December 6, 2008: Cabinet Watch – Nine to Three in race to 21 – Women Behind
For Immediate Release
December 6, 2008
Contact:
484-844-2996
Amy Siskind, The New Agenda – NewAgendaPress@yahoo.com
Cabinet Watch: Nine to Three in race to 22 – Women Behind
President-elect Barack Obama is on track to name fewer women to cabinet positions than both Presidents Clinton and Bush and possibly even Bush I and Carter. The announcement of Eric K. Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, brings the tally to nine men and three women in a field of 22 cabinet-level positions. “We’re in the third inning and the men’s team is beating the women 9-3. It looks like a real outside chance for the women of this country to catch up to the 1990’s when President Clinton had 47% women in his first cabinet,” said Amy Siskind, co-founder The New Agenda.
The New Agenda is monitoring the cabinet selections for gender parity, visit our Cabinet Watch at www.thenewagenda.net.
“We recognize other women’s groups have applauded Obama for naming high-caliber women to his Cabinet. While certainly encouraging, declaring real progress requires exceeding the 47 percent bar set by Clinton,” Siskind said. “To borrow a phrase from President Bush, anything less represents ‘a soft bigotry of low expectations.’”
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both expanded the participation of women. In Clinton’s first term, he appointed seven women to cabinet level positions and Bush appointed five, according to Equal Representation in Government and Democracy. Presidents Carter and Reagan each appointed four. While welcome progress has been made in the past two administrations, it still does not reflect the fact that women comprise 52 percent of the population.
The United States lags behind much of the world when it comes to parity in political representation. The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. 56th among 132 countries surveyed. This is lower than South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Latvia. In Europe, women are making substantial progress. Spain has become the first country to have more women in the cabinet than men. Nine women serve alongside eight men, including the country’s first woman defense minister. In releasing these rankings The Forum emphasized the importance of gender parity in reversing the current economic crisis and avoiding future downturns.
To reinforce the message that there is a rich pool of candidates, The New Agenda released the following bipartisan list of exemplar candidates for Cabinet positions. Three of those previously listed, Former State Dept. Asst. Secretary Susan Rice, New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, were tapped to be ambassador to the United Nations and heads of the Departments of State and Homeland Security this week.
• Founding executive director of American Rights at Work Mary Beth Maxwell
• Stanford University School Redesign Network director and head of Obama’s education transition team, Linda Darling-Hammond
• Founder of eBay Meg Whitman
• Former Hewlett- Packard CEO Carly Fiorina
• Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill
• Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar
• Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius
• Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm
• The first woman 4-star General Ann Dunwoody
• Wisconsin Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton
• FDIC head Sheila Blair
• Former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Comm. Chair Brooksley E. Born
• Former President, Morgan Stanley, Zoe Cruz
• Princeton University economics professor Cecilia Elena Rouse
• Former Citigroup, Inc. executive Sallie Krawcheck
• IL Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Director Tammy Duckworth
• Former Head PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, Kathleen McGinty
• CA Air Resources Board, Mary Nichols
• Former NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection Lisa Jackson
Since our nation’s founding, 33 women have served in cabinet level positions, leaving an indelible mark on our nation’s social and economic policies. The first was Frances Perkins appointed by FDR as Secretary of Labor in 1933, where she played a key role writing New Deal legislation and chaired the committee which was responsible for creating the Social Security Act of 1935.
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