The Chicago Tribune has a very moving article. Mugabe’s people have been killing members of the opposition party and we worry about our presidential candidates making poor jokes…

 Kalyn sent me these links from Field to Feast, an African food blog- a post from April with hope:

"A week ago today, the citizens of Zimbabwe went to the polls. They emerged proudly displaying their pinkie fingers, stained pink from the ink used to mark their votes. Excited whispers of change wafted on the air like errant plastic bags, shreds of new information were panned like gold, and I saw – for the first time in my three years here – a flicker of hope on the faces of people in the street.



Now, a week has past. The ink has disappeared. And so has the flicker of hope. As the delay in the release of Presidential results continues and the political posturing takes a hard-line turn, a veil of resignation has again descended and I can almost tangibly feel people looking inside themselves, trying to determine how they are possibly going to dig a deeper well of patience.



What is going to happen"?



And then, a post from today:

I ended my last post with a wish that the flicker of hope I saw in the days after the 29 March election would reignite. I was wrong, however, to assume the flame had disappeared. It remained a smolder low to the ground, tended by brave people, despite the boots and sticks and metal rods trying to snuff it out.



Yes, blogging about food still seems trivial to me. But, it also seems like something I need to do to take a mental break from thinking about the situation here. So, after two months, with this post, I am back! I’ll be consciously avoiding any discussion about the political or humanitarian situation here (which you can read about here, here and here), mostly for my own sanity. So today, I will tell you only one thing about Zimbabwe – a story about the country’s indigenous nyimo bean.

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When it comes to marriage, the more things change, the less things change. In a society where mothers who work full-time still do twice the amount of housework and even more childcare hours as working fathers, the idea that Dad would give up his career advancement to cook with the kids is pretty radical.

When we define equality for adult women and men, we usually use breadwinning as the key indicator. At home meanwhile, this mother puts it best when she says, “someone has to be in charge.” That someone is usually mom, a fact that hasn’t changed in decades. Look, we say, a mother can work too, and keep bringing home the bacon, even though she’s also staying up late to clean the house and take care of the children. That’s not equality – that’s taking on an extra job. These social norms change slowly, but we see more examples each day.

And now, in Barack and Michelle Obama, we have a fantastic opportunity for American leaders to model change, as psychologists say. Michelle has told us Barack forgets to pick up his socks, but most of their communication, both verbal and non-verbal (even the famous fist jab) signals he and Michelle are equal partners. Starting now, I hope they show us how.

For many, myself included, to be frank, it’s challenging to see men in these nurturing roles. It goes against so many of our cultural norms. We need leaders to model new norms for us. Amy Vachon, a shared care parent featured in the New York Times article, states that the “philosophy of being teammates” is more important than how tasks break down. And though his career clearly hasn’t suffered, the Obamas, with their international stage, can offer insight into how to manage an equal partnership, its successes and failures.

While much is made of Obama’s new masculinity – a non-martial viewpoint, his sensitivity and gestalt openly informed by a matriarchy – this is not a person who worked part-time so he could plan Sasha’s play dates and clean the house. But nor is Michelle, who was the breadwinner for many years. The Obama’s have offered us a rare, frank snapshot of their relationship, but I want to know more. I would love to know how these two super-achievers did it, because right now I see Michelle holding the lion’s share of the household duties, and that is equality version 1.5, not 2.0.

Michelle has gotten a lot of flak for describing her husband, but I recognize this loving self-deprecation as banter between equals. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had had the guts to rib Bill a little back in 1992. Defending her comments about Barack’s difficulty picking up after himself, Michelle said in an interview in Glamour magazine: “People understood that this is how we all live in our marriages. And Barack is very much human. So let’s not deify him, because what we do is we deify, and then we’re ready to chop it down.”

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What she meant was, stop multi-tasking for a second. Stop Twittering, blogging, IM-ing, catching up on email, or reading Gawker and listen. We all hear, we’re adept at hearing and performing actions at the same time. But listening is different, and at the modern tech or political conference structure listening is out of style. Like she often does, she referenced her two teenage daughters, who according to Arianna are always online, multitasking, and sometimes think their mom doesn’t get it. What Arianna—who gets it so thoroughly it’s staggering—meant was, her daughters aren’t present. Few of us are.

The conference was fabulous but it seemed nobody listened. The entire interplay happened not in the meeting rooms, but on Twitter. At some point the Twittering grew so self-referential that those on a panel referred not to each other or to the audience but to the giant Twitter page displayed on a screen above.

The conference closed, appropriately, with a “Twitter song.”

I realized I haven’t been fully present at work in years. I rarely listen in meetings, on phone calls, at conferences, and nor does anyone else I know. It’s not so much that Google culture has made my stupider (a la the Atlantic monthly article). It’s that I am distracted. Dave Winer wrote a great post about how un-useful most conferences are boring and unilateral (only fun for the panel) and so that’s why people space out in the audiences. I think most of us have too many options to keep busy in our virtual lives, and so we prefer to do that.

In so doing, we don’t process any information. We hear it, and post it immediately. We lose the valuable thing that happens when we are confronted with information and then have to break it down, understand what it means, and re-frame. Cogitating- it’s a dying art.

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“...It starts with equal pay. 62 percent of working women in America earn half – or more than half – of their family’s income. But women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In 2008, you’d think that Washington would be united in its determination to fight for equal pay. That’s why I was proud to co-sponsor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which would have reversed last year’s Supreme Court decision, which made it more difficult for women to challenge pay discrimination on the job.

But Senator McCain thinks the Supreme Court got it right. He opposed the Fair Pay Restoration Act. He suggested that the reason women don’t have equal pay isn’t discrimination on the job – it’s because they need more education and training. That’s just totally wrong. Lilly Ledbetter’s problem was not that she was somehow unqualified or unprepared for higher-paying positions. She most certainly was, and by all reports she was an excellent employee. Her problem was that her employer paid her less than men who were doing the exact same work.

John McCain just has it wrong. He said the Fair Pay Restoration Act “opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.” But I can’t think of any problem more important than making sure that women get equal pay for equal work. It’s a matter of equality. It’s a matter of fairness. That’s why I stood up for equal pay in the Illinois State Senate, and helped pass a law to give 330,000 more women protection from paycheck discrimination. That’s why I’ve been fighting to pass legislation in the Senate, so that employers don’t get away with discriminating against hardworking women like Lilly Ledbetter. And that’s why I’ll continue to stand up for equal pay as President. Senator McCain won’t, and that’s a real difference in this election.

As the son of a single mother, I also don’t accept an America that makes women choose between their kids and their careers. It’s not acceptable that women are denied jobs or promotions because they’ve got kids at home. It’s not acceptable that forty percent of working women don’t have a single paid sick day. That’s wrong for working parents, it’s wrong for America’s children, and it’s not who we are as a country.

I’ll be a President who stands up for the American family by giving all working parents a hand. To help with childcare, I’ll expand the Child and Dependent Care tax credit, so that working families can receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses. I’ll double funding for afterschool programs that help children learn and give parents relief. And I’ll invest $10 billion to guarantee access to quality, affordable, early childhood education for every child in America.

And with more and more households headed by two working parents – or a single working parent – it’s also time to dramatically expand the Family and Medical Leave Act. Since more Americans are working for small businesses, I’ll expand FMLA to cover businesses with as few as 25 employees – this will reach millions of American workers who aren’t covered today. We’ll also allow workers to take leave to care for elderly parents. We’ll allow parents to take 24 hours of annual leave to join school activities with their kids. And we’ll cover employees who are victims of domestic violence or sexual assault.

I’ll also stand up for paid leave. Today, 78 percent of workers covered by FMLA don’t take leave because it isn’t paid. That’s just not fair. You shouldn’t be punished for getting sick or dealing with a family crisis. That’s why I’ll require employers to provide all of their workers with seven paid sick days a year. And I’ll support a 50-state strategy to adopt paid-leave systems, and set aside $1.5 billion to fund it. I have a clear plan to expand paid leave and sick leave, Senator McCain doesn’t, and that’s a real difference in this election.

And at a time when folks are struggling with the rising price of everything from gas to groceries, I’ll provide working women with immediate relief. While Senator McCain wants to continue the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and didn’t ask for them, I’ll pass a middle class tax cut of $1,000 for each working family. This will deliver tax relief for over 70 million working women. And we need to help folks at the bottom of the ladder. Almost 60 percent of Americans who benefited from raising the minimum wage were women. I won’t leave any working people behind. That’s why, unlike Senator McCain, I’ll index the minimum wage to inflation so that it goes up each year to keep pace with rising costs.

We can’t afford an economy where folks keep working harder for less. We can’t let the women in our workforce get paid even less for doing the same work. And we can’t keep pushing more and more of the burden on to the backs of working parents who are struggling to balance their jobs and their family. Because what binds us together, what makes us one American family, is that we stand up and fight for each other’s dreams, and for the dreams of all of our children.

I want my daughters to grow up in an America where they have opportunities that are even greater than their mother had, or their grandmothers, or their great grandmothers – an America where our daughters truly have the same opportunities as our sons.”

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Before women entered the workforce, their social networks were almost entirely female. Even still women’s networks are more female than male, and contain fewer weak ties (See Ronald Burt). Their networks are less rich in those who can bridge, broker deals, and introduce them to people with power. Women’s networks tend to include fewer cross sex contacts, which hampers women in fields that are male-driven. The critical period for entrepreneur’s life cycles are the 20’s and 30’s: this is when you accumulate resources and contacts to sustain later ventures. These are precisely the years when married women with children suffer. Their networks tend to become more female, more dense. This is changing, but there is truth to it.

The concept of network analysis provides a rich framework to analyze why women don’t run for office as much, don’t become CEO’s as much, don’t become Masters of the Universe as much. This is based on the assumption that women are disadvantaged because they are excluded from key social relationships. For decades now, scholars have concluded that women tend to have more dense networks than men (in which contacts all know each other and talk to each other, without expanding out, or forming “weak ties,” those people who are casual acquaintances but help you get ahead.

Women, scholars say, should see if they are sacrificing diversity for density- strong ties overhwhelm the weak ties that are so valuable for business and politics. Those with children are characterized by all-female reference groups. A practical example includes investigating salary negotiations: women tend to ask other women in their social network what they earn, which makes us feel better about ourselves but causes us to lose perspective on what the men in similar positions might earn (see Robin Ely).

So it was with interest that at the PDF Conference today, I was watching a presentation of a visual map of the blogosphere in politics and technology. “Mommybloggers,” according to Matthew Hurst from Microsoft Live Labs, occupy their own dense hub of the political blogosphere, but they’re not interconnected with other nodes in the blogosphere, such as DailyKos, or big tech bloggers, or just big deal bloggers like Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine. According to the chart, “mommybloggers” occupy a dense and busy spot on the network map of the poli-tech blogosphere. But like women’s social networks in general, our networks are dense and familiar, and not as outreaching as others. We link to each other, and talk to each other a good deal. Do you think that’s a fair characterization?

Do tight-knit online blog communities hold politically-motivated women back? If women spent less time blogging and linking to our online friends and more time cross-pollinating with larger sites in the political blogosphere, would we gain political might, or perhaps just new perspectives?

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Of all the issues a potential first lady could talk about, I feel this is the most crucial. Our legislators are slowly making positive changes to family and medical leave (the most recent was the House’s passing of the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2008). This act allows federal workers “four weeks of paid administrative leave, at regular salary, to federal workers, to be taken within one year of when babies are born or adopted. Right now, 75 percent of Fortune 100 companies provide an average of six to eight weeks of paid leave to new mothers, but federal employees who become parents are entitled only to unpaid leave under the Family & Medical Leave Act. Many cannot afford to take the unpaid leave that law provides.” One hopes this would provide a model for companies in the private sector to restructure their paid leave policies.

But it’s not just about maternity leave. Two working parents means something must give. I say it’s the outdated notion that work consists of eight (or 10, or 12, or 14) straight hours at a desk. And I’m not alone. There are many movements afoot to create structural changes in how we work, from ROWE’s (Results Only Work Environment) to MCC (Mass Career Customization). But you don’t need an acronym to start talking about change. I’m so glad Michelle Obama is doing just that.

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“Imagine if you were interviewing John McCain and Barack Obama for a CEO post. You might ask:

Tell us about a high performing team that you’ve built. What made it high-performing?

Can you give us an example of how you have overcome resistance to bring about a needed change?

Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble?

These are questions recently drafted for Barack Obama and John McCain by a room full of leaders from many walks of life. While we would consider such questions crucial insight to gain from a potential senior executive, to my knowledge we’ve never asked them of our presidential candidates. Here are some more leadership questions for our potential chief executives:

What are the attributes and competencies you value most in yourself that will serve you well in the White House?
The internet and technology have flattened the political playing field, allowing for more participation and collective decision making. How will you create a more participatory democracy and give people the opportunity to influence decision making?

The president’s role requires decisiveness. Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble. In retrospect, what would you have done differently?

Tell us about a time when your judgment was tested in crisis. What do you want us to appreciate about your judgment?

Leadership is not a soft skill. It directly impacts the bottom line in business, and I hope good leadership will lift our country’s bottom line. Research from the consulting firm Hay Group shows 35% of the difference in employee engagement and discretionary effort is directly a result of the work environment leaders create. How would that translate into Congress’ ability to get things done? Plus, the climate a leader creates accounts for up to 25 percent of the variance in an organization’s performance – and this is the bottom line: productivity, growth, profit.

But what does presidential leadership mean? What, indeed does leadership mean? It’s an overused word, aligned more with airport paperbacks than the true test of one who can help us find our way in the dark. When I spoke with many of the day’s participants, their answers varied, but they came back to the same core qualities: a leader must serve as well as lead. A leader must listen, learn, and be willing to fail. A leader can’t go it alone. Sounds trite. But imagine if our current Chief Executive had developed such attributes. Would you ever hire a CEO without knowing how he makes decisions? What if George W. Bush had said to the American people when asked, “well, I prefer to make unilateral decisions based on the advice of a small, inner circle of advisors and I never, ever listen to people outside that group.” Next candidate, please.

For more, click here for the Center for Public Leadership

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Nicco is going to be a fellow this fall at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. This is a huge achievement and I’m so excited. Here is the press release:

HARVARD’S INSTITUTE OF POLITICS ANNOUNCES FALL FELLOWS

Cambridge, MA – Harvard University’s Institute of Politics today designated six Resident Fellows to join the Harvard Kennedy School community for the fall semester. Resident Fellows interact with students, participate in the intellectual life of the community and pursue individual studies and writing projects.

“This extraordinary group of Fellows range from one of the preeminent governors in America, to the highest ranking woman in the Central Intelligence Agency, to one of the most respected diplomats in the Muslim world, to America’s foremost expert on internet politics, to a talented presidential media consultant, to a gifted young journalist and television analyst,” IOP Director and former U.S. Representative (R-IA) Jim Leach said.

The following Resident Fellows will join the Institute for the fall semester and lead weekly, not-for-credit study groups on a range of topics:

• Alex Castellanos, founding partner, National Media, Inc.; served as senior strategist for Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and as a creative member to Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign;


• Jennifer Donahue, political director, New Hampshire Institute of Politics; on-air political analyst and contributor to broadcast networks during past three New Hampshire presidential primaries;


• Mary Margaret Graham, former deputy director of national intelligence for collection, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and retired senior CIA officer;


• Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom (2003-08) and ambassador to the U.S. (1994-97, 1999-2002); a diplomat, journalist and academic, considered one of the most accomplished women professionals in the Muslim world;


• Nicco Mele, founder and president, “EchoDitto;” former internet operations director, Vermont governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign;


• Tom Vilsack, governor of Iowa (1999-2007); former Democratic candidate for President of the United States; former chair, Democratic Governors Association; former executive committee member, National Governors Association; and co- chair of U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“The Harvard community, particularly undergraduates active in Institute of Politics programming, will benefit from the opportunity to engage with this group of extraordinary leaders who have such vast experience in international as well as domestic politics,” Leach continued.

The Fellows program is central to the Institute’s dual commitment to encourage student interest in public life and to increase interaction between the academic and political communities.

Harvard University’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at Harvard Kennedy School, was established in 1966 as a memorial to President Kennedy. The IOP’s mission is to unite and engage students, particularly undergraduates, with academics, politicians, activists, and policymakers on a non-partisan basis and to stimulate and nurture their interest in public service and leadership. The Institute strives to promote greater understanding and cooperation between the academic world and the world of politics and public affairs. More information is available online at http://www.iop.harvard.edu/.

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I saw Sex and the City last night, and hated it. It made me so sad. I felt the movie was what would happen if a gay fashionista and an 18 year old girl got together and wrote Sex and the City: The Movie. I can’t imagine a grown up woman would honestly embrace the film. It was an unfeminist, materialist montage that had more to do with pushing Louis Vuitton and Vitamin Water than portraying our favorite quartet of girlfriends and their travails.

Mostly, I wanted the movie to show the girls a little kindness. The blue palette and harsh lighting did nobody any favors. The film reflected a lot of what’s awful about fashion and the men who run it. Anorexic looking Carrie in her weird outfits, harsh hair, beaky makeup and super labels betrayed very little femininity to my eye. I felt as I often do when I see models on the runway these days: who is art-directing this and please tell me they don’t have ovaries and hope to bring children into the world.

As for the teenage girl part: I take SATC seriously. It was a friend to me all through my twenties and while it often depressed me, I always felt like the essential character of the characters shone a light. There is one scene in that last season that highlights the maturity of the women, the fulfillment of not only their quest for love but their quest to learn how to love. Miranda searches for Steve’s elderly mother in the streets of Brooklyn, finds her, bathes her, comforts her. Magda, Miranda’s long-suffering nanny says something like, “You know how to love.” I cried like a baby in that scene, seeing one of my screen heroines in the fullness of her life. So when in the film Miranda moves out and goes silent on her husband of five years, father of her child, I thought, really? Have two educated New Yorkers in a committed relationship never heard of therapy (apparently there’s a six month lead time required to begin couples counseling in their world, because that’s how long it takes them to make it to the couch). When Carrie and Mr. Big split and go radio silent after his moment of indecision…well, whoever’s been about to head down the altar must have shook her head twice. Maybe it’s because Big was about to marry Andre Leon Talley’s devil creation rather than a real woman.

I didn’t want SATC to be a Vogue story. I wanted it to be a human story.

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Washington, D.C.— With hordes of young women lining up at their local theatre across the country this weekend for the much awaited premiere of the movie “Sex and the City,” the staff of youth civic engagement organization Mobilize.org decided to stand in line with these ladies, clutching what is to become the new fashion staple this election season: clipboards with voter registration forms.

Mobilize.org announced today their “Sex and the City…and a Side of Voter Registration” campaign to encourage young women to register to vote in this critical election. According to “Every Woman Counts,” in the 2008 election, young single women are poised to be a huge voting bloc. Ninety-three percent of the women polled said they planned to vote in the 2008 Election, and sixty-two percent of women polled believe voting in this election is more important than in previous elections.

Starting tomorrow, May 30, Mobilize.org’s network of young volunteers will be standing in line at the movies registering youth under the age of 30 for the 2008 election. The organization rallied its thousands of members this morning to connect with their counterparts online across the country, part of Mobilize.org’s Democracy 2.0 campaign to empower Millennials to develop creative strategies to effectuate change at the local level. “Sex and the City…and a Side of Voter Registration” is a simple way for young women to engage members of their own community in the democratic process.

“One of the things that has rivaled my passion for politics and activism this election year is the question of whether Mr. Big and Carrie get married, and I am thrilled to ‘marry’ my two passions this weekend in our ‘Sex and the City…and a Side of Voter Registration’ campaign. This is an exciting opportunity to reach out to women and convince that last 7% of them to come out and vote, an easy task given the high percentage of woman who already have committed to voting in the next Presidential Election – 93%,” commented Chief Executive Officer Maya Enista on the campaign.

Recognizing that many young females are not only looking up to female politicians, but celebrity icons like the women from Sex and the City, Mobilize.org, led by female CEO Maya Enista, CIO Christina Gagnier, and VP of Grassroots Organizing Katelyn Archer, and Program Associates Katie Taylor and Kaelan Kennedy thought this campaign would be a creative way to engage their Millennial counterparts.

For further information, please visit Mobilize.org’s website at http://www.mobilize.org or contact Mobilize.org’s Chief Information Officer, Christina Gagnier, at 510.717.3022.

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