Excerpts
from the 2004 Commencement Address
by Former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell
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PHOTO
BY FRED LEBLANC
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Following are
several excerpts from the commencement address given on Sunday,
May 23,
by the Right Honourable A. Kim Campbell, the first woman to serve
as prime minister of Canada. You may also find MP3 and RealAudio
clips of these excerpts and the entire speech here.
The fact that
leadership is gendered masculine in most societies does not mean
that women do not lead, only that their leadership is seen as
unusual or unnatural. Successes for women are often regarded as
flukes. Their accomplishments don't stick.
In the United
States, women leaders are often rendered invisible. The White
House Project, a project based in Washington which is determined,
obviously, to get a woman in the White House, but does wonderful
research - the White House Project did a media survey of the Sunday
morning news shows in the United States. And they surveyed them
from January the 1st 2000 to June the 30th 2001. They found that
the ratio of men to women as guests on the Sunday morning news
shows - which are very influential - was nine to one. Is that
because there were no women? What was interesting is that these
shows were more likely to feature out-of-power men than in-power
women.
I wish
I could tell you that the world is your oyster. In many ways it
is, but I think it's probably for many of you going to be an oyster
that's too small for the size of your pearl. You have however,
a great advantage. Aside from the academic quality of your education,
which is extraordinay, you have lived in an environment that takes
women seriously. You have seen what women can accomplish when
there are no barriers. You know that men can believe in women,
and that the barriers are attitudes, not people. If women absorb
the cultural norms that say that women don't really count, they
also can be barriers.
You know that
women can and do lead, but you also have the advantage of your
network with each other. In this information technology age, such
networks can be very powerful. You can help to make sure that
the achievements of the class of 2004 are and continue to be recognized
and celebrated. You can be a force for demanding that women leaders
everywhere be seen and heard.
Women of my
generation were told that it was enough just to be good at what
we did, and many of them were extraordinary, and some of them
have even achieved significant positions. But we still fight against
the invisibility. We still fight against the tendency to see us
as not really belonging in those positions. And yet we know, because
we see this around the world, that the presence of women in decision-making
positions improves the quality of that decision-making. It is
not because women are better than men, but because they bring
a different experience and in many ways live a different reality
than that of men, and you cannot govern the human race by hearing
only one half of its voices.
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