WOMENIN THE
WildernessCHART ING A NEW PATH FORWARD
Voting for Obama by a solid 11-point margin, women followed their faith in government security.
How can we better explain that economic liberty and limited government benefit women?
The Independent Women’s Forum hosted a panel to set a winning agenda for the next four years—and beyond.
Winter 2013
“There’s a reason the topic of how to reverse this trend, and open more women to supporting the cause of liberty, commanded such attention: The future of our republic depends on it.”
Dear Friend:
As you may have heard, the Independent Women’s Forum’s Women in the Wilderness event drew a
standing room only crowd of people excited about ideas yet deeply concerned that ideals we hold
dear aren’t being effectively communicated in the current political atmosphere, especially to women.
There’s a reason the topic of how to reverse this trend, and open more women to supporting the
cause of liberty, commanded such attention: The future of our republic depends on it.
In November 2012, women voted for President Obama by an 11-point margin, demonstrating a
faith in big government and the security it supposedly brings. If we can’t find a way to speak to
women about why economic liberty and limited government benefit us more than big government,
we are in for long-term trouble with regards to liberty and prosperity.
As our event’s moderator, Christina Hoff Sommers explained: “A key theme of the Obama
campaign was protecting [women] from the aggressive Republican ‘war on women.’ If we want to
see conservatives survive, we are going to have to change the storyline.”
The theme of the evening was finding a better way to convey our ideals to women, while being loyal
to our principles. We selected our panelists with the hope that they would provide guidance as we
begin the process of charting a new path forward—getting out of the wilderness, so to speak—and
set an agenda for the next four years—and beyond.
We were fortunate to have a distinguished moderator in Hoff Sommers, philosopher, American
Enterprise Institute resident scholar, and author of seminal works on women’s issues (Who Stole
Feminism? and The War on Boys). Polling analyst Karlyn Bowman, also of the American Enterprise
Institute, knows more about public opinion than just about anybody in Washington. She left us with
causes for concern and reasons to hope.
A senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, Veronique de Rugy shared her expertise in economic
matters, speaking passionately about what can be accomplished when government gets out of the
way and lets us do our best. Mollie Hemingway, an editor at Ricochet, addressed the issue from a
cultural perspective. She made the point that we can’t just tell people who disagree with us that
they are wrong. We need to understand where they are coming from—but also have a grasp of the
values on which our own beliefs are based.
Last but certainly not least, my colleague, IWF Executive Director Sabrina Schaeffer, who is the co-
author of the book Liberty Is No War on Women, talked about what IWF research shows about how
women think about political issues. The research indicates that there are new ways to address the
issues and help women understand what they can gain from a free-market system.
We were so heartened by the quality of the discussion that we have pulled it together in this
small booklet. This is something new for us, but we kicked off this new “tradition” because it was
such an important evening that we wanted to put the information in a handy format and perhaps
broaden the audience.
Before I leave you to your reading, I’d like to comment on one more aspect of the event: the
response from the Left. We were barraged with criticism because we didn’t focus our attention on
the issue of abortion.
While we were very candid about our disgust at the absurd and hurtful comments made by some
members of the Republican Party during the 2012 campaign season, we did, indeed, prefer to
focus our discussion on issues of economic liberty and limited government.
We believe that the real “war on women” is big government—which truly undermines women’s
progress and financial security—a failed education system, excess regulations and taxation, a $16
trillion debt, and a government-run health care system.
The larger point is that the women at IWF and our fellow panelists (who cover the spectrum in
terms of their personal views on abortion) simply don’t agree that “women’s issues” should be
limited to our anatomy, as the Obama campaign seemed all too often to believe. We seek to
broaden the discussion, and we do not see women as solely a vessel for reproduction.
We hope that you will find the thoughts expressed by our panelists as helpful as we do in charting
a new path forward.
Sincerely,
Charlotte HaysDirector of Cultural Programs
Table of Contents
Remarks at the IWF’s Winter 2013 Women in the Wilderness panel:
6Christina Hoff Sommers,ModeratorAuthor, philosopher, and Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
12Veronique de RugySenior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center with expertise in U.S. economy, budget, and taxation 15
Mollie Z. HemingwayEditor, Ricochet.com and contributor to GetReligion.org
18 Sabrina Schaeffer Executive Director of the Independent Women’s Forum and co-author (with Carrie Lukas) of Liberty Is No War on Women
Karlyn BowmanSenior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute with expertise in politics, media, and public opinion and polls
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“Conservative leaders and funders don’t take women’s issues seriously. They tend to treat women’s groups like the Ladies Auxiliary and women’s issues as a distracting side show. But today, women’s issues are at the center of American politics.”
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, MODERATORAuthor, philosopher, and Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Good evening and welcome to the “Women in the Wilderness” forum. The question we are going to
consider today is: Where do we go from here? As conservative feminists, how do we better explain
how limited government and economic liberty benefit women. How do we set a winning agenda for
the next four years -- and beyond. I will say a few brief words about my view of the matter—then
turn the discussion over to our stellar panel.
Years ago, I read a list of writing tips that the famed editor of the Washington Monthly gave to
young writers. When you write, he said, always have a fair maiden—always have someone the
reader is rooting for––someone the reader cares about and wants to protect or vindicate.
The editor did not mean literally that you had to write about a damsel in distress—just that
journalism is best when readers have an emotional investment in someone’s well being. Well, here
is the challenge to conservatives in a nutshell: liberals excel at fair-maiden narratives; conservatives
do not. Fair or not, President Obama was perceived to be protecting the poor, the working class,
immigrants—-and most of all women. Liberals have literally embraced the fair maiden—a key theme
of the presidential campaign was protecting her from a vicious Republican war on women. If we want
to see conservatism survive, we are going to have to change the story line.
I drifted from being a liberal to a conservative as I came to realize that conservatism is a more
protective, compassionate, and rational philosophy. For me, expensive, poorly administered
entitlement programs that will burden our children and grandchildren with crippling debt, out-
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of-control, ideologically driven regulation that undermines our national economy—these are
destructive and harmful policies—superficially compassionate—but effectively, just the opposite. I
rejected hard-line feminism for just the same reason. I came to see how it promoted policies that
appear to protect women—but in fact harm them.
Conservative writers like Sabrina Schaeffer, Charlotte Hays, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Carrie Lukas
and many others have been focused on exposing the destructive side of the hard-line feminist
agenda. They also write brilliantly on the importance of limited government and economic liberty
for women. But their message is not getting across. Why? For at least two reasons.
One: We are vastly outnumbered when it comes to women’s advocacy. It is a David and Goliath
situation—without David’s slingshot. The feminist scholars in the nation’s women’s studies
departments, law schools, and research institutes enjoy a near-monopoly on “women’s issues.”
They write the textbooks, fashion the theories, teach the classes.
When journalists and legislators address topics such as the wage gap, gender and education,
and women’s health, they turn to these experts for enlightenment. Too often, what they get is
propaganda, grievance politics dressed up as research, and (in the words of Christine Rosen)
“deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries.” The feminist scholars are academically weak but
politically adroit. They represent only a tiny coterie of radical women, but they effectively present
themselves as the official voice of American women.
The second vexing problem: Conservative leaders and funders don’t take women’s issues
seriously. They tend to treat women’s groups like the Ladies Auxiliary and women’s issues as a
distracting side show. But today, women’s issues are at the center of American politics. The left
turns every issue into a women’s issue. And, often, they are right to do so.
Take something like Social Security reform. Try to reform it and you will run up against a legion
of feminist critics who will declare this is part of the war on women. Why? Well, because men,
on average, die earlier than women, more women depend on it. So yes, in a way, women have a
greater stake. Instead of being clueless about the issues, conservatives could make the case that
they are trying to SAVE a program essential to women—and liberals are driving it into insolvency.
But I am not sure what is worse—conservatives ignoring women’s issues –or conservatives
addressing them. Is there anyone more tongue tied than a Republican official talking about
women? During the election Kimberly Strassel, at the Wall Street Journal, wrote: “To say that the
Republican Party remains dominated by fossilized male dinosaurs who don’t know how to talk to
modern women—well, that would be mean. It would also be close to the truth.” She is right. Here
is what a frustrated former Bush advisor Karen Hughes had to say “If another Republican man
says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his
tongue… The college-age daughters of many of my friends voted for Obama because they were
completely turned off by Neanderthal comments like the suggestion of ‘legitimate rape.’”
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Memo to conservative men: Women’s life circumstances are different from men’s in important
respects. Their concerns need to be addressed by leaders who recognize and respect the
differences. And one more thing: women are 53% of the electorate.
To get out of the wilderness we need to change the narrative, we need a stronger research base,
and a stronger conservative women’s lobby. (If I were a billionaire committed to protecting the
American Dream—I would give 10 million dollars to the Independent Women’s Forum to develop
a women’s research center and a legal foundation. We would still be outnumbered. But good
scholarship would give us a powerful slingshot.) We also need new messengers (i.e., more female
legislators—and more younger male legislators who know how to talk to modern women). Then,
and only then, will be in a position to take back the fair-maiden.
Today we are going to hear from five distinguished women on the topic of “women in the
Wilderness and where we go from here? I am not sure if any of them share my ideas about what
went wrong—but I am sure you will find what they have to say enlightening.
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“Republicans should glue Cathy McMorris-Rodgers to John Boehner. She should be there every day because optics matter.”
KARLYN BOWMAN Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute with expertise in politics, media, and public opinion and polls
Good evening, I’m pleased to be with you tonight and to see this extraordinary turnout. IWF is
back, and we can thank Sabrina and the wonderful staff for that.
I’ve been at AEI for a long time and I’ll start with a confession: I wrote one of the first pieces on
the gender gap in 1982. So tonight, I’ll stick to electoral politics and numbers and talk a little
about what we learned in the 2012 election.
I want to start with the GOP retreat in Williamsburg and a presentation that is being given as we
meet titled “What Happened and Where We Are Now.” I don’t know what the pollsters will say, but
I’m guessing they might be modestly optimistic about 2014, mostly because 2012 was a wake-up
call for Republicans and conservatives. The first reason for modest optimism about 2014 is that
electorates in off- year elections are different from electorates in presidential election years. New
voters and young voters who did so much to put Obama over the top aren’t as committed to the
process and don’t turn out in high numbers like they do in presidential elections years. In 2010,
voters under 30 made up 11 percent of the electorate. In 2008, in Obama’s first election, they
made up 18 percent of all voters. That’s a big difference.
Unmarried women, whom pollster Stan Greenberg calls the largest progressive voting bloc in the
country, are also less reliable voters. Some key Democratic pollsters believe that their inability to
turn younger unmarried women out in big numbers contributed to Democratic losses in 2010.
Also looking ahead to 2014, the Democrats have far more seats at risk in the Senate than do the
Republicans. Twenty of the 2014 seats are held by Democrats and 13 by Republicans. Most of the
GOP Senate seats look safe at this early stage.
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Finally, second terms for any president are difficult. We have something we call the six-year itch
when people tire of a president and a lot of incumbents are defeated.
So there are some reasons for modest optimism about 2014, but there are enormous challenges
ahead. I’m going to talk about three—vote totals, demographics, and the attitudes that are the
source of the gender gap.
On Election Day, 55 percent of women voted for Obama and 44 percent voted for Romney. The
men’s vote was almost a mirror image. This is the familiar gender gap. But women turned out in
significantly greater numbers than did men. Christina mentioned that 53 percent of voters were
women and 47 percent men. In 2012 slightly more than 129 million people voted. That means 8
million more women than men voted.
If women are voting disproportionately Democratic on the presidential level and casting ballots in
greater numbers, there is a significant problem going forward. In every Senate and gubernatorial
race for which we have 2012 exit poll data, women were a larger share of the electorate than men.
The exit poll data allows us to look at women and men, and at married and not married women
and men. The not married female category includes women who have never been married and
women who are separated, divorced, and widowed and it’s hard to break out young single women,
the group that the Democrats are counting on in the future.
In every election since 1982, women have been more Democratic than men. Even in the
Republican sweeps of 1994 and again in 2010, women voted more Democratic than men. In
every election where we have data on the married and not married group, not married voters have
been more Democratic than married voters. In every election for which we have data married and
unmarried women have been more Democratic than their male counterparts.
The attitudes that produce the gender gap in politics haven’t changed since the gap was born in
1980. Women and men differ on using force, including questions about sending troops abroad
and gun control. In a new CNN poll, 44 percent of men, but 65 percent of women said they wanted
stricter gun control laws. Gun control however, is not a top priority for the public.
Women are more risk averse than men. Polls after the Fukushima nuclear disaster showed a
huge gender divide on nuclear power. CBS asks about whether you would like to ride on the space
shuttle if given the opportunity, and there is a gender chasm.
Women say they favor a stronger role for government than do men. This is true almost across the board.
Women are less likely to be informed on national issues.
On social issues we have an interesting pattern. On abortion, men and women have never differed.
But women are much more supportive of gay marriage than men.
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The question for me is whether these differences are hardwired or if a new generation of women
who expect to work and have families, who have more education than their male counterparts, will
be open to arguments that conservatives and the GOP are making.
Now what can conservatives and Republicans do going forward?
I agree with the things that Christina suggested, but let me add a few more. First, the GOP needs
to do better at recruiting women at the state legislative level because the GOP needs a farm
team. Patty Murray was chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and she
announced early that she would recruit female candidates to run in the Senate races in 2012.
She was very successful.
Republicans can never again allow the Democratic Party, as happened in Missouri, to be a part
of the selection of GOP candidates. Second, Republicans should glue Cathy McMorris-Rodgers to
John Boehner. She should be there every day because optics matter. Third, Republicans should
develop binders full of women to get women into DAS [Deputy Assistant Secretary] positions.
Someone such Carly Fiorina can provide names for farm team for DAS positions which many of
you might want to take.
My AEI colleague Jennifer Marsico noticed differences in advertising by the Obama and Romney
campaigns. If you went to the Romney campaign site, you would find “Moms for Mitt” bumper
strips. But Obama had a different approach designed to reach a younger demographic. Another AEI
colleague, Henry Olsen, made the point that GOP rhetoric needs to change to reflect demographic
realities. When conservatives appeal to Judeo-Christian values, he says, they are cutting out a
large swath of new voters.
There need to be more Republican and conservative women in broadcasting and polling -- more
Laura Ingrahams, more Sabrinas, and less Rush Limbaugh. In the polling community, I’m very
impressed by young Emily Ekins’ work for the Reason Foundation. Significant generational change
of that sort will pay dividends.
There may be short-term gains in 2014. If conservatives and Republicans address the larger
challenges, there may some significant long-term gains.
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“With very rare exceptions, there is nothing that women cannot do today … as long as the government gets out of the way. And that’s the fight we need to have.”
VERONIQUE DE RUGYSenior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center with expertise in U.S. economy, budget, and taxation
The title of this event Women in the Wilderness is very appropriate. This is exactly how it feels,
being a libertarian, a conservative, or a woman who actually believes in freedom. For those who
know me, shrinking the size of government is more than an academic pursuit. I moved here 13
years ago and I never imagined that living in the United States in 2013 would feel more and more
like living in France, minus the unpasteurized cheese and cheap but delicious wine.
How do women get out of the wilderness? I am not convinced that the path forward for freedom lovers
rests within the Republican Party, or Democratic Party for that matter. They have both failed us. The good
news is that if you love freedom, our ideas did not lose on the ballot last November. I say this because
freedom wasn’t on the ballot. (Remember that Gary Johnson wasn’t even represented in every state.)
We had the choice between big government and bigger government. So the good news is, we
haven’t lost the battle for freedom and we must continue fighting.
The bad news is that things in Washington are not looking up. For instance, the fiscal cliff deal
increased marginal tax rates on top income earners. This will affect women directly and indirectly.
As I explained in a recent Reason magazine column, how high income earners’ respond to
changes in tax rates is an issue that academics have studied extensively.
Counter-intuitively, studies have revealed that in the short run, the supply of labor is relatively
unresponsive to changes in after-tax earnings. Full-time employees—especially primary earners,
who have historically been men—don’t really seem to react much when their taxes go up. They
work the same hours at the same jobs even when they get to keep less of their earnings, which
affect them and their family.
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But studies have also shown that women and secondary earners more generally, are much more
responsive to changes in income tax rates. That means that as tax rates go up, taxes play a
bigger role in informing their decisions whether to work or not than factors that should be more
relevant such as their children’s needs for instance.
What’s more, even if higher taxes don’t discourage the efforts of those who are wealthy today,
they decrease the incentive for individuals to become wealthy in the future through their impact
on entrepreneurship, human capital accumulation, and career choices. In other words, increasing
marginal tax rates create an environment in which it will be much harder to become the next
Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. Increasing taxes on the wealthiest earners may raise some revenue
for the government in the short run, but the long-term costs can be substantial.
The fiscal cliff deal also makes the marriage penalty worse than it was before. If you are a woman,
and you make much less than your husband does (which is the case in a majority of households),
and you file jointly then you are taxed at your husband’s higher rate. The higher tax rates
implemented in the deal aggravate this penalty.
On the spending side, things are not looking up either. While spent less in 2012 than in 2011,
spending levels remain at an almost all-time-high since World War Two. Gross debt as a share of
GDP is over 100 percent. The debt held by the public is roughly 74 percent and it is growing. This
is a way to understand our spending problem and in my opinion this high debt is the reason we
were downgraded in 2011.
Why does this matter? We know that spending is the disease and debt is only the symptom. Yet,
there is a point where debt becomes a problem. Some research shows that debt can become so
big that the economy of a country starts to collapse.
How big does the debt have to be? On average, when debt reaches 90% of GDP then the economy
shrinks by 1%. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but as my colleague Matt Mitchell has calculated, if the
US had reached this level in 1975, the country would be 35 percent poorer today. This gap is what
our fight is all about.
Unfortunately, as long as we don’t change the path we are on, things will continue to get worse.
Spending programs like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are going to explode and as a
result so will our debt. And that doesn’t account for interest on our debt.
But women benefit from these programs you may say? They do. However, the benefits they receive
should be an incentive to reform the social safety net. Take Social Security, for instance. Today, 70
percent of Social Security recipients are women.
First, there are lots of things women could have done with the money (including saving for their
retirement), had they not been forced to put their money in this program which by all accounts
offers very low return on investment.
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Moreover, once the trust fund dries up, benefits will be cut overnight by 25 percent. This means
that if women are the ones benefitting now, they are also the ones who will be penalized when
the cuts occur. Women would benefit the most from reforming the program by putting it on sound
financial ground or by moving to private accounts.
Now, I have some good news. While the government is too big, regulations are awful, and we still
have this horrible tax code that can be a main factor in decisions women make about their career
or their family, things are otherwise looking great for women. Outside of the realm of politics things
are actually stunningly good for women. There is really nothing we cannot do today. For instance,
40% of privately held businesses are owned by women. Women can marry who they want, they
can decide not to get married, they can get divorced without being ostracized, they can prosper
and make a good living without being dependent of their husbands but they can also decide to
rely on their husbands while they stay home to raise their children if they want to. With very rare
exceptions, there is nothing that women cannot do today … as long as the government gets out of
the way. And that’s the fight we need to have.
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“We need to think more deeply about the principles that guide us—but we also need to do a better job of understanding the principles that guide those who don’t agree with us.”
MOLLIE Z. HEMINGWAYEditor, Ricochet.com and contributor to GetReligion.org
It’s important to remember, as we are doing our soul searching and agonizing, that the ideas
that most of us here tonight care about—liberty and freedom—were not well represented on the
presidential ballot last year.
I care a great deal about liberty, about limiting the size and scope of government, and about
market solutions to the problems that we are confronting. In 2010—which was one of the best
years for the liberty movement—the issue that people cared about most was ObamaCare. There
was a surge in voting at the polls and big, big wins for candidates who opposed ObamaCare.
And in 2012, what did the Republican Party, in its wisdom, do? The Republican Party ran as its
candidate a man who as governor of Massachusetts was the godfather of ObamaCare. When we
are talking about the ideals of liberty and freedom, we must remember that the Republican Party
isn’t always as friendly to these ideals as we might hope.
We need to think more deeply about the principles that guide us—but we also need to do a better
job of understanding the principles that guide those who don’t agree with us. One of the most
interesting books to come out in the last year is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, which was
well-received by conservatives but less so by liberals. Haidt was in some ways issuing a wake-up call
for liberals, saying that they must do a better job understanding the moral universe of conservatives.
Haidt was telling them that—much to their surprise—conservatives have a complex moral
approach to the issues. What he was really showing is that everybody is guided by a morality and
that it really helps to be able to understand what other people’s morality is. Everyone in this room
probably is concerned about many of the same issues.
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We are worried about threats to our freedom, we are worried about how increasing government
makes the things we care about less possible and we are already here in this room. But we want
also to reach out to other people who don’t share these values at all. Haidt puts it in terms of
morality binds you to one another. We share similar views and we’re here together.
But also morality blinds, it blinds us to the perspectives of other people.
We need to understand the motivation of other people and humble ourselves enough to try and
learn from it as well. Some people are not naturally attracted to the ideas of freedom. Instead,
they might be attracted to fighting oppression, or compassion, or equality of outcome. You can
say some of those values are stupid, or that if they really cared about them, they would be on our
team, but we would do better to really humble ourselves and understand where they are coming
from and learn the values of their moral universe and how to communicate with them in a way
that is more amenable to them. Of those voters who said that they cared about compassion, 81%
voted for Barack Obama versus 18% for Mitt Romney.
Among people who cared about basic competency issues, Mitt Romney won. But on caring the
chasm was vast—81 to 18! Do we say we care about liberty and freedom because we want to hurt
people? No! But we rarely talk about freedom as being better for people, and therefore we find
ourselves on the defensive. When people say they want to do this huge new government program to
help people, we rarely put forward a competing vision. This is the natural state of things, because as
people who aren’t seeking government solutions, we are going to be the ones saying no all the time.
But I think it is also important that instead of just saying no we put forward an alternative solution.
People who believe in limited government hold this belief not because they don’t care about other
people but because they believe there is a much better model for serving the community than
more government, and that is the heart of the message I wanted to share. I believe there can
be many gains made in the short term simply by not being stupid and making different ways to
improve the messaging.
We must keep this in mind, particularly when we hear depressing numbers about the gender gap.
The gender gap numbers sound horrific, and in many ways they are, but it’s also true that you don’t
need to win every single vote in that gap to have electoral success. You do need to win some of
them, though. On President Barack Obama’s website, if you were a woman and wanted to show
your affinity for the candidate, you could get a plethora of different things. You could get handbags,
you could get funny, witty T-shirts.
And all these people on the Republican side were making fun of the very specific, funny things
that were being offered. And on Mitt Romney’s website there were a total of three offerings for
women … and two of them were focused on mothers. So if you were a single woman you had all
of one “‘I’m a Lady for Mitt” T-shirt you could buy and there was an apron and a “Mom’s Drive the
Economy” bumper sticker. Simply being more welcoming to women who want to be supporters of a
given candidate might go a long way.
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But the actual difficulty is that there is a huge issue in the culture, the gender gap is 18 points,
but the marriage gap is 41 points. The gap is growing. In the 2020 census, it is likely to be 47
percent of women will not be married. This is a challenge to those of us who believe in a non-
big government vision that people’s needs can be meet at the individual level through family
formation, and in the community, at local houses of worship, local community organizations.
We believe that community and family institutions are the most flexible and agile and can respond
to the needs of the local community. We believe that they can do much better than the large,
impersonal federal government, which is full of bureaucrats who don’t know how to run a program
effectively if their lives depended on it. And the alternative vision that we have is when you have
less government, you have stronger institutions. And I think people who don’t have the same views
on freedom and liberty have been really effective in running roughshod over those institutions.
We must discuss an alternate to a big government vision, one where people’s needs are taken care
of, where there is security. It comes back that nugget about women not wanting to fly on a space
shuttle. Security is a big issue, compassion is a big issue. We must present an alternate vision that
features both security and compassion but is the opposite of a big government solution.
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“Our side tends to get bogged down in debating about whether or not discrimination exists. This is probably not a good way to start off any conversation about the wage gap or workplace regulations.”
SABRINA SCHAEFFERExecutive Director of the Independent Women’s Forum, co-author of Liberty is No War on Women
As everyone around this table has said if we have learned anything from November’s election
results, it was that Republicans and by extension the liberty movement have no idea how to talk to
women. In an attempt to be constructive tonight, I am offering a modest, four point plan as to how
to bring women out of the wilderness.
Point Number One: If you’ve Got It, Flaunt itI’m deeply turned off by the idea that you should elect somebody because of her gender. We’ve
had celebrations recently over the record number of women in the Senate, despite the fact that
the majority of them—16 out of 20—are Democrats and will vote for higher taxes and bigger
government.
Still, it’s time to acknowledge that the GOP is not just a party of older white men. Republicans
have a slate of strong, talented, fiscally conservative female lawmakers—former physicians,
accountants, business owners—who are poised to communicate the message that liberty is no
war on women.
Electing Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican from Washington, to the leadership as
chairman of the House Republican Conference was a step in the right direction. Now’s the time, of
course, to make sure she becomes as recognizable a face as Speaker John Boehner.
Unfotunately, the Republican Party lost several key female lawmakers in November—including
IWF’s 2012 Woman of Valor Rep. Mary Bono Mack from California, as well as Rep. Nan Hayworth
from New York—who now serves on IWF’s board. The bottom line is Republicans cannot afford
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to ignore the remaining elected women who understand and can communicate how progressive
policies fail women and their families.
Conservatives cannot afford to treat women such as Gov. Susanna Martinez of New Mexico,
Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Rep. Kristi Noem from South Dakota and and Rep. Lynn
Jenkins from Kansas as tokens. They must be viewed as ambassadors to a public that has been
systematically mis-educated about limited government and free market policies.
We’ve got it. So now it’s time to make women the face of conservative politics.
Point Number Two: Talk to Women…Especially Single WomenChristina mentioned that conservative funders and lawmakers don’t take women’s issues
seriously. And I couldn’t agree more. I sometimes go into donor meetings and I see donor’s eyes
glazing over. “Like why would I care about women?” And I’m thinking, if it is a male donor, well you
are married, you have a daughter, a sister, and an aunt. Apparently we live in a vacuum. Women’s
issues are at the center of everything right now.
Conservatives tend to shy away from playing gender politics. I think this is a good, admirable thing.
But in their effort not to pander to women, they seem to have forgotten that women exist at all and
that we make up 53% of the voting electorate.
The Obama campaign targeted women with a dishonest campaign about reproductive issues. They
used demeaning slogans like “Vote your Lady Parts.” (Of course, the media viewed “binders full of
women” as far more offensive than vote your lady parts! (While we are on the subject of “binders
full of women,” I want to mention that IWF compiled our own binder full of women who would be
great in elected office. Please look at our binder: http://iwf.org/blog/2790387/IWF-Releases-a-
Binder-of-Women-Candidates-for-High-Office)
As absurd as the Life of Julia info-graphic was, it worked. Women—especially unmarried women—
found that they could identify with that anonymous face of “Julia,” and Republicans were portrayed
as hostile to women in all areas of life from education to the workplace to entitlements. And they
never had a proper response.
Recognizing that the genders are different and that men and women might have different ways of
looking at things isn’t pandering; it’s simply finding a better way of communicating.
I’ll offer one quick example:
How on earth did conservatives allow President Obama’s campaign to frame the major issue
confronting women in 2012 as birth control? As I see it, if there was really a “women’s issue” this
election it wasn’t birth control, it was energy policy.
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Women are the leading consumers of everything from groceries to electronics to cars. Most moms
such as myself are responsible for shuttling kids around, doing laundry, and paying bills - activities
that put into sharp relief the impact high-energy prices have on families.
Still throughout the campaign President Obama kept talking about plans to invest more resources
in green energy companies and his commitment to a cap and trade plan that would unfairly target
the coal industry—an energy sector that represents nearly a quarter of total U.S. energy supply.
There are women in this room who know far more about energy policy than I. But the bottom line
is that energy is a critical issue for women that Republicans seemed to ignore completely.
We do need a competing vision. And when we have this unilateral disarmament and actually don’t
bother to engage with a part of the public, we can’t win. We have to learn to show how these
issues truly affect women. I don’t think it’s impossible. Because I’ll bet deep down the so-called
“Obamaphone woman” knows that a job and a good economy are better than a free phone.
Point Number Three: Don’t Play on Their Playing Field Don’t play on their field—this is the lesson we learned from research we conducted on the
Paycheck Fairness Act last June. Just a word about being able to do research in general before I
tell you about this project: Christina mentioned that conservative women are vastly outnumbered
by liberal women’s voices in academia and the media.
I would say that we are also vastly out-researched and outspent. One of the reasons women’s
groups on the Left are so far ahead of women’s groups on the Right is that they’ve been running
controlled message and GOTV experiments for years. Groups like Emily’s List and Women’s Voices
Women Vote have figured out exactly how to talk to women and how to register and motivate
specifically unmarried women. And they have money coming in from all sorts of seemingly centrist
or non-partisan organizations like the Pew Research Center to help them.
So in an effort to play a little catch up, IWF commissioned a message experiment last spring
to test the impact of arguments for and against the Paycheck Fairness Act. Respondents were
randomly assigned to one of five conditions in a true experiment—four treatments and one
control. All the treatment groups received the Progressive message in favor of the PFA; three
treatment conditions also included different IWF messages against the PFA.
And what we learned is that 74 percent of women agree at least somewhat that workplace
discrimination is a serious problem.
Our side tends to get bogged down in debating about whether or not discrimination exists. This is
probably not a good way to start off any conversation about the wage gap or workplace regulations.
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But we can, nevertheless, win these arguments—if we get on the right playing field.
Because we learned that despite the consensus that discrimination is a problem, it doesn’t
necessarily translate into support for legislation like the PFA.
It turned out that when respondents read both the progressive message in favor of the PFA and
IWF’s message highlighting the ill-economic impact of regulations like the PFA—how it will be bad
for business and the economy—support for the legislation dropped precipitously. In fact, “strong”
support for the bill dropped 35-points to a mere 10 percent when respondents were exposed to
the economic argument against the bill.
We also learned that a message intended to debunk the wage gap and emphasize instead how
the choices women make determine their wages and salaries was relatively ineffective in blunting
support for the bill.
Bottom line: If we try to out-Dem the Democrats—merely presenting a counter-argument on their
playing field—discrimination isn’t a problem!—we lose.
We might take this tact instead: We hear you on discrimination. But have you stopped to think
what this law might mean for our economy? And have you thought about other, non-governmental
approaches to closing the wage gap?
We don’t have to concede our principles. We don’t have to embrace the notion that society is
openly hostile to women. But we may need to frame the arguments in a way that wins women.
Finally…
Point Number Four: It’s Not Fair!Fairness is the critical lens through which Americans judge policies and candidates. And we know
from research that women place a high importance on “fairness.”
Even more important, how they define fairness— as equality of outcomes or equality of
opportunity— determines their support or opposition to particular policy questions.
For example, in evaluating women’s support for the Paycheck Fairness Act, we found that the
greater moral weight a woman placed on “equal outcomes,” the more likely she is to support the
PFA. In fact, more than any other factor—party identification or demographic characteristic—a
woman’s perception of fairness was the best guide to her position on PFA.
The reality is conservatives must begin by changing women’s perceptions of fairness as it relates
to public policy—that free market policies are fair.
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We need to explain how our solutions—a strong safety net for those in need and greater
opportunity for all Americans—are indeed the most compassionate solutions that lead to better
outcomes for the most vulnerable Americans as well as average Americans like us.
Still, my final word: I caution that we need to test this first. Just because this “fairness” frame
works for progressives, does NOT mean it will translate exactly for us!
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About IWF
The Independent Women’s Forum is on a mission to expand the conservative coalition, both by
increasing the number of women who understand and value the benefits of limited government,
personal liberty, and free markets, and by countering those who seek to ever-expand government
in the name of protecting women. IWF is a non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and educational
institution. By aggressively seeking earned media, providing easy-to-read, timely publications
and commentary, and reaching out to the public, we seek to cultivate support for these
important principles and encourage women to join us in working to return the country to limited,
Constitutional government.
Sabrina SchaefferExecutive Director
Carrie L. LukasManaging Director
INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM
IWF.ORG
1875 I Street NW, Suite 500Washington, DC 20006
202.857.5201 (phone)202.429.9574 (fax)[email protected] (email)