Michelle Bachelet has parlayed her experience as Chile’s first female defense minister and then as first female president into a new position. She now heads the newly formed U.N. Women agency. Always surprising, she threw traditional feminism a curveball when she said, “We need men. We need to obtain big important male champions.”
Not only are her appointments controversial, her agenda is as well. Her primary objective is focused on female empowerment, not female victimhood. She believes getting women into politics, business, military and peacekeeping roles is paramount to their gaining empowerment. She believes the quota system is a starting place for women but that alone will not get the job done. In advocating working with men within the system, she is seeking to gain support while expanding women’s roles.
While she has had great success in Chile, it remains to be seen if she can extend that success and those goals to a worldwide audience. The U.N. system of negotiation and compromise would seem to present a vastly different form of governance than Bachelet’s previous positions have entailed. Her challenge will be to make women’s issues a universal topic to many varied governments with many varied agendas. Her past success bodes well for predicting her administrative skills and hopefully her broad agenda will appeal to the world at large.
Do you think Bachelet’s approach is correct? Do you think female empowerment is the paramount issue for women?
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