There are Three (Familiar) Sheriffs in Town

“Every story is about class, race or gender. This one is about gender.”

And so began Monday’s event “The Women Sheriffs of Wall Street” at Harvard’s Memorial Church. Hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, current Director of the Project on Public Narrative at Harvard, the discussion included former FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair, former SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro and United States Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Suskind started the session with a brief history lesson in American economics, starting in the 1970s, whose hardships he described as a bruise to the country’s ego. Shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan declared that it was morning in America and ushered in an era of deregulation in an attempt to create confidence in the American economy, whether it was earned, manufactured or willed into the public consciousness. Suskind argued that 2007 was the pinnacle of this trajectory and saw the coming together of two disparate trends: (1) the male-dominated finance industry, which was driving the economy and culture and (2) female regulators, namely, the ones with whom he was sharing a stage, gaining power.

It’s been five years since TIME Magazine baptized these three women as the “New Sheriffs of Wall Street.” Since then, Warren has risen from Harvard Law professor and chief architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the United States Senate and brought financial reform and consumer protection to the national spotlight.

Sheila Bair, who served as Chairwoman of the FDIC from 2006-2011, was a bank teller early in life because her Philosophy degree couldn't get her any another job. Bair said that growing up in rural southeast Kansas kept her grounded in everyday people’s struggles, and she credits her philosophy background with forming her ethics, solidifying her dedication to fight for people, not banks. A self-described Populist Republican, Bair was a political appointee under several administrations and ran an unsuccessful Congressional bid in her native Kansas in 1990. 

2010 TIME Magazine Cover

Mary Schapiro, who served as the 29th Chairperson of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said she “always believed that government was a force for good,” and worked for the federal government right out of law school. Schapiro cited her time playing sports as what gave her a leg up in a male-dominated industry and believes that the expansion of women's sports under Title IX will do a lot of good for young women entering professional life. She said sports teach respect, as well as how to take hits, work as a team and play by the rules - something she said we don’t see enough of on Wall Street.

Elizabeth Warren, who needs little introduction these days, explained that when she first began to study bankruptcy policy, it was during an age of massive misunderstanding over what filing bankruptcy meant. The general public believed that "welfare queens" were gaming the system, but when Warren looked at the data, she instead found that 90% of bankruptcy petitions were due to a major medical issue, longterm unemployment, death or divorce. It turned out that many people filing bankruptcy were college-educated and living in households where both parents worked. In All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, a book that Warren wrote with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi in 2006, these statistics were confirmed. Warren found that a household with two working parents in the 2000s had less disposable income than households with one working parent in the 1970s.

Warren recounted a particularly painful memory of hers, of the day her mother walked to Sears to apply for a minimum wage job. Though the story was sad, Warren credits this job with saving both her house and her family. She emphasized that minimum wage jobs simply don’t do that anymore, saying “We cannot have a country where you work full-time and are in poverty. If some billionaire wants to fight me on it, I’m ready."

Bair chimed in, arguing that several lessons could have been learned from the great Recession, both good and bad. The wrong lesson to glean from the financial crisis is that bailouts are acceptable. The other, more important lesson is that short-sighted, greedy behavior wreaked a lot of havoc on our economy and in our communities and that we need to change going forward. 

Suskind asked the panelists if they believed there is a way for the financial services industry to be less focused on these high-risk rewards and winner-take-all setups, and he cited research by Harvard Business School Professor Robin Ely on oil rigs and culture change as an example. Schapiro responded hopefully, citing transparency as a major tool. “It’s amazing what people will stop doing if they have to tell the world they’re doing it.”

As could be expected, the discussion wasn’t complete without a question about Democratic Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. A member of the audience asked Warren what kind of financial sheriff she thought Clinton would be. In response, Warren emphasized that the 2016 race is an opportunity to move forward on these issues. She argued that it’s common sense to be a financial sheriff in today’s political world, as most Americans think that the financial services industry is not working for them and want more regulation on Wall Street. For possibly the first time, there is broad national consensus for making the financial services industry safer and more accountable. According to Warren, it is this opportunity that any Presidential hopeful should seize. 

Year of the Woman 2.0?

In less than 48 hours, on the morning of November 7, 2012, Elizabeth Warren might become the first Massachusetts woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate, bringing women one step closer to closing the stubborn gender gap in America’s national legislature. Warren is in good company – 18 women are running for the Senate, and 166 for the House of Representatives. These are record numbers of candidates and it will be the Year of the Woman 2.0 if enough of them succeed.

The factors that shaped 1992 to become the original Year of the Woman are present again in 2012. It is the first election after redistricting, coinciding with a presidential election, and a heightened awareness of gender and related issues. The awareness this time can be attributed to events like the infamous all-male panel at a Congressional hearing on contraception and the ‘legitimate rape’ comments of Missouri Senatorial candidate Todd Akin. Incidents like these propel gender to the surface of public consciousness, albeit not in a constructive manner.  

A constructive discussion would focus on the point that more than 50 percent of the population should not rely on only 17 percent of Congress for representation. Even with record numbers of female candidates this year, we are looking at a goal of reaching just 20 percent in the House of Representatives. Only the most ambitious advocates, like Political Parity, are aspiring to more - aiming to double the number of women at the highest levels of government by 2022.

In the meantime, the 2012 Project has focused on getting the House of Representatives to that 20 percent mark this year. This non-partisan organization has worked to encourage women to consider candidacy and then connected them to campaign training programs like Emerge America or WAPPP’s From Harvard Square to the Oval Office and to relevant state and national networks.

Through its latest campaign, the 2012 Project is hoping to net 87 female Representatives of the 166 candidates. Their estimate is that 56 women incumbents are certain to win, 3 are likely to win and 10 new women candidates are almost certain to win. This leaves 27 competitive races, of which women would need to win 18.

Such a scenario seems possible, in which case November 7, 2012 will bring the Year of the Woman 2.0 and allow the US to move up from 80^th place in the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranking, breezing just past Tajikistan and Bangladesh. 

Obama and America's Political Future...and Women!

Theda Skocpol is a rock star of the political science world. Her lecture on “Obama and America’s Political Future” drew a crowd to the WAPPP Cason Seminar room. I have never seen so many men at a WAPPP lunch before. Something tells me it’s because the topic was not gender this time...And yet, here are the top five women-related highlights from the conversation:

5. Women are a politically relevant demographic. In case you were wondering why both presidential campaigns are aggressively pursuing women, it is because women vote in higher numbers than men do. They trend Democratic. When they vote, they tend to be more aware of how policies may affect their families. 

4. The Tea Party is teeming with women – older white women, given the demographics of this movement. Professor Skocpol, who co-authored the first in-depth book on the Tea Party, said that the women were the lifeblood of the local chapters. They organized the meetings, brought the snacks and shouldered most of the work of the grassroots movement, but they stopped there. “Just like in every other movement” Professor Skocpol reflected “the women did not advance to the top or become candidates.”

3. Women in Election 2012: Issues and Voters is currently highlighted on the Scholars Strategy Network website. The SSN, which Professor Skocpol directs, brings together America’s leading scholars to address important public policy problems in language that anyone can understand. 

2. Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate challenger from Massachusetts, might benefit from the high number of educated female voters in the state. However, Professor Skocpol said Massachusetts is a historically difficult place for a woman to win. To illustrate the surprising ways that sexism manifests here, she described recent behavior of incumbent Senator Brown’s staffers at a Warren rally as “reminiscent of teenage boys trying to annoy their teacher.”  

1. “Hillary Clinton is going to run for President. And win.” Answering the question “Do you think Hillary Clinton might consider running?”

I should mention that in the best tradition of effective lecturing, Professor Skocpol also took us through the challenges the Obama administration has faced, dissected the failures of the administration to address some of those challenges, and explained the Tea Party practice of “kick-ass politics.”  She covered much more ground than I could possibly fit here, and even left us with some things to ponder for 2016.