APRIL 15, 2003
MOVEABLE FEAST
By Thane Peterson
What If Women Ran the World? | Would nations be more reluctant to take up arms? Harvard's Swanee Hunt thinks that may be the case
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When I look at the news these days, I can't help but wonder: Wouldn't we be a lot better off if women were in charge, given all the violence and atrocities perpetrated by men and male-run governments in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, and Iraq? Would U.S. troops be in Iraq today if, say, Hillary Clinton were President, and not George W. Bush?
Sure, woman leaders are sometimes as tough and warlike as any man. Britain's Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. But in my experience, women tend to pursue conciliation and cooperation long after men would have been at each other's throats. And, as the heroism of American women soldiers and pilots in Iraq has shown, when it's really necessary to fight, women hold their own.
Besides, once war ends, it's often women who step in first to help the orphans and other victims of battle. In Rwanda, for instance, 10% of the population was slaughtered in the 1994 genocide, mainly men. According to Elizabeth Powley in an article in the International Herald Tribune, about 70% of the population immediately after the genocide was female, so women set up numerous nongovernmental organizations to deal with the devastation. Today, some seats in Parliament and local councils in Rwanda are reserved only for women.
EUROPE'S LEAD. I suspect that the rising percentage of women in governments around the world is a very significant trend. It's a controversial notion, but some political scientists believe that when women (and other minorities) reach a "critical mass" of around 30% in an elected body, they often start to act together as a group outside party lines. And, in some governments around the world, the percentage of women has hit that threshold, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a Geneva, Switzerland-based organization of Parliamentary governments that tracks the numbers (www.ipu.org).
Nordic countries lead the trend. Women hold 45.3% of the seats in Parliament in Sweden, 38% in Denmark, 37.5% in Finland, and 36.4% in Norway, according to the IPU. All told, the percentage now tops 30% in the Lower Houses of a dozen nations, including the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Argentina, and Mozambique.
At the low end are several countries in the Middle East: Iran, 4.1%; Egypt, 2.4%; Jordan, 1.3%; and Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates at 0%. The U.S. ranks 59th, in the middle of the pack, with 13.6% of the seats in Congress and 14 of the Senate's 100 seats held by women. But, according to the Center for American Women & Politics at Rutgers University, women now hold 30% or more of the seats in six state legislatures: Washington, Colorado, Maryland, Oregon, Vermont, and California. Washington is tops, with 36.7%.
NO WIMP. I realize that the notion that the world would be more peaceful if women ran it is a hard one to test. But I checked in with Swanee Hunt, director of the Women & Public Policy Program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She's no wimp when it comes to war. As President Clinton's ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997, she pushed for a quicker intervention to stop the atrocities in neighboring Bosnia. Out of that experience, she has formed Women Waging Peace, a global initiative to get women involved in peace initiatives in conflict areas around the world.
Daughter of Texas billionaire H.L. Hunt, she has used her wealth to fund initiatives aimed at helping women and children. A mother of three, she has also found time to compose a classical piece called The Witness Cantata as a memorial to victims of war. Her husband, symphony conductor Charles Ansbacher, is scheduled to conduct the work on Good Friday, Apr. 18, at Boston's Arlington Street Church. Here are edited excerpts of our talk:
Q: What's the idea behind Women Waging Peace, and why should it be a goal to get women involved in the peace process in places like Iraq and Bosnia?
A: When I was the ambassador [to Austria], Bosnia was right next door, and there was a terrible refugee flood into Austria. What I noticed quickly was that the 60 people who were sent up from Croatia and Bosnia for the [peace] negotiations were all men -- even though there were more women PhDs per capita in the former Yugoslavia than in any country in Europe. It made me wonder why the warriors involved wanted to make sure there were no women.
That question stayed in the back of my mind. After I left the State Dept. and came to Harvard, I asked some people at the U.N. why there were no women on the negotiating team in the African conflicts. A U.N. official told me: "That's very clear. The warriors won't have them because they're afraid the women will compromise." I thought: "Bingo!" That is, after all, the whole point of negotiation. I wondered if there was something to that.
Q: Where did you go from there?
A: I brought, ultimately, women from 25 different conflicts to Harvard for a week or two, listening to them exchange their strategies. Some were pacifists, some not -- I certainly am not. There were lawyers, investigative reporters, members of parliament, the whole range.
What we found is that there were some extraordinary strengths among these women that would be very useful in trying to avert or stop violent conflicts. The women were bridging the divide. They tended to not see the person on the other side as the demon. They would often talk about how, "We're all mothers, and as mothers we understand each other." One of the sayings was, "As mothers, we cry the same tears."
Q: How is women's participation going in Afghanistan's new government?
A: Before the Taliban, women represented about 50% of the medical doctors and 40% of the government officials. So, [when] a meeting was set up of the warlords to determine who would be in the transitional government, there was lots of pressure from the [Bush] White House and the State Dept. to ensure that the U.N. would insist that there be lots of women. A U.N. official told me that eventually one of the warlords said, "All right. We'll have the same percentage of women as there are in the U.S. Congress."
Q: Which is about 14%. Is that good or bad?
A: Well, we wish he had said Sweden.
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Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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