On Sunday, I read "When It Comes to Scandal, Girls Won't Be Boys" in the New York Times focused on the current Congressman Anthony Wiener scandal.  Presented with a brief, quiet moment at home, I starting jotting down my thoughts about the Weiner matter, but each time, my kids interrupted me. “Can we have scones?” “Can you read Green Eggs & Ham?” “Can you help us with play dough?” Thus backing up Kirsten Gillibrand’s point in the article that mothers in power simply don’t have time for the types of Weiner-, Schwarzenegger-, Edwards-, or Spitzer-type messes.

According to the article women are more motivated by social good than ambition, and women are held to a higher popular standard than men—thus keeping them on their best behavior. These points have been reinforced time and time again through our work at The White House Project, where we have trained 12,000 women to run for office. With all the praise given to women in light of the Weiner story over the last week, one might conclude that we are at the dawn of a new era for women’s leadership.
 
But let’s not get too excited.

While it is absolutely true that we don’t hear about scandals of this nature from women in positions of power, it is not necessarily true that the Weiner fiasco is good for women. In fact, these types of “male politicians run amok” stories have a negative impact on one of the biggest linchpins to achieving gender parity in leadership: a lack of younger women getting involved.

According to an unscientific poll of millennial women in TWHP’s community, women under 35 don’t perceive that much difference between male and female politicians. Moreover, gender-specific messages arguing that women are simply “better” than men heighten the level of skepticism among this demographic.
 
Seventy percent of the women we train at The White House Project are between the ages of 23-35, and it is exactly this next generation of women that we’ll need to equip and inspire if we’re ever to dramatically increase the number of women in the highest positions of power. Google, one of our corporate sponsors, has helped us to calculate that in order to catapult the United States from 72nd to #1 in women’s political leadership alone, we’d need to train 8,000 women annually.

In order to get there we need to engage millions of them in our movement—and it won’t work to tell them that Weiner’s case proves women are better leaders.
 

So, then how will we recruit the next generation?

·       By showing them examples of women leaders that look like them, that come from their communities, and that they embrace as authentic—one of the most important leadership attributes they cite—and also one they feel is missing from many women leaders today;

·       By investing in their leadership as a tool to achieve social impact, a critical step for the most socially conscious generation.

·       By meeting them where they are, and leveraging the media and popular culture to attract their attention and invite them to join us in advancing social and economic progress. 
 

In order for us to include everyone in a brighter future, we need to engage, not alienate. That means inspiring the next generation of women less through stories about men who fall short and more with women who, everyday, achieve extraordinary impact. If we do our job recruiting and advancing enough of them into the leadership pipeline, we can all look forward to the day when the focus will be on their agenda and their gender will be irrelevant.

Now back to play dough.

Follow Tiffani Dufu on Twitter @tdufu
Read more about The White House Project www.thewhitehouseproject.org