 Today, we are looking at the subject of peace here with an institution that has a long and storied history in its dedication to promoting peace. I'm especially pleased to focus on peacebuilding as we will today from the perspective of women who are in so many places turning the violence and oppression into a new opportunity to offer new voices at the table for peacebuilding. And positive change. So to tell us more about the United States Institute of Peace is a woman that many of us know and love, Tara Sonnenschein. She has such a great biography, I'll just give you a highlight. She served in the White House in several capacities, including transition director for the National Security Council and special assistant to President Clinton. She studied foreign policy and communications at the Brookings Institution and began her career as a broadcast journalist at ABC. She also is a former contributing editor to Newsweek, has written numerous articles including some outstanding ones recently on foreign affairs. Please welcome Tara to introduce today's conversation and our panel. Thank you so much, Pat. You know, if there's one woman I think we want to celebrate when we talk about women and peace, how about a woman who has worked so hard in places like Northern Ireland, Congo, Afghanistan, and become a role model for women in the media? Would you join me in thanking our host today, the Pat Mitchell? Some of you in this room know a bit about the United States Institute of Peace. Congress are saying, hmm, how come I never heard much about them? So let me take just a moment to tell you a bit about us. We were created in 1984 by an act of Congress, a bipartisan act of Congress. And Congress in the mid-1980s in its infinite wisdom, as I wrote that I'm thinking how oxymoronic sounds to say Congress in its infinite wisdom these days. Back in the 1980s, Congress could foresee that the world was changing and that war and peace issues were emerging in a way that we in the United States were likely to have to wrestle with. And so we were set up first as a research organization to look at the drivers of conflict. What is it that causes international conflict? How do you prevent it? How do you get ahead of it? How do you resolve it? And then what do you do after the conflict is over and societies are ripped apart by the traumas of war? And over time, we labored in relative obscurity, not waving our flag and holding up big banners. We just went about studying conflict. And as we got into the 90s in the post-Cole War era, we became more operational and we realized we needed to go out in the field and really look at conflict from a field perspective. And so we began to work in the Middle East, in Iran, in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan. Today we have full offices in Baghdad and in Kabul. And we have grown. And one of the luxuries or curses of growth is that you start to get noticed and we will be moving to our first permanent headquarters on the National Mall next year at 23rd and Constitution. And this program is the beginning of our outreach to New Yorkers who have worked on similar issues and to hope we can strengthen that New York-Washington corridor. Gender is an issue we care deeply and passionately about. One of our big supporters is Madeleine Albright, the first secretary, woman secretary of state. And in fact, we will be naming a wing of our building for Secretary Albright, along with other extraordinary men and women from both parties who work in the stead of peace. When we saw Nick Kristoff's book and we've all read columns, we said, wow, this is us. This is the bridge between scholarly work and practical real work. And I don't need to tell all of you that our national security, our personal security, is inextricably linked to the international community. And women are not just victims of conflict, they are potential sources of peacemaking. And we've got to begin to look at that and to have women at the table, women part of the table, and bring in all those women around the table. So let me, without further ado, introduce our panelists today to you. The first really needs no introduction, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, author with Cheryl Wodun, Half the Sky, born on a raised on a cherry farm, I think I read. And it is a great delight to welcome to our panel the Nicholas Kristoff. Our second guest I've told you a little bit about, but former CEO and president of PBS, a woman who's worked in every network, cable programming, leadership management position, now CEO and head of this wonderful Paley Center. Please join me in formally welcoming Pat Mitchell. Our next guest Ann Marie Getz is the chief advisor of governance, peace, and security at the United Nations Development Fund for Women. Ann Marie is really the expert on development, women, and the role of the international community. We were lucky to have her on a panel with us in Washington. You are very lucky to have her here in New York from the United Nations. Please welcome Ann Marie Getz. And lastly from Goldman Sachs, although Dina Powell could not be here today, we are very fortunate that Kim Azarelli is here. Kim is vice president of corporate engagement. She runs Goldman Sachs Gives and she works on this signature project that we've all heard about 10,000 women. But not only that, Kim is the co-founder of the Avon Center for Women and Justice at Cornell. She was with Avon for many years. She's dedicated and determined to see women advance, particularly in the law sector. Would you join me in welcoming Kim Azarelli? And lastly, it is a great personal and professional privilege to tell you about our moderator for this session. She is ideally suited for the role. Dr. Kathleen Kinness has devoted her life to working on increasing opportunities for women in the global arena. From the United Nations to her work at the World Bank. She was with the Asian Development Bank. And today she's got a great job. She is the gender advisor, coordinator of all gender activities at the now after today famous United States Institute of Peace. Thank you, Tara. I am very pleased and really quite honored to be a part of this panel discussion today, a panel discussion about gender and peace building. And really more specifically how to turn the kind of oppression that we all have read about that we've experienced firsthand here, abroad, everywhere, and really turn it into opportunity. We have a very short time together, even shorter than planned. So I am going to move directly into the discussion and also want to share with you that we plan to open it up for comments and Q&A from the audience. So please feel a part of this conversation today. Nick, I'm going to begin with a question. The title of your book, What an Image, Half the Sky, comes from the Chinese proverb that women hold up half the sky. Here they actually hold up four fists in the sky. Well, I think you just stole my line because we had a discussion group recently and one of the women said, no, they have it wrong. It's really that women hold up 80% of the sky. It looks about right. Tell us about your vision of the movement because it's beyond the book and also how you believe it's making a difference. When Cheryl and I wrote the book, we really wanted to not just inform people, but really also galvanize people. And I mean, this is an issue that has been gaining ground for years. A lot of people have done great spade work and we hope to give it one more bit of a nudge and to do that, we need to go beyond the book itself. Because frankly, to buy a book about a subject, you have to already have an interest in it. But the great thing about television is you can watch a television show by mistake. And so the thought was to try to figure out ways of extending half the sky in various other media. So there's work on a six part television documentary series. The second part was just filmed in Bombay. And then also a game or social action campaign on social networks. An idea there, again, it's just, it's very easy to lure people in, hopefully with a kind of non-didactic way. And then once they get introduced to these issues, hopefully get them more and more active games. When we were looking into this, we asked our literary agent, who has the game rights to a non-fiction book? Well, who knew? It turned out that we had them. And so we gave them to a group called Games for Change, which has devised a very interesting game. And then there are various other elements of this. We also started a website called halftheskymovement.org. And the idea is that people can go from reading the book, hopefully wanting to do something, and they can go to halftheskymovement.org. And they're a bunch of great organizations doing good work. They can connect with them, perhaps to write checks. But we really want people to go beyond writing checks, but also to volunteer, get engaged if they're young people, then to go abroad and hopefully take a gap year or work for a time and embed yourself out there and then come back transformed. I'm going to follow up real quickly with you about this gender part and also the age. Are men reading the book? Are they buying the book? It's fascinating because among a somewhat older demographic, which I shouldn't use somewhat older, among a slightly more mature demographic. Thank you. Then I'd say the interest is overwhelmingly, the people who show up for talks, are overwhelmingly women or men dragged along by their wives. And they're interested, but it's definitely overwhelmingly women. In university audiences, that is not the case. It is fascinating to speak at university campuses and you get almost as many men showing up as young women. And the men seem to be utterly passionate about the issues. I think that this more mature demographic sees these as women's issues and women's rights. I think younger people just see them as human rights issues. And there's much less of a sense of kind of a zero sum game about their your rights, their my rights. And I find that really encouraging about where the trend line is for these issues. We're talking about trend lines. I wanted to move to Pat. One of the things that Cheryl and Nick say in their book, and you can put it out as provocative idea, that the 19th century was really the central moral challenge was about slavery. The 20th was the battle against totalitarianism. And that the century we're in now is really the moral challenge of gender equality. You have been somebody who has been looking at this for several decades. Gender and peace building has really been a part of your work. How do you see that challenge? Do you agree that they do they have it right in their ideas? And can you tell us a little bit about what you have been working on? Well, I certainly hope you've got it right because if we can't do it now, we can't put it forth as the central moral challenge as well as biggest opportunity for women to do something that we were encouraged to do in 1990 by a congresswoman from this very state, Bella Abzug, who said in the 20th century, women will change the nature of power rather than power changing the nature of women. I would like to say that now in the 21st century, it's time to lay claim to that. We know that there are more women in power, and we can look back and find examples of women who use that power in much the same way as the men they had followed and copied into power, rattling the sword and leading their countries into conflict and battle. But we also find isolated examples of times when women really did approach the use of power in a very distinctly different way. And for me, that's the opportunity. If I might just share something I've been thinking about all morning because of the nature of today's conversation. In 1990, I attended and covered as a journalist the first ever women's conference on peace. Anybody remember that, or was anyone else there besides me? Oh, great. Well, it didn't get a lot of coverage in the US in spite of my efforts and the few other journalists who were there, but it was 1,000 women, mostly Israeli and Arab women who had convened the conference, but many European and American women as well. And that's where Bella Abzug made that statement. And she made it following the opening night address from an Israeli Knesset member, Shula Medelani, who said, look, we've only got a weekend to get this peace thing negotiated. We have husbands to feed, children to take care of, schools to attend, jobs to take. By Sunday afternoon, we're going to leave Brussels with a statement that will negotiate the end of the conflict in the Middle East and everybody would. But it happened. It happened because the women did not allow long speeches. They cut everybody off who started on those list of grievances. They approached it differently than it had been approached before. Seven paragraph piece of paper would have resolved the conflict in the Middle East, probably would even now, but it never got considered in the Knesset or in the American Congress or anywhere else by any European parliament. Why? Because there weren't enough of those women who had power to make that happen. So as I left that conference, I was determined to look at other ways so we could inspire each other to go into these opportunities to build peace or to change politics and do it in a different voice. And I found two interesting examples I'll share quickly. One was Northern Ireland. Women had a profound impact on the ending of that decades-long resolution because they approached it both sides as mothers looking to protect the future for their children and jobs for their husbands. And they made that the total focus and they, more than any other American politician, brought peace to Northern Ireland. El Salvador, the women had a choice, pick up a gun, join the guerrilla army, overthrow the government or keep things as they were. And many of them chose to join the FMLN, the guerrilla army. And they became quite good at it as we are seeing around the world now as women, sadly, are also taking up force. I mean, I say sadly because wouldn't it be better to take up peace? But these women were on the front lines fighting that war for 10 years. But they were also the ones, by the way, they were having babies and the whole thing on the front lines. They were the ones who forced the FMLN to go to the negotiating table and end that civil war. It was the four women commandantes of the seven who I watched negotiate that peace agreement. And interestingly enough, one of those women made the transition from guerrilla fighter to vice president of El Salvador, Ana Martinez Guadalupe. And so there are these examples. And if you look at Liberia, which has been so documented so well by Avni in her film and all these other stories, we know they exist and we need to hold them up. To me, that's what we need to spend time doing. Look at the examples of how women changed not only their country, their communities, but literally changed the course of history in their countries by ending conflict and bringing about peace when they came to the peace building exercise in their own voice. And that's what's critical. Excellent. Picking up on that idea that Pat is so eloquently just laid out. And the nagging question that haunts all of the UN resolutions, 1325, 1820 now, and more recently, 1888 and 1889, how can we know that these important actions, these programs, help prevent a single woman from being raped in eastern Congo, Colombia, Sudan? And if they can't, what can make the difference? That's a great question. And it certainly is very relevant to people like myself who work at the UN, so very hard at changing normative frameworks and changing the way we address peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. I'll give you the starkly honest answer to that first and then the normative visionary one. The starkly honest answer to that question is that it's 10 years since the passage of Resolution 1325. And many people in here actually worked on negotiating that resolution or putting ideas into it, I'm very sure, and have followed it with great interest. Today, we have not seen an increase in the numbers of women participating in peace talks. UNIFEM has done a study of the numbers of women at the peace table. And the first thing we found is that nobody's ever tracked this to our amazement. And if women count for peace, we really have to start counting the women. Where are they and what are they saying? The second thing we found is that if anything, the numbers of women at the peace table have gone down since the passage of 1325. In the 1990s, in the resolution of the conflicts in Latin America, the average number of women at the peace table was about 10% of negotiating delegations, as in the example you just gave, Pat. Now it's 7.1 or less since that time. If there are no women at the peace table, then their issues will not be addressed in the peace accord and in the post-conflict peace building period. And that's a disaster because as Nick's book shows, and as you've said, Pat, peace building, the moment of peace building, the peace agreement offers perhaps the most important opportunity to challenge unjust relationships, to address them, and also to produce sustainable peace and long-term economic development as well. If women aren't at the peace table, their issues aren't addressed, and one of the strongest demonstrations of this was an analysis, again, that we did of 300 components of peace deals signed since 1989, and we found that out of 318 only addressed sexual and gender-based violence. Now just 18. So the agreements for Bosnia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and most of the DRC agreements, Burundi, actually I'm sorry, Burundi did mention it, but many others don't mention sexual violence, even though that's one of the ways in which the war was conducted, and this has enormous implications for the seriousness with which this issue is taken post-conflict. Okay, now what value are these resolutions if they haven't changed practice? They will change practice. I mean, on a pragmatic level, for things to change, you do need these resolutions to provide instructions to the UN. And if you look very closely at the text of the three most recent resolutions on women, peace, and security, you'll find that they are absolutely laden with explicit instructions to different parts of the UN to do things differently, and they come with resources. There will be a rapid reaction judicial force to go and help countries fast-track prosecutions on sexual violence in a highly visible way in order to scotch impunity as soon as possible. For example, there is now a special representative of the Secretary General on the prevention of sexual violence in conflict. UNIFEM is involved in producing indicators so that we start counting. We count the number of women, we count the number of violations, we count what's done. So that's also an explicit instruction that we're carrying out. There is a new Secretary General's report, you may not know this, on gender and peace building, which will be presented to the Council in September, a great opportunity to get the topics that we're discussing right now into the UN and into practical changes in the way the UN does peace building. So literally, increasing the numbers of women in the public view, increasing the amount of funding available to address women's needs post-conflict. Now, you asked me if the resolutions aren't enough, what can be done? And one of the things I like very much about Nick's book is the way it ended with three strong, simple ideas of things that can be done that would make a difference. And in addition to the resolutions, which I really don't want to downplay because they do change the world's thinking, especially Resolution 1820, for example, which represents a profound paradigm shift in how we understand violence against women in conflict. But if we think about three things that would make a big difference that the UN could do, because I can only really speak from that point of view, the first one is we really must see women in high office in peacemaking, keeping, and building. And we must see women as well above all, I think, in the military and the troops that are contributed to peacekeeping because this has a profound role modeling effect if nothing else. It builds other women's faith in the public sector and increases the chances that women in civil society will come to the state for help and come to the UN. The second thing would be financing women's land rights or at least asset control post-conflict. Women cannot engage in economic recovery without some economic security. The third would be something very difficult, which is financing women's collective action before the conflict finishes. One of the reasons women don't have voice in peace processes is because the women's movement is dispersed, it's in the diaspora, it's decimated. Trying to finance women's recovery or at least the recovery of the women's movement before the conflict is over, probably working mostly in the diaspora would be the third area. Thank you for those very important leads forward. Thinking about moving forward, I really wanted to ask you about innovation. It is so often when we start to look at women in peace building, these statistics that Anne-Marie just shared with us can lead us to a fairly depressed view of what we can do. When you think about women in economic advancement, women in economic empowerment, what do you see on the horizon? What is out there that's innovative that we need to know about that we can engage with? It's a great question and it's great to follow such amazing speakers. I think this is an incredibly important conversation and I would just respond by saying many of the things that you should just spoke about are really relevant to your question. I'm coming from Goldman Sachs, so I thought I'd just tell you a little bit about this innovation around economics, which we believe that sustainable peace requires women's empowerment economically. And so 10,000 women, which many of you may be familiar with, is... Take a second to explain. It's a large project that Goldman Sachs initiated a few years back basically to help 10,000 women across the world get an entrepreneurship education, invest in class entrepreneurship education and mentoring and networking. So we invested $100 million in the education of 10,000 women who are business owners already, believing that if they had that next little bit of help, it could really help them grow revenues, create jobs for themselves and really create sustainable peace and a sustainable situation. We're currently in 18 countries. We have 1,500 women who have gone through or are in the program right now. And the results have been remarkable. Talk about innovation. I mean, we've already seen revenue growth, job creation and more women accessing capital. So we really believe that economic empowerment of women is a key to sustainable peace. And obviously from the Goldman Sachs perspective, that's sort of what we know best is that side of the house. I also personally believe very much in the rule of law initiatives, my personal background is also, as you mentioned, for women injustice. And so Justice O'Connor had this amazing quote that she mentioned to me a few years back and she said that the key to peace is the rule of law and the key to the rule of law is impartial judiciary but the key to an impartial judiciary is the participation of women. So I've been spending the last several years trying to get more women into the judiciary and bringing women judges together throughout the developing and developed world to end violence against women because I believe that as you mentioned, if there are more women in power and more women implementing law, quicker implementation will hopefully help at least end some of the violence against women and will also allow for more sustainable. So I think innovation would be putting more women judges in the pipeline. There's a great organization doing that right now. I also think obviously these projects like the Goldman Sachs initiative, I mean when organizations such as Goldman Sachs put the Goldman Sachs imprimatur behind women, that's a remarkable thing. And so if we see more business leaders innovating around women's economics as Bob Zellick has said of the World Bank, it's not just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. And I think as more folks get on board and understand that investing in women will create growth and is the white space to the future, we'll see a more sustainable future. Thank you. I'm going to open up to the audience in a minute here but I have another question that I just wanna open up to the panelists here. We're really focused on women and women empowerment but one of the questions and when we really define gender we know it is about both men and women. How do we begin to engage men? We've already heard about the younger men but how do we engage men around the world in this process? Because it does take half the sky and what are some of the innovations that we might be looking at there? And I think someone mentioned it earlier but I think I think obviously it was Nick who mentioned it that you have to frame this, it's not just a women's issue. I mean this is the key to the future. You mentioned 20 years ago talking about women solving the Middle East crisis. I mean that's a real attainable possibility if more women are at the table. So I think we need to frame the conversation differently and not alienate people. I'm the first person to be completely in favor of a women's movement. I mean from a young, young age that's been always been my sort of dream but we have to think that this is the future of our world, not the future of just half the world, not one half or the other. So I think Nick summarized it the past. Pat? I'm sorry, I just had this image that the answer to that question, well there was always the Lysistrata action. That tended to engage men very quickly. Just cut them off and... I'm sorry but anytime I talk about war and peace in a conversation it's serious and it is nothing more serious. But women have found all kinds of ways to engage men in the conversation but the balance is still that primarily in most situations men are controlling the power and women are attempting to have access to it and to find ways to share it and use it. And what has often happened is that we make the kind of compromises that are sometimes necessary to share the power. I mean I keep thinking about Rwanda is a really good example. A country rebuilt by a legislated, mandated in participation of women. So now you have nearly 50% of the women of the people in government in that country are women. Well I want to see them quite frankly raise their voices, use their power to stop rape in Congo which is right next door. Where hundreds of thousands of women are being raped every year in a conflict that the world largely ignores in spite of Nick's fabulous columns on the subject. So why aren't those women using their power to do something to free that country right next door? I know it's complicated, power's complicated but that's what I mean by bringing our own voice and our own values to bear. Is that sometimes it takes dramatic action and it takes communal action and it takes women coming together and agreeing on an outcome and going for it. I think you're ready to speak here. I think that the reason that the issues haven't been more salient is that they come across as soft. They come across as women's issues and I think that in fact the rubric that we're looking at today and Kim alluded to this is the one that really does get people's attention and it's the notion of women's rights as a security issue. Security is something we obviously care immensely about and especially since 9-11 we have, and we're gonna spend about $100 billion this year on our military role in Afghanistan. And one of the things that always strikes me is when you're in Afghanistan and you're talking to a commander there, you know one moment they're discussing air strikes to defeat the Taliban, the next moment they're talking about getting more girls in school because one of the metrics that they use in any given district to determine the stability there is the proportion of girls to go to school there. And I think that you know increasingly there is a really pretty good argument that it's those societies where women are marginalized economically and socially that are more prone to conflict. There's obviously been ever since Samuel Huntington wrote about Islam's bloody borders there's been a lot of talk about terrorism and conflict within Islam. I think there's a reasonable argument that that mechanism has nothing to do with the Koran or Islam as such but has to do with conservative Muslim countries that marginalize women and it's the marginalization of women that leads to conflict in a couple of ways. One by having very high birth rates which result in this huge youth bulge and the proportion of young people in the society aged 15 to 24 for every extra percentage point in that society there's a 4 percentage point increase in the risk of conflict there. And it's probably not just the proportion 15 to 24 it's probably essentially a proportion of young men. And when you marginalize those women at age then these young men just assume you know what even greater magnifies their role and I think creates a lot of turbulence in these societies. And one of the arguments that I think I found people sort of is effective in getting men to pay attention to this is Bangladesh versus Pakistan. You know we're spending billions of dollars Pakistan may be the most dangerous place in the world right now and of course until 1971 Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan. When it split up it had very little going for it but the one thing it did was it turned to education and especially education of girls. Today there are more girls in high school in Bangladesh than there are boys. It's a pretty extraordinary achievement. In contrast in the tribal areas of Pakistan there's a 3% female literacy rate. And there are other differences can't take it too far but that difference is one reason why if a small nuclear device blows up in Times Square that attack will have been planned in the tribal areas and not in Bangladesh. Thank you. Nick your argument will persuade foreign policy analysts and development economists but will it persuade the men who sign up for the Taliban? That's the problem that I have in answering your question is how do we engage men because I think you will engage plenty of men who think about it and realize that investing in women is smart economics and it's good for peace and stability and good governance. That's clear and it's also good for minimizing terrorism but the problem that we have is these instrumental arguments hold very little water in the kind of environment I work in which is very multicultural where you come across sometimes the lowest common denominator of global patriarchy. And so what is going to shift men in those cases and I'd like to just say that in fact at your point that a little bit of real politic is necessary and that in the end we'll get some men working with us because their hearts are in the right place some because they agree with us intellectually and the rest it's got to be through politics. And that's what's so important about making sure that what do we have that men want? One thing is sex but the other thing is the vote. Is the vote. And I mean it's so striking the figure that you quote in the end of your book Nick about the fact that American public administration officials the minute women got the vote in American states started increasing public health spending. This had nothing to do with the number of women in public office but with the fact that people wanted to be reelected and they thought that probably that's what women wanted out of public officials is more public health spending which is true. But the point is if we want men to work with us we have to make it worth their while. So this is what's so important about working frankly on something as basic as women's suffrage and exercise of the vote around the world. And that's something I find terribly worrying about what happened last August in Afghanistan where over 600 polling stations were closed to women and women did not exercise their suffrage rights because if women are not using at least that one capacity that we have which is to change public policy then what have we got? And it's one of the reasons the subject of quotas keeps coming up too because if you have quotas and you mandate a certain number of women I mean however we may feel about it in a general sense it's worked in certain places and now what are women doing with the power once they have it? How are they using it too? Both bill peace but also prosperity for their sisters. To take it even more granular I was just thinking about one of the graduates from the 10,000 women program who told us this I think this is very typical but she had said that when her husband had found out that she was gonna be enrolled in this 10,000 women program he was not happy about it at all and that actually is part of the program which is to get the husbands comfortable with the fact that they're going to these classes and getting this networking and mentoring et cetera. So but once she started being successful in her business what she was right? She increased her employees by five I think she now has 25 temporary employees working for her et cetera. She started making some money right? So now he's like this isn't a bad hobby that you've got going on here right now she's got some income coming in she's able to pay for some expenses that they could never, things that could never afford and now she's getting some status even with her mother-in-law I mean things are really changing this woman's life. So as that's happening she wants to send her kids to school, her daughter's to school but her husband's like no way we're not sending them to school. She's like so she approached in a very intelligent way and she said listen I know I never had a son and that's the bane of my existence I know I'm a big disappointment but these girls what are we gonna do with them? If we keep them here they're just gonna be a hindrance to us but if we send them to school maybe they can contribute to the family business and he's like we need to send these girls to school. So that was like a huge but the economic shift in power is not a small thing. Those on the very granular level a little bit of shift in economic power goes a really long way and I was sort of making a joke before but it's absolutely true women had the right to sell Avon in this country before they had the right to vote and not that we don't want definitely wouldn't want to substitute selling products for voting but I do think actually another piece of the puzzle which is kind of interesting is actually the power of women generally in the world which is actually the power of consumption on some level that I think we overlook and I think that we have the ability to really influence more than we realize through both our voting patterns and then also our consumption patterns. Really excellent points. I want to open it up to the audience and begin to engage some of your questions. I have a few could just, yes Robin stand up and introduce yourself. There's a mic coming and if you can keep your comments brief to the point we'll have the panelists. Well thank you. I'm Robin Lerner. I work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for John Kerry and I've had correspondence with some of you and Anne-Marie and Kathleen, old friends and this is really great and there are so many things that I could comment on but I'm going to ask this question. I think it's mostly for Nick and actually you can probably all answer. So we have definitely been putting on the committee women's issues into the broader security. That's really, we had a hearing. It was excellent. We had well two men and two women. I almost had all men and I realized that's not really gender equitable but and we've definitely been trying to do that but one of the things we've talked about is this idea that the sex selective abortion and what you call gender side is creating sort of the, these effects of trafficking and these young men who can't get married and ultimately everybody wants to get married and have a family and so when you're on the ground and you're talking to people and you're talking to these men and these families it does that, do they see that? Do they see what's happening by having so many fewer women because it's creating so many further problems for themselves. I'm gonna take one more question and then we'll give it a minute to answer. Next question, right here please. Could you introduce yourself, sir? My name's Bruce Gelba. I used to be the director of the United States Information Agency in Washington and I'm spending a great deal of time especially focused on the Taliban and Afghanistan but it's not limited to that. The question really is that not one word except a passing word has been mentioned about the vital ingredient called religion in holding everything back in at least a large percentage of 1,300,000,000 people in the world and that has to do from everything I see and have experienced has to do with culture and the issue of culture which is terribly important in the lands that we are involved in. I wonder how this panel faces up to that. Wonderful question and I think these are very related so I'm going to ask the panelists to begin. Let me have a whack at that. When you first on the issue of sex ratios, one of the things that people just talk about obsessively in countries that do have these skewed ratios is how difficult it is for young men to get married and how incredibly frustrating this is. So at that level, it's a source of immense complaint but unfortunately that doesn't seem to translate to parents when they are thinking about a sex-selective abortion or when they're making healthcare decisions about classically if your son gets sick you take him to the doctor, if your daughter gets sick you fill her forehead and say well, let's see how you're doing tomorrow and every indication is that sex-selective abortion issue is going to get worse because as people get somewhat richer they get more access to ultrasound and it's in the richer states in India for example that tend to have the most skewed ratios so I think that in some of the world that is gonna get worse before it gets better and what that does in terms of the youth cohort the youth bulge cohort that I talked about earlier it's not just then young men 15 to 24 you worry about it's young men 15 to say 28 or whatever. On the culture side, you're absolutely right but I think that we sometimes psych ourselves out too much because the problem is culture and I think, I mean partly I can bet that Cheryl's Chinese American and her grandmother's feet were bound and footbinding was deeply embedded in Chinese culture as indeed third class status for women was and that changed remarkably quickly. I think that FGM is an interesting example of culture because it's one where I think international efforts against FGM really accomplished amazingly little. We changed laws, we held conferences, we did sort of global rallying and all that had negligible influence and some degree created a backlash. In the meantime though there have been some local groups most notably Tostan and Senegal but others and Ghana and Egypt that have been trying to work from within a society to bring about a change and because those groups aren't creating this sense of outsiders telling us what to do I think they've been far more effective and Senegal in particular is just on the verge of ending general cutting. So I think that that offers a clue about how we need to approach those kinds of issues. Really reframing and much more innovative in how we try to solve them. I just add on the culture piece because I was thinking not only of FGM where if you are working on the ground as some of us are and the messiah area with the women from the tribes. I mean there all you had to do is to make the economic argument to the fathers that their daughters were worth more if they were educated than the three cows they were going to cut them and then sell them to the elderly neighbor for. So we've seen that transformation happen in one generation where it is being wiped out but it has to happen on the ground with people who live in those cultures but I worry a little bit about our over respect for culture sometime because I mean in Congo there's a culture that has emerged and evolved that condones or allows to go forward the rape of hundreds of thousands of women and this is a systematic act of war and if it can happen there it can happen anywhere in the world and it has happened to other places as we know in Bosnia and other. So there's a certain we shouldn't get cowed by the well that's the culture. I mean okay that's not a culture that anybody who has human values of life and death want to live with and on religion I would offer one interesting thing that I've been noting and reading a lot about. Jimmy Carter who is a deeply religious man has been writing a lot lately about the need for the world's religion to begin fundamentally to rethink the way they see women. So if President Carter and other religious leaders around the world would really step forward as he's doing at the risk of losing his own church membership in Georgia by the way and make this statement and write the, that could begin to shift too because you're so right about it it being often an oppressive element. Yes I have a question right here in the front, thank you. Could you introduce yourself and stand up so that the audience can hear you? My name is Lisa Jonas and I'm a former federal prosecutor but I did want to say something about FMG. FGM, it is also an economic issue. I studied a fair amount about it and what I've heard from local tribeswomen who are the women who actually perform the mutilation they do it because they get money for it. So if you took some of the economics out of it or you gave them an alternative way to make money that might go a long way in stopping it. It's part of it. Putting them in 10,000 women for a crime. Right. Giving them another way to make a living. Right, the question I really had was, and this may just be my prosecutor background but I was at an event where Cheryl spoke and she told a story about a woman who was getting microloans from an organization and the woman was being beaten on by her husband and because she had no income and he beat her for years and then she had this little sewing business and she got a microloan and the sewing business grew and then she started to employ other people and she became one of the leaders of her tribe and she then said to her husband, well I need you to now transport the goods to other villages and he all of a sudden decided that she was worth something and became nicer. My question really was why would she employ him? Why didn't she just get rid of him? With that I'm going to ask for one more question and then we're going to have wrap up comments. One more question from the audience. Somebody who's, no? All right, please. Okay, please, right here. Sarah Covener, Pat you mentioned earlier that women are a majority of the Rwanda legislature. Almost. Yeah, well, close and it's very important. Always at 51, oh, it is, how about that, terrific. That's a very important fact but and you also mentioned that they adjoin the Congo. They are, I think they're known to be one of the biggest problems in the Congo with their own militias fighting. So where are the women in the Rwanda legislature? Well, that was really my question. I know they don't have absolute power but they have an enormous amount of it and it is a complicated story of minerals and trade and all other kinds of things but I think we should be a little cautious about celebrating the victories and the great things that are going on in Rwanda without also asking them to be held accountable for the role they are playing in the conflict right across their border. Yeah, I mean this sort of flows on from that but I think that often when one talks about these issues there's a tendency to really see the problem not only as kind of patriarchy but essentially as men and one of the things that strikes me is the degree to which women in so much of the world have internalized patriarchal and often fairly misogynistic values. If you ask people their views about wife beating the best predictor whether somebody is in favor or against wife beating is not whether they're male or female. It's their degree of education as whether they live in a city or a rural area and Saima, the woman you mentioned, I mean she would never dream of leaving her deadbeat of a husband and he's, and in fact her and her mother-in-law was infinitely worse. The mother-in-law was complaining to me about how it's kind of a problem now because husbands should beat their wives because Saima's earning more than her husband. It's hard for him to discipline her and this was presented to me as a problem. And I think that that also goes to the question about Rwanda and more broadly that there is no silver bullet if you, one of the things we tried to look at in the book was countries where women had been heads of state or heads of government and had there been an impact on female education or on maternal mortality. As far as we could tell there had been none, overall. There are some good examinables to the contrary but overall it's hard to see a correlation there. If you look at places where women have have been brought into society in South Asia, Sri Lanka might be a very good example of that. The country that has been most torn apart by conflict over the last generation or two. In the Arab world it'd be hard to find a country that where women had been brought into society and educated more than Lebanon. And again it's a country that has been at conflict for much of its modern history. So I think it seems to me that overall these trends hold and that there is strong evidence for them but there are counter examples everywhere in turns there is no silver bullet and I think it's important to try to change women's attitudes almost as much as to change men's. Excellent. I'm going to ask each of our panelists to wrap up with a bullet point, not a silver bullet. And just one recommendation moving forward. There's been so many brought forward in this panel. So I'm sorry that we can't go further but there is lunch waiting and there's much discussion I know among you to go forward. So if I could begin with Kim. I think it's hard to pick one for me but I think one thing I would say is I would echo the local approach. I think that it's really important to sort of center these problem solving in the local communities because each community has its own varying weighing interests and there's not one silver bullet as Nicholas said but if there was one silver bullet what I would think is that if we can figure out how to align interests properly and broaden the conversation but also broaden the incentives I think that's the best overarching if I can leave with one overarching thought is to be creative about aligning incentives. Very good. Thank you and I'll answer your question with a story about a recent experience I had in London when I was helping a group of Afghan women civil society leaders gate crash the London Conference on Security on January 28th where no women at all had been invited to speak from Afghanistan civil society or government. Government delegation had 63 people on it one woman at it at the very last moment and no women from civil society were invited until it was considerable lobbying efforts resulted in one person speaking very briefly three minutes exactly on women's perspective on security and of course this conference was where big decisions were being made about negotiating with the Taliban and that has implications for women's rights as you can well imagine. Now at a press conference prior to our gate crashing effort a journalist asked one of the Afghan women civil society leaders, isn't it going against the grain to be promoting women's rights right now in Afghanistan to come back to your question on religion and culture Mr. Gelb, isn't it going against the grain aren't we actually making things worse aren't we exacerbating the conflict by working on women's rights? And this view signaled I think a discourse shift that I picked up all over in relation to the Afghanistan conflict a recently appointed very senior NATO official at the same conference at a press meeting said that when asked about women's rights he said women's rights are a development issue they're not a security issue. And I thought that was very interesting there's this discourse shift saying pushing women and women's rights out of the picture these are postponed until we've got stabilization not seeing this as key to stability and to peace. It's extremely worrying because at the time of the invasion in 2001 the positive effects for women's rights were heralded and indeed used as a humanitarian justification for the action and I heard this described I know I'm running over time very briefly on a BBC quiz show brilliantly as something we can be proud of it's collateral feminism. And I thought this is very interesting collateral feminism it's good that we're proud of that but why aren't we making this command feminism why isn't command feminism part of our actions in foreign policy. And I think that that's the recommendation I would make although it's much less practical than yours and harder to realize but I'd like to see command feminism on the part of the UN and I'm starting to see it on the part of American foreign policy with Hillary Clinton in charge of foreign policy and making this a key part of what she understands to be foreign policy and security. Thank you so much. Well I want to be in that army. I'm signing up right now command feminism. Well I would just add that just as Nick and Sheryl's book reframed the whole thing around women's rights as human rights but also beyond the challenges to the barriers to the opportunities if we would only seize them. And it's clear that when it comes we can't say naively elect a woman president of every country or put more than 50% representation and the world would change we'll have peace and prosperity tomorrow. Of course we won't it's not that simple but it is never going to happen until women themselves embrace our power own it understand it as something that can be uniquely and distinctly in my opinion defined as different from what men bring to the table and that's the only way that shared power is going to result anyway and I think it's the only way that we will have peace and prosperity. My bullet would be see the guy at the table he brings bullets. My bullet would be education. Nothing works perfectly foreign interventions are harder helping people is harder than it looks but I do think that education gets more bang for the buck than any other intervention one can find and that in particular there's pretty good evidence that girls education gets even more bang for the buck for a few reasons. One is the gap right now between boys and girls education so that it's simply bringing them up to the to the level of boys brings more benefits. Second impact on birth rates that if you educate a boy you'll have fewer children but it's a much more profound effect when you educate a girl. Another has to do with the fact that when you educate people they earn more income and pretty good evidence that women with those higher earnings will spend money more on their children while men will spend money more on beer. And and women and women that's very true. So you know and it just it really seemed to me such a missed opportunity you know in Afghanistan for example since Afghanistan has mentioned several times that as we struggle along four solutions to try to bring greater security to Afghanistan which obviously is incredibly difficult task and there's no quick fix but for the cost of one US soldier in Afghanistan for one year when it can open approximately 20 schools that's essentially the trade-off and I think there's pretty good evidence that 20 schools really do bring about change and there have been efforts to work with the Taliban in some areas to open these schools and you know it's difficult and the Taliban insists that the school the textbooks that have to be Pakistani ones without pictures of Muhammad Karzai and this kind of thing but one can do it and I think the girls education in particular has a transformative effect on societies. Well on that note talking about transformation I think this has been a transformative panel and in very brief time have covered some of the most difficult issues and really brought forward some possibilities and solutions so I want to thank, I'll ask the audience to join me in thanking the panel.