Anne-Marie Slaughter on Leveraging Gender Equality | Big Think

Anne-Marie Slaughter on Leveraging Gender Equality

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anne-Marie Slaughter says gender issues are one of America’s greatest strengths.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Anne-Marie Slaughter, is the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is presently on leave, serving as Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State. She was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 2002-2009.

Slaughter came to the Wilson School from Harvard Law School where she was the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and Director of the International Legal Studies Program. She is also the former President of the American Society of International Law, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Drawing from this rich interdisciplinary expertise, Slaughter has written and taught broadly on global governance, international criminal law, and American foreign policy. Her most recent book is The Idea that Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World, published in 2007 by Basic Books. She is also the author of A New World Order, in which she identified transnational networks of government officials as an increasingly important component of global governance. Slaughter has been a frequent commentator on foreign affairs in newspapers, radio, and television. She was also the convener and academic co-chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy for the United States, and was a member of the National War Powers Commission.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Slaughter: One subject that never gets talked about when we talk about foreign policy is the way in which the United States can leverage our own empowerment of women and our understanding of the vital role that women, women’s health, women’s education, women’s leadership plays in a healthy and productive economy. We tend to look at, you know, development and education of women as a soft issue, a peripheral issue, an issue that is not really about, you know, core foreign policy issues, and yet if you look at the productivity increases in our own society. If you look at the ideas in our own society, the growth in many ways in our own society over the past four decades, a huge amount of that has come from liberating 50% of the population. And if we would focus on that as part of the story we tell, as part of what an open society is, we would, not only be being true to our own values, but we would be illustrating a development path that development experts know is the most effective way of a spurring development dollar for dollar. The dollars invested in women’s education have a huge multiplier effect in women’s health. So, I think the President ought to be talking about women’s education globally, women’s rights globally, not as a kind of interest group cause, but as something that we have learned from our own experience is the path to increase prosperity, increase values better society.