In U.S., Outrage Over All the President's Men

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/us/06iht-letter06.html

Version 0 of 1.

WASHINGTON — It began before the inauguration, a persistent hiss emerging from feminists and organizations that keep track of what women are due. In no time, the hiss grew into a deafening buzz that nearly drowned out other big noises in this city.

It all boiled down to one nagging question: Where are the women?

President Barack Obama’s all-male, all-white nominations for the top jobs in his second-term cabinet had advocates for women in an uproar.

Was it unreasonable to expect that women would cash in after their overwhelming support for Mr. Obama in his bid for re-election? Would women get the short end of the deal, yet again? Would they be consigned to second- and third-tier jobs, as happened to members of other blocs that supported Mr. Obama, like blacks and Hispanics, whose influence and visibility in high-profile jobs hardly match their voting muscle?

“President Obama has even managed to take a step backwards from his first term,” Rosa Brooks, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said in a column in Foreign Policy.

“For defense secretary, he inexplicably selected former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel over Michèle Flournoy, the universally respected former under secretary of defense for policy,” wrote Ms. Brooks, who once served as a counselor to Ms. Flournoy in the Defense Department.

“President Obama missed a historic opportunity to be the president who appoints the first female secretary of defense,” she added, echoing other supporters of Ms. Flournoy’s who had hoped she would be the new female leader in an Obama cabinet that no longer includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The president “is not really a feminist,” Ms. Brooks said in an interview last week. “What I mean by that is that although he clearly believes in the importance of formal equality, he doesn’t seem to have much instinctive feel for the more subtle structural barriers to women’s advancement, or to place a very high priority on gender issues.”

Mr. Obama, she said, had “surrounded himself by mostly male advisers and has shown no particular interest in focusing on making the White House a more friendly workplace for women.” She continued, “He’s a thousand times stronger on women’s issues than Republican candidates were, but I wish it was something he ‘got’ a little bit more.”

The president, perhaps stung by criticism from women who were a pillar of his re-election, has defended his diversity record by citing his appointment of two women to the U.S. Supreme Court in his first term and suggesting that he might have some surprise female appointments in store. He bolstered his argument in his Inaugural Address, addressing in unprecedented fashion the rights of women, gays and blacks.

Four days later came a groundbreaking victory for feminists. On Jan. 24, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced the end of the military’s official ban on women in combat, opening thousands of frontline roles and other jobs.

The announcement shifted the conversation from “where are the women?” to praise for a forward-leaning U.S. administration. It grabbed the news media’s attention and muffled the complaints about a lack of women in top jobs in the Obama administration.

Ms. Brooks, who is writing a book on the changing role of the military, said she thought the process might indeed have seen an acceleration.

“It’s just speculation,” she said, “but I wonder if the criticism aimed at Obama over the dearth of women in senior national security positions influenced the timing of the Pentagon’s announcement. The president was clearly bothered by the criticism, and may have felt that the Pentagon announcement would help defray it a bit.”

Whether politically motivated or not, it was a breakthrough that overturned a 1994 Pentagon rule that restricted women from artillery, armor, infantry and similar military roles (though women have, in fact, occasionally found themselves in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan).

None of this will come to pass quickly. The U.S. military services must now draw up plans for allowing women to apply for combat positions and will have until January 2016 to explain why some positions should remain closed to women.

Ms. Brooks, who once served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy, said that allowing women in combat does “eliminate formal barriers.” But, she added, that does not guarantee that more women will want to join the U.S. services. She cited structural factors that could be barriers to women’s advancement, like rigid personnel requirements and a system that forces people, in combat or not, to relocate frequently. “It can be punitive,” she said.

Not everyone is happy with the recent changes, of course. Critics of the decision point to the issue of women’s fitness for combat. They often say that women do not have sufficient upper-body strength, that they are emotional and subject to monthly hormonal cycles, and that the U.S. military would have to lower its standards if it were to allow women in combat.

The new rule is “changing the paradigm from exclusiveness to inclusiveness,” General Dempsey said Sunday on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” adding that standards would not be lowered.

One thing seems certain. “This means that now it is possible for a woman to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” said Laura A. Liswood, a co-founder and secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders. “It’s a sea change.”