Women on the Rise: Why Invest in America’s Women?

(R to L) panelists Joan Dempsey, Melissa Bradley, Anne Mosle, and David Leonhardt, and moderator Michel Martin

Booz Allen Hamilton Senior Vice President Joan Dempsey sat on a panel titled “Women on the Rise: Why Invest in America’s Women?” on June 28, 2011, at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas Festival. She appeared alongside Melissa L. Bradley, CEO of Tides, a nonprofit that supports the delivery of social services; Anne Mosle, executive director of Ascend at Aspen Institute; David Leonhardt, Pulitzer Prize winning economics columnist at the New York Times; and Michel Martin, the panel moderator and host of NPR’s “Tell Me More.”

Listen to the full panel discussion:

Javascript must be enabled to listen to this audio file. Alternatively, you may download the audio form here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ai-podcasts/aif11_043.mp3

Dempsey shares her impressions of the topic and discussion below.

What’s at the crux of this issue? Why should American corporations and government invest in women in the workforce any more than they have already?

I really think the burning issue is that we’ve got an economy that is going to falter if we don’t in the coming years get women up to a fully productive level that is on par with men.

What is the most significant barrier to achieving the balance the panel was talking about?

I think the challenge is much more around wealth inequity. We heard tonight from a young woman involved at the Aspen Institute, in this elite audience, say that she’s not sure there is a problem because in the millennial generation the men want the same high quality of a life as the women. Where I come from in southwest Arkansas, men and women in their 20s don’t see themselves as part of the millennial generation. They see themselves as struggling to get jobs and earn enough money to take care of their families. In order to support the idea of raising people up and giving them the opportunity to excel across the board, we need affluent men and women to give voice to people who are not affluent.

At one point you talked about how the solutions to the structural barriers we’re talking about here involve law, politics, and the judiciary. Can you elaborate on that?

Title 9 is the perfect example, but there are other examples going back as far as the mid-1800s and the Homestead Act. There was no concept of the equality of the sexes in that era, but there was a burning need to settle the West. So women who were the head of household qualified under the law to homestead property.

With Title 9, the Education Amendment Act did address the existing inequity, but didn’t specifically say how to solve the problem. But HEW (the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare), in writing the regulations, included a requirement that federally funded programs provide equal opportunity for girls and women in sporting activities. In 1971 there were 295,000 girls involved in sporting activities; 18 or 19 years later there were 2.5 million.

Both laws had tremendous social impact on the country as a whole. It doesn’t matter to me what we use as the rational for creating opportunities for people to achieve, it’s just important that we create those opportunities.

How exactly did Title 9 advance opportunity for women beyond sports?

Because of that law, many more girls have learned how to be part of a team and how to excel. They’ve learned about leadership and competitiveness. It’s improved their self-confidence. The value to society of that legislation has been tremendous. I don’t think we should underestimate the unintended benefits from something that simple.

One topic that came up tonight was about diversity of perspective, and the challenge of getting women to study the hard sciences. You manage 2,000 people at Booz Allen, many of whom are engineers. Please talk about your experience with this topic.

Obviously the hard science folks I work with bring things to the table that I could never comprehend. But with my background and focus on problem solving, critical thinking, and alternative approaches to the challenges we face, I believe they too understand that there is great value in blending hard and soft sciences.

One area that is a huge challenge for the country—and one that Booz Allen excels at—is cyber technology and cybersecurity. More than any other topic I’ve dealt with in my career, this one demands a blending of hard and soft science. We’re not going to solve this challenge just by taking a technical track. We’re not going to solve it just by taking a policy track. It requires a blending and a combination of the two.

It’s a very powerful argument for blending hard and soft science in our education system in order to come up with something better than we have today. It is important in terms or our ability to think about the future, to provide the intellectual capital and knowledge generation that so much of our economy is going to be derived from in the future.

The panelists gave the audience a list of takeaways at the end of the discussion. Did you hear something that you can consider a takeaway?

David Leonhardt provided some of the most compelling arguments for why men and women should care about the topic. He presents a very nice blend of the idealistic journalist and the pragmatic economist. He embodied what I’m talking about here: There is not a single track to solve this problem; it really is about bringing together a blend of people and ideas and disciplines. That would be my takeaway.