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Who's Really Failing Afghan Women?

by Patricia Lee Sharpe

The U.S. has loaded many missions onto its agenda in Afghanistan, but the original mission has long since been accomplished. Bin Laden is dead. His Al Qaeda is no longer a threat to the U.S.

Can it be said that ambitious Al Qaeda clones don’t exist here and there? That fragments of I.S.I.S aren’t worrisome? That the Afghan Taliban are not a powerful force? Emphatically no. Islam almost everywhere is at war with itself. Some say that civil war will break out if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan. They’re wrong. Civil war has been raging for years. Robotic mission creep entangled the U.S. in a battle not ours to win or lose.

Now that the anything-but-impulsive Biden White House seems resolute about withdrawal, Americans are under attack for abandoning women to a fate they have no desire for. Let’s explore that accusation.

To the extent that the war in Afghanistan has been a war about religion as well as power, it has been about women. Their education. Their garb.  Their freedom to do simple things like shopping without a male escort. Their slow progress toward acceptance as fully enabled human beings.

The Taliban Haven’t Changed

No Taliban statement to date has given the least hope that the Taliban will ever govern less dogmatically than they did at the time of the Twin Towers debacle twenty years ago. If the Taliban are back in charge, purdah in its most extreme form will be back in style.

While losing fighters and ceding terrain here and there, the Taliban as a force have never been defeated. Recruiting new fighters, clawing back territory, they rebound. Moreover, there has never been a time when they have been unable to wreak havoc even in Kabul, where a U.S. supported government is supposedly in control. By support I don’t mean approbation alone. I mean American (and allied) troops propping it up under the guise of turning its army into a force able to whip the Taliban on its own. Thanks to this formidable foreign force many Afghan women have been able to live the relatively unconstricted lives they enjoyed (check out the pix in the archives) before the advent of the Taliban. That life style is once again in jeopardy.

Did We Fail?

Twenty years have passed, but the Afghan army as it operates today is still incapable of holding the fort against relentless Taliban offensives. Does this mean that the foreign trainers have failed? Yes, but they have failed in this way: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Unless it’s thirsty.

In other words, you can equip and drill an army all you want, but the troops won’t fight with the necessary commitment unless there’s an objective they earnestly espouse and a leadership they respect. We’re talking about motivation. The most brilliant American instructors can’t provide a hunger for victory. Afghans fight ferociously and effectively for the Taliban. Their cousins in the Afghan army are a flabby force at best. If Afghan soldiers cared as passionately about preserving the non-Taliban way of life as the Taliban care about enforcing their own interpretation of Sharia, they’d need little or no help from outside. (Competitive pay might help.)

And the Women?

In short, Americans and their allies can’t save Afghan women from the indifference (or conniving) of their own fathers, brothers and uncles, the ineptitude and corruption of their own government and the time-honored constrictions of their own culture.

Time and time again, even in Kabul, professional women have been assassinated. Judges. Journalists. Parliamentarians. Admirable women all. And how has the U.S. funded Afghan government, whose current President is the U.S.-educated Ashraf Ghani, reacted? The culprits are never caught. Very few Afghan men on either side of the Afghan civil war are committed to full equality for Afghan women or to the social changes that would make Afghan women, prominent or otherwise, safe from religiously endorsed patriarchal violence.

Foreigners seldom succeed in regime-changing operations. Cultural change is even more resistant to outside influence. Thorough-going American control might protect ambitious, educated, strong-minded Afghan women (and gregarious housewives) from their own culture. That’s called colonialism. It’s not acceptable in this day and age. Nor has it ever been accepted in Afghanistan. I’m a woman. It hurts me to say this, but it’s time for the U.S. military to leave Afghans to regulate themselves.

It’s the Process, Stupid

By Patricia L. Sharpe

Esteemed Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: as you prepare for this highly sensitive hearing, please try to remember that justice requires a fair process as much as an examination of facts. Whatever the outcome of your inquiry, you will suffer in the court of public opinion if you are not seen to conduct a thorough, fair-minded investigation into the validity of the charges against a Supreme Court nominee.  The reputation of the court will also be compromised.

He said, She said

I do not know what happened on that terrible night so many years ago when a bunch of teens seem to have drank too much at a house party. I do not know if we will ever know for sure, even if both parties testify before a Senate committee next week, even if witnesses are called.  Why?  For one thing, there is no indication that the Republican members of the Judiciary committee intend to conduct themselves more honorably than they did in the Anita Hill case.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh's supporters, including the President, accuse the woman of keeping silence too long for credibility. Mr. Trump, who has plopped himself heavily on the scales of justice, needs to find other subjects to tweet about.  It is now up to the Senate to  evaluate his nominee's professional and personal qualifications.  Nevertheless, the President has demanded a police report as proof that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's was assaulted. 

To report or Not to Report

As Mr. Trump would have learned, had he cared to do a little research, massive accumulations of data prove that young women, even today, are unlikely to tell any adult that they have suffered a violent sexual assault.  The younger they are  the less likely they’ll speak up, even to their mothers.  Thirty years ago the zeitgeist always favored the alleged attacker over the alleged victim.  The victim got the blame and the shame, and trying to report a rape in those days was almost as painful as the rape itself.  To a marginally lesser extent, it still is. Most rapes go unreported. 

Non-reporting is not evidence of non-rape.

Down Memory Lane

Those who wish to discredit Dr. Ford also cite memory problems. Incomplete recall. Inconsistency. Vagueness.  Memory issues are vexing, but unsurprising.  They also do not prove that the charges are fabricated.

In fact, a similar criticism might be directed at the accused. As strongly and perhaps sincerely as he maintains his innocence, isn’t it possible that he has suppressed his role in the attack? Allegedly he was drunk.  Inebriation isn’t conducive to accurate, complete memory. In fact, the whole edifice of his current self-respect may very well rest on self-serving forgetfulness.

Peas in a Pod

We have here a politically-fraught tragedy involving two highly respected, middle-aged professionals. Let me repeat that: two highly respected professionals, two people with family members who love them and colleagues who trust them. By failing to acknowledge this equivalence between accuser and accused, the President and his allies have done their best to influence public opinion in Kavanaugh's favor, while demeaning the woman who dares to complain.  Classic misogyny.

The cruel and unfair process to which Anita Hill was subjected has not been forgotten. Oddly enough, there is little indication that the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, some of whom participated in the "lynching" of Anita Hill, are inclined to be any more judicious this time around.

They should think again. Accused and accuser must be treated with equal respect.  Charges deserve  thorough, objective  investigation.  In short, the process as such is critical, whatever the outcome. If justice continues to be an irrelevant consideration for the majority on the Judiciary Committee,  the looming 2018 midterm elections are likely to tilt decisively toward Democrats.

Please Read a Weightier "Open Letter" from the Yale Law Faculty to the Judiciary Committee

 

As the Senate Judiciary Committee debates Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, we write as faculty members of Yale Law School, from which Judge Kavanaugh graduated, to urge that the Senate conduct a fair and deliberate confirmation process. With so much at stake for the Supreme Court and the nation, we are concerned about a rush to judgment that threatens both the integrity of the process and the public’s confidence in the Court.

Where, as here, a sexual assault has been alleged against an individual nominated for a lifetime appointment in a position of public trust, a partisan hearing alone cannot be the forum to determine the truth of the matter. Allegations of sexual assault require a neutral factfinder and an investigation that can ascertain facts fairly.  Those at the FBI or others tasked with such an investigation must have adequate time to investigate facts. Fair process requires evidence from all parties with direct knowledge and consultation of experts when evaluating such evidence. In subsequent hearings, all of those who testify, and particularly women testifying about sexual assault, must be treated with respect.

The confirmation process must always be conducted, and appointments made, in a manner that gives Americans reason to trust the Supreme Court.  Some questions are so fundamental to judicial integrity that the Senate cannot rush past them without undermining the public’s confidence in the Court. This is particularly so for an appointment that will yield a deciding vote on women’s rights and myriad other questions of immense consequence in American lives.
 

 

 

 

To Touch or Not to Touch

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I touched a man last week. A strange young man, no less. He’d asked a good question after a lecture.   I delivered my compliment while laying my hand on a jacketed shoulder, after which I went into apology mode: “Sorry,"  I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, “but I can’t do it to you.”

My response? “Yes, you can.”  When I’ve done a great job, definitely give me a pat on the shoulder.  Or even a (not too hard) slap on the back.

And when mixed-gender teammates or committee members celebrate an unexpected victory, let them link arms in solidarity! What’s more natural?  Go, team!  Let them do a little cancan, too.

But, all you scumbags at a social event, don’t insinuate your arm around my waist or play kneesies under the table or stare pop-eyed at my chest when I’m trying to talk to you, although I usually minimize the latter by minimizing cleavage, the result of an amusing experiment I devised a few years ago. I baited the hook with a yumyum plunging neckline. Suddenly guys who’d ignored me before were buying me drinks. It was a hoot! It was also very boring.

Wolf whistles never frightened or flattered me, and it didn’t take me long to understand that the merest hint of a loutish ogle is nothing but diminishment. The so-called compliment that interrupts a job review, for example. What a beautiful smile you have! Such gorgeous blue eyes! Under that shower of sweet irrelevancies, I sensed immediately that I was no longer a hot prospect for a well paid professional position. I was bed bait, a one dimensional sex object. Did I call out the interviewer? Not then. But I would today.

The distance between leering and the look of love needs light years for measurement.

A hug is not a hug either. Take the exuberant bear hug of long lost friends. See the eyes lit up!  Hear the exuberant cries! This embrace bears absolutely no relation to the repellent office power grab that lasts too long and has the woman wondering how on earth she’ll escape without creating a scene—or losing a job. The hot flab under the suit! The sandpaper jowls! The beard tickle. Ugh!

There’s an easy solution to the abusive hug scenario. Men, for the most part, shake hands in public. Let’s jettison the air kisses for professional women at business meetings. Ditto the all-encompassing arm wrap from male acquaintances encountered at a party.   Trust to a warm firm handshake lit up by a delighted-to-see-or-meet-you smile.

Still, there are plenty of moments that demand physical closeness. When the need’s for comfort and a shoulder to cry on, who worries about male or female? And what kind of idiot rebuffs a gentle, consoling pat on the hand that comes from the “wrong” sex? All of us need generous doses of physical closeness, and anyone with a functioning brain knows the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching. So let’s not go overboard. Let’s not repel the intimacy we need in the course of insulating ourselves from predation.

Males especially need to face the fact that, for lo! these eons of impunity, they have pretended not to notice their colleagues’ abusive behavior. Defying the wolf pack may be tough on those who like being one of the boys, but it’s time for men to speak out. Hey, bro, that’s not the way to go!

As for those still addicted to grabbing pussy and pinching bottoms, the days when the hottie could be trusted to grin-and-bear-it are coming to an end. Expect to see hands slapped away. Expect audible protests. Expect targets to be increasingly immune to character assassination. Expect lost jobs and stained reputations. Not the lady’s.

I once got painfully pinched during a festival in Lahore, Pakistan. Almost automatically, I turned, protested in Urdu and punched the jerk,  striking a blow not only for myself, but for all Western women in Pakistan: we were universally disrespected as “loose.” After that came a moment of terror. The other men in the crowd—how would they behave?

Like gentlemen, as it turned out. They apologized to me. They turned on my molester.

Would I have received the same sympathy from American men? More likely, I’d have been advised to suck it up. Or, worse, been told to take it as a compliment.

Meanwhile, according to Vice President Pence and others of his religious ilk, the solution to the problem of sexual harassment and abuse at work is to segregate men from women, whether to prevent women from being mauled and or—the real motive, I suspect—to protect men from “false” charges. That system might work for the beneficiaries of patriarchy, but it would cripple the ability of women to compete in a “man’s world.”

What’s to be done? For the time being, since too many males in our society have been raised to manhandle any female they can get their paws on, there’s safety in numbers. Public shaming. Public blaming. Above all, swelling the “me-too,” chorus. Bill Clinton toughed it out. Donald Trump became President. Roy Moore may or may not win his election, but he will never be sworn into the Senate. That’s progress.

About Those Tea Parties

Patricia Lee Sharpe

(A review article based on Jane Austen, The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly)

Having popped into the English Department office to register for some courses I hoped to take, I was chatting with the Chairman’s secretary when the Big Man himself burst out of his sanctum. He was waving a fistful of papers, and he was monumentally annoyed.

Only women had registered for his seminar, he grumbled. “It’s going to be a god-damned tea party!” He saw me then, but he didn’t blush.

The scene was funny and infuriating—and typical. Talk about micro aggressions!

No, it wasn’t easy to be a female graduate student in those days, not even in the gyno-ghetto of the humanities. We were, for instance, supposed to admire Ernest Hemingway the macho man as well as his muscular prose, and woe betide us if we revealed that his female characters weren’t real women so much as masturbatory phantasms. And so on. The male view was still the unchallenged norm.

Not So Trivial Pursuits

Nor did the male establishment see much to admire in the works of that reclusive weirdo poet Emily Dickinson (avoid the dreadful new movie about her) let alone the novels of Jane Austin, spinster. Austen did have a wicked way with syntax, they conceded, and her romantic plots generated blockbuster movies decade after decade, but really! Tea parties. Decorous balls. Gossip. Fluttery mothers worried about daughters making a good marriage, or a bad marriage or, worst of all, no marriage at all, which actually was no trivial matter.

Sociologist

And there’s our entry! Meet Jane Austen, sociologist, ruthlessly anatomizing her patriarchal, class-ridden society, its norms and its horrible consequences, especially for women, though younger sons had a pretty tough time, too. Surviving in the social jungle was no picnic, if you weren’t rich, landed, aristocratic and first born. As for females, an unmarried woman was pitiable, although she could own property, while a woman with a man was powerless because hubby got all her property. So life for women was lose-lose, although misery with money was obviously preferable to being poor and slammed around. Austen did a thorough job of showing the fragility of life for the middle and lower classes, too.

Economist

Which brings us to Jane Austen, the economist, sufficiently expert in nuances of property acquisition and management to show up our Trumps and Kushners for the bounders they are, the one a tasteless bling builder, the other a ruthless slum lord. In fact, Austen’s books should probably be read along with tomes like The Wealth of Nations, to understand how the economic system worked at the day-to-day level: how wealth was accumulated, increased, preserved and used to personal advantage as the industrial world was dawning. The novel Emma is like a treatise on the effects of the enclosure acts on British society, according to Kelly. After you’ve read Kelly’s study, Mr. Knightly will never seem so attractive again. As for the wholly admirable Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, having made his money in business, he’s no gentleman—which doesn’t discredit him in Austen’s eyes. She conveys to us very clearly the snobbery, pretension and viciousness of the class system of her day.

Political Scientist

Men! How could so many of them have failed to perceive the extent to which Jane Austen’s novels hinge on the vulnerabilities of England during the Napoleonic Wars? Fears of a French invasion caused defensive military units to be quartered around the country. The resulting inundation of small towns by unprincipled young officers created havoc in local society, as in Pride and Prejudice, where captains and commodores become prime dinner guests and war talk dominates dinner discussions. Kelly reveals to us a novelist wholly aware that England has become a thoroughly militarized society whose rural verities are being challenged by colonial complications and international anxieties.

Theologian

Speaking of colonial complications, although England’s evangelical Christians were at the forefront of nineteenth century efforts to abolish slavery, the Anglican establishment wasn’t so noble, evidently. Wealth derived from the slave-based sugar islands in the Caribbean underpinned the fortunes of the Church and much of the upper class. According to Kelly’s analysis, Austen’s Mansfield Park is virtually a tract on crafty anti-abolitionism. What’s more, although Austen’s novels abound in curates and other ecclesiastical notables, most of them are slimy, opportunistic hypocrites. Think of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Within the whole of Austen’s oeuvre, Kelly notes, there is only one admirable cleric, and that a merely mentioned character in Sense and Sensibility. Was Austen’s condemnation of the whole class accidental? Probably not. She was the daughter of a clergyman.

While warming up to her subject in Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Helena Kelly writes: “We’re perfectly willing to accept that writers like Wordsworth were fully engaged with everything that was happening and to find the references in their work....But we haven’t been willing to do it with Jane’s work.”

Many of us have sensed the need for a more penetrating look at Jane Austen’s portrait of her times. Helena Kelly has done the analysis. Give Austen’s novels another read. See how much the sexy movies have edited out.

(Note: Kelly should have referred to her subject as "Austen," not "Jane.")

Minnie: Puccini's Girl of the Golden West

By Patricia H Kushlis

The Santa Fe Opera’s production of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West (La Fanciulla Del West) opened the 41st season July 1 with Patricia Racette starring as Minnie. Although Giacomo Puccini considered it his best opera, the reviews at the time were mixed.  He composed the opera between 1907 and 1910 and based it on a popular play by American David Belasco which Puccini had seen in New York.

The play and the opera were set in a gold mining camp in 1849 in the “Cloudy Mountains” apocryphally named for California’s Sierra-Nevadas.  Minnie was the keeper of the camp’s Polka Saloon yet supposedly as pure as the driven snow and as pious as Jesus.  In the opera, but not the play, she was portrayed as a teacher who taught the supposedly illiterate miners not only how to read but also good old fashioned redemption through Bible verses.   Her sole rival was Nina Micheltorena, a prostitute from Cachuca who ran the local brothel.  Nina, however, never appears on or off stage, but we hear plenty about her nevertheless.  (Photo left: Patricia Racette as Minnie, (c) Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera)

The reviews suggest that The Girl of the Golden West was basically ahead of its time perhaps most importantly musically.   The major melodies are assigned to the orchestra and they, unlike in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and La Boheme, are also often fragmented, presented in slivers and not necessarily developed beyond the initial phrase or phrases.  Two of the three major themes at least are distinctly American folk but neither have California roots.    Furthermore, Minnie’s theme is never sung by Minnie but played by the orchestra during her various entrances as well as sung by her lover (Johnson/Ramerrez) near the opera’s conclusion.

Yet if you think of the period in which this opera was written and that Puccini was influenced by Richard Wagner, Debussy and Puccini's contemporary Richard Strauss, Puccini composed The Girl of the Golden West during a time of tremendous artistic and social flux, innovation and impending international turmoil and disintegration.  This had been set off by incompetent political leaders harnessing  the immense physical power of the industrial revolution.  From Russian composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, Spain's early Pablo Picasso, the Russian Avant Garde movement and the soon to come tragedy of World War I which tore Europe and the Middle East apart, it’s easier to understand the context of Puccini’s innovations in this ahead-of-its-time opera.

Art is not created in a vacuum.

Puccini had already broken ground by featuring stories about everyday people so The Girl of the Golden West follows in the same vein but, despite its happy ending, it's the musical fragmentation that most foreshadows the disturbing future.  His musical innovations also include use of the whole tone scale as well as the incorporation of a Zuni (New Mexican, not California Native American tribe, located 150 miles west of Albuquerque) melody as one of its three main themes.    A second melodic fragment and leitmotiv is the theme of the African-American dance known as “The Cakewalk” which was wildly popular throughout the US at the time Puccini was composing the opera.

Much is made of the redemption concept but in this opera, that really pertains exclusively to men.  Either women are apparently not redeemable – as in the case of the never-seen-or-heard Nina - or didn’t need redeeming, as Minnie.

But what seems to be shorted in reviews of the time and has reverberated in some later ones too is the importance and centrality of women in America’s settlement of the West.   Minnie’s personification of the independent, take-no-prisoners Western woman is, I would argue, the real theme of this opera.  Not only did she carry a gun and knew how to use it, (see photo right (c)Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera 2016) but she also owned property - in her case the Polka and her cabin in the woods – unlike women in the US and elsewhere yet to obtain even the basic right of property ownership let alone the vote. 

The letters home and journals that women who took part in the Western migration kept religiously or otherwise detailing their experiences demonstrate this unequivocally. 

Coupling Today in America: Who’s Making It (with Whom)

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Lu marries Tham, but Chen marries Healy. Flannagan marries Kennedy, but Roberts marries Maheshwari.

So the U.S. is still a melting pot, ethnically.

But wait: birds of a feather—East Asian as well as Irish—are definitely flocking together.

Both, obviously, are true, from the evidence of the matrimonial announcements published on May 15th in the New York Times. Actually there were only 20 items, but they tell a powerful story about who’s making it—and who’s not, colorfully confirming more abstract analyses.

First the photos: remember the time not so long ago when you did a double take at the first couples photos? Portraits of bride and groom in mufti, that is, instead of a generic Barbie doll topped with a veil, as if a wedding were a solo performance. And then something else happened: a same sex marriage was celebrated pictorially in the newspaper of record. Imagine the editorial discussions preceding the breaking of this barrier a few years ago, especially since there are still some bakers, professedly Christian, who balk at making a wedding cake for a non-heterosexual couple? Two brides on top. Awesome! Anyone who finds love is to be congratulated—and envied.  This batch of matrimonials includes same sex partnerships of the male and female ilk as well as traditional couples.

So who performed the marriages that got announced on May 15th—and where did the couples choose to get married? Once again, it looks as if diversity thrives. Rabbis. Episcopal officiants (one of them a woman). A Greek Orthodox priest. A Lutheran minister and a pastor from the United Church of Christ. A Hindu priest. A judge. Several Universal Life ministers, which seems to be a frequent recourse for secular people with a spiritual nature and a taste for ritual—or perhaps with warring families of different faiths. Conclusion: freedom of (and from) religion is alive and well in America, despite the absence of Muslims in this sample, which I’d be inclined to attribute, not to snobbery or bigotry, but to the distribution of wealth and the related Times subscription base, about which more below.

The where of the weddings is roughly predictable from the affiliation of the officiants. Churches, including a cathedral. Synagogues. Resort and event venues. A judge’s chambers. A couple of country clubs, including the not so countrified and suddenly salient Mar-a-Lago.

Some brides kept their names, others didn’t, at a ratio of somewhat less than two of the former to one of the latter. Women who kept their own names looked to be very successful professionally, but among those who chose the Mrs. degree, there wasn’t a single bride who seemed to be a candidate for traditionally dependent housewifery. Also interesting: last names gave no clue as to who’d be changing and who’d be keeping her name.

So, well established professionals are marrying professionals, which tends to boost household income well into the six figures of comfortable, upper middle class life. What’s more, most of the parents of this cohort of the newly married , that's mothers as well as fathers, also appear to be successful managers or professionals, which makes for strong class continuity even as ethnicity fades in importance. If successful men these days are universally marrying their female peers, an important upward mobility ladder for disadvantaged young women has vanished. And so these apparently innocent matrimonials confirm a trend: the U.S. is becoming an ever more sharply differentiated class society, with an increasing income gap between upper and lower classes.

Meaning: our story darkens. The people who wished to publicize their happiness in the NYT belong to a financially privileged class, some of whom may even be able to buy those multi million dollar condos advertised every Sunday, which may be one reason why, during my occasional perusing of Times matrimonials, I’ve never encountered a Muslim marriage (which doesn't mean there haven't been any). It’s said that Muslims have been more fully assimilated in the U.S. than in other Western countries, but their visible presence at high income, leadership levels remains minuscule. In some such cases, of course, photos of the bride would be taboo, which isn’t necessarily a disqualifier. Most but not all NYT announcements are accompanied by pictures—and surely it would be possible to accommodate a photo of groom only, if it came to that.

What’s more, and far more distressing, as some readers may already have discerned, there were no Latinos or Black Americans (not couples, not even one side of a partnership) among the matrimonial announcements on May 15th. Given U.S. demographics, these absences testify to the lack of educational and economic opportunity faced by a huge proportion of the current U.S. population. The massively disadvantaged don’t have anything to crow about in the pages of the NYT.

All in all, then, here’s the good news from Sunday May 15th: Women have a solid toehold on the professional world, and they aren’t giving it up. Ethnicity is of indifferent importance when it comes to personal happiness. A wildly variegated freedom of religion thrives. But there’s truly bad news, too. It’s conveyed by omission. Blacks, Latinos and Muslims aren’t making it.

And, at last! here’s the dope you unhappy singles have been slavering for: where the lovers met. I found a mix of the old and the new. Several couples found one another through OKCupid.com or Match.com. But more were brought together by friends or met in college. And two pairs of future spouses met in a bar.

There is, evidently, no one path to true love.

 

More than undiplomatic moments: State's diversity record remains behind a hard line

By Patricia H Kushlis

Madeleine Albright wrote in “My Undiplomatic Moment,” a commentary published in The New York Times on February 13, 2016, that she had said at a Clinton rally in New Hampshire “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” She explained that that she had first used the phrase nearly 25 years earlier when she was US Ambassador to the UN. She almost seemed surprised that her most recent iteration had gone viral on social media, not been received as intended and more or less regretted saying it.

I’d like to know, however, just how helpful she (1997-2001), Hillary (2009-2013) or, for that matter, Condoleezza Rice (2005-2009) were when they were Secretaries of State to women in the career Foreign Service. Albright, Rice and Clinton, after all, occupied the lofty position for a combined total of 12 years since Albright assumed it as our first female Secretary in 1997. Verbally advocating women’s rights is nice, but actually righting a long standing injustice in one’s own department is another.

What did any of them do to help career Foreign Service women at State?

I haven’t observed that any of them can point to real progress in improving gender or racial equality while running the State Department. As I previously wrote in several WV posts beginning in 2011, the situation in terms of gender and minorities at the State Department has remained so unequal that State’s statistics on promotion by gender and race (which had once upon a time been made publicly available) are being kept behind a “hard line” under an SBU (an administrative classification) designation: Year after year after year.

As I noted in “Still a Man’s World? Foggy Bottom’s Bohemian Grove” on July 22, 2011, “the paucity of gender based promotion data over the past decade in State’s official magazine has been palpable.” This was well into Hillary’s term as Secretary. In a 2014 video entitled “In Search of Diversity,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, then Director General of the Foreign Service, was refreshingly frank about the problem stating that “At the mid-levels and senior levels the numbers are not there.”

Nothing has changed since then: I understand that the data for 2015 is no exception.

Yet every other department in the federal government has complied with the federal law for years. Why are OPM (Office of Personnel Management) and the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) required by law to report on how federal agencies are complying with EEO regulations and mandates yet the State Department has either exempted itself or been exempted from reporting EEO numbers for the Foreign Service?

I understand that potential bills have been discussed this session in the US Senate and House to force State to make the statistics public – but whether these bills will ever become law is another story. In any event, they seem redundant to me – shouldn’t State just be made to comply with existing law by its Secretary? Shouldn’t the Secretary of State simply order State’s Office of Civil Rights, whose Director reports directly to the Secretary, to comply with the law and publicly release the stats? Isn’t that all it would take? It’s not as if releasing aggregate numbers would present either a security or a privacy risk.

Gender Mainstreaming Assessment?  What Is That?

I’d also like to know why the State Department has just “launched” (its term, not mine) a bizarre “Gender Mainstreaming Assessment” which may or may not be designed to assess gender equality and the status of women in other countries. Or is it to assess the promotion of gender equality and status of women in American missions in the US and overseas? Hard to say – the announcement is so garbled. Nevertheless, rather than have State’s own staff produce this assessment which is what should happen, contracts have been let to Dynamo Technologies and Blue Compass: two firms which appear to have scant, if any, qualifications for the task at hand.

Previous WV posts on gender and minorities issues:

The Foreign Service Still Clueless about the Face of America, December 2014.

What's the Big Secret with State's Diversity Statistics and Why, August 2014.

State's Female Proof Glass Ceiling Breaking Into the Good Old Boys Diplomatic Club Is Still Hard to Do, June 2014.

Still a Man's World: Foggy Bottom's Bohemian Grove, July 2011.

For other State Department Human Resources related WV posts see:  The Troubled State of State.

 

 

The Foreign Service: Still Clueless About the Face of America

By Patricia H Kushlis

It’s been nearly four months since we asked the State Department to grant open and public access to its statistics - broken down by gender and race - regarding promotions in the Foreign Service in “What's the big secret with the State Department's diversity statistics and why"?

A similar question was posed by Diplopundit at about the same time:  “Foreign Service 2013 Promotion Results — Gender, Ethnicity, Race Stats Still Behind the Great Firewall” August 18, 2014.

We found it puzzling that both OPM (the Office of Personnel Management) and the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) are required by law to report on how federal agencies are complying with EEO regulations and mandates, yet the State Department has either exempted itself or been exempted from reporting EEO numbers for the Foreign Service.  Nevertheless, neither the reasons for the secretiveness nor the statistics in question have been revealed publicly. 

Hope Springs Eternal?

We continue to await word from State Human Resources (HR) and the Office of Civil Rights (S/OCR) as to what the numbers are and why they have been kept hush-hush for years on end. 

In the meantime, however, we ran across this presentation about the Foreign Service on PBS’s show To The Contrary:  “The Foreign Service: In Search of Diversity.” November 14, 2014. 

If you have not seen it, this video is well worth watching.

It is about 25 minutes long and details efforts, primarily in recruitment, that the State Department is making to attract a more diverse workforce; one that reflects, as former Director General Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield put it in an interview on the program, “the face of America.”

What struck us about the video, however, is that while efforts to recruit women and minorities have been strengthened, there is no visible progress within the State Department to mentor, retain, and ultimately promote women and minorities into leadership positions.

Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield is refreshingly frank about these shortcomings, stating at various times that “[the Foreign Service] has a retention issue,” “At the mid-levels and senior levels the numbers are not there,” and “[the Foreign Service] must do a better job mentoring [women and minorities].”

We agree.

But would the Department please tell us how it intends to rectify the situation when officials in leadership positions continue to hide the statistics, why this glaring shortcoming wasn’t addressed years before and why officers – like Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield – who have the authority to implement the needed changes haven’t done so?  Lamentations - on or off camera - are not enough.