Is Obama building a basketball team or a cabinet? December 18, 2008

So moving on from the big bad shock of an anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, anti-stem cell research preacher giving the inaugural invocation, we can look at the cabinet.  Yikes again!   Is he concentrating on getting a good basketball team for the YMCA? 

From email from Women Count:

In recent days we have been urged by some of our colleagues in the world of women’s advocacy to call attention to President-elect Obama’s failure to nominate more women to his Cabinet.
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With this week’s announcements, the new Cabinet stands at 14 men and 4 women. That puts the current percentage of women in the Obama Cabinet at 22 percent – and there are only four Cabinet-level openings left to fill.

President Clinton’s first Cabinet – 16 years ago – was 37 percent women. In his second term, it climbed to 47 percent women. President Bush began his first term with 22 percent women in his Cabinet. We want that number to go up - not go down or stay the same!

Some more math: women make up 51 percent of the American population and 56 percent of voters. In the 2008 presidential election, women voted for Obama 56 to 49 percent over men.

Dozens of qualified women have been recommended to fill critical slots on the incoming leadership team.

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Women Count advocate a Presidential Commission on Women and invite you to sign a petition here.  That sounds to me like a lot of good fun, but I’m not sure its the way to be effective in the cause of increasing women’s representation.  Very large groups can mean very long disagreements ending in compromises and an unclear message.  Perhaps the thing is to concentrate on the local and state level. 

What do you think?