The Best-Kept Secret: Women Corporate Lobbyists, Policy, and Power in the United States

Chapter 3: The Problem with No Name? Women’s Interests, Corporate Power, and Public Policy

47 Chapter 3 The Problem with No Name? Women’s Interests, Corporate Power, and Public Policy Although still a relatively small proportion of all women lobbyists, there has been a recent increase in the number of those who specialize in policy areas traditionally thought of as “male,” most notably tax and social security policy. At the same time, tax policy and social security policy increasingly advantages business to the detriment of other groups, most notably women.This chapter examines the contradictory positions of women corporate lobbyists who increasingly work in the interest of corporations through the passage of legislation that is contrary to the interests of women. Women who specialize in tax and social security policy are no longer an anomaly in business and government.They lobby for top corporations and work as aides to legislators who serve on key tax-writing committees. A few have even served as top presidential advisors. One of the most successful and prominent of these women is Leanne Abdnor, who was commissioned by GeorgeW. Bush in 2001 to study the so-called funding problems facing social security. She appeared with Bush on the campaign trail, standing alongside him onstage, in support of his push for personal accounts. In 1995, Abdnor served as vice president of external affairs at Cato, a conservative nonprofit research foundation based in Washington, D.C., where she was “introduced to the gospel of privatization” (Vieth 2005).After Cato,Abdnor 48 Th e B e s t - K e p t S e c r e t went to work for the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, an organization created by the National Association of Manufacturers (the largest industrial trade organization in the United States) to promote private retirement accounts. Within corporations, the number of women government relations officials who specialize in taxes and social security is also steadily increasing, as evidenced by the fact that many top U.S. firms such as Exxon, Pfizer, and American Express now employ women as their head legislative liaisons in the area of tax policy. As more and more women enter these policy areas, they are beginning to form networks, both formal and informal. Among women who lobby for corporate interests, and those who work crafting legislation and regulations in the government realm, organizations have sprung up to provide a place for women to share career and policy information and develop and maintain friendships. The Tax Alliance, examined in the next chapter, is one such organization, composed of women who represent top U.S. companies and women who work as legislative staffers and on congressional committees (such as the House Ways and Means), all of whom specialize in tax policy. As growing numbers of women lobbyists enter what are typically viewed as “male” policy areas, policy is increasingly crafted to the advantage of business and, conversely, to the disadvantage of women and other groups. Public policy is not value-free; it reflects and maintains the interests of dominant groups and the ideologies that reinforce these interests. For instance, Heberle (1999) argues that homicide laws work to the disadvantage of women because inherent in them are assumptions about masculinity and femininity, such that “when women commit violence in the private sphere, they are breaking the rules of gender and must be either refeminized . . . or severely sanctioned. When men commit violence in the private sphere, they are in a sense fulfilling the grim assumptions about masculinity.They do not have to be remasculinized to be The Problem with No Name? 49 considered redeemable or ‘human.’ Instead, judgment turns on whether they took masculinity too far” (Heberle 1999, 1103). The gendered nature of homicide policy helps explain why women, compared with men, receive harsher sentences, particularly when convicted of domestic homicide. Instead of being an engine for equality, state policy over time has increasingly become an engine for inequality. This is true particularly in the case of tax and social security policy. In the United States, relative to other countries, tax and social security policy reflect and perpetuate an increasingly unequal distribution of power and wealth. Changes in tax rates, loopholes in the tax law, and proposals for privatized retirement accounts result in a system whereby the rich and powerful pay less and less (and in some cases zero) in taxes, while the working poor and middle class, and especially women, are held increasingly responsible and accountable for shouldering the burden. It Wasn’t Always...