The facts of life in Washington:
Success is not measured in revenue earned and market share increased.
No — ideas win. To win with your idea, you need to make an argument, in front of the decision-maker. You need to be heard.
Also, you need to be seen.
And that is what matters in this flap over the White House being a “hostile work environment” for women in the first years of the Obama administration, as communications adviser and political pro Anita Dunn describes it in a new book about the president’s term.
Yeah, the boys of the winning campaign threw their footballs around the cubicles, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel threw his F-bombs, anywhere he stood. But the senior women of the West Wing were not pinched in the halls or confronted with girlie calendars above the desk, hallmark behaviors that would meet the “classic” legal definition of a hostile work environment.
The women couldn’t get close enough to the president enough of the time to make their case, according to accounts in Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men,” and their voices were drowned out.
In a culture that rewards argumentation over persuasion, command over consensus and hierarchy over inclusion, it hardly is a shattering revelation that men would be the advantaged gender, all across the warrens of power in Washington, in the lobby shops and associations and research departments.
But are we still having this conversation? About women struggling for a seat at the table?
Well, yes. “And having to articulate that you need a seat at the table!” says Jennifer Lawless, who directs the Women and Politics Institute at American University. It's a numbers problem — 83 percent of the members of Congress are men, which puts the United States in 90th place among the world’s legislatures, for all you politics workers obsessed with scorekeeping.
“So you can play a pivotal role,” Lawless says, “but first you have to earn that role and then articulate that role, before you can raise your voice.”
You have to develop work-arounds, say women who have gone through the revolving door of government and academia and the private sector, to learn that there’s a fake meeting and a real meeting, and to make sure that you get to the real meeting, the one they might be having while you are dropping off your kid at school.
Elaine Kamarck recalls having to fight for inclusion as the vice presidential adviser for reinventing government in the Clinton White House, and “after about 10 times where my issues were discussed in the senior staff meeting, without me somehow being considered a necessary person to be present, I complained enough to [White House Chief of Staff Leon] Panetta until he let me in.”
Seating, meetings and e-mail loops are everything. Because power in Washington is proximity to the principal, “There can be an aspect of bullying to male-female relations,” Kamarck says.
Because? “White Houses tend to attract people with really, really strong wills, and they tend to attract men who think their ideas are right,” and the good manager, as Panetta was, she says, keeps them in line. “They get all tough and macho, and they can try to roll you.”
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