[music]
[Sterly] And we're also really fortunate this
morning to hear from Sally Kornbluth.
As you know, Sally was appointed Provost in 2014
and reappointed for a second term in 2019,
and her full bio is in your program.
Sally is a terrific Duke leader and of course
is the chief academic officer of the University.
In addition to the tremendous responsibility
of overseeing the schools, programs, and units,
she and her team are incredibly supportive
of engaging alumni in the lives of our students
and in the university, and in thinking about
ways that lifelong learning and programs like
this weekend can be a reality for our alumni.
So, Sally, good morning.
Thank you.
[Sally] So I've been... thank you Sterly.
I've been charged with the task of doing an
overview of academics in under 10 minutes.
So rather than speaking incredibly quickly,
I think I'll just pick a couple of items here.
So, I've spoken with this group before about
the strategic plan of Duke, which we completed
a couple years ago now.
And there were four sort of goals, and I'm
going to tell you about just one or two highlights
from some of these goals.
So the first goal was to invest in Duke faculty,
as scholars and leaders of the University's
intellectual communities.
And so, one of the things I wanted to tell
you about from that first sort of pillar of
academic strategic plan had to do with building
Science and Technology at Duke.
So when I came over, I was a Vice Dean in
the medical school before becoming Provost.
When I came over, I sort of was looking at
the landscape, and I saw that what we call
the campus side, really needed to have an
investment in the sciences.
And at the same time, the medical school leadership
was coming to the conclusion that they needed
to up their game in fundamental
basic discovery science.
And I should say that the leadership of the
health system in the School of Medicine and
the leadership on the campus side, the deans,
myself, President Price are all extremely
aligned in what we want to do.
And so we actually started to think about
searching for top scientists across the country
actually across the world, in different ways
than we had done before.
And we have comprised search committees rather
than in departments, or in particular units,
but search committees across the university
of our top scientists.
And let our top scientists try to find top
people.
And we've also thought about how we build
on strength that we already have.
So we picked just a few, not that we're not
going to hire across the sciences,
but we picked a few areas where we thought we were
already on our way in an upward trajectory.
One of them is material science.
One of them is what the medical school
is calling a biological resilience.
And what that actually means is, if you have
a stroke or a heart attack, how do you recover.
How do we make biological systems more resilient?
And then the third pillar is artificial intelligence
for health.
So everybody in the world is working on AI
now.
We have the option and opportunity of working
closely with our math and stats departments, etc.,
our engineering school and our medical school to think
about how we can improve the medical experience.
And what's really interesting is Larry Carin,
our Vice President of Research has already
piloted some of these experiments, and it
turns out that artificial intelligence can
do better than a pathologist now in diagnosing
thyroid cancer.
It can do better than a pathologist with some
other imaging modalities.
So if you look at radiology, you look at pathology,
anything that relies on imaging, I think you're
going to see a change in the paradigm there
in terms of how things are interpreted.
The other thing that they're working on is
when you go to the doctor now, you sit and
the doctor's filling out the electronic health
record and asking you these questions over
and over again, and it's actually a major
cause of burnout for physicians as well as
stress in the patient relationship.
And so folks on the campus side, led by Larry
Carin and others in the School of Engineering,
are trying to figure out how you could get
the equivalent of like, Alexa, or Hey, Google,
or whatever, to listen to the conversation
and populate the electronic health record,
so that the physician wouldn't have to do
it.
So those are the kinds of things we're thinking
about there.
And I'm happy to say that in the sort of material
science, another arm of that is also something
we're interested in is quantum computing and
computational thinking.
And we just scored a really fabulous huge hire.
His name is Chris Monroe.
He's a world-renowned National Academy Member,
Quantum Computing Fellow.
So I think we're really off and running.
So another goal was to provide a transformative
educational experience for all of our students.
So I think many of you are aware of,
from having been undergraduates here, potentially,
are thinking about how we educate students,
and I think there's now become a sort of unique,
what I would call almost cool buzz on something
that makes Duke a little bit different.
And this is an emphasis on being able to work
as a member of a team,
being able to work across disciplines and being able
to think about complicated problems and break them
down into pieces that can be solvable.
So maybe some of you are aware of things like
Bass Connections, which are team-based endeavors,
usually a graduate student, a faculty member, some
undergraduates, who work on real world problems.
So that's gotten extremely popular.
I think there's 60 some odd teams this year,
probably many of you familiar with Duke Engage.
We're actually expanding Duke Engage in ways
that are interesting.
I think we want to be getting more into sort
of rural areas in North Carolina and South Carolina,
as well as trying to make an impact
globally.
And then we have an interesting piece for
those of you who are part of professional schools,
we have something we're developing
called reimagining the professions.
And a lot of it is catching students who are
pre-med, pre-law, etc., to think about their
future careers holistically.
So for instance, we ran two years of something
called reimagining medicine, where students
were trained more in sort of humanistic pursuits.
How do you think about medicine
in a humanistic way?
And we're starting to think about how we'll
do reimagining law, reimagining business, etc.,
so I think you're going to see more
of that in the coming year.
Another thing, our third goal was to strengthen
Duke's capacity to address global challenges
for communities across the world.
I have to say, we have a lot,
a lot of global activities.
Our concentration has shifted in the last
few months in ways we had not anticipated
because of the Coronavirus.
Because many of you know we have a campus, a joint
venture University, Duke Kunshan University in China.
For any of you who are curious, almost all
the students are home now.
But we are mounting a full online semester
within a matter of three weeks.
So this is a sort of short term utility for
us in continuing the student enterprise at DKU,
but it's going to have utility after
that as well across the board.
And I think we want to use this for a model
of how we can combine sort of distance learning
with the real highlights of a Duke education.
And then finally, I'll say that we want to
create a supportive environment for research,
learning, and academic communities.
And there are a whole lot of things going on in this goal
across the board, but a couple things I'll mention.
If you look at the previous strategic plans
at Duke, graduate students are barely mentioned.
And it turns out we really have as many or more
graduate students as undergraduates on campus now.
And so there has been a really strong push
called reimagining doctoral education or RIDE
led by Vice Provost Ed Balleisen to think
about how we prepare our graduate students
again, for life beyond Duke.
Not all, in fact, many of our graduate students
do not go into the Academy now.
They're doing PhDs or master's degrees for
other pursuits.
So for instance, we started something called
a Summer Doctoral Academy where we'll work
with doctoral students on public speaking,
on negotiation, on basic coding, and using apps.
Things they might use in their career beyond
Duke if they don't go into the Academy,
or even if they do go into the Academy,
that will be useful.
We are working hard on trying to think about
how we prepare students for careers outside
the Academy, and also just to get them to
think critically about really what they want
to do and why they want to do it.
And so this is like, as I said, a whirlwind
tour.
There are many, many elements of all of this.
I am always happy to hear people's input,
take questions over time, but I just wanted
to give you a quick snapshot.
And so with that, I will change gears to think
about our next panel.
I have the pleasure of introducing, I guess,
the moderator of the panel, Kerry Abrams,
who is the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke
Dean of the School of Law.
I always like to say this, but Kerry is one
of our seven women deans now at Duke.
[applause]
And she's among the newest of the cohort,
and it's just been fantastic to see this sort
of esprit de corps and the interactions.
This is not to denigrate our fantastic male
deans as well, but it really has been great.
So Kerry became the Law School Dean
on July 1, 2018.
She's well known for writing on family-based
migration in the history of immigration law.
And indeed, Kerry helped us out in our most
recent Provost forum on immigration.
Prior to her appointment at Duke, Dean Abrams
served on the faculty of the University of Virginia
for 13 years, and most recently as
Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs.
And I will say as an aside, her experience
as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs is incredibly evident
in her leadership of the law school
because a lot of Dean's job is to navigate
complex interpersonal relationships between
faculty, faculty and students, etc.
It's not simple.
You have to be sort of, not only an academic
leader, but a master of HR and sometimes a
master of complex psychology.
And she has all of those traits.
Because as Vice Provost, she was responsible
university-wide for faculty recruitment and retention,
faculty policies, promotion and
tenure, professional and leadership development
programs for faculty, so she has actually
got a lot of qualifications and experience
that make her a great Dean.
She also has all of the credentials to be
a leader of our law school.
She was a graduate of Swarthmore, and then
of Stanford Law School.
She clerked for Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of the
US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
And she also practiced as a commercial litigator
in New York City.
So she's really had all kinds of aspects of
both in the law profession and in sort of
faculty and student interactions which make
her a terrific Dean.
So, Kerry. 
[applause]
[Kerry] I just want to take a couple of minutes
to welcome all of you to our first panel of
the morning, it's a real honor for me to get
to be a part of Women's Weekend, and a part
of Duke University.
Our panel is entitled 100 years after the
19th amendment, Women's Voice and the Vote.
So as you probably are aware, this year is
the centennial of the 19th amendment.
We have now had the right to vote as women
in this country for 100 years.
And on this panel, we want to take a few moments
to think about what that means for us today.
For those of you who have not read the 19th
amendment recently, I thought I would read it to you.
The right of citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any state on account
of sex.
So if you think about that for a moment, prior
to the 19th amendment, women could be denied
the right to vote and indeed, we're in many
states and had no federal right to vote.
Today we're going to consider the history
of the amendment, situating it in its context.
We'll discuss what the amendment did and didn't
do for women.
And then finally, we're going to consider
what still holds women back, and whether we
need additional law or social change to move
forward even further.
So before we get started, I'd like to invite
our panelists up, and I'll introduce them one by one.
Our first panelist is Professor Sarah Deutsch.
She is Professor of History and Gender and
Feminist Studies at Duke.
And some interesting facts about Professor
Deutsch include that she was in the very
first class of women Rhodes Scholars, and
has degrees from both Oxford and Yale.
[applause]
She's the author of three books,
most recently
Women and the City: Gender, Space,
and Power in Boston, 1870-1940.
She served as the second woman chair of the
history department at Duke 25 years after
Anne Firor Scott served as the department's
first chair.
She served as program co-chair for annual
conferences for the American Studies Association
and the Organization of American Historians,
as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences
at Duke, and is chair of the executive committee of delegates of the American Council of Learned Societies
and on the executive committee of
the OAH.
Her current book project is
Making a Modern U.S. West, 1898-1942.
Thanks for joining us.
[Sarah] Thank you.
Our second speaker is Patricia Timmons-Goodson,
who is currently the vice chair
of the United States Commission of Civil Rights.
Justice Timmons-Goodson received her BA and
JD from the University of North Carolina in
Chapel Hill and an LLM from Duke University
Law School in our Judicial Master's program.
She told me before she came up here today
that she is a triple Tar Heel and that her
friends tell her that she got to Duke as soon
as she could.
[laughter]
Justice Timmons-Goodson began her career as
a district manager
of the United States Census Bureau in the Department of 
Commerce from 1979 to 1980.
And then her justice career began as an assistant
prosecutor and continued as a legal services
lawyer in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Most recently, she was an Associate Justice
on the Supreme Court of North Carolina from
2006 to 2012, and an associate judge on the
North Carolina Court of Appeals
from 1997 to 2005, and a district court judge of the
12th Judicial District of North Carolina from
1984 to 1997.
The judicial selection system employed by
North Carolina required her to stand before
the voters in two statewide elections and
three district elections during her judicial career.
The 28-year tenure on the bench was marked
by distinguished work on each of these three courts.
[applause]
Then finally, our third panelist
is Kathy Tran.
She is currently a delegate to the Virginia
House of Delegates for the 42nd District representing
Fairfax County in Virginia.
But before that she's had a long and storied
life and career.
Delegate Tran and her parents fled Vietnam
as boat refugees when she was seven months old.
On the voyage, she grew so sick that she almost
died at sea.
Although many other countries offered them
asylum, they waited 13 months for
the United States to accept their application.
She graduated from Duke University and earned her
Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan.
During her 12 years of service at the
US Department of Labor,
Miss Tran served
in numerous leadership positions,
including as the Acting Administrator
for the Office of Workforce Investment,
and the Director of the Division of Policy, Legislation,
and Regulation.
Kathy went on to work at the National Immigration
Forum, one of the nation's leading immigration
advocacy organizations.
And since 2018, she has served in the Virginia
House of Delegates.
Welcome.
[applause]
So I'd like to start out by situating the
19th amendment in historical context.
So it gave women the right to vote nationwide.
That was a very, very significant moment.
If you think about the Constitution,
it's really the document that enshrines
our country's collective civic values.
And women were finally included in that document
for the first time.
But the amendment didn't spring up overnight.
Women and men had fought for years for this
right for women and had actually already achieved
it in some states and territories prior to
the ratification of the Federal amendment.
So I'd like to take some time to think about
what women's citizenship was like in the 19th century.
Why was there so much resistance
to women's voting?
And why was the amendment ratified
when it was?
Sarah, do you want to start us out as that
as the historian on the panel.
[Sarah] Yes, I can take a stab at that.
So one of the things you have to remember
is when women first began to meet in conventions
and organize about their rights in the mid-19th
century, there were a lot of things they were
organizing for.
One of the things they wanted was control
over their own bodies.
They wanted to control their own wages.
They wanted to control their own property.
The vote was only one of the things that they
asked for, but it was by far the most controversial
thing they asked for.
And it was controversial because until the
Jacksonian Era, there were a lot of men who
couldn't vote as well as a lot of women.
But once Jackson and that regime expanded
dramatically, the right of white men in particular,
some black men lost the right when white man
got it, but expanded the right of white men
to vote almost universally.
It created this big distinction between men and women,
and the vote became identified with manhood.
Elections were these messy things where people
brawled and fought and drank and sold votes.
So did everything that women were not supposed
to do.
So it was shocking to think that women would
want to be embroiled in that kind of arena.
So one of the things that women had to do
was to come up with all these logics for why
it made sense to give women the vote.
And some women argued that it made sense because
women were people, and they had human rights
like other people.
That was not the most popular way to frame
it oddly enough.
So then women began to say, well, we stand
above all that messiness, and we'll elevate
politics and will work for things that matter
to society at large.
And they were able to do a lot.
Organized women can get a lot accomplished,
even without the vote, even outside the electoral
process, and they were able to get many things
done.
They were able to get mothers pensions in
some states.
They were able to get various welfare enterprises
going at the state level, things like school lunch,
but the vote was still a stumbling
block.
And so they organized a number
of different of ways.
They started state by state organizing.
When there were leftist regimes that came
in and like the populace, women would get
the vote with the populace.
But aside from that, it was very hard for
women to get the vote.
And then they finally began to organize 
precinct by precinct.
They had a great grassroots ground game.
We all know how important those things are
in electoral politics.
And they made alliances.
And women may be able to get a lot done when
they organize, but they can't do any of it
without alliances.
And some of these alliances were less than
savory.
So when women who were running the national
organizations decided they wanted to get the South,
they meant the white South and they
were willing to accept white women's organizations
that excluded black women in doing this.
And when they decided they wanted to get the
Southwest; they were willing to not look after
the interests of people we would now call
sort of Latinx voters.
And so there were divisions even before they
actually got to the vote that then carried
over after they got the vote.
So when we get the vote in 1920, it's white
women who get enfranchised everywhere.
It's black women in the North who get enfranchised.
Black women in the South don't get enfranchised
until the Voting Rights Act in the 60s.
Puerto Rican women don't get to vote until
1929.
Women on reservations don't get the vote until
the men also do in 1924.
So there's this complexity
that comes with it.
And the alliances are central and often elite
women didn't even want the vote because they
had other ways to be influential, and they
didn't want to vote with their maids.
So you get all these conflicts
coming to the fore.
And then women have to learn all over again
how to do politics.
And when they first get the vote, the men
are like, oh my God, we have a voting bloc of women.
We're going to pass and they did the first
maternal and infant welfare that the Federal
Government had ever provided.
We're going to do a Peace and Disarmament
Conference.
We're going to let women have citizenship
even if they marry people who aren't citizens.
And then by the late 20s, it was apparent
that women didn't vote as a bloc, and that
women like men voted their economic interests
and their other things.
And so the guys stopped listening.
And Eleanor Roosevelt talks about going to
the Democratic Convention in the 20s and being
excluded from all the important committee
meetings.
So now I'll let you guys speak.
[Kerry] Would you like to add Pat?
[Patricia] Yes, I was only going to add that
I'm so glad that Sarah mentioned African American
women in that, while the work and the effort
was being made to get suffrage for women,
it was not assured that African American women
would be included.
As a matter of fact, there was strong resistance
by the southern legislators who vehemently
did not want black folks included.
So we take, it appears a lot for granted now,
but it certainly was not easy.
[Kerry] Kathy, did you want to add anything?
[Kathy] So just a little bit of that history
is tied to the area of Virginia that I represent,
Southern Fairfax County, if you know Northern
Virginia geography.
Alice Paul and other suffragists were demonstrating
in front of the White House at the turn of
World War One, when we were just starting
that war.
And I think the President found it really
unseemly that women would be demonstrating
for the right to vote, while men were going
off to war, and he felt that was really unpatriotic.
And so this is somewhat from...
I'm sitting next to historian... somewhat
of history from a movie with Alyssa Milano
[laughter], but I will confess she did come
and talk about it.
So he imprisoned Alice Paul, who went on to
write the Equal Rights Amendment and other
suffragists in the Lorton workhouse which
is located in my district.
There was an evening in 1917, where these
women, they were on a hunger strike, and the
guards were really upset, and they were clubbed.
They'd had been forced fed.
They were shackled.
And so their treatment became known as
the night of terror.
And it somehow came out to the public into the press
that this was how these women were being treated.
And I think, we like to say, the 42nd district,
that that really became the turning point
and the groundswell of then support to ratify
the 19th amendment.
So this year, if you come in August to celebrate
the hundredth anniversary, as immense as that
expansion of democracy was, and as flawed
as it was, you can come and we are... they
will be unveiling the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial
to celebrate the expansion of democracy to women.
And also to start a leadership program for
young girls around growing up as strong and
fierce leaders themselves.
[Kerry] So it's 1920.
We have the 19th amendment now.
We've started to talk a little bit about what
that didn't do.
But I'd like to flush that out a little bit
more.
So what differences did a national right to
vote immediately start to make for women?
And then in what spaces was there a lot of
work still to be done?
And can we start to think about the story
of additional movements around women's rights
that continued throughout the 20th century?
[Sarah] So, there continue to be massive sort
of labor movements.
There was some conflict among women about whether
you wanted a minimum wage for women or not.
The minimum wage for women gets thrown out, and that
becomes a whole, like, what do you do with that.
And the Equal Rights Amendment is blamed,
the idea of Equal Rights Amendment and equal
rights for women, is blamed for throwing out
the minimum wage for women.
So there's a lot of framing that goes on.
It isn't necessarily in the control of the
people who need to do the work.
And so that has to be reframed.
Alice Paul starts the National Women's Party
to back the ERA.
African American women come to her and say,
well, we still have this problem in the South
where we don't even have the vote.
And she says, that's 
a different problem.
We're focusing on this problem,
the Equal Rights Amendment.
So one of the major things that had to be
done was the recreation of alliances that
would be effective going forward.
And the other problem women had, the machine
politicians and the men in party politics
didn't want women to run, because it wasn't
clear what they brought to the table because
women didn't vote as a bloc, and women had
positioned themselves as above politics.
So they weren't even loyal party members.
So why would you invite those people into
your tent.
And so there had to be a lot of work done
by women to get that kind of right.
And a lot of that happened with Eleanor Roosevelt
and Mary Dewson in the Democratic Party.
They were sort of partners off to the side
of Roosevelt.
And so that work had to be done to rebuild.
But I really think the major thing that has
made the most difference is EMILY's list because
money is huge and access to money and being
able to run was big.
So you had to rediscover a gender gap.
Even though it wasn't as big as people had
thought it would be in 1920, it was still there.
And then you had to find ways to fund... and
for a long time, I thought Emily was somebody
who had founded this organization.
You guys probably all know it means,
Early Money Is Like Yeast.
Early money is like yeast and the essential
nature of early money in political campaigns.
So I got invited to the EMILY's list gathering
when I was in Arizona, and the person doing
it was Emily and I thought, well, that [laughter]
It took me years to figure that out.
But fortunately, EMILY's list worked faster
than that.
And we began to have this bump in women representatives.
It's still really slow and if you parse out
how long it's going to take to get equity -
it's like in our daughter's children's lifetime.
It's very slow.
So we collectively have work to do.
We organize women who can accomplish anything
if we have the right alliances.
[Patricia] I understand the history that Sarah
has so well set forth in terms of what was
going on, and why men perhaps pushed back,
and women were pushing forward.
But I think it's as simple as power.
That men understood what giving the right
to vote to women would be.
It would immediately confer upon them a level
of power and potentially influence that they
were guarding very jealously.
And so we continue to see that today.
We've all heard about how those that have
power don't just voluntarily relinquish it.
That's because they appreciate what it means.
[Kerry] Well, one way of thinking about the various
rights that we have is dividing them into
different kinds of categories, right?
Sometimes that can be useful.
So political rights, which include the right
to vote could also include the right to run
for office that we've been talking about,
the right to serve on a jury.
But then there were civil rights.
There was the right to control property that
you owned, there was the right to contract,
and women also had not had full rights in
that realm.
And that was a different regime than not having
the right to vote.
That was a regime called coverture under which
if a woman was married, her husband took on
all of those roles for her.
So he would control her property.
He was the one who had the right to contract.
And so, one way of thinking about what the
19th amendment did and didn't do, perhaps
is because it's so focused, unlike the ERA,
unlike the Equal Rights Amendment, on just voting,
that it could be read narrowly or
broadly, right.
And some people thought it was going to be
read broadly, and it would be the end of all
of these other limitations on women's rights.
And then in the years after it, you start
seeing it being read very narrowly, even to
the point where jury service and elective
office aren't included in it.
And so it really takes until the 1970s for
a lot of this to start to change.
I mean, it's a series of supreme court cases,
many of which justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
litigated back when she was a lawyer that
were trying to pull apart these restrictions
on women's rights to be breadwinners in their
families.
A lot of these cases were cases that she brought
on behalf of men.
Men who were denied survivor's benefits because it was
presumed that the wife had not been the breadwinner.
And so, I just think it's an interesting thing
to note that we... looking back at this hundred
year history, the first 50 years, we still
didn't even start to get into a lot of the
issues that are what mattered to us most today.
[Patricia] Just a word.
Those of you from North Carolina might appreciate
the fact that it was prior to 1975 say,
if you were married, I don't care how long the
duration, if you divorced, what you took away
from that breakup was only those items of
property that had your name on them.
And so I don't care how wealthy the family
had been, what your socioeconomic status was,
you took only that that had your name
on it.
And so it was only after we begin electing
women to the legislature here in North Carolina
that we passed legislation that called for
the equitable distribution of marital assets
upon the breakup of a marriage.
And all of the assets and debts acquired during
the course of the marriage were deemed to
belong to the marriage, and that they were
subject to an equal division.
It was presumed that they should be divided
equally, unless there were some matters that
would call for otherwise.
And so I'm talking about...
I finished Law School in 1979, 1981, 82.
We were dealing with equitable distribution
of marital assets.
I don't know about you, but I find that absolutely
incredible.
[Kerry] Well, and it gives you an appreciation for
why the right to vote mattered.
The right to vote led to these other political
rights.
And then, when you get enough women voting
and enough women in office, then these other
laws start to change.
[Kerry] What I want to think more about your experiences
across your lives and your careers.
Do you think it's easier for you now to be
a woman in politics or law or other professions
than it was when you started out?
And, and how much of that has been the result of these legal and social changes that we're talking about?
Kathy, you want to start?
[Kathy] I feel like I'm the baby in terms
of being in politics on this stage, but I
feel really fortunate that I feel like I came
in on a women's wave in 2017.
And if you followed what happened in the country
then in, or in Virginia, we were the center
of the country then, we flipped 15 seats in
the House of Delegates, which was unimaginable
until it happened.
Eleven of those seats were won by women, vast
majority of whom were like me, never thought
about running for office, were kind of busy
with our lives in other ways and decided to
jump into this space.
You had the first public defender, social
worker, immigrant activist, reporter, people
with very different types of professional
experiences and also very different types
of lived experiences.
We elected the first Asian American women,
the first Latinx women, the first out transgender
and out lesbian women ever to Virginia state
government.
And so I'm very fortunate to come in on that,
with that cohort, because to me, it's normal.
But when you look around the State Assembly,
you realize we were not the norm.
There's this graphic of the folks we replaced,
and it was my cohort, and then all these older
white men who we had replaced in office, and
I found that really fascinating.
But to me, it makes me think about what it
means for the future.
I'm a mom of four, and I remember my children
came down in 2018.
So my oldest daughter was seven at the time,
about seven, and they went home and they play
House of Delegates at home, because what else
would you play?
[laughter] They vote on things like being
able to drink soda and watch TV and things like that.
But she was sitting there, and she was like,
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, and
she looks at me and she's like, can a woman
be a speaker?
And I was like, well, yes, we've just never
had one in Virginia in 400 years.
[laughter] But this year, we won the majority,
and we elected the first woman speaker in our history.
[applause]
And this year when they were playing after
the fall elections, my daughter said, I get
to be the speaker now because Miss Eileen
is the speaker.
I think you can't quantify what that means
for her and for her kids to be able to see more women,
whether it's in deanships or leading
departments in academia or in the political realm,
and I get really emotionally excited
about that, honestly, yeah.
[Patricia] Just follow up on what you've said,
and perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I think
it does make it easier for the next one to
come along.
You no longer have to imagine or think,
can I do this?
Because you've seen someone that looks like
you, do it.
And so it definitely makes it easier in my
mind.
Some of you may remember, I guess it was Banneker
that ran the sub four-minute mile.
And prior to the time that he did that it
was never imagined that a human being could
run that quickly.
It's interesting to note that shortly thereafter,
like within a year or 18 months,
four or five other folks had done it.
And so there's something to be said for seeing
other individuals accomplish things.
[Kerry] Sarah, anything to add?
[Sarah] When I was an undergraduate, my professors
were all white men, most of whom were
a little bit shorter than I am.
And I thought, well, this is going to take
quite a transformation if this is really what
I want to do in my life.
[laughter] So it definitely makes a difference
to have role models, to have people that you
can see and make it possible to be who you
are without having to pretend to be somebody
else to get to that spot.
And at the same time, there were role models
that I would not endorse.
There was a queen bee syndrome in a world
in which it was structured to make it difficult
for women to get ahead.
Sometimes women were in that position and
liked being the one in that position and they
made it just as difficult for everybody who
followed them.
And so that was not a model I wanted to adopt.
And then it's also those of us who have been
tokens, I assume that includes most people
probably in this room, know that it's a very
difficult position to be in because you're
there so that you can be visible but you do
not have enough weight to throw things in
a direction that people who
put you there want you to do it rather than
the people who allowed you to be there would
want you to do it.
And so managing those expectations and creating
those alliances and finding people who understand
and will speak up with you, not on your behalf
but with you.
Is one of the trickiest things.
I definitely think it makes it easier to have
pioneers.
My way was definitely eased by having people
who succeeded before me who were female.
There weren't enough of them to make it totally
easy.
And the fact that the previous woman chair
had been 25 years earlier did not exactly
create this kind of easy and smooth transition to that.
And when I went for my job interviews,
I went to seven interviews and I got home
 the day before I was not allowed to fly anymore.
And people were so unused to seeing a pregnant
candidate for a professorial job, that everywhere
I went, people had made arrangements to go
to the hospital in case I went into labor.
They also looked at me like, oh, my god, she's not only a
full professor, but she can reproduce. [laughter]
So I think there continue to be these,
you know, we're not complete,
we're definitely closer and the number of women
in this room show that and what can be done,
but I think there's a ways to go.
[Kerry] Well, you may recall hearing a few years ago
that there were more fortune 500 CEOs by the
name of John than women.
[laughter] I just saw on Twitter the other
day, that of the advocates who are arguing
cases before the United States Supreme Court this year,
there are more people named John than women.
And if you think about the fact that when
I was in law school 25 years ago, nearly half
my class were women.
We no longer have the excuse that we are a
recent phenomenon.
We've now been able to vote for 100 years,
we've had equal access to a lot of things
for the last 30, 40, 50 years, and yet there
are still barriers that are stopping women
from getting to the very top.
I'm wondering what our panelists think some
of those are.
[Kathy] I think there's clearly some structural barriers,
we can talk about that.
When you talk about the need to raise the
minimum wage.
It's mostly women, women of color, and immigrant
women who are in these low wage positions.
I was thinking about this recently because
we are debating raising the minimum wage in Virginia,
and when we first came to the United
States and my dad's first job, where he got
a paycheck, paid the minimum wage in 1982,
it was about $3.35.
And the purchasing power of that minimum wage
at $3.35 is greater than it is today at $7.25.
That, to me is mind boggling. 
But you have that.
You have the fact that we don't really have
an affordable childcare system.
And the truth is, in some of our relationships,
it might be much more equal than it ever has
been in our nation's history, culturally,
but at the same time, women still bear the
brunt of childcare.
We don't have family medical leave across
the board.
These things that I think are systematically
making it hard for women and families
to be able to rise up.
But I think also there's a cultural expectation.
I remember I had, just even this new
year, I have a very strong supporter, a constituent
of mine who said, when I learned you had four
kids, I wasn't sure how that was going to work.
And I was like, well I'm now going to have
five. [laughter]
It's like this expectation.
I had somebody else tell me, I think you're
great, but I don't know if we're ready for
an immigrant woman to lead our community.
And so, it's what are the cultural and societal
norms that people are just placing on you
as you kind of live your everyday life.
And I think that's some of that, depending
on... in all of our different professional
and personal spaces, we have
to still grapple with.
Speaking specifically about politics, I think
one of the barriers is money.
And so, thank God for EMILY's list and other
groups that support women financially.
Like it or not, in order to get your message
out in today's world, you're going to need
to have the financial resources to communicate
that message.
And it's usually through media that costs
significant sums of money and women traditionally
have a hard time raising the amount of money
that...
[Kathy] And asking for it.
[Patricia] And asking for it.
And I heard someone said, you have not because
you asked not.
You just have to learn to ask.
But I do believe that that is a barrier.
[Kerry] Can you say more about that?
So there is definitely a stereotype about
women that they don't ask in negotiations,
that they don't ask in politics.
We do not have the same kind of chutzpah to
ask.
But then there's also a lot of data supporting
the idea that we get punished when we do.
That there are different societal expectations
on how we're supposed to behave.
And there's something unseemly about asking
for things.
Is that a dynamic that you found you've had
to navigate?
[Patricia] I have had to navigate that.
Like many of the ladies in this room, I'm
accustomed to doing what needs to be done.
I do it, whether it's at home, or with the
children, or at work.
I don't ask anyone to do anything for me that
I can do for myself.
And so, it does take some getting used to,
to ask for help.
And we've got to get over that.
And as I campaign, I have gotten over that.
You have not because you ask not.
[Sarah] Have you found that?
[Kathy] I do find that, and I think even in the state
legislature, I painted a very rosy picture.
I love the fact that we have such a strong
presence of women and such fierce women leaders.
But at the same time -
I do sometimes sense there's still a good
old boys’ network and how it works.
And it's not that those good old boys are
all of the same generation, right.
Sometimes I'm like, oh, it's some of my...
I have some colleagues I feel very much like
bros, right, and they know how to navigate this.
That's just not the way I communicate, it's
not, you know, I'm a juice and soda kind of person.
Some of my colleagues have a Methodist whiskey
with... or other types of drinks after a long
night in session.
My first year, I brought the baby, and I sat
there, I was like, can I have some peanuts?
But it's just a very different culture that
I'm finding.
There's a...
I forgot the original question.
How you communicate and how you're expected
to kind of engage I think is really,
still a very strong culture in doing that.
But I think also, stereotypes of Asian American
women as kind of more meek and mild and less
likely to assert ourselves.
My own kind of thinking is, is that just me naturally?
Is that how my mother has raised me?
Or is that because I'm responding to some
of these expectations too?
And so sometimes you're wondering how you
need to be in a particular place to respond
to comments and things like that.
And I think lastly, I would say, just about
running for office, I think the statistic
is you have to ask a woman to run like three
or five times before she'll even say,
hey, I might actually be qualified to do this.
Versus a man would be like, well, of course,
I'm going to run right?
Like, why wouldn't I?
And I think even that, how do you flip that
on its head for folks who are interested in
running or some of our girls for the future
and making them think that they inherently
can have that confidence and be out there
to go and get it.
It's really important.
[Kerry] I identify with that so much.
[Patricia] I was thinking the same thing.
[Kerry] For me in becoming the dean here.
It was the third call from a member of the
search committee trying to persuade me to
apply that finally made me say to my husband,
they keep calling, I'm not going to do this.
He was the one who said, you are so ready
for this.
You need to do this.
But I had this sort of imposter syndrome of
thinking that it was something that oh, maybe
in five years, I just don't know if I'm ready.
And that's something we just have to get over.
Well, this has been tremendously inspirational
to me.
We have time left for questions from the audience.
One just quick reminder for everyone is that,
as a university, we can't turn into a stop
on the campaign trail.
And we have female politicians up here including
someone currently in a position and someone
who's running, and so I want to make sure
that the questions aren't campaign oriented
questions, but you're completely welcome to
ask more general questions about women and
politics and our panelist's individual experiences.
How are we doing questions?
Do we have microphones or anything?
[audience member] ERA, can you talk about
that?
[Kerry] The Equal Rights Amendment which was
just finally passed by Virginia.
[Kathy] In Virginia, we ratified the Equal
Rights Amendment this past session.
[applause]
We are the 38th and final state to do so.
We don't need any more.
I think just... was it last week, the House
of Representatives kind of did away with a
deadline or, it was really important, but
I think it's in their hands right now,
and for some of the reasons I spoke about earlier
where you see pay disparities.
We can't even get the Violence Against Women
Act to be extended, things like that.
There are lots of reasons why it's important
still to have women's equality enshrined in
the Constitution, and we're hopeful that with
our efforts that will continue moving forward.
[Kerry] Are there specific things that you
want to address that you think the Equal Rights
Amendment would do that the 19th amendment
hasn't?
We've talked about a lot of the ways in which
it didn't get us as far as they wanted to go,
do we need the ERA this point?
[Patricia] I think there's a lot to be said
for a woman being paid for her work as a man
doing the same work.
[applause]
[audience member] Thank you for your comments.
They're very insightful.
But when we started this conversation, you
read us the 19th amendment.
I'll admit I had never read it before.
But there was one thing that stood out at me,
and that was that it was based on sex and not gender.
And I'm wondering if that is going to impact
the future.
And if it's something we should consider changing
in light of gender identity and all the other
things that we're dealing with in this country
right now.
[Patricia] I'll just say that there, again,
continues to be much work to be done.
There are fights over the issue of gender
and sex, and our supreme court will be speaking
very shortly, I believe, in a case that will
deal with that.
And so we may have to revisit it.
But someone said, how you don't need to allow
the excellent or worse or that effect to be
the enemy of the good.
Often progress is incremental.
And so if the ERA as is presently written,
is what we're able to get, we get that,
and then we fight from there, or struggle from
there.
[Kathy] I want to just add to that, I mean,
clearly lots of big efforts it takes to amend
the US Constitution, right?
And so the role of State legislatures and
helping to codify some of these expansion
of rights and protections for some of our
most vulnerable communities is so entirely important.
And in Virginia, we're poised to be the first
state in the south to expand anti-discrimination
protections to the LGBTQ community in both
employment, housing, and public accommodations.
And we're really excited about that.
But the arguments against it are really strong,
and I think there's so much education that
has to be involved in what does it mean to
have anti-discrimination protections.
It doesn't take away anybody else's rights
to religious freedom and to personal expression
and other things like that.
But how do you have those two coexist?
So we're poised to expand those rights, and
I think we still have a lot of education to
do in terms of what that really means for
communities.
But I also urge all of us to look at what
your own particular state is doing in areas
that you care passionately about because the
state laws is also right where you'll see
the biggest differences in your everyday lives
as we work towards national change in the
federal system.
[Kerry] I just add to that, that we have a really
short constitution compared to most countries.
We were an early adopter of the idea of a
constitution, and our Constitution is pretty minimal.
So a lot of where the action is in the Supreme
Court's interpretation of the Constitution.
So we didn't have the same differentiation between
sex and gender when the 19th amendment was ratified.
That doesn't mean that our Supreme Court couldn't
interpret the word sex to include gender and
gender identity, but it matters who that court
is.
And so that's another space in which women's
voices, voting, and leadership really matters.
[applause]
[audience member] Morning. 
Yes, thank you.
I live in Georgia.
So I've been watching Virginia closely, and
you're very inspirational.
Thank you.
But I had a question about the judgeships
for Judge Timmons.
So, and I haven't seen a good analysis, but
are there more men being appointed lately?
How has the ongoing... it looks like change
in the judicial appointments and the system
for that... could you just speak to maybe
what we are looking to in the next 10 years
or so or how might it affect the cases coming
up that get accepted or get ruled on?
[Patricia] Well, I can't speak to what's going
on in all of our 50 states, but I can certainly
tell you and you can see for yourself that
where the federal judiciary is concerned,
the number of appointments that our current
President has made a first it's just been
record breaking for the amount of time that
he has been in office.
And I can also assure you that 90% of them
or better are men.
And so... not making a lot of progress in
terms of diversity in that arena at this time.
[Alex] Hi, I'm Alex Michael.
I'm a graduate student here at the public
policy school.
And I just wanted to go off of the comment
about the US Constitution.
I'm currently in a class called Legal Analysis
for Governance and Justice Moseneke,
who was a previous Constitutional Court Justice
in South Africa is a professor of the class
which has been an honor to have someone of
that stature as a professor, and a lot of
the conversation that we have had has looked
at the South African Constitution versus the
US Constitution and the rights that it affords
its citizens.
And a big element that is a distinguishing
factor between the two is that built into
the Constitution is this opportunity for judges
to assess every situation on the basis of
discrimination, whether or not it's included
in the laundry list of items, whether it's
gender, birth, which they have a very long
list of classifications that are protected,
but then if it's not in there, that the court has an
opportunity, a precedent that has been set to evaluate.
So in the case that are currently in the Supreme
Court, it would have allowed this to be evaluated
on discrimination.
So I'm curious from a historical standpoint
as well as for you guys in politics,
what sort of opportunity could there be to allow
the constitution to change in that regard,
not adding necessarily yet another characteristic
to the list, but putting as part of our Constitution,
a discrimination piece that allows any discrimination
case, regardless of what discrimination is
being perpetrated.
Whether or not that's not something that could
potentially be an option in the future.
[Sarah] Do you want to answer that?
[Kerry] I guess I would say again that the
interpretation of our Constitution by judges
is the primary way that new law, new constitutional
law gets made in our country.
And I don't see any reason why that kind of
interpretation couldn't be possible, especially
under equal protection.
We have a strong equal protection amendment
in our Constitution that has been read in
all sorts of ways to cover all sorts of things.
And then we also have a system where we give
a lot more deference to states than a lot
of countries do on developing their own constitutional
law.
So if you think about things like marriage equality,
a lot of the thinking around marriage equality
for gays and lesbians came up out of State Courts,
including the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts,
which was really the first court to make 
the affirmative case for marriage equality,
and then got adopted later on 
by the United States Supreme Court.
So I hear you that there are really big differences
between our Constitution and South Africa's
which is much more recent, but the political
system that we're involved in and the judicial
system that our country uses is so different,
that a one to one comparison doesn't necessarily
tell you what people's rights on the ground
actually are.
It just tells you what they say that they
are in the actual document itself.
[Sarah] And there's a precedent for judicial activism
on issues like this around race.
You think about Brown versus the Board, as
opposed to Plessy.
And so certainly, there's grounds for the
Supreme Court to decide that things are discrimination,
even when they're not explicitly in the Constitution
or in the amendments that way.
[Kerry] We have time for one more question.
[audience member] Cool, because it's kind
of involved.
Hi, so we talked a lot about and I think a
lot of people are very familiar with the idea
that the movements of feminism and suffrage
for a long time really didn't represent the
interests of the whole population of women
in this country.
I think in our current age, we are seeing
compromises that women voters are making to
advance other interests that may include electing
known predatory men, keeping them in office,
continuing to advance issues that do not help
all women or all female identified people.
And these compromises that we're making now differ
from compromises that were being made a century ago.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how they
differ and whether we will ever see women
being able to come together and vote in a
way that reflects
values that are beneficial for all women.
[Kerry] Do you want to start, Pat?
[Patricia] I'll just begin by reminding you
that while women, we are of the same sex,
we are not and never will be one monolithic
group.
I mean, I'm sorry.
It's just not going to be.
And so, I think that you can and should always
expect that individuals, women, groups of women
will make decisions in the best interest
of whatever their group, or that  serves them.
I'd love to think that one day women will
be about making decisions, and men too,
that are in the best interest of the whole.
That's what we like to think.
But I don't know, I don't see that frankly.
[Sarah] I would take us back to the need for alliances.
When I teach this material and my students
always think it’s failure if alliances don't
last forever, but alliances are always contingent.
It's not realistic to expect them to last
forever.
You can have great victories on single issue
alliances, and we have had great victories
on single issue alliances.
And then you need to create a new alliance when you
have a new set of issues that are coming forward.
And if you don't recognize that,
then you lose.
If you're not willing to make alliances,
then you lose.
And so, it's an issue of choosing your allies,
being really clear about what this alliance
is for and how you mobilize people and going
forward to victory, which I think can be done.
[Patricia] And understanding that just because
someone's not with you today, does not mean
they won't be with you tomorrow.
[Kathy] I just want to echo that.
So in 2016, during the presidential election,
I was working in immigration advocacy.
And we were frankly stunned that lots of immigrant
and immigrant communities voted for the current
president because he had a very clear immigration
platform, and it was not going to be pro-immigration.
So we were stunned.
And then we realized very quickly though,
for some members of those communities, immigration
wasn't their top issue.
It was something else that this particular
president appealed to them for.
I think the same thing goes for women.
When you talk about women voters, sometimes
you think it should be on this issue because
we're women, but there's something else that
is much more of a burning priority for that
individual woman or for that particular group
of women.
And that's how you vote right?
When I knock on doors, and I'm sure Pat does,
too.
I say I'm Kathy Tran.
I'm here to hear about what your priorities
are.
And it's stunning.
The priorities of a household are all very
different.
The priorities of neighbors are all very different
and things like that.
And it's what motivates you when you go to
the polls, and it might not be because you
are a woman and these things should be your
set of issues, but they're not, right.
But I do think forming alliances whether as
a movement is particularly important or whether
in trying to move policies or a particular
agenda.
I have a republican colleague who just voted
for my bill to expand driver's license access
to undocumented immigrants.
And when he voted, I thought the whole floor
gasped because he was a very unexpected, yes vote.
And he told me afterwards it was because on
his farm, he has a gentleman who had lived
there since before he bought his farm.
And this family deals with this issue.
And they have one daughter, and who could
expect this one daughter to be the driver
for the entire family, and he wants him to
be able to drive the farm equipment.
He wants him to be able to live his life in
this community, and he wants to see how he
can help me.
And we don't agree, like when you look at
our votes, we don't agree on anything else.
But this is my one best buddy on this particular
bill, but on another bill, I'm going to have
a different best buddy, right.
And so, I think it's trying to figure out
what motivates either that group when you
form that alliance or that community or that
particular individual, and we're all motivated
differently depending on the on the issue.
I think that's really key.
You just have to be upfront and honest about
it because politics and what we're talking
about makes for very odd bedfellows sometimes.
[Kerry] Did you have something to add Pat?
No.
Well, despite or maybe because of all of our
differences, as women, it's really wonderful
to be able to come together and think about
our commonalities as well.
And I want to thank...well, first of all,
the audience for being such a terrific engaged
audience and your wonderful questions.
[applause]
And then thank our very amazing panelists.
[applause]
[music]
