Fighting for economic equality

As a Harvard-trained economist and newly hired policy director for then-Senator Barack Obama, she had been writing for years about the need to update U.S. economic policies and social institutions — rooted in the post-World War II boom — for a digital, globalized economy where half the U.S. work force is female and more than 70 percent of mothers work at least part time. But most debate — “Mommy Wars: Episode I” — was still framed as one of lifestyle choices, not economic necessity. Until George W. Bush, seeking re-election, spoke at the Republican National Convention. “The workers of our parents’ generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often with one company that provided health care and a pension. And most of those workers were men,” he said. “Many of our most fundamental systems — the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training — were created for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow.” Ms. Kornbluh, watching on television, was stunned: A conservative president was embracing her arguments on a national stage. “I dropped a glass on my kitchen floor,” she confessed in a recent interview. The Bush administration ultimately delivered few big policy initiatives aimed at women and “juggler families” — a term for two-career parents that Ms. Kornbluh coined a decade before Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former high-level State Department aide under Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised it in last week’s much-discussed Atlantic magazine article. As chief architect of the Democratic Party platform in 2008, Ms. Kornbluh said she pressed her “obsession” with the gender dimension in discussions ranging from pay discrimination to education and health care reform. Four years later, Ms. Kornbluh, 49, is U.S. ambassador to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — and as passionate as ever that women’s issues are fundamentally about economics. Her approach, she said, has been to persuade (mostly male) fellow ambassadors that championing women is ultimately in their national self-interest. “Even if all you care about is economic growth, you have to care about gender issues,” said Ms. Kornbluh, whose priorities at the 34-member body include fighting corruption, promoting sustainable development and nurturing Internet commerce. “Women are not a separate issue from the economy. Women are half the economy.” As a mother who struggles herself to balance career with family needs, Ms. Kornbluh said she had chafed most of her working life against the “antiquated options” available to most women — the very constraints that Ms. Slaughter argues fly in the face of the post-1970s myth that they can “have it all.” “I’ve been obsessed since forever in how the economy and the world are changing but we’re not,” Ms. Kornbluh said. “How do we change our institutions and our approaches and our investments so that we can still have opportunities for families?” Indeed, she admitted, “it didn’t hit me until I had my own kids that there was a gender dimension to all of this, too. It took having a kid for that to hit me on the head, which I’m quite embarrassed by.” After Harvard, she followed a fairly classic path, becoming an expert on telecommunications and Internet regulation at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission before moving to the Treasury Department, where she quickly rose to become a deputy chief of staff. But, when pregnant with her second child, she made a decision that shocked colleagues: She quit. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I was in that classic dilemma of feeling like a terrible employee and a terrible mother.” After a year off, she joined a think tank, where she started out writing about technology policy but eventually transitioned to studying how policies affect women and families. When she joined Mr. Obama’s Senate team, it was on the condition that the job be part time. When Mr. Obama named her O.E.C.D. ambassador in 2009, her career moved from the carpool lane back to the fast track. Her young family moved to Paris, where her husband, a lawyer, telecommuted to his high-powered job in Washington and took on a larger share of parenting their two sons. Ms. Kornbluh set to work on raising awareness of the need to create new economic opportunities for women. That culminated this year in the Gender Initiative — a broad database of indicators from O.E.C.D. member states measuring participation and performance of women in education, employment and entrepreneurship. The aim was to provide comparative statistics that would help governments seeking to level the playing field for women. “I was very impressed that she took the initiative to work on something that had previously not been high on the agenda,” said Thorir Ibsen, a former ambassador to the O.E.C.D. from Iceland now representing his country to the European Union in Brussels. Gender “is not something that automatically takes a force of its own.” Ms. Kornbluh’s arrival in Paris came as the global financial crisis hit, said Mr. Ibsen, whose country chose a woman, Johanna Sigurdardottir, as prime minister in the midst of the meltdown. The crisis, he said, was an opportunity to get gender into the global conversation. “When you encounter a crisis of that kind,” he said, “there is increasing demand for a rethinking of how organizations and societies work.” Yet as the global economic crisis has deepened, Ms. Kornbluh acknowledged, gender risked slipping from governments’ priority lists as leaders — particularly in Europe — reduced ballooning public debts and shored up teetering financial systems. Even worse, the burden of austerity is often falling heavily on women, in the form of reduced pension and child-care benefits or cuts to (heavily female) public-sector jobs. “Money spent on education, child care, support for poor families is not just consumption — these are pro-growth investments in our modern, knowledge-based economy,” Ms. Kornbluh said. “Cutting these programs is like eating our seed corn.” She rattled off a list of countries incorporating women into economic development, including Japan, South Korea and Italy, post-Silvio Berlusconi. Those who have worked closely with Ms. Kornbluh describe her as a persistent negotiator who is most effective pushing her agenda — softly — behind the scenes. “She operates below the radar,” said Charles Heeter, chairman of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee, which lobbies the O.E.C.D. on behalf of businesses. “Her approach has been to be very inclusive and to try to reach out to different aspects of civil society.” “Business could easily be a target for a lot of criticism for its slow progress in promoting women to top positions,” Mr. Heeter said. “But Karen has never taken that approach and we appreciated that a lot.” Ms. Kornbluh still struggles to balance career and family life — and admits, like Ms. Slaughter, that she does not always succeed. Her husband and sons, now 11 and 14, returned to Washington earlier this year, making for long stretches apart between school vacations. “It has been really hard,” she said, while insisting she has no regrets. She expects to return home whether Mr. Obama wins or loses this year’s election. “I don’t think I’ll work explicitly on gender,” Ms. Kornbluh said. “But I think the way I approach everything has to do with this idea that women are half the economy and half of families. So any new product you design, any new technology, is going to want to address women’s lives as well as everybody else’s.” Ms. Kornbluh said she was “grateful” to Ms. Slaughter and women like Sheryl K. Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, for using their status to re-open the conversation she started. “Now we need to extend it to women with the least options — single moms, women who can’t earn much,” she said, referring to getting new technology working for everyone, rather than increasing the vulnerability of the disadvantaged. That, noted the veteran fighter for women’s empowerment, “is going to be a challenge.”