15 Democratic candidates pledge to seek gender parity in their national security teams

Fifteen presidential candidates — all of them Democrats — have pledged to seek to hire an equal number of women and men in senior national security positions should they win the White House.

Those commitments came from an initiative by the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS), a new advocacy organization created by former officials to get more women in top government jobs. The council asked Democrats and Republicans to commit to 50-50 parity in top-level, mainly Senate-confirmed positions in the Defense Department, the intelligence community, the State Department, and other national security-related offices.

2020 Democratic frontrunners former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) were the first to commit to the pledge, and others soon followed: Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro (D-TX), former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO), Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

So far, no one has declined to sign on, LCWINS says, but many have failed to respond in part because organizers don’t have good contacts in some campaigns and because some of the campaigns themselves are large and bureaucratic, slowing down the response time.

The initiative is the latest push by activists and civil society organizations to improve diversity in academic and think tank circles and government leadership positions.

There’s a dearth of it now: Of 714 key Senate-confirmed positions in the Trump administration, only 177 women have been nominated or confirmed, according to a Washington Post tracker.

Roughly 16 percent of people listed as Pentagon leaders right now are women, and only 18 percent of military officers are female. While the Obama administration wasn’t perfect in this regard, it did have a record number of women in senior offices.

LCWINS hopes to change that dynamic. With a mix of pressure and getting powerful people to advocate for women, the organization hopes it can increase the number of women safeguarding the country in the next administration.

And based on the response from presidential campaigns already, the group is well on its way.

Rosa Brooks, a co-founder of LCWINS and a former Obama-era Pentagon official, gave me two main reasons why she started this effort.

First, people who look alike and have similar experiences tend to come up with less creative solutions to problems. A group of mostly white men — who dominate high-level posts in the Trump administration — are therefore less likely to devise the most effective policies for many of the world’s ills. With more women and people of color in the room, the chance that a government agency finds the right answer grows.

“Women’s experiences are different than men’s experiences,” Brooks told me. “America is a diverse country and we live in a really diverse and complicated world. We can’t afford to have decision-making groups that don’t have insight into the types of experiences that most of the world’s citizens have.”

Second, there are many structural and societal issues impeding women from rising to the top of the national security field. Women are still the main caregivers for families, for example, which makes it harder for them to work late on important issues at their jobs or fight for a promotion. And because many government leaders are men, they are more likely to hire or at least recommend other men they know for key jobs.

LCWINS plans to help identify women who could staff the administration of whoever wins the 2020 election, but “in some ways that’s the least important piece,” Brooks told me. She noted that while 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had “binders full of women” that he vowed to draw from when staffing his administration, few transition officials actually look at those books during the short and high-stress time a new team has to recruit people.

“Binders full of women don’t tend to make much difference by themselves,” she continued. “It’s a rushed process. The transition team has a lot of positions to fill really quickly, and they tend to go to their own networks. They don’t open those binders.”

Instead, she says, these teams call up powerful people and ask for their recommendations. By creating a network of powerful women — people like Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, among many others — and some men, the hope is more women will rise to the top.

It’s of course unclear if those who’ve pledged to have gender parity atop the national security bureaucracy will follow through with their promise. And it’s unlikely there’ll be much change should Trump retain the presidency.

But for now, Brooks and her team are at least getting the message out — and that’s a start.