 Good evening. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Andrew Schwartz and I have finally figured out my role at CSIS. I am the Ed McMahon of CSIS because monthly I get to introduce Bob Schieffer. Before we get started, I'd like to thank the Stavros Niarchos Foundation that makes the Schieffer series possible. They are great, great friends of ours and very, very generous. And we want to give a big shout out to them. They're based in New York. I also want to say thank you to TCU, the TCU Schieffer College of Communication in particular. It's now seven and a half years that we've been partners with TCU. And we all wear purple as a result. We are big horn frog fans and so thank you to TCU for your amazing partnership. This is an emotional night for me personally. And I'd like to dedicate this evening with these amazing women who are here to talk about women's issues to my mother. We lost my mother a few years ago and my dad's here. My mom was a pioneering educator who devoted her life to empowering women as dean at Trinity College here in Washington. And because of my mom, literally hundreds of thousands of young women in inner cities were also able to get educated that wouldn't otherwise have been. It's also an emotional night for me because my dear friend Bob Schieffer, who when I lost my mom was really there for me in a very quiet and important way. Bob, as many of you know, has announced his retirement from CBS. And I'd like to congratulate Bob on that. He's actually only announced his retirement from Face the Nation. I suspect Bob will be doing, you'll be seeing plenty of Bob. And the great news is, is that he is not retired from the Schieffer series, so the Schieffer series will go on. And with that, and with that please allow me to introduce my dear friend and colleague Bob Schieffer. Thank you very much. Thank you all for coming and the subject today is advancing global gender equality. It's not hard for me to figure out which side I'm on. I am the father of two women and the grandfather of three. And I wouldn't have any choice if I had to make a choice. I know where I come from on this. But you know, I just want to say something in the beginning here. In journalism especially, we are seeing a revolution. Not just in communications, but in the number of women that are going into journalism. Now, you know, CBS made its name with the Murrow Boys, but now it is the CBS women who have come to the fore. And they are doing the heavy lifting in the most dangerous parts of the world. And they are doing it just right. And anybody who thinks women are not the equal to men and can't do these jobs, when I was a young reporter on the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the women all got to work in the women's department and they weren't about to let them do anything else. They were, for one thing, feared for their safety. Well, that is no longer the case. And it's just a great thing. We have a great panel today and this is a very important subject. Catherine Russell is right now the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues at the U.S. Department of State. She currently serves as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues prior to assuming that position. She served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to a second lady, Dr. Jill Biden, focusing on military families and higher education during her tenure at the White House. Ambassador Russell coordinated the development of the administration strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally. Carrie Hessler-Rattlet was sworn into office as the 19th Director of the Peace Corps in June 2014. She served as a Peace Corps Acting Director and Deputy Director. She began her career in international development as a Peace Corps volunteer in western Samoa, teaching secondary school English from there. She went on to spend two decades working in public health, focusing on HIV AIDS. And then our own Dr. Sarah Mendelson, the Senior Advisor and Director here of the CSIS Human Rights Initiative. She's the Senior Advisor and Director of the Human Rights Initiative here at CSIS. Before that, Dr. Mendelson was Deputy Assistant Administrator responsible for democracy, human rights and governance in the Bureau for Democracy Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She was also the agency lead on combating human trafficking, which I hope we can talk a little bit about today. But I kind of wanted to start with this whole thing about Let Girls Learn initiative. Tell us about what that's about. Let Girls Learn is an initiative that the President and the First Lady announced several weeks ago. And it's based on this. The international community has made a lot of progress over the last few years in getting primary school kids, including girls, educated. We've got record numbers of kids in school. But what we're seeing is that when girls get to the adolescent age, they're dropping out of school in alarming numbers in certain parts of the world, in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia. And the question is, what do we do to keep these girls in school? The downside of them dropping out, of course, is that they, one, are not being educated. Two, they are facing higher risks of violence, including child marriage, which is pervasive in many of these places. They're at higher risk of gender-based violence and HIV. So we're very concerned about what to do about that. There's no easy answer to it, but we do know that keeping them in school makes a huge difference. So the First Lady, recognizing this issue, wanted to think about how to address it. And I think there are several pieces of the pie. But one of the most important parts is one that I think Carrie should talk about, and that is engaging the Peace Corps. And that's based on the First Lady's view that these need to be community-driven responses. And so the Peace Corps is a huge piece of that. The other piece is programming that we will do the State Department and USAID will do to try to keep these girls in school in different parts of the world. And Carrie, what I like about your background is you kind of learned about this from the ground up. Absolutely. In fact, yeah. Tell us a little about that. Sure. I mean, my own Peace Corps experience, I was a teacher at an all-girl secondary school, and so I saw firsthand the power of education to transform girls' lives. So we're very excited about it. I mean, one of the things about the First Lady in the First Lady's office actually came to the Peace Corps because in her travels she saw how the best solutions to girls' education really came from the community themselves. And so we have 7,000 volunteers in 65 different countries. They are already catalysts for community-led change. And so we're really excited about this initiative. There's actually three parts of this initiative, what we call three pillars. The first is a training component. We're working with care and many other partners, including USAID and State Department and a whole host of others to train our volunteers and best practices of gender analysis, different kinds of interventions that you can do with the community, how to facilitate community meetings, et cetera. And then our volunteers in turn are going to train tens of thousands of community champions, local leaders, school principals and teachers, women, PTA groups, so that they can be champions for girls' education and then identify opportunities at the community level that address the specific needs of that community because there are many reasons, and Catherine listed some of them, but there are many reasons why girls don't go to school and so we want to divide solutions that are effective for that community. So that first pillar is a training component in the development of local capacity for girls' education. The second component is once they identify the problem to have money available, resources available so that communities can do project activities to address those needs. So in one community it may be that poverty is an issue and families can't afford a school fee or they can't afford the uniforms or they can't buy books. So then that would demand one kind of intervention, perhaps a scholarship fund or something. Another place that might be that child marriage is a leading problem and so then you might want to devise a whole different kind of campaign, perhaps working with traditional leaders, working with parents, helping to communicate, first of all the economic benefits of keeping girls in school, why it's important to delay marriage until after girls graduate. It may be that the school is too far away from the community and girls are not safe going back and forth and so you may work with planners from the Department of Education to build a new school or there are many funders who are willing to build schools, perhaps just making sure that those schools are built in the right places and talking about safety on the way. It may be pregnancy, it may be many other reasons why people drop out of school. So we want to make sure that these solutions are identified by the community and they have some resources to be able to do something about them. The other part of that second pillar is to bring these issues to the American people and that's why we're so excited to be here today because we really want all Americans both to know how important it is to educate girls because frankly if there's no better investment in terms of development outcome than educating a girl. So we want Americans to know that. But the other part of it is we want Americans to appreciate their own education and learn from these young women who are incredibly powerful and you cannot believe some of the things that girls and boys do to get an education around the world. They walk five miles barefoot. All the things that our grandparents used to say that they used to do. I mean these girls work so hard to get their education and so we want to regenerate within our own young men and women an appreciation for their own education. So that's the second part and then the third part is to increase the number of Peace Corps volunteers. We have some very ambitious plans for growing Peace Corps. We want to get to 10,000 by 2018 so that's all part of it too so that we can have greater impact in more countries. Sarah you have written a lot about this and some of the figures that you have come up with in your research are just staggering. I mean how hard is it for young women girls around the world to get educated? Some obviously it's very very dangerous in many parts of the world. What you were just hearing is really development in the 21st century having it be community led, being able to listen and respond. So in any sort of effort or engagement for example to combat trafficking of girls having girls be part of the change having their voice be critical in organizing any kind of intervention or program is a very different model than how we've done it for the last 20, 30 years. When I was at AID we were very focused on a phrase nothing about us without us meaning that the community and especially if we're talking about women and girls be part of generating solutions so that it's not some Washington based or capital led effort but it's something that really is context specific and has the opportunity for the greatest success. But the truth is there's so many different obstacles facing girls in terms of staying in school including attitudes and perceptions. So here there's actual a role for social science and understanding how local populations are thinking about girls' education. Using girls in surveys when we did a survey in Russia we found a population based estimate of something like it was 90,000 to 150,000 females ages 18 to 32 had been trafficked and we're currently living in Russia with no services whatsoever. So using social science to be able to design programs and quite frankly design better policies. What do you think Kathy the most effective tools that the United States has? What's your sense of what's the most important thing we ought to be doing? I know about this initiative and so forth but what have been some of the things over the years that have worked and some that didn't? The way I look at it is this there are a lot of different problems that women and girls are facing around the world but all of them come back to one simple problem which is that they're not valued and so the question presented for us is how do we try to address that and I think Sarah made an important point about one of the things we're trying to do is change the understanding of a community of a family of how they view their girls you know in too many places girls are a commodity girls are a burden you know their families have to support them until they get married at which point they have to pay a big dowry and then they go and they are in the possession of some other man and family and so I think the way I look at it and this hopefully is reflected in our policy is we try to address that problem comprehensively and I think one of the challenges is that's not always the way government does things you know sometimes we do education policy here and we do a health policy here and we do a gender based violence program over here I think that what we need to try to do is bring those all together and say we need communities and families to see that girls have value and so we have to do that by one two, making sure they have adequate healthcare three, hoping that if we get them educated we can move them into the workforce in a way that they're no longer a burden and so we're trying to do that but it is a challenge and I think the way we have to do it is better coordination within the government better coordination with other governments and other actors who are out there because there are a lot of people in this world and all of them are in a world of sort of more diminished resources so it's really imperative that we do our best to make the best use of the limited resources that we do You know the thing that strikes me as I read about this and I read the paper you wrote Sarah somehow it's almost like 9-11 we don't have the imagination to understand how bad this really is in so many parts of the world I mean what was this you had this piece that just struck me the number of people in human trafficking and what is it in economic terms it's something like So the numbers are very difficult there are some organizations that place about 20 million people in servitude in various forms 20 million people are slaves So that's the low estimate then there's upwards of 36 million and the amount of money that is generated is upwards of 150 million it's said to be be with be billion right so this is big big money there are a lot of interests obviously these are illicit flows people are making money off of the buying and selling of other people and generally the international community has been moving towards a global movement we're not entirely there yet the US government has been a leader in this through it was actually First Lady Hillary Clinton's initiative to found a trafficking act in an office at the State Department and there are others that have joined along private foundations private sector but the truth is it needs to not be the work only of organizations that work on combating trafficking it needs to be everyone in this room your neighbors, your cousins, your relatives thinking about is this water or is this bottle or is this shirt made by slave labor is the chocolate that I'm eating is the shrimp that I'm consuming has it been touched by slave labor and what more can we demand to make it stop Kerry, does the Peace Corps encounter this and how do you deal with this? there are a number of countries where there is trafficking in persons and we do have volunteer programs that address that issue so and in places we have several different kinds of programs we have a certain number of volunteers who are trained social workers who have experience in this and they're actually working to prevent the trafficking of women and mostly what they do is they work with nonprofit organizations local organizations they do a lot of awareness building they do education I was just recently in Azerbaijan for example and a Peace Corps volunteer was working with a legal aid association and they had a group of the room was absolutely packed and there were women there were women who were very traditional very conservatively dressed to women who may have been sex workers I don't know they were young, they were old but the whole topic was how to prevent trafficking and what do you look for what do they say they had various women who had been trafficked and who had come back and they were giving their own personal testimony they were talking about this is what they told me and a lot of it was promises of a job and I think that that there are very real economic drivers of this industry both on the demand and the supply side and so one of the things we really need to address and you both talked about this is just the economic drivers of this and what is it that would cause a family to consider pushing their daughter into such a situation and then on the demand side too on the part of the person that is buying the services I mean I think we all need to be aware here as employers even one of the things that's really great recently and you guys have done a lot I mean AID and Osteaxias to promote this I mean there are signs all over everywhere saying you know are you aware of human trafficking right here in our midst it's right here in Washington DC and we need to be aware of that and where I mean K Street I mean it could be your house cleaner or the person who's cutting your lawn I mean there are so many different kinds different ways of the trafficking occurs anyway just to finish the Peace Corps story so we do have a few programs that really focus on preventing the trafficking in persons with a special focus on women but many of our volunteers in other countries are just doing general education to help girls stay in school and then to find livelihoods afterwards and you know it's not enough to just stay in school it's also getting a job afterwards and I think that's another part that we really have to address and then on top of this and all the awful things about this now we have the terrorists involved in this and terrorists are using this and it just gets worse and worse yeah and it's the good and bad of my jobs I see everything through the prism of women so it's interesting to look at these terrorism issues in that context and certainly we're seeing that in some places and I just got back I took a trip to Iraq and you know there are women and girls there who have been abused in all sorts of horrible ways Iraqi women as part of ISIL's strategy and it is you know truly horrific to see that they are buying and selling these women they are sexually abusing them and it's a very conservative community the Yazidi community so the consequences of that are particularly difficult for these women who come back and you know are pregnant and somebody was telling me that on their birth certificate sometimes it says father and then father says terrorist you know and so how does the child grow up like that but we're also seeing in some places in western Europe women you know being sort of joining ISIS and some of this has been very interesting to see how they're appealing to them so these really young women who want they want to be part of the cause some of them have very romantic notions about what happens and it's similar to what Carrie said about the traffickers because then they get a very rude awakening when they end up in these situations with these ISIS folks and they're you know essentially servants and slaves to them sometimes sexual slaves so in any case it's a very complicated problem but I think in every situation that you ever imagine whether it's a hurricane or a war a conflict women and children tend to be more vulnerable and so as bad as it is for anybody it's usually not always but almost always worse for them you know I thought it was interesting as I was reading for this that some make the point that women should always be at the table on any kind of conflict resolution who and I think that's probably right but who talk about that a little bit the literature is very clear that if women are not actually involved in the negotiation, the mediation and the peace deal the peace deals tend to fall apart so we need to reform how we think about security I think we need to rethink how we think about development democratization human rights where the elevation of the role of women and girls is fundamental to getting the kinds of development goals we want to getting the kind of peaceful prosperous communities that we want that is well it's empirical that and here I think of ambassador Don Steinberg who I worked with very closely at AID and he has a story about negotiating the end of Warren and Gola and they left out the women and for him it was just a very visceral lesson but wherever you look around the world if women are not part of the solution it doesn't hold so it is you get men with guns who are putting down their guns and then having the negotiation but it's never going to the next step I think there is a larger point which is we tend not to understand the role that historical grievance in general plays as a driver of development and the more that we actually organizes an international community to understand how history plays a role everybody's history not just a part of not just men's history that will help drive towards more peaceful and stable solutions so that do you think women are able to stay more focused than men and I bring this up I was in Israel last summer and we were down right at the north wall of the Gaza Strip and they call them stationary drones and what it is there are these big poles and on top of it they have these things and there are cameras up there and there are also machine guns up there they take pictures they're constantly surveying and the operators of these machines are all women and the Israelis tell me have found that women are able to stay more focused and it literally just pay better attention than the men do and so all of the operators of those machines are women well I just came back from Peru yesterday and four fifths of the police force the traffic police are women because what they found is that the men were first of all more susceptible to corruption but also women were more likely to hold the line because emotional even angry, what have you they've done it now for Mexico and Lima Peru, Mexico City and Lima Peru I'm told have pretty much all female or mostly female traffic cop workforce maybe for some of the reasons there are some great examples of where women have been involved in peace building this made a huge difference one of the ones that maybe most of you see a situation where the women basically did a protest in the main field outside the presidential palace for a very long time during the rainy season in the mud Muslim and Christian educated illiterate rich and poor together all wearing white so that to hide any ethnic divisions that they might have saying enough is enough we need to come together and then when finally agreed to peace talks and then the rebel leaders agreed to peace talks and then they went off to I think it was Ghana to have the talks and the talks were going were stalling and they weren't going forward to finally those women took a plane over to Ghana surrounded the room and told the men inside the room you will not have food or water until you come to some agreement and peace was restored and now they have a female president and that whole sort of episode was documented on that really great film by Abby Disney I'll pray the devil back to hell. That's a great example of when women are involved how it can matter and I don't know if women are more focused but I think that women have always been the peacemakers in the family they have to their roles have been to care for men or for the children male and female they also have to negotiate with their own husband often times and I just think that in some ways women are equipped from a very early age socialize at a very early age compromise. But you know this just illustrates really how far we have come even in this country as to where we used to be I played baseball and I remember the worst thing you could say to a guy on the baseball team is you throw like a girl and the reason we were taught that girls throw like this is because they're clavicle is different than the male clavicle and because of that that's why they throw like a girl as it was called well what nobody stopped to think about is nobody had ever showed them how to throw like a boy and you know as long as you get your elbow up here in turn that's how you like to throw and you watch any of these female athletes today they can do it just like that. I improved positive with this because maybe the scariest thing I've ever done is I threw out the first pitch at the nationals game and I had no training in how to throw but I got a crash course several members of my staff spent hours teaching me how to throw and I threw it and I hit it over the pitch but I would never no one ever trained women to throw baseball well exactly scariest thing I've ever done it was much scarier than going to my senate confirmation hearing which took place like a week before that first row you hold it like a little bunny it's all in the hips too it's all in the hips there is actually an incredibly important role I think that sports plays in the empowerment of women and girls we were saying as we were walking out I played field hockey and lacrosse and I learned life skills I mean working in government as a team sport and the lessons that I learned on the playing field are among the most important and for generations of women that was not possible and this is all this is all the result of an act that congress passed so that there would be equal title line equal access to education for both genders and the knock on effect was a generation of women and girls who have experience playing sports as a national security advisor I think it really does change women's health I mean I have these 14 year old twin granddaughters and I mean sports is a big part of their life and I can see they want to be the best and they want to get better and when I was growing up you didn't see that and the reason you didn't see it because they just simply weren't encouraged and title line I think had a huge impact and it's all for the good as far as I'm concerned on American society and American culture and there are many programs like that internationally too Peace Corps does a lot of work we have a very active partnership with grassroots soccer that is training both boys and girls to using soccer as a way to teach life skills and teamwork really benefited from team sports because they've learned how to compromise and work together and give a little and not always seek limelight or whatever I mean especially team sports are really good for young men as well well let's have some questions from out in the audience here right here here we go we'll start right here thank you very much I'm the ambassador of Tanzania I thought this was very interesting subject just let me be there and it's very good to see you my good friend Kareli how are you it's very fascinating when you have a panel like this but also in this audience to talk on very fundamental issues regarding the women equality I didn't know which angle you take it but I'm happy that you addressed very fundamental issues one how do you keep the girls in school how do you keep the girls in school at school yes because in our countries there are so multiple factors but then the interventions that are always made as Kareli pointed out just one either one or so we always tell them it's not either all you need a holistic approach because for example if statistically you have many girls dropping out of schools because of any pregnancies and for our societies that's the end of you two you have this very simple sorry for the men but for the girls they understand it very well they don't go to school during the menstrual period they have no pads they get stigmatized and then they go to school so things that are taken for granted but these are very basic and what I like is whatever the US has doing a lot in our countries but usually with these agencies it's some program here very fragmented so my message is take the holistic approach but two and the final one it's about the involvement of women in peace processes I was heading an international, I mean a regional organization on peace and security for the post-conflict countries in the Great Lakes region of Africa which was bringing Rwanda, Congo Angola, all of them the main challenge was how do we bring the women on the table negotiation table because in the negotiations you have the women or taking notes they are never on the table but then what we are asking from I was asking the United States that always supports these peace processes make it a condition that we will find this peace process if you have women on the table and at one point it worked it became as a part of the rules of procedures that you have to have 50-50 it worked because they need you to find it and therefore they have to meet the condition so I said you have sometimes to use the unconventional ways to get the women on the tables and they never regretted to have them I was in this peaceful for six years nobody regretted but they were saying I was making a lot of noise you have to make a lot of noise, thank you maybe that's what we all need to do why don't we just go around here one thing I would say about that is and I've seen this in different conflicts the challenge is that typically when they look to put together the people who are going to negotiate the peace are the people who are the combatants combatants are usually men and I think what we are saying is women have a stake not just in negotiating but in the future of their country and that's why they need to be at the table and I think the way I would look at this is we have some statistics that make it clear that women make a huge contribution in certain areas for example women are more likely to take whatever money they make in their family and invest it back in their children they get their kids educated they get their kids immunized so women we think are a good investment generally but as to peace agreements and business and any place else it's not so much women although I think women do add they tend to be more concerned about things like education health statistically but it's more that whatever the discussion is should be representative of people who are affected by it and so that by definition should include women and if you have there's a lot of research emerging now on boards of directors and how companies do better when they have women on the board there are boards of directors in the United States of public corporations that only have men which is shocking to me especially considering that women are the people who are often buying the product so I think just across the board it's the right thing to do to have women on a board or the right thing to do women in a peace negotiation what I would argue is that they have a stake in the future they have something to contribute and they are more likely to help that enterprise whatever it is be more successful and so we always argue that it's in the interest of whomever we're dealing with to try to include women and all voices so that they are represented in a reasonable way to add anything to that I mean I think you're absolutely right I think all the research has shown that I think it's not only a good thing to do or the right thing to do it's a smart thing to do because I mean for the very reasons that you just said that there's plenty of research that shows that diverse teams in general you know having gender diversity but just diversity in general is so important and the principle nothing about us without us I think is one that we all need to live by it's a basic design principle if you spend any time in Silicon Valley you'll recognize that you never design anything without the people that are going to be the user and so we're catching up thank you, my name is Paolo von Schirach I'm the editor of the Schirach Report and Economic Development Consultant just one general question obviously you talked about the challenges and the difficulties of furthering the cause of women there are real brick walls I would say when you talk about culture and religion and not something that hasn't been mentioned but it's sort of a well known fact in Muslim societies the education of women is openly discouraged in some places actually forbidden the Taliban has been actively engaged in Afghanistan for years among other things in targeting girls schools and clearly doing their best to discourage families to send kids their girls to school how do you deal with such large insignificant cultural and in some cases religious which become in many instances also legal blockages that create huge problems for the education of women or young girls we know the case of the young lady in Pakistan who was shot at because she was promoting she got the Nobel Prize afterwards but a very heavy personal prize I think that's one of the key questions Raydie, Sarah do you want to take her on it then? Sure I think here I think looking at religious texts actually is incredibly important and I take the lesson of how Chinese foot binding of women and girls was created in a very brief period after thousands of years there was a very interesting campaign that relied on religious leaders language that basically it combined two things it used religious leaders language to say it wasn't absolutely necessary to do foot binding and then it solved an economic problem where you had girls bound their feet the parents had boys that they were going to be mirroring we promise we won't bind our feet and because marriages were arranged you will not shun those women and girls whose feet are not bound so I think in any culture there are religious texts that people use to bring people together and then the religious texts where people use them to tear people apart and to leave people as minorities or what have you and what we need to be is very strategic in understanding what voices there are for progress this isn't just by any means an issue in Islam this is in all sorts of religions and we come from many cultures where certainly the history of the United States it took us quite a long time for it was the last century the century we were all born in where women achieved the vote so it's a long road but it is one with lots and lots of waystations and Muslims to be learned if I could say something about that it's certainly not the case that this is just a problem in Muslim communities at all and we there are many Muslim leaders who are strong advocates for women and girls and I think when you talked about Malala and what happened to her the person who was one of the most powerful advocates for education and continues to be is her father and for us I think it's really as the United States and for people who are working on this issue we need to try to listen to amplify the voices of religious leaders who are supportive of the issues that we believe in and also men and boys and we spend a lot of time thinking about how not to look at men and boys and we do a lot of work on gender-based violence and not to look at men and boys as just the perpetrators but it's also part of the solution and that is really important and I think we are very open to working with whomever and however we can to try to move these issues forward in a positive way right here Hi my name is Kristi Kaufman I'm the executive director of the Kota Support Foundation which is the military veteran support I'm going to bring this a little closer to home and how this affects the international community there's a lot of discussion now going on about women in combat positions my colleague Angie Fresnel is a colonel in the Army helicopter pilot so we all know it's been going on my question is how do conversations and issues like this in the US translate internationally and maybe push forward is it something that people pay attention to in other communities if we're actually having conversations about opening up more combat roles women if they can do the job should be able to do the job that's the basic bottom line right so I'm wondering internationally how that translates I don't know very much about women in combat but what I do say is that we all need to be thinking about blasting the gender barriers for all professions I mean yesterday I was on an airplane and both of the pilots were female now this is the first time that I've been in that situation I was actually I was really delighted I was delighted to see that women are entering male professions I was and the occasion that I was at is that I was at my friend's wedding the male son of my friend who was a nurse so what we're seeing is that professions that were previously considered women are now being done by men and professions that are previously considered men male professions are now being done by women I mean I think that that should be that is the purpose of a gender equitable society is where people can find their own potential find their own passion and can work hard to achieve their own life goals no matter what it is and so I think that this is taking us in the right direction but I can't really speak anymore about women in combat so there's been a very long effort on women peace and security in general that the United States in some ways came a bit late to the game putting together a national action plan and it applies to all government agencies everybody has a role the Department of Defense State Department USA and I think they're different sort of terms for how it's laid out but the issues are not that complicated it's about leadership it's about making sure we walk the walk it's about we had a lot of sort of toing and froing should there be integrated programs or should there only be standalone programs that elevate the role of women well why not both protection and prevention of violence is integral parts different agencies are responding to this I think it's a conversation that is ongoing with the Department of Defense I think an organization like CSIS which has such great ties with colleagues we have a lot of colleagues who served in the Department of Defense we need to be continually raising the issue I think that the U.S. has lessons to be learned from other uniform service members other countries where women have played combat roles yeah I mean the Israeli example that Bob gave but I think even in the last 10 years especially you see quite a bit of change and again it's an evolution you know I think the best message is not what people say but what they do and when you can point to something like we just heard two female pilots that says more than a hundred speeches because it works and I think things that work are part of you know telling Americans and telling the world about who we are what's so interesting is the way in which countries generally have airline industries is their pilots come from the military they've been trained that's right usually if they have good airlines and you're seeing exactly the results of this so that's right but you know nobody frankly neither men nor women benefits from a status quo in which men only have certain roles they can play and women only have certain roles because there are many men who would like to be the primary caregiver there are many women who want to you know serve on a sub yeah exactly so I mean we should have societies that give support to everyone achieving their potential being their best finding their passion that's what we should all be searching for in our country and others I think that's an excellent point and that's why hi I'm Ann Howard an international education and public affairs consultant I wanted to ask Ambassador Russell and the other members of the panel what's the role of the private sector in helping to reduce human trafficking there's a wonderful organization here in town called free the slaves and I recently learned of a lot of work they were doing with multinationals that indeed have this problem themselves with their own employees if you could address that issue please I would say just a little bit more broadly that the role of the private sector on all the issues that we work on is critically important and I would say it for a couple reasons one because if you look at girls education as an example the private sector wants to have an educated workforce right they want to have a workforce that's free from gender based violence they want they know that if a mother is educated her children are more likely to survive and be educated when we look at women's economic empowerment which is another one of our huge priorities the GDPs of countries are much higher if women are fully engaged in the workforce again it helps private sector when you look at trafficking and I'll defer a little bit to Sarah on that because she's more of an expert on trafficking than I am certainly companies and I've seen this when I travel that companies are very mindful of they don't want to be on the wrong side of the trafficking discussion and neither do countries obviously because for those of you who don't know the trafficking world it has a very strict regime of tears that the United States imposes and sort of categorizes countries based on their performance on a set of indicators and so companies want to do well, countries want to move into a higher tier lower tier, higher tier, better tier, higher tier tier one so I think they're all there's a understanding broadly that it's in the interest of everyone and the private sector knows that they're going to benefit obviously you're going to have some who are exploitive and all the rest of it but I think in general private sector plays an important role in that it has the potential to play game changing role when you think of the amount of capital generated there's some first movers in the tourist industry interestingly the Carlson group has been a real leader the the Hilton company has been very good about training they have something like 4,000 units around the world and they've trained their staff to be able to recognize airlines Delta has been very good in this and has worked with Department of Transportation Homeland Security and Track but there are pockets where we need really to lean in the extractives have an uneven track record and if you think about the kind of mining that goes on this is a labor issue this is your sex trafficking there's bondage anything that has a supply chain has the potential for exploitation and so making sure that again as consumers the power that everybody has in this room to ask of companies to do better and who doesn't want to be on the right side of combating trafficking and ending modern slavery I ask you I think there was a lady back here yes this will probably have to be the last question here thank you very much my name is Janet Fleischman with the Global Health Policy Center here at CSIS and thank all of you what a fantastic panel we just put out a report last week looking at adolescent girls and young women and HIV 7,000 girls a week are infected with HIV just in southern and east Africa alone and it underscores the need for a multi-sectoral approach to look at gender-based violence to look at all the issues you've been talking about what's happened in recent years with the new strategy on gender-based violence with the work on women peace and security the work on trafficking family planning 2020 so many initiatives so what I'd love to hear from you is how do we build on this momentum it's not only in the US there's a global convergence around some of these issues education for girls of course with Malala getting to the level of the Nobel Prize but how do we make sure that this momentum isn't lost what do we need to do next why don't we just go down the line here well I think we have to I think we have to seize this moment because I agree with you Janet that there is enhanced attention which is I think based on the fact that we all understand that this is a critical priority and if we lose these girls we'll never get them back so I think we have to seize the moment and do as much as we possibly can and from my perspective I'm trying to get as much of it ingrained in the State Department and USAID so that it will just continue moving in a positive direction but as you pointed out there are a lot of pieces here and part of my job is to try to make sure that all of these different parties are speaking to each other and that all of the work is synced up and that is pretty much a full time job in addition to everything else we're trying to do but I do think it is critically important I would agree with you I mean I think that one of the largest challenges is the fact that there is real dispersion of effort and I have to say that in this administration there's been more whole of government working together than ever before and I hope that that's going to continue on into the future there's a dreams initiative that I know you're very familiar with that PEPFAR is working on with Nike and Gates and a lot of other Peace Corps is part of it for our part we're very happy to be part of some of these large you know large whole government initiatives because we think we can really add value at the community level because it has to be both top down in terms of you know development investment in terms of policies in terms of you know getting the main leaders on board but it also has to be ground up and that's where Peace Corps comes in making sure that those large scale investments of others are actually owned by the community reaching those who are most vulnerable implemented properly monitored and evaluated, sustained over time et cetera et cetera I mean because Peace Corps volunteers are at the community and have such rare insight into how communities work and have such strong powerful really transformative relationships of trust with their communities they are such great partners with USAID with State Department with the Learning Challenge Corporation with CDC I mean and then a lot of civil society partners and international NGOs but we all need to be working together on a continuum it's not just enough to get the right policies in place they need to also build up from the bottom Sarah I'll give you the last word here well before I say anything I want to thank you so much for the role that you've played and continue to play at CSIS it's a real it's a lot of fun that's what we're doing I always learn something about what we're doing in the service I know it's a lot and it takes you away from your families I think everybody needs to make sure that we're holding now I'm going to say the tough thing make sure that we are holding those in government accountable there's a lot of language that a lot of us have shared over the last couple years what are the resources that have been spent what's left to be done and what's left to be done it takes a while let's make sure that this is on the agenda going forward through the next two important years and making sure that whenever there's an international convening that this is a really critical part of the conversation and that it's not again left only but it should be in addition to organizations that are working on this full time that it begins to filter into conversations that are not the usual suspects traditional security conferences or banking conferences or other gatherings of private the hospitality industry a couple years ago there was the world hospitality meaning in Zimbabwe I got all excited because I thought this is a great opportunity the US ambassador agreed to raise the issue of trafficking I really think so I think imagination, creativity and looking for every opportunity I think we have to number one keep reminding people just how bad this is I mean when I read your paper and you start talking about the billions upon billions of dollars that all this goes into I didn't understand really how bad it is and kind of the first real context to me is you have to explain to people why this is good for you why this is bad for you why this impacts on you and I think reminding people of how awful this is and why this is not only something that none of us should be proud of we should be ashamed of it to remind people and help them understand why it's not good for them and why it's costing them and why it's in all of our interests to try to do the best we can to make this situation a little better than it is I want to thank all of you on behalf of TCU and CSIS, thanks again