A: On the campaigns that have cultivated and promoted their lower-level female staffers.
Like Matt, I think Garance makes an incredibly important point about the reasons for Hillary Clinton’s largely female senior staff:
After all, it’s not like there was some huge population of female strategists out there the various campaigns were competing for and Clinton just happened to snap them all up. Clinton created, on her own, a cadre of female strategists to serve her political needs, by spotting talent in the women around her and promoting them up the political food chain. No other candidate can say, for example, that their campaign is being managed by their female former scheduler.
This is one of the reasons I get so frustrated when I hear male editors say they’re “really committed” to having more women writing and editing for their publication, while at the same time only cultivating lower-level male employees. I’ve heard older female editors say it took them years to realize that their male counterparts were being groomed by the older men in the office. It can be a very subtle, everyday kind of thing. So it’s important to keep pointing out to people in positions of power (in business, in politics, in media, etc.) that the best way to achieve gender parity higher up the ladder is to develop the skills of women at the bottom and promote them — not only to look for women to hire in at the top.
–Ann Friedman
