Look for them in the near future on booktv cspan. Good evening everyone. My name is jennifer and i was just a dent first used it and in the liberal studies program. Its my pleasure to welcome you all to the family auditorium for tonights program how women are changing the way america works. Im thrilled to introduce to you these women to leave tonights talk. A washington correspondent for Time Magazine and author of the influence which is the focus of tonights event she writes about everything from washington politics to the Foreign Policy and natural trends and covers stories from conflicts in the middle east to the earthquake in haiti to the movement november 2015 in paris. Shes interviewed numerous heads of states including state including president barack obama and george w. Bush as well as senators, senators, governors and foreign dignitaries. She was a reporter for Bloomberg News where she covered the white house, congress and the 2004 president ial campaign. She received from Columbia University and undergraduate degrees in International Relations in art history from this university. She was a 2015 Harvard Institute of politics below and 2016 new America Foundation fellow. Welcome. [applause] served as a United States senator from North Carolina in 2009 to 2015 and prior to her time in the senate she served in the North Carolina senate from 1999 to 2009. After taking office in january of 2009, she served on four committees in housing and urban affairs, Small Business and entrepreneurship and Health Education labor and pensions. She introduced the bipartisan opposition to train workers for the Jobs Available right now by bringing businesses together with colleges to create a nationwide program. Shes been a champion for education through her career in Public Service. As a member of the committee she worked to include earlier legislation the Financial Literacy to students in education reform. To assure the u. S. Remains competitive she left the fight for the Public Schools to meet the needs of todays students. She was born and shall be North Carolina and is a graduate of Florida State university and wake forest law school. Please join me in welcoming tonight panelists. [applause] first i want to say thank you so much for coming in having me to talk about broad influence and i want to thank the senator for doing this. Its really awesome to have you here to talk with me about this. So to give you a little bit of background, we were fellows together at harvard and so she really kind of helped me right through some things so its great to have her here as we talked over a lot of these issues in the year years weve known each other more than a year now. Shes familiar with so much stuff having served in the senate as well as a lot of the industries i talk about in the books are to give you a little bit of background about the broad influence, i first got interested in doing a book after i did a story for Time Magazine in 2013 after the Government Shutdown about the women of the senate coming together to restart the negotiation to reopen women of the men would talk to each other. I i i had a lot of interest writing a book about the women of the senate but they were all writing their own books and didnt need one from me. In that episode was interesting is for the first time its 20 of women and they actually ended up having a huge impact in that session that produced 75 of the legislation that passed the session so it was a tangible difference and i covered the senate and congress on and off for almost 13 or 14 years and there was such a tangible difference that session you could see the impact women were having. Having written that story i started getting cards and emails and notes from friends and perfect strangers from across the country saying that this sort of phenomena exists elsewhere sits between 20 to 30 of any institution whether its a legislature or Corporate Board, navy ship or Appellate Court and they begin to change the culture of that institution. The institution. It actually comes from cyan. Surrogates to the point at which the Chain Reaction cant be stopped so for example the Nuclear Reaction you cant make the thing will go boom. In this case the use Critical Mass in gender and minority and it was also used for example in the Civil Rights Act in the south it was a Critical Mass that thereve been a ton of studies on this issue splits between 20 to 30 because people depend on critical actors so the reason it is was the threshold of the 20 but they still got a lot done is because they had so many powerful women, critical actors in the senate so they ended up sharing 11 of the committees. The same sort of things you need at least a minimum in search insert with the officers and go down. You doing it less overall to create the mass. Its about different areas so. Do you feel a tangible difference. It was so true it evident that when i got elected we had at the time. We had the 20 threshold and when you look at what that means, we were able to pass the legislation because we came together we and we got a bill in an agricultural bill that was long in coming. When you study if you wonder why its the ability to compromise until you get the job done. Whats in it for everybody and that means youre not going to get everything you want otherwise it is a winning and losing situation but how can we compromise and come together and understand what these issues are but at the end of the day get something done and i think thats is what our country once and is demanding but at the same point, whos doing it, the women at the table that you cant get it done unless one thing you run for office. I think that we have always got to focus on that and historically if you look at the women running for office, they tend to be recruited. So whenever im speaking to a group of students in particular male and female are always encouraged everybody to consider it one day. And im getting it to you now at nyu we need young people. We understand how the work is done into the education boards in all these things and it really is important but then i take it one step further and i look at the women and many times younger girls and im recruiting you particularly to run because girls need to be recruited and i have to admit i was going to do it no matter running for the state senate but when you have the governor calling up and saying that by the way, we would like you to run, it gives you the extra little impetus to say im planning on it. They say that it takes asking seven times before she will run for office. Was that true for you . It certainly makes it easier. Not seven times. But once again, i knew i wanted to do it. But when you have to president of the senate and the majority leader come to you and say we really want you in and by the way it helps a lot. What was your experience running for office is it different for a man or a woman running for the office did you have to be more prepared . I tell people there will never be a perfect time, whether it is the business that you are in, the family situation, if you have young kids, old kid, you will have a perfect time. So youve got to feel it in your gut that we are going to jump in and do this because if you have a family let me tell you its a family event. In my case i have been incredibly supportive husband. When i first ran into this was 1998. They love it. Its a 32nd ad and they got their stopwatches out. When i ran into 08 my kids were hit in the College Campuses who were still in school and took a sixmonth sabbatical and then went back so they could give speeches at the College Campuses. When i ran the second time after the Citizens United decision and all of a sudden you have this unlimited amount of money which means 32nd ads that are the worst things you could possibly imagine i had my team come over and say okay show us the worst commercials youve seen to be sure my family was ready to go into there were some terrible ones out there. Sure enough they said we are behind you 100 and off we went. So you were the first of ran to the senate. Talk about terrible commercials she was running against you and called had called you godless i believe . Historically they said it was one of the best records to a commercial. Evidently an individual to host a fundraiser for me was a humanist and atheist and they used used that as if i was a godless person. Its the first furthest thing you can imagine from atheist and that shouldnt focus in on running for Political Office the way we have seen so much of it today. I ended up having a press conference on the lawn of my church the very next morning after that ran and i have my Bible Studies class and a jewish rabbi who was there. Whats my report was was an ad that says i shall not bear false witness. I ended up winning might close to nine points. One of the things that fascinated me why they got so much done is because they got together a lot. They had these dinners they would talk about not necessarily legislation that everything going on and they were actually friends and it used to be in washington once upon a time in those days when washington was functional you had Ronald Reagan and tip oneill they would have drinks every night and the house and senate used to move their families here and they would live here and become friends and that began to change under Newt Gingrich who basically changed the house rules in order to allow more recesses and longer weekends because we thought it was a corrupting influence people were inside the beltway too much and so there were friendships across the aisle so people didnt have time to get to know each other so when it i became a dysfunctional. No matter what was going on, will you tell us a little about those dinners . Senator mikulski from maryland who is retiring this year is the dean of the way men and its interesting she is the longestserving woman in the u. S. Senate and in the democratic room there are telephone booths and she now had her dedicated Barbara Mikulski telephone booth. We would have dinner together democrat and republican and at some point weve actually rotate. A lot of times the dinner would be held in the capital in what was called called the strong thurmond room. Its a very elegant room with a chandelier he was a renowned with the safe email grabber so female pages used to be warned not to come within arms length of him even in a wheelchair he was definitely a little bit of a ladies man you could say all old southern ladies man said the fact they were having these dinners and lunches in the room the irony wasnt lost. And i can remember when senator Lisa Murkowski from alaska hosted we all got this email saying she was going to have a potluck dinner and she said her teams that you cant have a potluck dinner and ask you this senators to your senators to bring something. She said yes i can and sure enough everybody bought something from their home state. She said you bring the entree, you bring this and of course she had the entree of salmon her husband caught the week before. It was wonderful. We had a ball. We talked and had a good time and talked about our families and business and everything stays there. Senator mccaskill had it at her place one time. Down a long narrow hallway you are looking at your phone might whats the address, whats with the apartment number, you get out of the hallway and its the den of the womens voices. You knew right where to go to find it. I hosted at one time several months before my election but i wouldnt have thought to do that and we had the library of congress and we asked some of the people in charge to pull together some historical facts and we had an incredible night so it was one of those times you have multiple things going on so if you couldnt make the whole dinner i guarantee every woman showed up for part of it. Is there anything else in the senate you want to talk about . You mentioned the Government Shutdown. I dont know if it was the Washington Post were which paper it was the men shut us down and the women got us out coming to forage and craft a compromise to open the Government Back up after 16 days. Many books grew from here and one of the main things i found is that the Public Sector is doing better than the private sector and so all three branches are reaching Critical Mass of about the same time you have 20 in congress, 30 in terms of highlevel service and political appointees and 35, 36 of the federal bench and 40 of state lawyers, state judges as well which is striking when you look at the private sector that has been installed for the last decade about 17 and 21 to 20 of their workforces and the workforce is and theres a lot of factors for that. Some women did the women fled to go to the Public Service and felt if they were going to miss their kids every day day it better be for the greater good. The path is easier like state legislatures in 36 or 35 states are parttime jobs that are easier to do if you have kids. So frankly the Public Sector unions are stronger protecting jobs in private sector so theres a bunch of Different Reasons but you chose to go from the private practice at the time were the Financial Sector so the Financial Sector is one of the worst areas in fact we are there in Silicon Valley which i have chapters on both they are the farthest apart and that is in part because they are not as strong witches in science technology, engineering and math but then its also because both of the professions tend to be very testosterone driven and competitive and dont have a butt of opportunities do so theres a great theory since she worked in the industry is called beaman sisters where is the idea of the Lehman Brothers had been sisters, the Global Financial crisis wouldnt have happened because women take less risk and so i look at this and it is an interesting question do you think its true . I would have to think about that one. I worked for a bank for bank of america and i can remember at that time we would actually go over the loans and credit risk and i can remember there was one in particular making tons of loans but lots of them didnt work out and i can guarantee that implementation i did was so thorough and im not an expert on people and their analysis but i can document in my own experience that certainly was the case. When i first got hired i was right out of law school going into the division i was the first woman in this department and the city that had been hired to work on that part of the bank and i remembered i was told by the head of the department of women that they had assigned to be my assistant said no she wasnt going to work for a woman and i said wait a minute she hasnt met me. This was a long time ago so sure antimatter, and we got along great thats what it was like a long time ago. I also remember they put together it was interesting, one of the recent hires and me we worked together to open up a new division in a different city. That graduate was also a woman and when we went to the city we were going to host the community in the business lunch place where the business women and men went there was no opening for a woman to join the club said the president of the bank at the time who is probably credited with making bank of america the place it is today said are you kidding me if they want us in that community you better let us in and of these are the two women that represent us and sure enough we were able to join and be at the main dining room. Those are the kind of crazy things that really truly happened. One other story in the senate when i first got there candidacies in january of 09 we have 700,000 jobs a month in this country and when i went for training in late december for parliamentary issues and they brought us all the new senators cant democrats, republicans together to say this is one of the rules of the senate and i remember i said nobody mentioned something about healthcare in a gym and i thought certainly theres a gym somewhere around here so they said come back next week when you were here and we will take you to see it. We went in and the rules committee met me and said this is the womens part which isnt that big and i said my husband always said i had a great sense of smell. [inaudible] [laughter] but i said i smell a pool and a city at theres a pool but its for men only. I said really. I didnt think a big deal. I went back to my office and told my female staff its for men only. They wanted me to talk about that and i said no we have several jobs a month we are not going to talk about a pool for the senators to use. Fast forward, the news media found out about it, they talked to the committee and they said she doesnt know what shes talking about. We had a meeting of the minds. After a couple of weeks pool is now open to women and in the womens locker room there is a sign that says poole, coed facility, where appropriate attire. I always wondered about that. [laughter] the idea is interesting because you cant say that the women are monolithic. There will always be the women that take more risk or dont conform to these ideas but studies show women