 Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for the arrival of the official party and remain standing through the singing of our national anthem by Ms. Ani Keith-Kart and the invocation by Chaplain Corwin Smith. I want you to now please join me in prayer. Muddy God, as we gather for this ceremony today, we understand the significance of this day in the year 1920, women were granted the right to vote. Since that day, their vote, voice, and thoughts have been crucial to our nation. They have been and are an integral part of the success we have accomplished as a nation. And we're thankful, Lord, that you have allowed this opportunity to celebrate this moment for which this day represents. May we also take time to remember the sacrifices of many of those pioneers that fought to make this day we witness now a reality. For many of them, you, oh Lord, were their strength to endure during the hardships for the vision of equality you place in their hearts. As we commemorate this day, may we be reminded of our responsibilities we have as citizens with the privileges we have been afforded. Help us to appreciate and utilize our rights and privileges for the betterment of our family's nation and the world. We humbly ask your blessing upon this day and this time. In your holy name, Lord, we pray. Amen. Thank you, Ms. Keith-Kart and Chaplain Smith. You may be seated. Welcome to the 2015 Women's Equality Day. The theme for this great occasion is Celebrating Women's Right to Vote. I am Ms. Amanda Owens, your mistress of ceremony for today's event. The sponsors of today's program are the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the United States Strategic Command Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Standing Joint Force Headquarters for Elimination Joint Command, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Contract Agency, the Defense Technical Information Center, as well as our Equal Employment Opportunity Offices. It is my honor to introduce to you Mr. Kenneth Myers, Director, Defense Threat Reduction Agency and United States Strategic Command Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction. Good morning. Beautiful day. Great opportunity to be here today and I'm pleased that so many of you joined us this morning. Women's Equality Day commemorates American women achieving full voting rights under the U.S. Constitution by passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It is an honor to introduce our guest speaker. Admiral Michelle Howard has achieved many historical firsts throughout her naval career. She is the first female four-star admiral in the Navy's history and serves as the Vice Chief of Naval Operations. She was the first African-American woman to achieve the three-star rank and the four-star rank in the U.S. Armed Services. She graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1982 and from the Army's Command and General Staff College in 1998 with a Master's in Military Arts and Sciences. She took command of the USS Rushmore on March 12, 1999, becoming the first African-American woman to command a ship in the United States Navy. Admiral Howard deployed to Indonesia for tsunami relief efforts, participated in maritime security operations in the North Arabian Gulf, and served as commander of a counter-piracy task force where she led the rescue of the merchant vessel Maersk, Alabama from Somali pirates. Please join me in welcoming Admiral Michelle Howard. Please have a seat. That may have been premature. Alright, so this is actually a brand new presentation. So if you don't like it, give me feedback. But first of all, I can't thank you for inviting me to come speak. And I have generally end up speaking on Women's Equality Day, just as I end up speaking during Women's History Month. But it is an important day. And it's a great time for all of us, and I appreciate the prayer, for all of us as citizens to understand this journey and what it means. Now, because it's you guys, we said, oh, this is about WMD. Women making a difference. So for now on, when you see WMD, I want that to be in your head. Nice. Well, let's start with the first slide. This is actually a pretty long journey. And it is about rights. And to be honest, it started off as a journey about freedom of speech. This is Sarah and Angela Grimke. One sister was born in 1792, and the other was born in 1805. They were born and raised in a slave-holding family in South Carolina. And as they grew up, they felt that this whole institution of slavery was wrong. And they became vocal opponents to slavery and were forced to relocate to the north. They became Quakers. And in the Quaker religion, they could, in church, speak as women. But outside of the church, speaking on the topic of abolition, speaking against slavery, it wasn't norm in society. So they're adults in the 1830s. They finally find their voice through newspapers in the north, like The Liberator. And they start writing articles about slavery and condemning slavery and encouraging women of the South to also find their voice and help convince people that slavery is wrong. And then they got feedback. Women writing about slavery, freedom of speech. It was just unheard of. And later on, they actually got death threats. But they persevered. And then the sister did something really outrageous. They decided to start talking about this right to speak. Women have a right to free speech. Well, was that or was that not true? Their status, our status as women, our status as Negroes in those days, we really weren't full-fledged citizens. And so despite all of this animosity, they continue to say, we have a right to speak. Next slide. Lucretia Mott is a Quaker, and she's the friend of the Grimkees. In fact, she's about the same age. She's also friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was born in 1815. And so she's a teenager at the time the Grimkees are writing and talking about this right to speak. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is definitely a rebel. There must have been a hard time being her mom and dad. And by the time she's ready to get married, she says, I am not going to have the word obey in my marriage ceremony. Wow. And they didn't. But for women at this time frame, now we're in the late 1830s, 1840s, women did not enjoin many of their rights. They didn't have the right to own property. And so when you married, everything you owned went to your husband. And then if your husband passed away, everything you owned went to the next male person. And so you literally could have your own wealth as a woman, but the minute you married, it was gone. Control of property was gone. For Elizabeth, this was really about property rights, as well as the right to speak. Both she and Lucretia, in their abolitionists, found that they would go to abolitionist meetings and they would not be allowed to speak. And they had enough of that. So they decided to put together the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. They are going to draft a settlement, a declaration of sentiments about women's rights. They advertised in the newspaper and then they start talking about what should this convention be about and what rights should we declare for ourselves and start this conversation across this country. And so of course freedom of speech is up front, property rights are up front. And then Elizabeth Cady Stanton on her porch to Lucretia goes, we need to add the right to vote. And poor Lucretia goes, Cady, you will make us look ridiculous. It was such a far-fetched concept. There was no way it was going to happen. But they put together the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Many people came and everybody agreed on putting out this declaration of women's rights. The convention almost fell apart when they got to whether or not women's right to vote should be in this declaration. And literally Frederick Douglass stood up and gave one of the best speeches of his life and convinced everybody that citizenship, citizenship is a right to all human beings. And this is a man who's a slave on the lamb and has no rights himself. And they signed the Declaration of Sentiments. It was well published. They had such hostility after that that almost every signer within the next year said, I didn't mean to sign. And by the time we fast forward to the, when women finally get the right to vote, only one of the signers who was basically a teenager was still alive when that occurred. But that's convention put us on this path of a great dialogue and movement that women have a right to speak. Women have a right to own property. Women have a right to vote. And so it got picked up by Lucy Stone, who also knew both Stanton and Mott. And in her adulthood, started an American Suffrage Association to keep pushing forward with this dialogue and conventions and saying, we have a right to vote. And she too believed in full emancipation as a human being. And so when Lucy Stone got married, she said, I'm getting married, but I'm keeping my own name. That was really radical in the 1800s. But her husband agreed, said, absolutely. You are an emancipated human being. And I am too. Next slide. So their work continues on. In the end, there's a falling out between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone. And it was really the Civil War. And it came down to the amendment that gave African Americans the right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, we should be pushing that the right to vote should be for women as well as black men. And Lucy Stone said, no. Let's do this first step and then eventually we will get to the point when women have the right to vote. And so they separated. But the different movements that they started continued on. And now we're up into the 19th century. And it really starts to come to the forefront in 1912. 1912. You've got Woodrow Wilson running for president, Theodore Roosevelt running for president. Who knew Theodore Roosevelt in his campaign, he's like, yes, women should have the right to vote. Woodrow Wilson was kind of lukewarm. At the Republican convention, women were there. Suffragettes were there at the Republican convention holding these great signs. This is 1912 going, you know, for the safety of the nation, a woman's right to vote. The hand that rocks the cradle, will never rock the vote. Wilson gets the nomination. He becomes president. 1916, he occasionally meets with suffragettes. But in reality, he's not so much into women voting. And so they started to pick it outside the White House, very consistently. In the 1917, Woodrow Wilson's on his way out of the White House, there's women anti-war protesters, there's women suffragette protesters, there's other anti-war protesters, and then there's people who are like, we should help defend the world. There's this huge mash-up outside the White House that everybody gets arrested. Including the women's suffragettes, we want the right to vote. They're all in jail. The women's suffragettes start a hunger strike, and then that gets in the paper. And so finally, Wilson says, let them out of jail and to pacify them and get these women from stop protesting outside the White House, agrees to have the amendment introduced in 1918, believing it's never going to pass, that women would have the right to vote. Well, guess what? 1920. It passed. It was ratified. And that's why we have this day. It is recognition of all, literally, literally at that point, over a hundred years' worth of work by both men and women for women to have the right to vote, as well as free speech. Next slide. But in some ways, the movement continues. And as women move into the workplace, it becomes clear we don't have the same opportunities as men. And in 1963, women were only making like 53 cents on the dollar to men. So President Kennedy signed out an equal opportunity. He signed out an equal pay amendment. And women started to move into the workforce. We're like 46% of the labor workforce today. We are actually 51% of the population in the United States. And then in 2007, there was a equal opportunity lawsuit where Lily Ledbetter sued a good year tire and rubber company. She figured out that the other men at her level were getting a lot more money for the same work. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Well, initially, she won, and she got 3.3 million back pay. But then good year appealed and it went to the Supreme Court. And fundamentally, the Supreme Court, in a very close decision, 5-4 said, yes, we're not saying you weren't discriminated against, but we're saying that you really can't sue for back wages prior to the time you made your claim. And so in 2009, current president signed out the Lily Ledbetter Act, which basically says if you have a discrimination suit and it's found in your favor that there really was discrimination at your organization, you can receive back pay. Unfortunately, for Lily, it was too late. She not only lost with the Supreme Court, good year filed against her to pay for their lawyer's fees that she had to pay. Now, the reason when the Lily Ledbetter Act was signed in 2009, you see all the congresswomen and Senator Mikulski there, why are they wearing red? They're trying to point out that women today were now making about 76 cents on the dollar. So it takes women about 15 months of labor to reach the same level of income as a male who works for 12 months. And so they refer to this as we are in the red, whether you're a minority or a woman. And so we still have a little ways to go. We have come very far from 1920 in that amendment. But we still have other areas where we can get to better equality in this country. And I refer to it since I take an oath to the Constitution that all of us get to enjoy the full rights that are guaranteed us in the 10, that first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights. So that's sort of where we are. But then that gets us to you. And you guys are basically a technical organization, engineering, math, science. And so when you think about who works for you and who does what, is it here? And is this really just this group a reflection of what America looks like? So let me give you a test I often give to folks. I'd like you to close your eyes. I promise to stay up here on the stage. Close your eyes. And when I say the word scientist, scientist, what's the image that comes into your mind? And is there anybody who, open your eyes? Is there anybody who would be willing to stand up and tell me what image came into their mind with the word scientist? Yes, ma'am. A man that's highly knowledgeable. Did you have any specific image? Normally I get pocket protector. Trying to get better improvement. That's a great image. So thank you. It takes a courage to be the first one to stand up and answer. Courage is a core value in the Navy so I like to reward courage taking it. Next slide. 1983, this guy started this in order to understand when stereotyping starts. He has this, it's been going on for decades. He asks school kids to draw a scientist test. And of course that's a seventh grade boys version of a scientist. But in reality, that is our perspective of scientist. And so it's hard for that is our belief whether you're a man or a woman. Well some people, the other common one I get is Einstein. Not Madame Curie, Einstein. So if that is our belief set we have mental belief sets we have to break through in order to make sure women get into engineering and math and science. And so one of the things I wanted to do today was help break open the stereotypes of what an innovator looks like. Next slide. Who's this? Nope, not Vivian Lee. Nope, not me. Blonde hair. Close, not Eva Gardner. Come on down. Hedy Malamar. Came to this country in the 1930s. Hollywood actress. Who said Hedy? Come on down Hedy. How do you know Hedy Malamar? You watch old black and white movies? Thank you. You hear a lot of women's history. Absolutely. Hedy Malamar was considered you know in my culture aviators have call signs. Hedy's moniker in Hollywood was the most beautiful women in Hollywood. 36 films over 28 years. Probably her most famous was Samson and Delilah. Hedy came to this country just as the storm clouds were brewing in Europe. She had been married to a factory owner. And she happens to be a smart woman. So actress by day time her hobby was tinkering. She kept a draft board in her home in Hollywood. And World War II comes along and Hedy gets interested in wireless guided torpedoes. Trying to break your stereotype here. So Hedy's next door neighbor happens to be a composer. He writes you know the show scores for movies and they start talking about you know the war and munitions and wireless guided torpedoes. Turns out her next door neighbor George Ant Hill he collects antique pianos. That's his hobby and it makes sense. He's a musician and a composer. Does anybody here know how a roller piano works? The old antique pianos from the 1800s? Anybody willing to stand up and give it a shot? One shaking lieutenant had? No one? I asked this question once and a guy stood up. It was over at SSP and it turns out that's his hobby. I've got several other ones. No one wants to say none of you saw any like that when you're visiting museums as a kid? Let me walk you through it. So you have a roller piano and basically what it is is you have a long voluminous sheet with different holes stuck in it. And then as it rolls through cranks through, those holes match up to pins and then as the pins move through the holes, those are mechanically geared to the different pikes that line up to the actual key on the piano. So is this different holes? So then the piano looks like it's playing itself, but it's really just pre-staged what these holes are to make the piano keys move. So Hedy is talking to George and they're talking about wireless guided torpedoes and she goes, you know, the real issue is you've got this signal and when you think about signals they're continuous, right? And as long as that continuous tone is going or signal is going to the torpedo, it's going to do what you want it to do. That's the communication path. And Hedy goes the problem is that can be disrupted. Somebody can cut that signal off and then the torpedo doesn't do its job. So she goes why do we have a continuous signal? Why don't we move that signal and put it into burst so that it's harder for someone to cut off? And she got the idea from the piano roll from those holes she goes, you can get the signal and the sound enough movement fast enough without having a continuous beam that means the torpedo can't be jammed. Frequency hopping. Hedy Lamar invented frequency hopping. Patent. 1942, her and George. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. She tried to turn it over to the Navy. Do you think we took it? No. 1963 off of Cuba we go, wow this is a pretty good thing. 1997 the electronic frontier company called Hedy out of retirement said oh my god you know the patent of frequency hopping we would like to honor you and she goes, it's about to tie it. Her patent is the basis behind Bluetooth. Wi-Fi. You don't have to look like a mad scientist to be creative and innovative and technically smart. You can look like anything you want to look like including being the most beautiful women in the world. Next slide. But there is, it is important to have role models. Most of the services are involved with the Center for Creative Leadership and at different points in our careers they either provide us 360 surveys or we go and get additional training for them on leadership and then we sit in with folks from different communities. We've been running a survey on military leaders about what is the most important thing factor in being a good leadership and they list different things you know is it experience is it mentoring the most common response almost half the people regardless of rank say it's a positive role model positive role model and so we have to sometimes make ourselves aware of positive role models like Heady to know that things are possible. So in this case I've got Dr. Shirley Jackson she's the first African American woman to get a doctorate from MIT in physics and she's currently the president of Rancelier Polytech and for a while she was the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I've got Juan Andon who had bachelors in both chemistry and computer engineering and worked for the Navy over at the Naval Warfare Surface Center in Indian Head and she helped put together the T that in a very expedited manner brought a series of munitions forward during the middle of operation and during freedom. She's the one credited with sort of bringing the thermal barrack bomb to bear the one that helped destroy the caves in Afghanistan. She received a national medal and currently works for Homeland Security and then Becky Allinger who is a material expert at Los Alamos and just likes to blow things up, a critic of her. But she's also a huge STEM advocate and goes out to the local high schools and elementary schools talking about the importance of engineering and they are important but when we talk about what women make on the dollar some of it I think is just where we are and the occupations we've chosen and when you talk about engineering and science and technology and math those tend to be better paying jobs and we are very capable and innovative. Next slide. So where are we going? Well there's role models out there you just have to look for them. Sunita Williams is a Naval Academy graduate helicopter pilot basic diver qualified test pilot masters in engineering management who started to work for NASA about 1998 and she'll probably be one of the first astronauts once we get to the point where commercial industry provides space flight she'll probably be one of the first astronauts to go up on a commercial platform by say government platform so we're out there help spread the word and then stereotypes just really are important for the people coming up last month I was on a phone call with Ruer Admiral Houghtonou of the Nigerian Navy she's the first woman to make Admiral and actually the equivalent to General in any of the armed forces in Nigeria and she made two stars she'll be retiring later this year her degree is in architect and she ended up in logistics in the Nigerian Navy and of course was the first at everything she ever did on her way up to making two star she told me this great story when she was a commander and the senior woman officer at the Nigerian Navy at the time and with an engineering background she was just on the internet one day thinking about engineering and women and she came across a website on Grace Hopper and Grace Hopper is inventor of cobalt, admiral in my Navy appointed by Congress but really the heart and soul behind computer engineering as we know it today and so when she saw this and read about Grace Hopper she goes I had never heard of this woman it was fantastical to me and that she was an engineer and became an admiral and printed off and cut off Grace Hopper's picture and stuck it on her corkboard when she was a commander and she thought about Grace Hopper and what that meant to her and then what she might mean to others as she continued on that journey up so we need leaders role models who look like us to help inspire us and help us move forward and then finally you think about where I started from with the Grimke sisters the right to speak all the way up through the Seneca Falls Convention all the way up to this last entry in today and our right to vote about 66% of the women in this country registered to vote and in the last election 46% of us voted there are a lot of leaders men and women who invested a lot of time to give us this right please you have the privilege of a full citizenship please exercise it speech vote right to be an entrepreneur and to help lead this country into the next century so thank you very much for listening and if you have any questions I have time for a few questions no questions everybody's happy oh I have several I would save my mom and dad initially and then little they would give me different books to read and I was enamored first of all I was enamored with Queen Elizabeth the first and that whole flotilla thing kicked the Spanish Armada yeah Harriet Tubman when I first read about her I was fascinated by a woman who had been a slave who escaped into freedom and then had the courage to go back and lead others into freedom and then she ended up as a working for Union Army as a scout during the Civil War and actually eventually got um veterans benefits at the end of the war for her service as a scout um and then as I transitioned into the Navy um I was aware of Grace Hopper but one of the people I met when I was a Lieutenant Commander was C&O Zoomwall retired at that point and I heard him speak a couple of different times he was a champion of diversity he was the youngest C&O we ever had and he helped bring in women admirals uh and helped get the Navy on a footing of where we treat people equally and he did this uh despite the culture of the Navy and realized he had to lead the Navy to be in a better place and how we think of our people and that everyone once they put the uniform on is a sailor and to put it into context when he was C&O shortly after he came into office we had um we had sit downs on carriers the black sailors were so sick of being treated poorly they were literally doing sit downs on carriers and refusing to get the carriers to see I mean it was a crisis that unfolded nationally and he just said there's something wrong with my Navy when we don't treat every sailor like a sailor and he put us on a footing that really led to the Navy we have today and that he was charismatic but also persistent as a leader and I took a lot from hearing him speak yes sir could you follow that thread and just give us a view of what you see in today's Navy going on particularly the role of women in various combat roles absolutely so for gender integration the services are actually on different tracks and milestones for the Navy when I started on Atlas women could serve on hospital ships as nurses and doctors and women nurses serving on ships actually starts with the Army serving on some like 1908 on a hospital ship the relief but women could not serve in what would be the equivalent to combat arms and so while I'm at an Atlas there was a lawsuit after World War II we had we had the combat exclusion law which basically said women couldn't serve on combatant ships or fly aircraft in combat and the Navy to simplify just said we just won't have you serve on any ships but hospital ships and so a group of women sued and said no, not every ship's a combatant ship they're not all warships, some of them are support ships so the Navy changed policy while I was at an Atlas and they opened up salvage ships, support ships so by the time I graduated we were just starting putting women to sea as officers and enlisted but then what it did is it opened up lots of different ratings to enlisted women pretty much had been administrators but now they could be quarter masters and machinists mates then in the 80s we opened up ammunition ships and oilers and we opened up the entire logistics fleet to women so by the time Desert Storm comes around we had about 2,000 women serving on support ships in Desert Storm and for the Air Force the big change was the repeal of the combat exclusion law in 94 well that opened up everything cruisers destroyers so since then we've had more women in command of destroyers and cruisers and other ships than I can count we've had about 4 years ago we had our first woman command a carrier strike group we had our first 3 star fleet commander a few years ago 10th fleet and then Nora Tyson just took over as third fleet and these are women aviators we had a few years ago our first women carrier air group commander fighter pilot she transitioned when the combat exclusion law repealed she transitioned from support aircraft into fighters and she ended up commanding a fighter squadron in the carrier group in combat and for example the head of the CB Corps our senior CB's a 2 star is a woman right now classmate of mine so for us when that law was repealed it just opened up just about everything what we still had closed at the time were submarines and special forces because they're direct ground combat and then we opened up submarines 4 years ago and we've started with women officers and women enlisted will start going to submarines in 2016 so what's left closed in the Navy is seals and so then I'm sure all of you are aware that's the big decision for sector this this coming October so he'll so calm and the other services will make recommendations to him on infantry armored special forces so we'll see where we're going one more question sure yes sir what navy and was the military service your your primary choice yes yes yes the so let me answer two first and then one so I was 12 and I saw this documentary on TV and I was like wow service I want to do that I don't know if it was the leadership and the thought of being in charge or it was the uniforms but I thought it was pretty neat so I go to my older brother he said oh well you can't go service academies are closed women it's the law what I was in shock but it was true it was the law women couldn't go to service academies so I went to my mother and I was I was just done it just didn't seem fair to me and she said well that's that's true but you're young and but years from now if you still want to go and you want to apply we'll go ahead and apply and then if you're denied we'll sue the government just like 72 and then she maybe go look up words like precedence lawsuits you know but she said think about it she also made it a teaching moment she goes there's gonna be things in life that you want to do that the law says you can't do and she says it's it's up to you to go after things where people say no if you believe it to be right and she said if it is right the government the supreme court will eventually agree with you she said but the way things work is it could take a long long time and she said by the time you get to yes you could be too old to go to a service academy and she said but if it's the right thing to do by the time you get to yes that means some other women will get to go because you did the right thing and she said that that is just as important so fight for what's right that's what she taught me the service academy opened up in 76 and I applied when I was my junior in high school and then Y Navy I did research and went to the library and said I knew when I graduated I'd be going into military service whatever women could do in the army they could I could do if I went Marine Corps and whatever women could fly in the Air Force and if that was where I was going to go women could fly the same things in the Navy and I said well this gives me the most options and of course ships weren't open that happened while I was there and then I ended up going into ships so that's a great question to end with thank you but it is a great reminder of all of our obligations as citizens to fight for what we think is right so thank you for spending time with me today everyone here today and all of the organizations here at the DLA headquarters just kind of give appreciation for spending time with us today and your words of wisdom you guys thanks so much thank you very much on behalf of the headquarters complex equal employment opportunity offices I would like to extend the special thanks to Admiral Howard and to each one of you for participating in today's program this concludes our women's equality day observance we invite you to greet Admiral Howard and the Rotunda as you leave the podium and to view the various exhibits highlighting women in the U.S. military we also invite you to enjoy a documentary entitled Aung Sung Heroes The Story of America's Female Patriots which will be shown in the headquarters complex cafeteria today at 1130 ladies and gentlemen this concludes our ceremony please remain in place until the front two rows of senior leaders have exited