Can an all-woman team succeed? Yes we can!

by Marcy Rothenberg

First posted to Let's Talk Nation, July 2016

I don’t know if Hillary Clinton will ask Elizabeth Warren to be her vice presidential running mate. No one but Hillary does – and she probably hasn’t decided yet. But I do know that, if she does, Hillary and Elizabeth are equally as likely to succeed in office as any of their same-gender predecessor teams have to date.

As I listened to political commentators pose that question, over and over, in the days following Hillary’s nomination-clinching primary wins on June 7 and Elizabeth’s rousing endorsement days later, I thought back to high school. Because that’s where I first experienced “girl power” in action.

The high school I attended, a Los Angeles Unified School District campus in the East San Fernando Valley, was barely a decade old when I enrolled as a sophomore. The campus included a football field and bleachers, but it lacked stadium lights. So our Friday night “home” games were played on our opponents’ fields – giving the opponent a psychological edge and depressing the sense of school spirit that normally accompanies a meeting with your opponent on home turf.

Every year since the school’s opening, candidates for student body president had pledged to raise the needed funds for stadium lights. Every year, they’d bring in a few thousand dollars…and every year, the projected cost would increase even more.

And in every year but one, the student body president was a boy.

My junior year, a group of students took note of this trend and decided to do something about it. We assembled a candidate slate – student body president, VP, recording secretary, corresponding secretary, treasurer and historian – and promised that, if we were elected, we would raise every last penny of the funds needed…the next year.

The six of us were girls.

The novelty of an all-girl slate, and our audacious promise, captured the attention of our fellow students, and we were elected.

And, to the amazement of students, faculty and community alike, the next year, we got the job done.

We raised money every which way – placing collection cans for pocket change at local merchants, holding flower and cookie and candy drives for months on end (I couldn’t look at a pink Almond Roca can for years afterward), seeking contributions from parents and local businesses, waging a public relations campaign that reached out to the local media…and finally, holding a fundraising rally on a Friday night on our lightless field, with the football team, cheerleaders, band and drill team parading around the gridiron with flashlights, to highlight the need for stadium lighting. We made the local news.

And we raised enough money to get the lights installed.

We also trimmed the project costs, first by convincing a general contractor, the father of one student, to oversee the work at cost, and then convincing another dad, the owner of a local electrical contracting company, to do the same.

Shortly after our graduation in June, construction began. And a year later, we were invited back to campus – as college sophomores – for the first Friday night home game on our high school field.

Now, I’m certainly not equating a one-time fundraising drive at a local high school with the immensely challenging job that confronts the President and Vice President of the United States. I’m merely suggesting that capability is capability, competence is competence, creativity is creativity, and leadership is leadership – and that those qualities, and all others, are equally likely in all of us.

When former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell responded to a question about naming Elizabeth Warren to the ticket by saying she’s “bright” but “not…ready to be commander-in-chief,” I thought about the male political leaders who have been mentioned as possible running mates for Hillary -- many with no more military or international relations expertise than Elizabeth Warren, but none dismissed from consideration for that reason. After all, whoever is tapped to run for vice president on Hillary’s ticket will be running with a former Secretary of State. Perhaps the nation will be better served if the VP brings complementary expertise to the team.

Rendell’s remarks also reminded me of the research studies that show how people’s assessment of job candidates’ qualifications can be colored by the candidate’s gender: resumes from John Doe are considered more impressive than resumes from Jane; musicians performing in “blind” auditions result in more gender-diverse orchestras than do auditions where the musicians can be seen as they perform.

Maybe our elections ought to be run as “The Voice” competition is on television – with our chairs turned so we cannot see the candidates. If there’s one thing we all need to keep in mind as America considers the election of our first female President, it’s that the gender of the person being considered for the job is – or ought to be – irrelevant.