PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
"If Women Ruled the World" is a two-hour PBS documentary special featuring an historic dinner party that took place June 23, 1999 in Washington, D.C.'s landmark Senate Caucus Room on Capitol Hill. The dinner was hosted by Canada's first and only female prime minister, the Honourable Kim Campbell, and the 19 guests were celebrated women from diverse cultural, ethnic, generational, and professional backgrounds. They were coming together to share their experiences and observations as trailblazers in male dominated fields and to explore the prospects for full gender equity. The guests included Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, General Claudia Kennedy (the highest-ranking woman in the U.S. Army), feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, Elle magazine's editor-in-chief, Elaina Richardson, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, and supermodel Alek Wek, among others.

The program presents background guest profiles, expert commentary, and behind-the-scenes vignettes that punctuate the dinner conversation and help to dramatize and clarify the issues. These cutaways include an unprecedented roster of the most accomplished women of our time, e.g., Madeleine Albright, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Liv Ullmann, Queen Noor, Martha Stewart, Janet Reno, and Angelina Jolie, among others.

The aim of the program is to convey how historic and unprecedented women's rise into positions of public power has been, how women's empowerment is transforming both our work and family lives, and why genuine gender equity is proving so elusive.

PROGRAM MESSAGE
The consensus of the dinner participants is that women are beginning to assert a distinctive approach and make a real difference as they expand their presence in the professions. This distinctive approach is generally defined as being more social, civil, collaborative, and inclusive, and it's consistent with rising educational standards and the evolution of democracy and globalization toward greater pluralism, decentralization, transparency, and accountability. The factors influencing this approach include women's traditional role in the family as the civilizers and unifiers and their experience as outsiders in the public world.

However, as women humanize and democratize the workplace, the family itself is being neglected and the matrix for these values is consequently being eroded. This has created a major impediment to further advancement for women. It has resulted in the persistence of wage discrepancies and of the glass ceiling, as both well-educated young women and older accomplished professional women are the ones compromising their careers for the sake of the family. It has left the upper echelons of corporate and political power monopolized by men without stemming the continuing erosion of family life.

This is a problem of our institutions failing to keep up with social change. Only when our institutions adapt to accommodate women and men's dual obligations--to both career and family--will the real economic and personal promise of women's empowerment, of finally integrating both our public and private lives, be finally realized.

WHY A DINNER PARTY?
If Women Ruled the World" was partly inspired by Washington, D.C. dinner parties and the role that dinner parties have traditionally played as vehicles for bringing people together from diverse backgrounds. The very diversity of "If Women Ruled the World" and the prominent role that women have played as hostesses/facilitators and arbiters of civilized dinner manners become a metaphor in the program for how women's empowerment is changing the world.

The tension within every dinner party--between satisfying selfish, carnal survival needs and adhering to the civilized, rational demands of the community--also becomes a metaphor for the partly biological, partly cultural role that gender itself plays in our lives.

In addition, the informality, freedom, and egalitarianism of the dinner party dramatizes the democratic impact of women's empowerment.

WHY AN ALL-WOMEN'S DINNER PARTY?
In most of Western history starting with ancient Greece, social dinners tended to be all-male affairs, and they tended to be an extension of professional life. So the very fact that you can have a dinner party consisting only of women whose decisions have wide-ranging social, political, and economic repercussions represents a stark historic turnaround, one that dramatizes the seismic change that is taking place in gender roles and relations.

Having only women also helped to facilitate the informality, intimacy, and candor necessary for a good discussion, and it reinforced the shared bond.

WHY WASHINGTON, D.C.?
As the backdrop for "If Women Ruled the World," Washington dramatizes both the complications that women face in acquiring and exercising power in a world where politics and power have been defined by men as well as the possibilities that democracy is creating for women and genuine gender equity.

WHY IS WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT RELEVANT?
As Margaret Mead asserted, and the latest research confirm, there is no evidence to suggest that women as a group have ever exercised or shared ruling power. Yet today, with women college graduates now outnumbering male graduates, with half of all incoming law students in the U.S., 45% of all medical students, and 46% of all U.S. doctorates being women, with women owning 38% of all U.S. firms and filling 48% of managerial positions, they are finally poised to break through fossilized gender stereotypes and fundamentally alter the reigning gender balance of power.

At the same time, women are still no more than a token presence in the upper echelons of real power and in the corporate boardrooms and political establishment, the technology gender gap if anything has been widening, and the average wages for women still haven't exceeded $.75 for every dollar earned by a man. Not so long ago, the official view of women as the weaker, subordinate sex belied women's domination of family and social life; today an official consensus on gender equity belies pervasive and often unconscious discrimination, evident in an explosion of substance abuse and eating disorders among the current postfeminist generation of young women and in persisting employment inequities.

At this critical crossroads in women's history, if women are to finally achieve real power as a group for the first time in recorded history then it is necessary to come together and clarify the lessons of the past.