Women Rule

Live from SXSW in Austin, Congresswomen Terri Sewell and Veronica Escobar tell us about the unsolicited advice they've received as women running for office, what it's really like to wage a campaign for Congress, the very real barriers that women face in politics, and the best advice they've ever received about raising money.

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The longtime president & CEO of PBS describes how she psyches herself up to fundraise, what businesses can do to foster talented women and how PBS has responded to the #MeToo movement.

For 13 years, Paula Kerger has led PBS, making her one of the media industry's most powerful players — which is probably not something you expect to hear about someone who considers herself an introvert. In that time, she's led the organization through a lot — from the rise of online streaming services, to battles with the Trump administration over funding, to the “Me Too” movement, when sexual harassment allegations brought down one of PBS’s biggest stars: Charlie Rose.

Through it all, PBS has remained a place known in the industry for the number of women in meaningful leadership roles — both on-camera and off. That’s by design. And Kerger sees that diversity as a fundamental component of PBS fulfilling its mission.

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The head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administers the health care plans of 130 million Americans and oversees around 26 percent of the federal budget. It's a big job. And for Seema Verma, it's one that requires a complicated balancing act with her family back in Indiana.

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The star and showrunner of Netflix’s "One Day At a Time" — one of Hollywood's few series starring and led by women of color — talk Hollywood, sexism and the stereotypes they’re tired of hearing about Latinas.

It’s a TV show about a Cuban-American single mother who works as a nurse. She’s an Army veteran and her ex-husband is still a contractor overseas. She has post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety. Her teenage daughter is an out and proud lesbian in a world that isn’t always welcoming. Her son has been bullied by racists who tell him to “go back to Mexico,” even though he’s a third-generation American. Her mother, a devout Catholic and Cuban immigrant, and lives with them in a small apartment in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood.

If you’re among those who read that and think the show isn’t for you, Machado is having none of it.

“We get this question a lot, like, ‘What does it have to do with me? Why should I watch it?’” Machado said in an interview for POLITICO’s Women Rule podcast. “And I’m saying personally, I grew up watching white people and I identified with them. And I didn’t have anything in common with ‘Growing Pains.’ I had nothing in common with Kirk Cameron. … They were telling universal stories about family, about love, about all of these things.”

“When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think, like, ‘Another day in the life of a Latina!’” chuckled Gloria Calderón Kellett, the series’ co-runner, who joined Machado on the podcast. “You just wake up, and you’re a human and you’re trying to go about your day.”

Over its three seasons, “One Day At a Time” has earned a devoted fan following, both for its sharp writing and for its perspective on the world. It’s one of relatively few TV shows in Hollywood both led by and starring women of color (Machado’s mother is portrayed by Rita Moreno, the legendary EGOT winner whose career has spanned from “Singin’ In the Rain” and “West Side Story” to the Netflix series).

Having strong women behind the camera makes a difference, too.

“Day One of our show, we sit down with our staff and we say, ‘Hey, listen. If you have something — your kid has something at their school, you get to go to that,’” said Calderón Kellett. “‘And for those of you who have chosen not to have children, but your dog or your mom or your best friend is the most important person in the world to you, they have something? You get to go to that. All of you get to live your lives. And we’re going to try very hard to get out of here so that you can have dinner and have a full life outside of this.’ The moment you say that to anybody, they will kill for you.”

Having worked a steady career in TV on series like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Rules of Engagement,” Calderón Kellett said she was moved to take the approach because she’s toiled away in so many toxic and unaccommodating male-dominated writers’ rooms.

“Here I am in Hollywood, and I’m suffering [because of] a guy who doesn’t want to go home because he doesn’t like his wife and kids, and he wants to hold me hostage here while he’s telling dick jokes,” she said. “The more I would be in rooms where there would be half women, or more and more women, the more that type of misogynistic behavior ended. It would just start to end.”

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New York City first lady Chirlane McCray joins us to talk about the work she's been doing to expand access to mental health care, her experiences growing up as the only black student in her class from sixth grade through high school, the strangeness of being an introvert in a prominent public position in one of the most media-saturated cities in the world, and whether her husband (NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio) will run for president in 2020 — and why she's thinking about running for office herself.

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Years before Heather Wilson was secretary of the Air Force or a member of Congress, she was a student in just the third class in Air Force Academy history that admitted women. She talks with us about how the national security world has changed for women over her career, the many different hats she's worn, and what it's like to be mentioned as potentially the first woman to become secretary of Defense.

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Nan Whaley has always known she was a democrat. Her father was a union worker and her mother was a local official in their small Indiana town. She got into politics after going to Dayton for college, and she became the youngest woman elected to the Dayton City Commission, at age 29. She offers her perspective on how to get comfortable with asking for political donations -- "You’re asking people to invest in you and invest in the vision that you’re trying to move forward" -- and what she learned from her failed campaign to be Ohio's governor.

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Earlier in her career, Jean Case was on the executive track at General Electric when she made a big leap -- into tech. She rose to be a senior executive at AOL in the 1990s. Later, she and her husband Steve founded the Case Foundation, which she now runs.

She speaks with Anna about taking risks, learning from failure, and how the culture at tech startups was different some 25 years ago.

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Stacey Abrams says the surge of new voters in Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial election -- though it wasn't enough to propel her to victory -- means the state is a must-visit for Democrats running for president in 2020.

Abrams tells Anna Palmer about the discrimination she faced in the Georgia State House, what she learned in her run for governor, and how her first campaign job morphed from being a secretary to being the candidate's speechwriter.

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Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) is the first woman to chair the powerful House Appropriations committee since it was created in 1865. And she’s ready for the government to open back up.

Plus, a conversation with Patrina Clark, president and founder of the government consulting firm Pivotal Practices and a longtime federal worker, on the real-life impacts the shutdown is having on her and her business.

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