Where are the women wonks? Why the average D.C. think tank event features five guys in suits.

• Author: Kim, Anne
• Position: Washington D.C.

Every day in Washington, D.C., brings numerous announcements about the various policy events, forums, and conferences around town that serve as meet-and-greets for the city's thinking elite. In addition to a prepackaged muffin or a stale sandwich and some badly brewed coffee, these events typically feature a slate of experts on whatever topic is the focus. Also typically, most of these experts are men.

One recent big-name panel on money in politics, for example, featured seven white men (including the moderator) and just one woman: Jane Harman, the Woodrow Wilson Center president and former congresswoman. Another recent all-day, all-star conference on economic policy included only twelve women among the fifty featured speakers.

Certainly, some of the most powerful people in policy today are women, such as the Center for American Progress's president, Neera Tanden, and Sarah Rosen Wartell, president of the Urban Institute. But male "brand-name" policy experts far outnumber the women. Men--white men--dominate the senior management at many of the most influential D.C. think tanks. And men--white men--dominate the ranks of "scholars" in many institutions.

Even at such venerable tanks as the Brookings Institution, male scholars heavily outnumber women. The worst offenders, not surprisingly, are the right-wing think tanks, many of whose staff rosters look like the membership of Augusta National. The Heritage Foundation, for example, has fifteen (almost identical) white men on their "senior management" page and only two women, neither of whom hold policy positions. At the American Enterprise Institute, just eight of the sixty resident scholars are women, as is only one of the institution's top five officials.

One consequence of this is that we have the irony of a bunch of men debating the existence and merits of a "war on women" in this year's campaigns. Another consequence is that too many Washington policy discussions are missing the perspective of half the people in America (actually, 50.8 percent) who will be affected by these decisions.

There are a number of possible explanations for the dearth of women in wonkery. The first is generational--people at think tanks are old. It's no coincidence that almost everyone who works in think tanks is a "senior fellow." Often, think tank fellows are senior in all meanings of the word. Washington has always revered two types of talent: the fresh and brilliant wunderkind, and the been-there and done-it-all...