In this Women’s History Month edition of Wilson Center NOW, Women’s Leadership: Efforts to Close the Gender Gap, John Milewski, Moderator of the Wilson Center NOW series, interviews Sarah Barnes, Project Director for the Wilson Center’s Maternal Health Initiative, and Samantha Karlin, Founder and CEO of Empower Global, a gender consulting firm that works with organizations to help them better recruit, retain, and advance women. They discuss feminist leadership, women in the think tank space, and the work remaining to achieve gender equality. The 2023 Women’s History Month theme is Women Who Tell Our Stories.

Selected Quotes:

Sarah Barnes on Women’s History Month and women as experts in think tanks:

Women who tell their own stories and the women who tell other women’s stories are really worth celebrating this month. At the Maternal Health Initiative, we challenge ourselves to find people who can tell their own stories, who can share that lived experience because we’ve found that that’s what really helps to move the needle on gender equality and women’s health issues. We’ve found that the personalized stories help to motivate change-makers.

Historically, women have not been seen as the experts and it’s taken a lot of effort from a lot of people—a lot of women’s stories—to help really move forward on this issue in the think tank space.

Some tangible things that men can do [as allies] are stop interrupting women when they’re speaking and as a man in the room, if you see another man take credit for something that a woman just said, be able to stand up and say, “actually you know what, Samantha just made that point.”

Samantha Karlin on what led her to work on women’s leadership:

I realized most books about women’s leadership were actually about “How do women get to the top?” but they weren’t actually about leading, which was partially because there weren’t as many women leaders.  But now we look at people like Jacinda Ardern, who unfortunately is not going to take up another term, and how she’s leading.  We see Finland and Estonia – all these millennial women leaders who are reshaping what we think of as the traditional leader, the traditional politician.

Feminist leadership prescribes to a set of values which are about triple bottom lines: taking care of people, gender equality, ending gender-based violence, diversity, transnational cooperation, and peace. It’s a type of leadership that’s not about ‘women are better than men,’ it’s really not that at all—it’s prescribing to a set of quite idealistic and very human-centric values about how do you treat people and how do we create policies again and create a world where people are free from harm and can reach their full potential.

In 2022, the Global Gender Gap has been closed by 68.1 percent. However in 2020 the gender gap was set to close in 100 years and in 2022 it’s set to close in 132 years. The pandemic really set us back and it has really shown a light how much caretaking women do that is unpaid care work and that work isn’t factored into the global economy.

I think one thing that’s been a problem in the U.S. is that it’s mostly women fighting the women’s fight—we don’t have a lot of intersection between movements.