Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

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  When I became Secretary of State in 2009, I was determined to put this “unfinished business” at the top of America’s diplomatic to-do list. Melanne Verveer was one of my first calls. She had spent the previous eight years running Vital Voices, an organization she and I had started with Madeleine Albright to find and support emerging women leaders around the world. I asked Melanne to serve as the first Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues and to help me craft a “full participation agenda” and weave it into the fabric of American foreign policy and national security. We had to push tradition-bound bureaus and agencies to think differently about the role of women in conflicts and peacemaking, economic and democratic development, public health, and more. I didn’t want her office to be the only place where this work was done; rather I wanted it to be integrated into the daily routine of our diplomats and development experts everywhere.

  The State Department and USAID launched a wide range of global and regional initiatives, including programs to help women entrepreneurs gain access to training, markets, finance, and credit; a partnership with some of America’s top women’s colleges and universities to identify, mentor, and train women in public service around the world; and efforts to help more women use mobile technology for everything from secure banking to documenting gender-based violence. Melanne tirelessly traveled the world, finding local partners and ensuring that these efforts took root in communities as well as capitals. I liked to joke with her that she might be the only person I knew with more frequent-flier miles than I. (If only the Air Force offered them!)

  Many years ago on a trip across Africa I was struck that everywhere I went I saw women laboring in the fields, women carrying water, women fetching firewood, women working at market stalls. I was talking to some economists, and I asked them, “How do you evaluate the contributions that women make to the economy?” One of them replied, “We don’t, because they don’t participate in the economy.” He meant the formal economy of offices and factories. But if women across the world all of a sudden stopped working one day, those economists would quickly discover that women actually contribute quite a lot to the economy, as well as to the peace and security of their communities.

  I encountered this attitude all over the world. I can’t tell you how many times I sat across the table from some President or Prime Minister whose eyes glazed over whenever I raised the issue of women’s rights and opportunities in his country. I quietly kept track of how many women leaders or advisors ever joined those meetings. It wasn’t hard to do, because there were hardly any.

  My most egregious interaction with a clueless leader was in the remote Southeast Asian island nation of Papua New Guinea in November 2010. It’s a mysterious and bountiful country on the verge of progress, but plagued by one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world. According to one estimate, 70 percent of women in Papua New Guinea will be victims of rape or physical violence in their lifetime. At our joint press conference, Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare was asked by an American reporter what his response was to these troubling statistics. Somare claimed the problems were “exaggerated by people who write about us.” Yes, he admitted, there were some cases of violence, but he added, “I have been around for a long time and I know that men and the women, sometimes there are fights, arguments do take place, but it’s nothing very brutal.” There were laws in place, he said. “We have cases where people are drunk. . . . A person cannot control when he’s under the influence of liquor.” I was taken aback, to say the least, and even the jaded American press corps was speechless. Afterward, as you can imagine, Melanne and I got right to work on new programs and partnerships with civil society in Papua New Guinea, trying to amplify women’s voices and provide them with new platforms for participation. I am pleased that in May 2013, a new Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill, formally apologized to the women of his country for the violence and promised to toughen criminal penalties.

  Even at home in Washington our work on behalf of women was often seen as a parenthetical exercise, somehow separate from the important work of foreign policy. In one Washington Post article about our efforts with women in Afghanistan, an unnamed senior administration official sniffed, “Gender issues are going to have to take a backseat to other priorities. . . . There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.” I wasn’t surprised the official was afraid to be named making a comment like that. Melanne and I started calling her shop the Pet Rock Office and kept on working.

  I have to admit, I grew tired of watching otherwise thoughtful people just smile and nod when I brought up the concerns of women and girls. I’d been championing these issues on the world stage for nearly twenty years, and sometimes it felt like all I was doing was preaching to the choir. So I decided to redouble our efforts to make a case strong enough to convince skeptics based on hard data and clear-eyed analysis that creating opportunities for women and girls across the globe directly supports everyone’s security and prosperity, and should be part of our diplomacy and development work.

  Melanne’s team began combing through all the data that had been collected by institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. They quickly learned that some aspects of women’s participation were well studied, especially the benefits of bringing more women into the workforce and the obstacles that held them back, but others were significantly under-researched. In many parts of the world there was a lack of reliable and regular data on even the basic facts about the lives of women and girls, such as whether they had birth certificates, at what age they had their first child, how many hours of paid and unpaid work they did, or whether they owned the land they farmed.

  I’ve always believed that good decisions in government, in business, and in life are based on evidence rather than ideology. This is especially true when it comes to policies that will affect millions of people. You have to do the research and run the numbers; that’s how we minimize risk and maximize impact. And these days we keep statistics on everything we care about, from RBIs in baseball to ROI in business. There’s a saying in management circles: “What gets measured gets done.” So if we were serious about helping more girls and women achieve their full potential, then we had to get serious about gathering and analyzing the data about the conditions they faced and the contributions they made. We needed not only more data but also better data. We needed to make it accessible to researchers and policymakers so it could help them make good decisions. The State Department launched a number of new initiatives to fill the data gaps, working with the UN, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and others.

  (In general I was surprised how many people in Washington operated in an “evidence-free zone,” where data and science were disregarded. A senior advisor to President Bush was once quoted disparaging what he called “the reality-based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I’ve always thought that’s exactly how to solve problems. The Bush aide went on, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. . . . We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” That attitude helps explain a lot of what went wrong in those years.)

  We didn’t have to wait for all these projects to bear fruit to start trumpeting the data we already had, especially on women and the economy. And you didn’t have to look far. In the early 1970s, American women held 37 percent of all jobs in the United States, compared to 47 percent in 2009. The productivity gains attributable to this increase accounted for more than $3.5 trillion in GDP growth over four decades.

  The story has played out in less developed economies as well. For example, Latin America and the Caribbean steadily increased women’s participation in the labor market starting in the 1990s. The World Bank has estimated that extreme poverty in the region decreased by 30 percent as a result of recent gains.


  These and similar findings add up to a compelling case that it is in everyone’s interest to increase women’s participation in the economy and to tear down the barriers that still hold them back. In September 2011 I assembled all the data I could and made this argument at a summit of Asian-Pacific leaders in San Francisco. “To achieve the economic expansion we all seek, we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economies in the decades to come,” I told the delegates. “And that vital source of growth is women. With economic models straining in every corner of the world, none of us can afford to perpetuate the barriers facing women in the workforce.”

  I was delighted when the Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe announced that increasing women’s economic participation would be a pillar of his ambitious new economic agenda. It was dubbed “womenomics.” He detailed plans to improve access to affordable child care and extend parental leave to encourage more women to enter the workforce. Abe also asked the country’s biggest businesses to each appoint at least one woman executive. We need more far-sighted leadership like that at home and around the world.

  Another area where we focused our efforts was the role of women in making and keeping peace. We had seen so many inspiring examples of women around the world making unique contributions to ending conflicts and rebuilding shattered societies in Liberia, Colombia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. I remember vividly my visit to a fish and chips restaurant in Belfast in 1995, where I had a chance to sit and drink tea with both Catholic and Protestant women who were tired of the Troubles and eager for peace. While they may have attended different churches on Sunday, seven days a week they all said a silent prayer for the safe return of a child from school or a husband from an errand in town. One of them, Joyce McCartan, who founded the Women’s Drop-In Center in 1987 after her seventeen-year-old son was shot and killed, said: “It takes women to bring men to their senses.”

  When women participate in peace processes, they tend to focus discussion on issues like human rights, justice, national reconciliation, and economic renewal that are critical to making peace. They generally build coalitions across ethnic and sectarian lines and are more likely to speak up for other marginalized groups. They often act as mediators and help to foster compromise.

  Yet despite all that women tend to bring to the table, more often than not they’re excluded. Of the hundreds of peace treaties signed since the early 1990s, fewer than 10 percent had any women negotiators, fewer than 3 percent had any women signatories, and only a small percentage included even a single reference to women. So it’s not too surprising that more than half of all peace agreements fail within five years.

  I spent years trying to get generals, diplomats, and national security policymakers in our own country and around the world to tune in to this reality. I found sympathetic allies at the Pentagon and in the White House, including Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy and Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. State, USAID, and Defense got to work on a plan that would change the way diplomats, development experts, and military personnel interact with women in conflict and postconflict areas. There would be new emphasis on stopping rape and gender-based violence and empowering women to make and keep peace. We called it a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security.

  In December 2011, President Obama issued an executive order launching the plan. Flournoy and Winnefeld joined me at Georgetown to explain it to the public. Looking at the Admiral in his crisp Navy uniform at an event about women as peacemakers, I hoped we had finally turned a corner, at least in our country.

  As my term as Secretary drew to a close, I wanted to be sure that the changes we had made to knit gender issues into every aspect of U.S. foreign policy wouldn’t disappear after I left. In any bureaucracy, institutionalizing reforms is difficult, and that was certainly true at the State Department. Over several months we worked with the White House to prepare a Presidential Memorandum that would make Melanne’s position of Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues permanent and ensure that her successors reported directly to the Secretary of State. It took some pressing to get this through the White House system, but luckily my former Deputy Secretary Jack Lew had become President Obama’s Chief of Staff, so we had a very well-placed ally. On January 30, 2013, one of my last days in office, I had lunch with President Obama in his private dining room off the Oval Office, and, as I was leaving, he stopped me to watch him sign the memorandum. He could not have given me a better send-off.

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  Our work on behalf of women and girls around the world was embedded in a broader human rights agenda aimed at defending the freedoms enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and making them real in the lives of people all over the world.

  In 2009, there was no denying that our country’s approach to human rights had gotten somewhat out of balance. On his second full day in office President Obama issued an executive order prohibiting the use of torture or official cruelty by any U.S. official and ordered the closure of Guantánamo Bay (a goal that has not yet been achieved). He pledged to put human rights back at the heart of our foreign policy.

  As I’ve described, the United States became a champion of freedom on the internet and stepped up aid to dissidents trying to evade censors and bypass firewalls. We advocated on behalf of journalists thrown in jail for exposing inconvenient truths about repressive regimes, helped survivors of human trafficking step out of the shadows, and made the case for workers’ rights and fair labor standards. Behind these headlines was the daily work of diplomacy: pressing foreign governments, supporting dissidents, engaging civil society, and making sure that our own government kept human rights front and center in all policy deliberations.

  One of our first steps was to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council, a forty-seven-member body created in 2006 to monitor abuses around the world. It replaced the UN Human Rights Commission, which Eleanor Roosevelt had helped establish and lead in the late 1940s. Over time it had become a laughingstock as notorious human rights violators like Sudan and Zimbabwe were elected as members. The new organization faced the same problems; even Cuba won a seat. The Bush Administration refused to participate, and the Council seemed to spend most of its time condemning Israel. So why join? It wasn’t that the Obama Administration didn’t see the Council’s flaws, but we decided that participating would give us the best chance to be a constructive influence and put it on a better track.

  The Council continued to have serious problems, but it proved to be a useful platform for advancing our agenda. When Muammar Qaddafi was using extreme violence against civilians in Libya in early 2011, I went to the Council in Geneva to rally the world against his atrocities. While there I spoke out against a continuing bias against Israel. I also urged the Council to move beyond a decade-long debate over whether insults to religion should be banned or criminalized. “It is time to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression and pursue a new approach based on concrete steps to fight intolerance wherever it occurs,” I said.

  For years some Muslim-majority nations at the Council had pushed resolutions opposed by the United States and others that would have threatened freedom of expression in the name of preventing “defamation” of religion. This was not just a theoretical exercise, considering the firestorms that erupted periodically when someone around the world published a cartoon or posted a video online denigrating the Prophet Muhammad. I thought we could break the impasse by recognizing that tolerance and freedom are both core values that need protecting. To reach a compromise, we needed a partner willing to move past the charged political and ideological questions clouding the debate.

  We found that partner in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which represents nearly sixty nations. Its chair, the Turkish diplomat and scholar Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, was a thoughtful man whom I had met in the 1990s, when he was the director of the Research Centre for
Islamic History, Art and Culture in Istanbul. İhsanoğlu agreed to work with me on a new resolution at the Human Rights Council that would take a strong stand for freedom of expression and worship and against discrimination and violence based upon religion or belief, while avoiding the broad prohibitions on speech called for in the former “defamation” resolutions. Our teams in Geneva began hammering out the text, and in late March 2011 the Council unanimously adopted it.

  Religious freedom is a human right unto itself, and it is also wrapped up with other rights, including the right of people to think what they want, say what they think, associate with others, and assemble peacefully without the state looking over their shoulders or prohibiting them from doing so. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes clear that each of us is born free to practice any religion, to change our religion, or to have none at all. No state may grant these freedoms as a privilege or take them away as a punishment.