“We’re into growing up, women of the future hold the big revelations.”  I was pondering this lyric yesterday by U2’s Bono while reading a piece in the New York Times on women in the military.  Knowing a little background on Bono and his reverence for women in power may help flush out why such a lyric popped into my mind.  Principle Management, the management group behind U2, essentially what is corporate U2, is almost entirely staffed by women.  Although their manager is, and has been since the beginning, Paul McGuinness, a healthy portion of the higher ups are women.  Bono has made his beliefs pretty clear that women need to attain more positions of power throughout the world, and I couldn’t agree more.  What’s going to be interesting in the next couple of decades though is how many women ascend to places of power who have military combat experience.

As of April 2009, the number of women on active duty in the military was 205,396.  That means that in ten or twenty years there will be a pool of a couple of hundred thousand women with military experience from which to draw CEO’s, senators, professors, and possibly even a U.S. President.  The question is, how will this change things and will it be for the better?  Certainly women in power is not exactly a new concept, Egyptian queens were ruling as far back as 3000 B.C., and that we just narrowly missed out on a female president with Hilary Clinton shows that it isn’t exactly a foreign idea today.  But none of the current top women in politics, and few in corporate America, have combat experience.  Unquestionably combat experience changes a person, and occupying positions of leadership within the military influences future positions of civilian leadership, but can this have a positive effect for the female leaders of tomorrow?

If nothing else, combat experience should have a positive influence on eliciting respect.  The Old Boys Club will have a tough time sloughing off the directives of a woman who qualified for the M240B machine gun at expert level, much like Specialist Jennifer M. Hoeppner in the NYT article.  But of course it’s not just about the ability to wield heavy artillery.  What women in positions of leadership still occasionally struggle against is not the ability to lead but perception.  There is still a generation out there not fully committed to the idea of women being as qualified as men in any and all endeavors.  As much as I disliked Sarah Palin, I was wholly unimpressed by the argument that she couldn’t be an adequate leader because of her responsibilities as a mother.  She wouldn’t be an adequate leader for reasons of competence, in my humble opinion, none of which had to do with gender.  The perception still exists however, whether we want it to or not, of the overwhelming demands of matronly responsibility eclipsing all else.  

Ironically, numerous observers have remarked that, if indeed such biological programming exists, a woman’s knack for running a household closely resembles the demands on a CEO of a corporation.  Time management, multi-tasking, influencing reticent investors (kids doing chores), and long term planning, are all aspects of both occupations.  If anything, men should be handing over power to women with eager enthusiasm.  The idea of the emotional woman not being able to manage under stress should have been thrown out the window with corsets.  Believing the genetic disposition for running the household argument would put women at the forefront of leadership ability.  It should come as no surprise then when Sgt. Evette T. Lee-Stewart remarks in the NYT piece, “I’ve relieved males from command.  I’ve never relieved a female commander in two and a half years as a commander.”

What military service will do for women in the long run I think is break down that last perception barrier, that last shred of male arrogance that says men are somehow more qualified leaders.  It could also have the added benefit of not only giving us a generation of powerful women, but powerful women with military refined leadership skills, something that the veterans of WWII taught us is a highly prized commodity.  Of course Israel has had mandatory military service for women on the books for many years and that is a country just crawling with powerful women.  President of the Supreme Court Dorit Beinish, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni, and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik all seem to be holding up alright.  As a male who’s relatively unimpressed the leadership status quo in this country, I look forward to a generation of combat hardened women taking places of power traditionally held by men.  And yes Bono, I agree completely, women of the future will hold the big revelations.