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The Hillary Effect
In honor of the 2009 International Women’s Day celebrations,
Speakers: Senator Pilar Cayetano, member of the Philippine Senate and President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Coordinating Committee of Women Parliamentarians Blanche Wiesen Cook, bestselling biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Distinguished Professor of History and Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center Rounaq Jahan, Senior Research Scholar at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and former Bangladeshi representative to the UN Ambassador Kirsti Lintonen, Permanent Mission of Finland to the United Nations World Policy Institute Senior Fellow and New York Times science writer Claudia Dreifus will moderate. When: Monday, March 9, 2009 6-8 pm A reception with light refreshments will start at 6 pm; the panel discussion will begin at 6:30. Where: Scandinavia House Victor Borge Auditorium 58 Park Avenue (between 37th and 38th streets) New York, New York Cost and RSVP: The cost of this event is $10. The fee will be waived for full-time students with ID and non-profit professionals. Register and pre-pay here: You can also register by emailing
events@worldpolicy.org or calling 212-481-5005 Option 2.
Speaker Biographies
Senator Pilar (Pia) Cayetano
is the youngest
woman elected in the history of the Philippine Senate. Four years
into her first term, Senator Cayetano has been responsible for
crafting and co-authoring a number of landmark laws as chairperson
of the senate committees on health and demography and on environment
and natural resources. An advocate of women’s health and
empowerment, she authored and
introduced the Magna Carta of Women, which aims to end all forms of
gender discrimination.
In 2008, Senator Cayetano was elected
President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s Coordinating Committee
of Women Parliamentarians, the highest position held by a Filipino
in the IPU’s 119-year history. Prior to her election to Senate,
Senator Cayetano served as chairman of the Maxi Group of Companies
beginning in 2001. A lawyer by profession, she was a general
counsel of the Philweb Corporation from 2000 to 2001. She was an
officer for the legal and corporate affairs of the Belle Corporation
from 1996 to 1999, and was previously an associate lawyer of the
Castillo, Laman Tan, and Pantaleon Law Offices in Manila.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
is Distinguished Professor of History and Women's Studies at the
John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York. She was chosen for the honor of Scholar of the Year in
1996 by the New York State Council on the Humanities. She is the
author of the bestselling biographies Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume
One (Viking, 1992), which remained on The New York Times
bestseller list for three months and received the 1992 Biography
Prize from The Los Angeles Times and the Lambda Literary
Award; and Volume Two (Viking Penguin, 1999), and is
presently working on the third and final volume. Dr. Cook speaks
regularly on history, politics and women's issues for political,
academic and community organizations. In addition to the
biographies, she has edited and contributed to several anthologies,
and is the author of Crystal Eastman On Women & Revolution
(Oxford University Press, 1978), and The Declassified
Eisenhower (Doubleday, 1981), a New York Times
Book Review notable book of 1981. For more than twenty years,
she also produced and hosted her own program for Radio Pacifica,
originally called Activists and Agitators, and later retitled
Women and the World in the 1990s. Dr. Cook appears frequently
as a commentator on such programs as The Today Show, Good Morning
America, C-Span's Booknotes, and MacNeil/Lehrer,
where she participated in the joint PBS-NBC coverage of the 1992
Democratic National Convention.
Rounaq Jahan
joined the faculty of Columbia
University in 1990 as a senior research scholar at the Southern
Asian Institute and as an adjunct professor of international affairs
at the School of International and Public Affairs. Professor Jahan's
research is concentrated on gender and development, governance,
health, and politics of Bangladesh. Among her books are Bangladesh:
Promise and Performance, which she edited (Zed Books 2000); The
Elusive Agenda: Mainstreaming Women in Development (St. Martin's
Press 1995); Bangladesh Politics: Problems and Issues (University
Press 1980); Women and Development: Perspectives from South and
South-East Asia, which she coedited with Hanna Papanek
(Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs 1979); and Pakistan:
Failure in National Integration (Columbia 1972).
Professor Jahan has held fellowships
at the CHR-Michelsen Institute in Norway, the University of
Chicago’s Committee on South Asia, the Center for Asian Development
Studies at Boston University, and the Center for International
Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy Institute,
and has been a consultant to UNDP, UNFPA, UNIFEM, UNICEF,
UNCDF, SIDA, NORAD, USAID, OECD, the Ford Foundation
and the Rockefeller Foundation.
She has also been a
member of many organizations and associations, among which are the
advisory board of Human Rights Watch; the international council of
the Asia Society; and a representative of Bangladesh to the 32nd
Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1977. Ambassador
Kirsti Lintonen is
the Permanent
Representative of Finland to the United Nations in New York.
Before taking up her post in 2005, she
was Ambassador to South Africa from 2000 and, from 2001,
simultaneously represented Finland in Botswana, Lesotho, Mauritius,
Namibia and Swaziland. She was also the Finnish representative to
the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
From 1996 to 2000, she was
Under-Secretary of State at Finland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and also served on the governing councils of several international
funds and banks, including the African Development Bank,
Inter-American Development Bank, International Fund for Agricultural
Development and the Asian Development Bank. She was Deputy
Director-General for Political Affairs at the Foreign Ministry from
1994 to 1996, and served as Ambassador to Namibia from 1990 to
1994. Ambassador Lintonen began her diplomatic career at the
Finnish Foreign Ministry in 1971, and occupied progressive positions
in several capitals, including Brussels, Berlin, Belgrade and
London. She was Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign
Policy and International Affairs from 1983 to 1987 and Deputy
Ambassador in Stockholm, Sweden, from 1987 to 1990. Moderator World Policy
Institute Senior Fellow Claudia Dreifus writes about the
lives of international scientists in her popular interview column in
the Science Times section of The New York Times, "A
Conversation with..." When the scientific honor society Sigma Xi
made her an honorary member in 2006,
they described her as "a pioneering and original force in making
science accessible." Ms. Dreifus' interviews with leading figures in
world politics, particularly with emerging women leaders, have
appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ms., The Nation,
Playboy, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Town and Country,
AARP's The Magazine, and many others.
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