Jay Newton-Small - Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way Washington Works

For my mother.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

GETTING TO CRITICAL MASS

My mother was a tiny Asian woman5'3" and less than 100 poundsbut she filled up every room she entered. She was usually the smartest person there; she spoke seven languages and had graduated from Cambridge, Oxford and Columbia, where she got her degree in international law. These credentials brought her into the United Nations at a high level, one of a handful of women at the top of the organization. My parents, both U.N. professionals, met in Zambia, where my father was deputy chief of mission and my mother went to work on international development in 1972. My father gave her a tour of the office, which evolved into a tour of the town. When the afternoon became dinner and cocktails, my mother understood that my father had more than a professional interest in seeing her properly settled in. I bet it was easy for her to fall for him: a gregarious Australian, so different from her. My mother was blunt and bold but socially awkward, while my jocular father, a real guys guy, had a way of putting everyone around him at ease. Their marriage in Malawi two years later created a bureaucratic dilemma: it was against the rules for couples inside the U.N. to marry. In every previous instance, the bride immediately had resigned her post to follow her husbands career. But my mother outranked my father, and always would. In order to keep my mother on, the U.N. had to make an exception.

They led impossibly glamorous lives. Though my father came from a modest Australian family, my mother was born to a prominent Chinese one with huge construction interests in Hong Kong and Malaysia. We traveled so much, my father called us global gypsies. They hunted in Africa, danced in Tahiti, skied in Switzerland and sailed in Sydney Harbor. For much of my childhood they were stationed in separate countries: him in Bangkok while she worked in Geneva, or her in Phnom Penh while he was in New York. Some years I saw my mother only when we all met up to celebrate Christmas or take a vacation. No matter what city we were in, my memories have a common feature: dinner parties where my father had everyone roaring over his stories about Winston Churchill or tall tales of African exploration. But every holiday visit also included a darker scene. There would be at least one night, after they put me to bed, when my mother collapsed crying as she described the brutal way she was treated by the men she faced at work.

This same scene took place in Paris, London, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Windhoek, but it happened most often in Greenwich, Conn., where we lived when my parents worked at headquarters in New York. I remember waking up late at night to the sound of her sobbing. I picture my 10-year-old self coming around the corner into a kitchen thick with cigarette smokeDunhill Redsand empty wineglasses and cups of decaf coffee scattered on the kitchen table. The overhead light illuminated just my mother and father, him with his hand on her arm, rubbing softly back and forth. He was so engrossed in trying to soothe her that neither of them noticed me enter the room. When she saw me, my mother pulled in the sobs, detached from my dad and straightened up. She never wanted anyone to see her that way; she never wanted to be seen as weak or complaining. By the time I asked if there was anything I could do for her, she was fully upright. She assured me nothing was wrong, and my father scooped me up and put me back in bed.

Only much later did I understand how tough it was for her. Back then, and arguably today, there were only about 20 countries that endorsed the equality of women, and not just on paper. The fact that my mother outranked most of the men she encountered didnt matter to them. Africans ignored her. South American men thought it was part of a womans job description to sleep with them, my mother would say only half-jokingly. Middle Eastern men were the worst. Once she had a Palestinian subordinate who refused to look her in the eye or shake her hand and constantly appealed her directives to her Syrian boss. At U.N. headquarters in New York the assault was sexual. When my father moved to Thailand on assignment when I was 10, one of my mothers peers, an Argentine friend of my fathers, groped her every time they were alone, continually inviting her to a hotel nearby. My father gave up his promotion to be transferred back to New York, hoping that his presence in the U.N. building would prevent his colleague from insulting my mother this way.

Despite these assaults and insults, my mother loved her work. In Geneva, she worked on high-level international finance and business development treaties. After the Khmer Rouge fell in 1991, my mother was part of the U.N. peacekeeping mission to restore the Cambodian government. The U.N. appointed her governor of Kandal Province, where the capital, Phnom Penh, is located. She advised on the drafting of the countrys new constitution and helped supervise its first democratic elections.

So you can imagine my surprise when, as I was graduating from college, my fierce, career-driven mom very strongly advised me against going to graduate school for journalism at one of her alma maters, Columbia University. Over many phone calls, she tried to persuade me to use the classes Id taken in art history to get a job in a museum or a gallery, find a husband and start a family. She so disapproved of my life direction that she said she wouldnt attend my graduation from Columbia. She kept her word.

At the time, it was hard to see that as an act of love, but I understand now things that I could not then. My mothers profound wish was for me to be happy and not have to fight as hard as she had. But our experiences working with men were so different. I had come up after substantial progress in womens equality, the result of battles fought by pioneering women like my mom. Plus I was in the United States; my encounters with overt sexism were comparatively mild. I was one of the first girls to integrate the previously all-boys Deerfield Academy boarding school in Massachusetts. Not everyone there was happy about the arrival of girls. Some of the legacy students were especially boorish, trying to intimidate us by singing the old lyrics to the school songs, the ones that referred to an exclusively male environment, while looking pointedly at the girls. I had a teacher who refused to call on female students, from time to time barking, Women should be seen and not heard! I think he was asked to retire after our second year. While this was infuriating, I never felt unsafe, as my mom often had.

When I went to D.C. as a Capitol reporter, my mentors were men; they had to be, since I was usually one of the few women in the bureau, first at Agence France-Presse , then at Bloomberg, and later when I started at TIME. The atmosphere was a lot more civilized than what my mom had encountered. I never felt slighted because of my gender; I covered politics and received assignments in hot spots like Iraq and Iran. During my time in Washington the female ranks in the White House press corps have swelled; there are so many that at a news conference in 2014 President Obama made a point to call on only women. That wouldve been a very brief event when I first started covering the White House.

When there were more women alongside me at work, we went out to dinner together and had drinks after work, supporting each other and gaining confidence that helped us to be bolder. I had peers who understood how it felt as a woman when a congressman handed you the key to a room at a nearby hotel or made a clumsy pass at you during a convention. When one of us told the story of some drunken lout of a lobbyist calling late at night with sloppy propositions entangled in every one of his sentences, we could all laugh at him instead of feeling isolated and vulnerable. I had always felt comfortable and confident at work, but with more women as peers, I felt more supported and validated. My workplace had achieved what sociology refers to as critical mass.