Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – Women from the Hoover fellowship representing national security fields participated in a forum commemorating International Women’s Day, recalling their own challenges in a profession historically dominated by men and assessing the status of women around the world, especially those deeply impacted by social, political, and economic crises.
Chaired by Hoover Institution director and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the forum featured Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow Amy Zegart; senior fellow Elizabeth Economy; and research fellows Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Rose Gottemoeller. This year, all four fellows will have released authoritative books covering various subjects in national security.
How They Reached the Top of Their Fields
Rose Gottemoeller began the conversation by describing how she became an expert in Russian affairs and missile defense. Following the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, US Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which aided students who aspired to work in support of America’s response to the Soviet challenge. Gottemoeller became a beneficiary of the program and took up study of the Russian language at the high school and university levels. Early in her career, Gottemoeller worked at the RAND Corporation, where she helped Soviet expert Thomas W. Wolfe write a study about the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
After a career spent in academia and think tanks, Gottemoeller was appointed by the Obama White House in 2009 to become the chief negotiator on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which was signed in April 2010 and imposed verifiable limits on all Russian-deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons. Her forthcoming book, Negotiating the New START Treaty, chronicles her role in this historic event—specifically in negotiating the terms of the treaty with Russian diplomats and shepherding its ratification through the US Senate.
Elizabeth Economy also began her scholarly career focused on Russia. From 1985 to 1987, she worked as a Gorbachev analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. However, as Economy pursued a PhD at the University of Michigan, she was persuaded by her faculty advisors to also study China’s politics. Ultimately, Economy wrote her dissertation on a comparison of Soviet and Chinese climate change policies. When she sought employment following her graduate work, there was much greater demand for expertise on China. Thus, she established her career at the Council on Foreign Relations as fellow for China studies and rose to become the its C. V. Starr Senior Fellow and director of Asia studies. In 2020, Economy joined Hoover as a senior fellow.
Economy has written major books about China’s domestic politics, including The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, By All Means Necessary: How China’s Resource Quest Is Changing the World, and The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State. Her forthcoming book, The World According to China, explores the foreign policy of President Xi Jinping and his ambitions for China to be the dominant power in East Asia, to redefine rules of global governance in international organizations, and to advance its economic, political, and security interests throughout the world through vehicles such as the Belt and Road Initiative.
While a graduate student at Stanford, Amy Zegart became inspired to study US national security after she took a course taught by Condoleezza Rice and professor of political science Terry Karl. The focus of her dissertation concerned organizations within the national security apparatus, in particular the Central Intelligence Agency. Zegart explained that she has been attracted to the intelligence field ever since her education at Stanford.
Zegart has authored Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11, Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community, and Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (with Condoleezza Rice). Her upcoming book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, explores the history of the America’s eighteen spy agencies and how emerging technologies such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and commercial satellites are challenging their roles in national security decision making.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali brought a unique perspective to the forum as a female immigrant to the United States. In the early 1990s, she fled her native Somalia and received political asylum in the Netherlands. She became a member of that country’s parliament, focusing on the integration of immigrants into Dutch society.
She is the author of The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, Infidel, Nomad: From Islam to America, and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. Her latest book, released in February, is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, an examination of how emigration from Muslim-majority countries led to a rise in sexual violence against women in Europe.
Status of Women in the World
Hirsi Ali explained that the roots of Europe’s migration crisis began at the end of the Cold War. Before then, countries in the developing world, particularly in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, looked to either the United States or the Soviet Union as a source of political and economic stability. That two-pillar system eroded after the fall of the Soviet Union and the scaling back by the United States of its global engagement in pursuit of its so-called peace dividend.
As a result of instability in the developing world, the European Union over the past three decades has experienced a surge of immigration, particularly in EU member states that are linked to the colonial past of the immigrants’ countries of origin. Since 2015, immigration flows into Europe reached the level of a humanitarian crisis, as refugees fleeing war-torn and economically devastated countries such as Libya and Syria started arriving on the shores and at the borders of Europe.
Hirsi Ali asserted that among the consequences of this unmitigated migration is that European officials have largely turned a blind eye to sexual violence that exists within Muslim-majority populations. Furthermore, European leaders’ mismanagement of the migrant crisis has divided society to polar extremes, with nativists at one end and Islamists on the other, leaving little or no space for moderate voices that can seriously address pressing social issues, including violence against women. She emphasized that the circumstances of women in these communities can be improved only if females in political leadership demonstrate courage and advocate on their behalf.
Women leaders are expected to raise the issue of sexual violence, Hirsi Ali explained: if women don’t bring it up, no one will ever talk about it.
Economy described how at the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the country’s political leadership had expressed progressive views regarding women’s status in their society. However, in reality, women have been historically underrepresented in the Communist Party. The politburo includes just one woman, and women compose just 4 percent of the top 200 of the party’s central committee. Among the entire Communist Party, women make up less than one-third of the total 90-million-person membership.
Economy also explained that when she participates in track II dialogues with academic counterparts in China, she rarely interacts with women.
“I feel sad for many of the young Chinese female scholars, because they are not getting the opportunities to engage with their foreign counterparts,” Economy said. “I think this is only going to be to the detriment of [China’s] scholarship moving forward.”
Similarly, Gottemoeller recalled that during the New START negotiations with Russia, almost all of her counterparts were men. She recalled achieving a small victory with her Russian counterparts by convincing them to allow the only female diplomat in their delegation to participate at the negotiating table.
“At the end of the day, I had to conclude that my little efforts were probably not going to be sufficient for [Russian women’s] careers,” said Gottemoeller. “There really has to be a sea change. . . .There are good diplomats in Russia who are women, and they are just never going to rise up.”
Gottemoeller added that while working as deputy secretary at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), she noticed that the proverbial glass ceiling was beginning to crack for women, even in military operations. For example, she noted that women representing Canadian forces were commanding battlegroups in Iraq and Latvia.
Zegart addressed the challenges for women in American academia, primarily the disadvantages that often arise when the demands of raising children conflict with the rigidity of the tenure system, which places time limits on young professors’ ability to demonstrate scholarly achievement. She also lamented the deficit of women studying in STEM fields in higher education and argued that greater efforts are needed to inspire female interest in those fields.
Condoleezza Rice concluded the forum by asserting that the voices of the forum’s participants were important to upholding the Hoover Institution’s mission of contributing to a better world for free peoples.
“All of the women you have just seen here don’t just work on International Women’s Day or during Women’s History Month,” Rice said. “We work 365 days a year.”
In commemoration of International Women's Day and Women's History Month, the Hoover Institution would also like to recognize other women in national security fields including Kiron Skinner, Jendayi Frazer, and Jacquelyn Schneider. Beginning in January 2021 and continuing through March 2021, Schneider has served as the host and moderator of the six part, "A Decade of Cyber Strategy: A Hoover Chat Series with Cyber Experts and Defense Leaders."
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