27 October 2008
Girl Scouts Grill Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice
Posted by admin under: Community Partners; leadership .
The Girls Scouts of the USA (literally there were a lot of Girl Scouts there) had a chance to interview Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice last month. The state department has released the transcript of that interview. I love the Girl Scouts getting to interview a national female leader and there were a lot of personal questions (the Secretary’s former history with figure skating, her piano playing, golfing, favorite color and sleep habits), but an interesting one was the establishment of a female leader network.
QUESTION: Christine Lagarde, which I’m sure, as you know, is the French Minister of Finance, spoke to our school last year. And she’s also a Holton graduate. She spoke about the importance of creating a network amongst female leaders, much like the old boy network. I was wondering how you try to further that community. And how important do you think it is?
SECRETARY RICE: I think it’s very important. The one thing you should never let people tell you is that, well, it’s not a good thing to draw on contacts or to have people. It is important. Everybody needs to draw on people that they know. There’s nothing wrong with calling somebody who might know somebody who might know somebody who can help you. There’s nothing wrong with that. And so it’s – it is good to have networks.
And I’ve actually gotten together with other female foreign ministers and a few female leaders around the world, and we actually have a women’s foreign policy network. And we’re going to meet for the third time in – at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
And we do several things. We try to encourage young women to become interested in foreign affairs, to become – in countries where women are not really well represented in political processes, to become engaged in politics. We try to encourage business leaders to engage young women and help bring them up through the system. We also do work on foreign policy issues of concern to women. For instance, we have recently been working on women and violence in warfare, the fact that violence against women is sometimes used as a tool of war, and we’ve tried to focus the United Nations on that problem; on access of women to justice and to courts and to legal counsel. So we’ve taken that up as a cause.
Because this is a pretty powerful group of women. I think there’s several women leaders now: the President of Chile; the president of – the Chancellor of Germany; the President of Liberia; the President of Argentina. And if you put that together with the fact that you’ve got a lot of women foreign ministers, we think it’s become an important network for addressing these issues and for saying to young girls, “You can do this too.”
Hm. Well, I’m not a big fan of limiting contacts on that scale based on anything: race, creed, or gender. I do understand the interest in promoting specific items regarding female issues in the world. I just think anyone can work on those issues. However, if establishing an old-girl network gets a little more freedom to women elsewhere in the world then I’ll hold off judgement for now.
(hat tip: Libby Leist of NBC News)
- Hardball’s Matthew and Rep. Murtha Honor Boy Scout Volunteer
- Dee Dee Myers Distinctive Girl Scout Guest
- Focus on the Ridiculous
- Financial Literacy Event for Girls
- BoyandGirlScouts.com on FoxNews and MSNBC
