Just last fall, Rove caused a firestorm on the night Christine O’Donnell won the Republican Primary in Delaware by calling her “nutty.”  For this, Rove was excoriated by leading voices of his own party including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin.

Not to be outdone by himself, one month later, Rove caused an all-out civil war in his party with his on-air trashing of Tea Party favorite Governor Sarah Palin.

With Republican friends like Karl Rove, who needs enemies?

We get the joke American Crossroads.  Try to brand Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz as the character from Saturday Night Live, Debbie Downer.  Ha, ha.  Really clever.

Problem is, Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz is not nearly as negative as, say, Karl Rove.  She is doing her job which involves speaking out for her party with power and force.  But Rove is trying to use her gender to make the Chairwoman’s legitimate criticisms of the RNC whinny and negative; thereby taking away the force of her words.

Which is about as clever as The Rovemeister.
Rov-vee.  The Rove-man!  The Rove-ipulator!  The Rovemeister!

All good for a laugh. But, simply ridiculous.

A shot from the unreleased documentary, as it is posted at Newser.com.

When the credits rolled at the end of the pre-screening of ‘The Undefeated’ my first thought was this: Why didn’t Hillary’s advisors think of this? It was impossible for our country to know the real Hillary Rodham Clinton through the media’s sexism-colored-glasses during the 2008 presidential race.   The real Hillary was never introduced.  By the time our country finally got to know her post-2008 and she became our most popular politician,  it was already too late.

Which is why “The Undefeated” is providing such an important service by, finally,  introducing Sarah Palin.  True, the producer Stephen Bannon does share the same political ideology as Governor Palin, and so has a point of view (as Bannon aptly points out, so does Michael Moore in producing his documentaries).  Yet, it’s hard to watch the film without tripping over the facts:  the character of Sarah Palin and what has she accomplished.  Seems pretty basic, yes.  Yet, our country has yet to know Governor Palin beyond the initial smear job done on this woman as she entered the national political arena.  At the end of the film, I suspect the 20% of voters who consider themselves far left still won’t consider her  (just as those 20% on the far right would never vote for a Democrat);  but, I am quite certain that a whole lot of reasonable voters in between will be surprised by what they see.

Admittedly, Secretary Hillary Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin share next to nothing in political ideology or background.  Here’s what they do have in common:  both woman candidates were victims of a media smear campaign which played a major factor in their temporary political demise.  And the parallels are uncanny.

Prior to embarking on her 2008 presidential run, Hillary Clinton was the State of New York’s first woman senator.  Then Senator Clinton won re-election to the Senate in 2006 with a whopping 36 point victory and was extremely popular in her home state.

Similarly, Governor Palin was the state of Alaska’s first woman governor.  On the day then presidential candidate John McCain called Governor Palin to ask her to be his running mate, polls revealed her popularity was above 80% – simply, unheard of.

Both women took a risk in their run for the White House.  Both paid a price:  a smear campaign saturated with overt sexism.

I knew little about Governor Sarah Palin when she was selected as a vice presidential candidate; but, I knew Senator Hillary Clinton very well when she ran for president.  Which is why it was so painful for me to watch the media’s sexist savagery (I found myself talking to my television:  “that’s a lie!“, “that ‘s not Hillary!“).   From “she devil” to “white bitch” to “unstable” to just simply “isn’t likeable” the attacks were relentless.  In March 2008, observing the onslaught of sexism, Kathleen Deveny penned over at Newsweek:  America is not ready for a female president.   To which I would add:  our country surely did not know Hillary Clinton in 2008.

When Governor Palin entered the national spotlight, we had just formed The New Agenda and we braced ourselves for Sexism, Part Deux.   We thought it would be bad.  We were wrong.   It was worse.   When it was over, of one thing I was sure:  just as our country did not know Hillary Clinton, we surely did not know Sarah Palin either!

Which is why I would encourage you to see “The Undefeated” when it is released.  Be an educated consumer/voter.   Allow yourself to be curious.  I had my ‘aha moment‘ at Act 3, watching Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention. The context of the speech and the person clicked.  Here was a woman who had outed ethics violations and corporate cronyism in the GOP (outraging not only her own party, but also the big oil companies), then turned around and passed the AGIA (Alaska Gasline Inducement Act), landmark legislation, working hand-in-hand with Democrats (58 votes for, 1 against).  At which point I thought about the all male federal budget negotiations going on in DC -  a bunch of grown men acting like 5 year-old boys in the playground without supervision.

Here’s what we know:  after the media was done savaging Secretary Clinton, we got to know her and she became our country’s most popular politician.  Could this possibly be the same Secretary Clinton who was told by President Obama:  “you’re likeable enough?”

We owe it to Governor Palin to get to know her and see through the haze of the media’s sexism-colored-glasses.  We might learn about her and disagree on policy and issues, and that is okay.  But we also might find a different kind of leader at a time when the country we love needs fixing.

Sarah Palin and daughter Piper board her "One Nation" bus after visiting Fox News headquarters in New York on Wednesday. (The Week)

1. Our country has yet to elect a woman president – a national embarrassment! Almost every country in Europe and Latin America; along with India, Israel, New Zealand, Canada, China, Pakistan, Rwanda and many other countries have been led by a woman. The UN cites: “The achievement of democracy presupposes a genuine partnership between men and women…”; then goes on to rank the U.S. 75th for women’s representation in government (great news, we’re tied with Turkmenistan). It is time we move forward as a country and elect a woman president!

2. Left to their own devices, neither party will run a woman – in 2008, Hillary was not only betrayed by the’ Senate Boys Club’, but the DNC allowed overt sexism to hurt her chances (acknowledged by Howard Dean after she dropped out). The GOP Establishment continually discourages Palin (and Bachmann) from running. For a women of either party to become president, she’ll need to take a non-traditional, circuitous route. Since women are brought up to be ‘good girls‘ the moxie and bravery to buck the system is rare. Palin has it.

3. A generation of girls will see politics as a possibility – over the past decade, an alarming trend has developed on campus: college women are less likely to seek out positions of power. Not only avoiding politics, but also corporate America. One Ivy League woman told me her take-away freshman year on career paths for women was: “social work or medicine – you know, women need to help people.”

4. Women’s representation in leadership is moving backwards – from congress to Fortune 500 management, the percentage of women in leadership roles is decreasing. We’re moving backwards! The best way to move forward again is to get women who support other women into positions of power.

5. Palin ‘walks the walk’ on supporting and mentoring women – no one has done more to dismantle the GOP’s white-male construct than Palin. Her 2010 efforts helped deliver the country’s first Latina governor (Martinez-NM), first Indian-American woman governor (Haley-SC) and many new and returning women candidates.

6. Standing up to sexism - Palin has faced a steady barrage of sexism since 2008, including yesterday when a sign was posted on her bus referring to her as a media “whore.” In fact, women in power are frequently referred to as “sluts, bitches and whores.” Unambiguously, sexism hurts female candidates. Which is why it is so important for Palin to continue to stand up against and smack down the low-lives who perpetrate sexism and misogyny, by running despite them!

7. Women’s voices (and faces) are evaporating - increasingly, the decisions which determine the future of our country are made predominantly or exclusively by men. Although women make the bulk of consuming decisions, there is not a single woman in the federal budget negotiations or leading a major economic agency in the Obama Administration. Geez, NASA couldn’t put one female astronaut on Shuttle Endeavor’s final mission?

8. Teaching girls to take risks (and pick themselves up and try again) – our culture pressures teach girls not to take risks. That they must be perfect and not make mistakes. As a result, as women we are under-represented in high-paying jobs and top-level management positions. Palin running for office again would send a powerful message to take risks, keep trying and never give up. Truly empowering.

9. Like so many of us, Palin is a working mom – she understands the quandary facing today’s women, and how we are put in a no win situation. She’s been a victim of gender stereotyping from the moment she stepped into the national spotlight: how dare she be a working mother ?! (here, here and here). She’ll bring that understanding to office.

10. Palin made her own way – she was not the beneficiary of her father and his cronies, her fraternity, or the boys’ network. She worked hard and did well based on her own abilities, and never forgot where she came from. This gives her an implicit understanding of the battles that the marginalized and underrepresented (including women and girls) must wage to advance.