Center for Strategic & International Studies

Schieffer Series: Advancing Global Gender Equality

Panelists: Catherine Russell, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, U.S. Department of State

Carrie Hessler-Radelet, Director, U.S. Peace Corps

Sarah E. Mendelson, Senior Adviser and Director, CSIS Human Rights Initiative

Moderator: Bob Schieffer, Anchor, “Face the Nation;” Chief Washington Correspondent, CBS News

Introduction: H. Andrew Schwartz, Senior Vice President for External Relations, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Location: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.

Date: Monday, April 20, 2015

Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com

H. ANDREW SCHWARTZ: Good evening. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Andrew Schwartz and I have finally figured out my role at CSIS. I am the Ed McMahon of CSIS – (laughter) – because monthly I get to introduce Bob Schieffer.

Before we get started, I’d like to thank the Stavros Niarchos Foundation that makes the Schieffer Series possible. They are great, great friends of our and very, very generous. And we want to give a big shout-out to them. They’re based in New York.

I also want to say thank you to TCU, the TCU Schieffer College of Communication in particular. It’s now seven-and-a-half years that we’ve been partners with TCU. And we all wear purple as a result. (Laughter.) And we are big Horned Frog fans. And so thank you to TCU for your amazing partnership.

This is an emotional night for me personally. And I’d like to dedicate this evening, with these amazing women who are here to talk about women’s issues, to my mother. My mother, we lost my mother a few years ago. And my dad’s here.

My mom was a pioneering educator who devoted her life to empowering women as dean at Trinity College here in Washington. And because of my mom, literally hundreds of thousands of young women in inner cities were also able to get educated that wouldn’t otherwise have been.

It’s also an emotional night for me because my dear friend Bob Schieffer, who when I lost my mom was really there for me in a very quiet and important way, Bob, as many of you know, has announced his retirement from CBS. And I’d like to congratulate Bob on that. (Applause.)

He’s actually only announced his retirement from “Face the Nation.” I suspect Bob will be doing – you’ll be seeing plenty of Bob. And the great news is, is that he has not retired from the Schieffer Series, so the Schieffer Series will go on. (Applause.)

And with that, please allow me to introduce my dear friend and colleague Bob Schieffer. (Applause.)

BOB SCHIEFFER: Thank you very much, Andrew.

Thank you all for coming.

And the subject today is advancing global gender equality. It’s not hard for me to figure out which side I’m on. (Laughter.) I am the father of two women and the grandfather of three. And I wouldn’t have any choice if I had to make a choice. I know where I come from on this.

But you know, I just want to say something in the beginning here. In journalism especially, we are seeing a revolution, not just in communications, but in the number of women that are going into journalism now.

You know, CBS made its name with the Murrow Boys, but now it is the CBS women who have come to the fore. And they are doing the heavy lifting in the most dangerous parts of the world and they are doing it just right.

And anybody who thinks women are not the equal to men and can’t do these jobs – when I was a young reporter on The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the women all got to work in the Women’s Department and they weren’t about to let them do anything else. They were, for one thing, feared for their safety.

Well, that is no longer the case. And it’s just a great thing.

We have a great panel today. And this is a very important subject. Catherine Russell is right now the ambassador at large for global women’s issues at the U.S. Department of State. She currently serves as U.S. ambassador at large for global women’s issues. Prior to assuming that position, she served as deputy assistant to the president and chief of staff to second lady, Dr. Jill Biden, focusing on military families and higher education during her tenure at the White House.

Ambassador Russell coordinated the development of the administration’s strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally.

Carrie Hessler-Radelet was sworn in to office as the 19th director of the Peace Corps in June 2014. She served as a Peace Corps acting director and deputy director. She began her career in international development as a Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa teaching secondary school English. From there she went on to spend two decades working in public health, focusing on HIV/AIDS.

And then our own Dr. Sarah Mendelson, a senior adviser and director here of the CSIS Human Rights initiative. She’s a senior adviser and director of the Human Rights initiative here at CSIS. Before that, Dr. Mendelson was deputy assistant administrator responsible for democracy, human rights and governance in the Bureau for Democracy Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She was also the agency lead on combating human trafficking, which I hope we can talk a little bit about today.

But I kind of wanted to start with this whole thing about Let Girls Learn initiative. Tell us about what that’s about.

CATHERINE RUSSELL: Let Girls Learn is an initiative that the president and the announced several weeks ago. And it’s based on this, that the international community has made a lot of progress over the last few years in getting primary school kids, including girls, educated, got record numbers of kids in school, but what we’re seeing is that when the girls get to the adolescent age they’re dropping out of school in alarming numbers in certain parts of the world, in Sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia.

And the question is, what do we do to keep these girls in school? The downside of them dropping out, of course, is that they, one, are not being educated; two, they are facing higher risks of violence, including child marriage which is pervasive in many of these places. They’re at higher risk of gender-based violence and HIV.

So we’re very concerned about what to do about that. There’s no easy answer to it, but we do know that keeping them in school makes a huge difference.

So the first lady, recognizing this issue, wanted to think about how to address it. And I think there are several pieces of the pie, but one of the most important parts is one that I think Carrie should talk about, and that is engaging the Peace Corps. And that’s based on the first lady’s view that these need to be community-driven responses.

And so the Peace Corps is a huge piece of that. The other piece is programming that we will do, the State Department and USAID will do to try to keep these girls in school in different parts of the world.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And Carrie, what I like about your background is you kind of learned about this from the ground up.

CARRIE HESSLER-RADELET: Absolutely. And in fact – yeah.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Tell us a little about that.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Sure. I mean, my own Peace Corps experience, I was a teacher at an all-girls secondary school, and so I saw firsthand the power of education to transform girls’ lives.

So we’re very excited about it. I mean, one of the things about the first lady – and the first lady’s office actually came to the Peace Corps, because in her travels she saw how the best solutions to girls’ education really came from the community themselves.

And so we have 7,000 volunteers in 65 different countries. They are already catalysts for community-led change. And so we’re really excited about this initiative.

There’s actually three parts of this initiative, what we call three pillars. The first is a training component. We’re working with CARE and many other partners, including USAID and State Department and a whole host of others, to train our volunteers in best practices, gender analysis, different kinds of interventions we can do with the community, how to facilitate community meetings, et cetera.

And then our volunteers in turn are going to train tens of thousands of community champions, local leaders, school principals and teachers, women, PTA groups, so that they can be champions for girls’ education, and then identify opportunities at the community level that address the specific needs of that community.

Because there are many reasons, and Catherine listed some of them, but you know, there are many reasons why girls don’t go to school, and so we want to devise solutions that are effective for that community. So that first pillar is a training component and the development of local capacity for girls’ education.

The second component is, once they identify the problem, to have money available, resources available so that communities can do project activities to address those needs.

So in one community, it may be that poverty is an issue and families can’t afford a school fee or they can’t afford the uniforms or they can’t buy books, so then that would demand one kind of intervention, perhaps a fund, a scholarship fund or something.

Another place, it might be that child marriage is a leading problem. And so then you might want to devise a whole different kind of campaign, perhaps working with traditional leaders, working with parents, helping to communicate, first of all, the economic benefits of keeping girls in school, but why it’s important to delay marriage until after girls graduate.

It may be that the school is too far away from the community and girls are not safe going back and forth. And so you may work with planners from the Department of Education to build a new school. Or there are many funders who are willing to build schools, perhaps just making sure that those schools are built in the right places and talking about safety on the way.

It may be pregnancy. It may be, you know, many other reasons why people drop out of school. So we want to make sure that these solutions are identified by the community and then they have some resources to be able to do something about them.

The other part of that second pillar is to bring these issues to the American people. And that’s why we’re so excited to be here today, because we really want all Americans both to know how important it is to educate girls, because frankly there’s no better investment in terms of the amount in outcome than educating a girl. So we want Americans to know that.

But the other part of it is we want Americans to appreciate their own education and learn from these young women who are incredibly powerful. And you cannot believe some of the things that girls and boys do to get an education around the world. They walk five miles barefoot, you know, just all the things that our grandparents used to say that they used to do.

I mean, these girls work so hard to get their education. And so we want to regenerate within our own young men and women an appreciation for their own education. So that’s the second part.

And then the third part is to increase the number of Peace Corps volunteers. We have some very ambitious plans for growing Peace Corps. We want to get to 10,000 by 2018, so that’s all part of it, too, so that we can have greater impact in more countries.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Sarah, you have written a lot about this. And some of the figures that you have come up with in your research are just staggering. I mean, how hard is it for young women, girls around the world to get educated. Some, obviously, it’s very, very dangerous in many parts of the world.

SARAH MENDELSON: Well, what you were just hearing is really development in the 21st century, having it be community led, being able to listen and respond.

So in any sort of effort or engagement, for example to combat trafficking of girls, having girls be part of the change, having their voice be critical in organizing any kind of intervention or program is a very different model than how we’ve done it for the last 20, 30 years.

When I was at AID, we were very focused on a phrase “nothing about us without us” meaning that the community, and especially if we’re talking about women and girls, be part of generating solutions so that it’s not some Washington-based or Capitol-led effort, but it’s something that really is context specific and has the opportunity for the greatest success.

But the truth is there’s so many different obstacles facing girls in terms of staying in school, including attitudes and perceptions. So here, there’s actual – a role for social science and understanding how local populations are thinking about girls’ education.

Using girls in surveys – when we did a survey in Russia, we found a population-based estimate of something like it was 90,000 to 150,000 females ages 18 to 32 had been trafficked and were currently living in Russia with no services whatsoever. So using social science to be able to design programs and, quite frankly, design better policies.

MR. SCHIEFFER: What do you think, Cathy, the most effective tools that the United States has? What’s your sense of what’s the most important thing we ought to be doing? I mean, I know about this initiative and so forth. But what have been some of the things over the years that have worked and some that didn’t?

MS. RUSSELL: The way I look at it is this. There are a lot of different problems that women and girls are facing around the world, but all of them come back to one simple problem, which is that they’re not valued. And so the question presented for us is, how do we try to address that?

And I think Sarah made an important point about one of the things we’re trying to do is change the understanding of a community, of a family of how they view their girls. You know, in too many places girls are a commodity, girls are a burden, you know, their families have to support them until they get married at which point they have to pay a big dowry and then they go and they are in the possession of some other man and family.

And so I think the way I look at it, and this hopefully is reflected in our policy, is we have to try to address that problem comprehensively.

And I think one of the challenges is that’s not always the way government does things. You know, sometimes we do education policy here and we do a health policy here and we do a gender- based-violence program over here.

I think that what we need to try to do is bring those all together and say we need to see, we need communities and families to see that girls have value. And so we have to do that by, one, making sure they’re educated; two, making sure they have adequate health care; three, hoping that if we get them educated we can move them into the workforce in a way that they’re no longer a burden.

And so we’re trying to do that, but it is a challenge. And I think the way we have to do it is better coordination within the government, better coordination with other governments and other actors who are out there, because there are a lot of people in this world and all of them as in a world of sort of more diminished resources. So it’s really imperative that we do our best to make the best use of the limited resources that we have.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, the thing that strikes me as I read about this, and I read the paper you wrote, Sarah, somehow it’s almost like 9/11. We don’t have the imagination to understand how bad this really is in so many parts of the world.

What was this – you had this piece and it just struck me, the number of people in human trafficking. And what is it in economic terms? It’s something like –

MS. MENDELSON: So the numbers are very difficult. There are some organizations that place about 20 million people in servitude, various forms, around the world.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Twenty million people are slaves.

MS. MENDELSON: So that’s the low estimate. Then there’s upwards of 36 million. And the amount of money that is generated is upwards of 150 billion (dollars). It’s said to be –

MR. SCHIEFFER: B.

MS. MENDELSON: B, billion.

MR. SCHIEFFER: B, billion.

MS. MENDELSON: Right. So this is big, big money. There are a lot of interests, obviously. These are illicit flows. People are making money off of the buying and selling of other people. And generally, the international community has been moving towards a global movement, we’re not entirely there yet.

The U.S. government has been a leader in this through – it was actually first lady Hillary Clinton’s initiative to found the trafficking act, an office at the State Department. And there are others that have joined along, private foundations, private sector.

But the truth is it needs to not be the work only of organizations that work on combating trafficking. It needs to be everyone in this room, your neighbors, your cousins, your relatives thinking about, is this water or is this bottle or is this shirt made by slave labor? Is the chocolate that I’m eating, is the shrimp that I’m consuming, has it been touched by slave labor? And what more can we demand to make it stop?

MR. SCHIEFFER: Carrie, does the Peace Corps encounter this? And how do you deal with it?

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: There are a number of countries where there is trafficking in persons. And we do have volunteer programs that address that issue.

So in places – we have several different kinds of programs. We have a certain number of volunteers who are trained social workers who have experience in this and they’re actually working to actively prevent the trafficking of women.

And mostly what they do is they work with nonprofit organizations, local organizations. They do a lot of awareness building, they do education.

I was just recently in , for example, and a Peace Corps volunteer was working with a legal aid association and they had a group of – the room was absolutely packed. And there were women who were very traditional, very conservatively dressed, to women who, you know, may have been sex workers, I don’t know. They were young, they were old, but the whole topic was how to prevent trafficking and, you know, what do you look for, what do they say.

They had various women who had been trafficked and who had come back. And they were giving their own personal testimony. They were talking about this is what they told me. And a lot of it was promises of a job. And I think that that – I mean, there are very real economic drivers of this industry, both on the demand and the supply side.

And so one of the things we really need to address, and you both, you know, talked about this, is just the economic drivers of this and what is it that would cause a family to consider, you know, pushing their daughter into such a, you know, a situation.

And then on the demand side, too, on the part of the person that is buying the services, I mean, I think we all need to be aware here as employers even.

One of the things that’s really great recently, and you guys have done a lot, I mean, AID and now CSIS to promote this. I mean, there are signs all over everywhere saying, you know, are you aware of human trafficking right here in our midst? It’s right here in Washington, D.C. and we need to be aware of it.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Really?

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Oh, yeah.

MS. MENDELSON: Oh, absolutely.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Yeah.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And where? I mean –

MS. MENDELSON: K Street –

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: I mean, it could be your house cleaner or the person who’s cutting your lawn. I mean, there are so many different kinds – different ways that trafficking occurs.

Anyway, just to finish the Peace Corps story. So we do have a few programs that really focus on preventing the trafficking in persons, with a special focus on women. But many of our volunteers in other countries are just doing general education that really tries to help girls stay in school and then to find livelihoods afterwards.

And you know, it’s not enough to just stay in school, it’s also getting a job afterwards. And I think that’s another part that we really have to address.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And then on top of this and all the awful things about this, now we have the terrorists involved in this and terrorists are using this. And it just gets worse and worse.

MS. RUSSELL: Yeah, and it’s, you know, the good and bad of my job is I see everything through the prism of women. So it’s interesting to look at these terrorism issues in that context.

And certainly, we’re seeing that in some places – and I just got back, I took a trip to Iraq and, you know, there are women and girls there who have been abused in all sorts of horrible ways, Iraqi women, Yazidi women, as part of ISIL’s strategy.

And it is, you know, truly horrific to see that they are buying and selling these women. They are sexually abusing them and impregnating them. And it’s a very conservative community, the Yazidi community, so the consequences of that are particularly difficult for these women who come back and, you know, are pregnant.

And somebody was telling me that on their birth certificate sometimes it says mother and then father it says “terrorist,” you know. And so how does a child grow up like that?

But we’re also seeing in some places in Western Europe women, you know, being – sort of joining ISIS. And some of this has been very interesting to see how they’re appealing to them. So these really young women, they want to be part of the cause, some of them have very romantic notions about what happens.

And it’s similar to what Carrie said about the traffickers because then sometimes they get a very rude awakening when they end up in these situations with these ISIS folks and they’re, you know, essentially servants and slaves to them, sometimes sexual slaves.

So in any case, it’s a very complicated problem. But I think in every situation that you ever imagine, whether it’s a hurricane or a war, a conflict, women and children tend to be more vulnerable. And so as bad as it is for anybody, it’s usually, not always, but almost always worse for them.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, I thought it was interesting as I was reading for this that some make the point that women should always be at the table on any kind of conflict resolution. And I think that’s probably right.

But who can talk about that a little bit?

MS. MENDELSON: The literature is very clear that if women are not actually involved in the negotiation, the mediation and the peace deal, the peace deals tend to fall apart.

So we need to reform how we think about security. I think we need to rethink how we think about development, democratization, human rights, where the elevation of the role of women and girls is fundamental to getting the kinds of development goals we want, to getting the kind of peaceful, prosperous communities that we want.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Why do you think that is, Sarah?

MS. MENDELSON: Well, it’s empirical that, I mean – and here I think of Ambassador Don Steinberg who I worked with very closely at AID, and has a story about negotiating the end of war in Angola. And they left out the women, and for him it was just a very visceral lesson.

But wherever you look around the world, if women are not part of the solution it doesn’t hold. So part of it is you get men with guns, who are putting down their guns, and then having the negotiation, but it’s never going to the next step.

I mean, I think there is a larger point, which is we tend not to understand the role that historical grievance in general plays as a driver of development. And the more that we actual organize as an international community to understand how history plays a role, everybody’s history, not just a part of – just not just men’s history, that will help drive towards more peaceful and stable solutions so that –

MR. SCHIEFFER: Do you think women are able to stay more focused than men? (Laughter.) And I bring this up, I was in last summer and we were down right at the north wall of the Gaza Strip. And they have, they call them stationary drones, and what it is there are these big poles and on top of it they have these things and there are cameras up there and there are also machine guns up there.

And they take pictures. They’re constantly surveying. And the operators of these machines are all women. And the Israelis tell me that they do that for a reason. They have found that women are able to stay more focused and literally just pay better attention than the men do. And so all of the operators of those machines are women.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Well, I just came back from yesterday. And four-fifths of the police force, the traffic police, are women. Because what they found is that the men were, first of all, more susceptible to corruption, but also women were more likely to hold the line and be less emotional even, angry, what have you. They’ve done it now for – Mexico and Lima, Peru, Mexico City and Lima, Peru, I’m told, have pretty much all female or mostly female traffic cop workforce, maybe for some of the reasons – you know, there are some great examples of where women have been involved in peace-building that’s made a huge difference.

One of the ones that maybe most of you are familiar with is the Liberia situation where the women basically did protests in the main field outside the presidential palace for a very long time, during the rainy season, in the mud, Muslim and Christian, educated, illiterate, rich and poor, together all wearing white to hide any ethnic divisions that they might have, saying enough is enough, we need to come together.

And then when finally the president agreed to peace talks and then the rebel leaders agreed to peace talks, and then they went off to I think it was to have the talks and the talks were stalling and they weren’t going forward, until finally those women took a plane over to Ghana, surrounded the room and told the men inside the room you will not have food or water until you come to some agreement. And peace was restored, and now they have a female president.

And that whole, you know, sort of episode was documented on that really great film by Abbie Disney called “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” That’s a great example of when women are involved how it can matter.

And I don’t know if women are more focused, but I think that women have always been the peacemakers in the family. They have to. Their roles have been to care for the children, male and female. They also have to negotiate with their own husband oftentimes.

And I just think that, in some ways, women are equipped from a very early age, socialized at a very early age to find compromise.

MR. SCHIEFFER: But you know, this just illustrates really how far we have come, even in this country, as to where we used to be.

I played baseball. And I remember the worst thing you could say to a guy on the baseball team is “you throw like a girl.” And the reason we were taught that girls throw like this is because their clavicle is different than the male clavicle is different than the male clavicle. And because of that, that’s why they throw like a girl, as it was called.

Well, what nobody stopped to think about is nobody have ever shown them how to throw like a boy. And you know, as long as you get your elbow up here and turn, that’s how you learn to throw.

And you watch any of these female athletes today, they can do it just like the guys.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: I am proof positive of this. Because maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever done is I threw out the first pitch at the Nationals game. (Laughter.) And I had no training in how to throw, but I got a crash course, several members of my staff spent hours teaching me how to throw. (Laughter.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yes.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: And I threw it and I hit it over the pitch. But I would never – no one ever trained women to throw a baseball. (Applause.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, exactly. Exactly, yes.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Scariest thing I’ve ever done. It was much scarier than going to my Senate confirmation hearing. (Laughter.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yes, absolutely.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Which took place like a week before that.

MR. SCHIEFFER: First, you hold it like little bunny foo foo.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Yes. It’s all in the hips, too. Isn’t it all in the hips?

MR. SCHIEFFER: (Laughs.) Yeah, it’s the turn.

MS. MENDELSON: There is actually an incredibly important role, I think, that sports plays in the empowerment of women and girls.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

MS. MENDELSON: We were saying as we were walking out, I played field hockey and lacrosse. And I learned life skills. I mean, working in government in a team sport, and the lessons that I learned on the playing field are among the most important.

And for generations of women, that was not possible. And this is all the result of an act that Congress passed so that there would be equal access –

MR. SCHIEFFER: what? Title IX, right?

MS. MENDELSON: Title IX, equal access to education for both genders. And the knock-on effect was a generation of women and girls who have experience playing sports, including our national security adviser.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I think it really does change women’s – I mean, I have these 14-year-old twin granddaughters. And I mean, they are just sports is a big part of their life. And I can see, you know, I can see they, you know, they want to be the best and they want to get better.

And when I was growing up, you didn’t see that, you know? And the reason you didn’t see it, because they just simply weren’t encouraged in that way.

And Title XI, I think, has had a huge impact and it’s all for the good as far as I’m concerned on American society and American culture.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: And there are many programs like that internationally, too. I think Peace Corps does a lot of work. We have a very active partnership with Grassroot Soccer that is training both boys and girls, you know, using soccer as a way to teach life skills and teamwork.

And I think that boys have also really benefited from team sports because they do learn how to compromise and work together and give a little and not always, you know, seek the limelight or whatever. I mean, especially team sports are really good for young men as well.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, let’s have some questions from out in the audience here.

Right here. Here we go, we’ll start right here.

Q: Thank you very much. I’m the ambassador of Tanzania. I thought this was a very interesting subject as – (inaudible).

And, Catherine, good to see you.

My good friend, Carrie, how are you?

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Wonderful to see you.

Q: Yeah, it’s very fascinating when you have a partner like this, but also in this audience to talk on very fundamental issues regarding the women equality. I didn’t know which angle you take it. But I’m happy that you addressed very fundamental issues.

One, how do you keep the girls in school?

MR. SCHIEFFER: How do you keep the girls in school?

Q: At school, yes. Because (in teaching ?) in our countries, there are multiple factors. But then the interventions that are always made, as Catherine pointed out, just one, either one, so we always say there is not either/or. You need the holistic approach. Because, for example, if statistically you have many girls dropping out of school because of early pregnancies, and for our societies that’s the end of you.

Two, you have this very simple – sorry for the men, but for the girls they understand it very well. They don’t go to school during their menstrual period. They have no pads. And then they get stigmatized and they don’t go to school. So things that are taken for granted, but these are very basic.

And what I like is whatever – the U.S. is doing a lot in our countries, but usually with these agencies it’s some program here or here, very fragmented. So my message is take the holistic approach.

MR. SCHIEFFER: All right.

Q: But, two, and my final one, it’s about the involvement of women in peace processes. I was heading an international – I mean, a regional organization on peace and security for the post-conflict countries in the Great Lakes region of Africa, which was bringing Rwanda, Congo, Angola, all of them. The main challenge was, how do we bring the women to the table, negotiation table? Because in the negotiations you have the women are taking notes around the table. But then what we’re asking from – I was asking the United States, that always supports these peace processes, make it a condition, that we will fund these peace processes if you have women on the table. And at one point it worked. It became as a part of the rules of procedures that you have to have 50/50. It worked because they need you to fund it, and therefore, they have to meet the condition. So I said, you have sometimes to use the unconventional ways to get the women on the tables. And they never regretted to have them on.

MR. SCHIEFFER: All right.

Q: I was in this peace process for six years. Nobody regretted it, but they were saying I was making a lot of noise. You have to make a lot of noise. Thank you. (Applause.)

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Maybe that’s what we all need to do.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, why don’t we just go around here.

MS. RUSSELL: One thing I would say about that, and I’ve seen this in different conflicts, the challenge is that typically when they look to put together the people who are going to negotiate the peace are the people who are the combatants. Combatants are usually men.

And I think what we are saying is women have a stake, not just in negotiating, but in the future of their country and that’s why they need to be at the table.

And I think the way I would look at this is we have some statistics that make it clear that women make a huge contribution in certain areas. For example, women are more likely to take whatever money they make in their family and invest it back in their children. They get their kids educated, they get their kids immunized.

So women, we think, are a good investment generally. But as to peace agreements and business and anyplace else, it’s not so much women, although I think women do add, you know, they tend to be more concerned about things like education, health, statistically, but it’s more that whatever the discussion is should be representative of people who are affected by it. And so that, by definition, should include women.

And if you have – you know, there’s a lot of research emerging now on boards of directors and how companies do better when they have women on the board. There are boards of directors in the United States of public corporations that only have men, which is shocking to me, especially considering that women are the people who are often buying the products.

So I think just across the board, I don’t go out and argue that it’s, you know, it’s the right thing to do to have women on a board or the right thing to do to have women in the peace negotiation.

What I would argue is that they have a stake in the future, they have something to contribute, and they are more likely to help that enterprise, whatever it is, be more successful.

And so we always argue that it’s in the interest of whomever we’re dealing with to try to include women and all voices so that they are represented in a reasonable way.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Carrie, would you like to add anything to that?

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Yeah. I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. I think all the research has shown that. I think it’s not only a good thing to do, the right thing to do, it’s a smart thing to do because, I mean, for the very reasons that you just said, that there’s plenty of research that shows that diverse teams in general, you know, having gender diversity, but just diversity in general is so important.

And the principle “nothing about us without us” I think is one that we all need to live by.

MS. MENDELSON: It’s a basic design principle. If you’ve spent any time in Silicon Valley, you’ll recognize that there’s never a design, anything without the people that are going to be – the user. And so we’re catching up.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Great.

Q: Thank you. My name is Paolo von Shirach, I’m the editor of the Shirach Report and an economic development consultant.

Just one general question. Obviously, you talked about the challenges and the difficulties of, you know, furthering the cause of women. There are real brick walls, I would say, when you talk about culture and religion and not, you know, something that hasn’t been mentioned, but is sort of a well- known fact in Muslim societies, the education of women is openly discouraged, in some places actually forbidden.

The Taliban has been actively engaged in for years, among other things, in targeting girls’ schools, and clearly doing their best to discourage families to send their girls to school.

How do you deal with such large and significant cultural and, in some cases, religious which become, in many instances, also legal blockages that create huge problems for the education of women or young girls?

We know the case of a young lady in Pakistan who was shot at because she was promoting – she got the Nobel Prize afterwards, but at a very heavy personal price in promoting education. Thank you.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yeah. I think that’s one of the key questions really.

Sarah, do you want to take a run at that?

MS. MENDELSON: Sure. I think here, I think, looking at religious texts actually is incredibly important. And I take the lesson of how Chinese foot-binding of women and girls ended in a very brief period after thousands of years.

There was a very interesting campaign that relied on religious leaders’ language that basically it combined two things. It used religious leaders’ language to say it wasn’t absolutely necessary to do foot-binding, and then it solved an economic problem where you had girls bound their feet, the parents had boys that they were going to be marrying, and so you basically had parents saying we promise we won’t bind your feet and, because marriages were arranged, you will not shun those women and girls whose feet are not bound.

So I think in any culture, there are religious texts that people use to bring people together and then there are religious texts where people use them to tear people apart and to leave people as minorities or what have you.

And what we need to be is very strategic in understanding what voices there are for progress. This isn’t just, by any means, an issue in Islam. This is in all sorts of religions.

And we come from many cultures where, and certainly the history of the United States, it took us quite a long time, in fact it was the last century, the century we were all born in, where women achieved the vote.

So it’s, you know, it’s a long road, but it is one with lots and lots of way stations and lessons to be learned.

MS. RUSSELL: Yeah. If I could say something about that.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yes, sure.

MS. RUSSELL: It’s certainly not the case that this is just a problem in Muslim communities at all. There are many Muslim leaders who are strong advocates for women and girls. And I think, you know, you talked about Malala and what happened to her. The person who was one of the most powerful advocates for education and continues to be is her father.

And for us, I think it’s really, the United States and for people who are working on this issue, we need to try to listen to and amplify the voices of religious leaders who are supportive of the issues that we believe in, and also men and boys.

I mean, we spend a lot of time thinking about how not to look at men and boys. And you know, we do a lot of work on gender-based violence and not to look at men and boys as just the perpetrators, but as also part of the solution. And that is really important.

And I think we are very open to working with whomever and however we can to try to move these issues forward in a positive way.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Right here.

Q: Hi. My name is Kristy Kaufmann, I’m the executive director of the Code of Support Foundation, which is a military veterans support.

I want to bring this a little closer to home and how this affects the international community. There’s a lot of discussion now going on about women in combat positions. My colleague Angie Franell (ph) is a colonel in the Army, helicopter pilot, so we all know it’s been going on.

My question is, how do conversations and issues like this in the U.S. translate internationally and maybe push forward? Is it something that people pay attention to in other communities, if we’re actually having conversations about, you know, opening up more combat roles? Women, if they can do the job, should be able to do the job. That’s the basic bottom line, right?

So I’m wondering internationally how that translates.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: I personally don’t know very much about women in combat. But what I do say is that we all may be thinking about blasting the gender barriers for all professions.

I mean, yesterday I was on an airplane and both of the pilots were female. Now, this is the first time that I’ve been in that situation. I was actually – I was really delighted. I was delighted to see that women are entering male professions.

And the occasion that I was at is that I was at my friend’s wedding, the male son of my friend, who is a nurse. So what we’re seeing is that professions that were previously considered women’s are now being done by men, and professions that were previously considered male professions are now being down by women.

I mean, I think that that should be – that is the purpose of a gender-equitable society is where people can find their own potential, find their own passion and can work hard to achieve their own life goals, no matter what it is.

And so I think that this is taking us in a right direction, but I can’t really speak any more about women in combat.

MS. MENDELSON: So there’s been a very long effort on women, peace and security in general, that the United States in some ways came a bit late to the game, putting together a national plan. And it applies to all government agencies. Everybody has a role, the Department of Defense, State Department, USAID.

And I think there are different sort of terms for how it’s laid out, but the issues are not that complicated. It’s about leadership, it’s about making sure we walk the walk.

It’s about we had a lot of sort of to-ing and fro-ing, should there be integrated programs or should there only be standalone programs that elevate the role of women? Well, why not both?

Protection and prevention of violence is integral parts. So different agencies are responding to this. I think it’s a conversation that is ongoing with the Department of Defense.

I think an organization like CSIS, which has such great ties with colleagues, we have a lot of colleagues who served in the Department of Defense, we need to be continually raising the issue.

I think that the U.S. has lessons to be learned from other uniformed service members, other countries where women have played combat roles. Yeah, I mean, the Israeli, the example that Bob gave.

But I think even in the last 10 years especially you see quite a bit of change. And again, it’s an evolution.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, I think the best message is not what people say, but what they do. And when you can point to something like we just heard, two female pilots, that says more than a hundred speeches because it works.

And I think things that work are part of, you know, telling Americans and telling the world about who we are.

MS. MENDELSON: What’s so interesting is the way in which countries generally have airline industries is their pilots come from the military.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Yeah.

MS. MENDELSON: They’ve been trained –

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: That’s right.

MS. MENDELSON: – usually if they are good airlines, and you’re seeing exactly the results of this. There are women fliers.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Yeah, so that’s right. So maybe this was in fact an example.

But you know, nobody, frankly, neither men nor women benefits from a status quo in which, you know, men only have certain roles they can play and women only have certain roles. Because there are many men who would like to be the primary caregiver, there are many women who want to, you know –

MS. MENDELSON: Serve on a sub.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, we should have societies that give support to everyone achieving their potential, being their best, finding their passion. That’s what we should all be searching for in our country and others.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I think that’s an excellent point. And that’s right.

Q: Hi. I’m Ann Howard, an international education and public affairs consultant.

I wanted to ask Ambassador Russell and the other members of the panel, what’s the role of the private sector in helping to reduce human trafficking?

There’s a wonderful organization here in town called Free the Slaves. And I recently learned of a lot of work they were doing with multinationals that indeed have this problem themselves with their own employees. If you could address that issue, please.

MS. RUSSELL: Sure. I would say just a little bit more broadly that the role of the private sector in all the issues that we work on is critically important and I would say it for a couple of reasons.

One, because if you look at girls’ education as an example, the private sector wants to have an educated workforce, right? They want to have a workforce that’s free from gender-based violence. They know that if a mother is educated, her children are more likely to survive and be educated.

When we look at women’s economic empowerment, which is another one of our huge priorities, the GDPs of countries are much higher if women are fully engaged in the workforce. Again, it helps the private sector.

When you look at trafficking – and I’ll defer a little bit to Sarah on that because she’s more of an expert on trafficking than I am – but certainly companies, and I’ve seen this when I travel, that companies are very mindful, they don’t want to be on the wrong side of the trafficking discussion and neither do countries, honestly, because I don’t know, for those of you who don’t know the trafficking world, it has a very strict regime of tiers that the United States imposes and sort of categorizes countries based on their performance on a set of indicators.

So companies want to do well. Countries want to move into a higher tier, lower tier, higher tier, better tier, higher tier.

MS. MENDELSON: Tier one, they want to be tier one.

MS. RUSSELL: So I think they’re all – there’s an, I think, an understanding broadly that it’s in the interest of everyone, and the private sector knows that they’re going to benefit.

I mean, obviously you’re going to have some who are exploitive and all the rest of it. But I think in general, the private sector plays an important role in that.

It has the potential to play a game-changing role when you think of the amount of capital generated. There are some first movers. In the tourist industry, interestingly, the Carlson Group has been a real leader. The Hilton company has been very good about training. They have something like 4,000 units around the world and they’ve trained their staff to be able to recognize. Airlines, Delta has been very good in this and has worked with Department of Transportation and Homeland Security, Amtrak.

But there are pockets where we need really to lean in. The extractives have an uneven track record. And if you think about the kind of mining that goes in, this is a labor issue, there’s sex trafficking, there’s bondage. Anything that has a supply chain has the potential for exploitation.

And so making sure that, again, as consumers, the power that everybody has in this room, to ask of companies to do better. And who doesn’t want to be on the right side of combating trafficking and ending modern slavery, I ask you?

MR. SCHIEFFER: I think there was a lady back here. Yes, this will probably have to be the last question here.

Q: Thank you very much. My name is Janet Fleischman with the Global Health Policy Center here at CSIS. And thank all of you, what a fantastic panel.

We just put out a report last week looking at adolescent girls and young women and HIV. Seven thousand girls a week are infected with HIV just in Southern and East Africa alone. And it underscores the need for a multi-sectoral approach to look at gender-based violence, to look at all the issues you’ve been talking about. And so much has happened in recent years with the new strategy on gender-based violence, with the work on women, peace and security, the work on trafficking, Family Planning 2020, so many initiatives.

So what I’d love to hear from you is, how do we build on this momentum? It’s not only in the U.S. There’s a global convergence around some of these issues, education for girls, of course, with Malala getting to the level of the Nobel Prize. But how do we make sure that this momentum isn’t lost? What do we need to do next?

MR. SCHIEFFER: Why don’t we just go down the line here?

MS. RUSSELL: Well, I think we have to seize this moment. Because I agree with you, Janet, that there is enhanced attention, which is, I think, based on the fact that we all understand that this is a critical priority. And if we lose these girls, we’ll never get them back.

So I think we have to seize the moment and do as much as we possibly can. And from my perspective, I’m trying to get as much of it engrained in the State Department and USAID so that it will just continue moving in a positive direction.

But as you pointed out, there are a lot of pieces here. And part of my job is to try to make sure that all of these different parties are speaking to each other and that all of the work is synced up. And that is pretty much a full-time job in addition to everything else we’re trying to do.

But I do think it is critically important.

MS. HESSLER-RADELET: I would agree with you. I mean, I think that one of the largest challenges is the fact that there is real dispersion of effort.

And I have to say that in this administration there’s been more whole-of-government working together than ever before. And I hope that that’s going to continue on into the future.

There’s the DREAMS initiative, that I know you’re very familiar with, that PEPFAR is working on with Nike and Gates and a lot of others, Peace Corps is part of it.

For our part, we’re very happy to be part of some of these, you know, large whole-of- government initiatives because we think we can really add value at the community level, because it has to be both top-down in terms of, you know, development, investment, in terms of policies, in terms of, you know, getting the main leaders onboard, but it also has to be ground-up.

And that’s where Peace corps comes in, making sure that those large-scale investments of others are actually owned by the community, reaching those who are most vulnerable, implemented properly, monitored and evaluated, sustained over time, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, because Peace Corps volunteers at the community and have such rare insight into how communities work and have such strong, powerful, really transformative relationships of trust with their communities, they are such great partners with USAID, with State Department, with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, with CDC, I mean, and then a lot of civil society partners, local NGOs and international NGOs.

But we all need to be working together on a continuum. It’s not just enough to get the right policies in place. They need to also build up from the bottom.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Sarah, I’ll give you the last word here.

MS. MENDELSON: Well, before I say anything I want to thank you so much for the role that you’ve played and continue to play at CSIS. It’s a real –

MR. SCHIEFFER: It’s a lot of fun. (Laughter.)

MS. MENDELSON: – privilege for us.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I always learn something.

MS. MENDELSON: And for the work that you’re both doing and the service, I know it’s a lot and it takes you away from your families.

I think everybody needs to make sure that we’re holding – now I’m going to say the tough thing – make sure that we are holding those in government accountable. There’s a lot of language that a lot of us have shared over the last couple of years. What are the resources that have been spent? What’s achieved? What’s left to be done?

I mean, understand, it takes a while. Let’s make sure that this is on the agenda going forward through the next two important years and making sure that whenever there’s an international convening that this is a really critical part of the conversation.

And that it’s not, again, left only, but it should be in addition to organizations that are working on this full time, that it begins to filter into all sorts of conversations that are not the usual suspects, traditional security conferences or banking conferences or other gatherings of private sector, the hospitality industry.

A couple of years ago there was the world hospitality meeting in . And I got all excited because I thought this is a great opportunity, and the U.S. ambassador agreed to raise the issue of trafficking in places that you wouldn’t necessarily think.

So I think imagination and creativity and looking for every opportunity.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I think we have to, number one, keep reminding people just how bad this is. I mean, when I read your paper and you started talking about the billions upon billions of dollars that all this goes into, I didn’t understand really how bad it is.

And you know, kind of the first rule of politics to me is you have to explain to people why this is good for you, why this is bad for you, why this impacts on you.

And I think reminding people of how awful this is and why this is not only something that none of us should be proud of, we should be ashamed of it, to remind people and help them understand why it’s not good for them and why it’s costing them and why it’s in all of our interests to try to do the best we can to make this situation a little better than it is.

I want to thank all of you on behalf of TCU and CSIS. Thanks again. (Applause.)

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