What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power by Marianne Schnall Read Free Book Online Page B

hires that are women and minorities.
    MS : I think about how they always put women on these “most powerful lists”—I know you’ve been on more than a few of those. What does being powerful mean to you, and how do you think—not just for women, for men, too—this whole power paradigm needs to change?
    PM : Well, everything about it needs to change, because it’s been defined by one gender. I mean, one gender throughout most of our history has had power, so there’s little wonder that when we think of power, we think about it in one-gender terms. So we need to change that, and we can onlychange that by changing the people who have power. So we know that, number one. A new power paradigm emerges when a different gender holds it, has it, and then uses it differently. I mean, if women get power only to be just like the guys who had it before them, then that’s not progress. I’m not for women getting power just so they can prove they can be as whatever—whatever the adjectives may be that follow. And then the second thing is to really think about power from the point of view of community and what we’re building. We know that no one in history—not many anyway, I guess the Pope just did—but very few people ever give up power voluntarily. So why is that? And yet women give it away all the time because it is a way in which women approach power: sharing it. Well, of course that’s a great way to look at power, but how do we get that to be the power paradigm, as it were, the prevailing power? By getting power and using it that way, using it in a way that shares it, that redefines it, that gives it other adjectives, other than the ones we attach to it now. There’s little wonder that young women, particularly in the generation who came up right behind the pioneers—I guess that would be me and Gloria and all the rest—that generation did move away from power because they didn’t like the way it looked. And still today, the reason forty-something percent of the women in corporate America are jumping off and taking the exit ramp before they get to CEO jobs is they look up there and they don’t like the way that looks. They don’t want that kind of power. But why don’t we stay on the road up, taking a few sisters along the way, so that when we get up there we can change it? And it does take numbers. You can’t do it one at a time. One woman at a time is just not enough to change the power paradigm. It takes more.
    MS : Speaking of numbers, even in other industries, for example the media, I think the statistic is that women hold only 3 percent of clout positions in the media industry, and the numbers that you hear from organizations like the Women’s Media Center are shockingly low in terms of overallrepresentation of women in all forms of media. How do you also explain the disparity of women in the media and is that something that you think is important?
    PM : I wish I could explain why it is that the overwhelming numbers of consumers of media are women [ laughs] and the underwhelming numbers of people who are leading and making and creating media are not. The explanation again is that we haven’t done enough for each other, those who are inside media. And then I think there is the very real cultural fact that there are just not that many women who are kind of sticking it out to make it to the top positions. Part of it may be that we haven’t built the networks. And then the other part may be simply that we need to make some conscious noise [ laughs] , protest. I look at the Women’s Media Center numbers—those seem to be reasons to be in the streets! Reasons to be saying to the networks, “Unacceptable, guys, unacceptable,” especially since they’ll be the first to tell you that 60 percent of the consumers that matter to them are women, so it’s unacceptable. Because really it does have to do with the two things we’ve heard a lot about recently—since Women’s Media Center and Miss Representation