President Obama is the first president to call himself a feminist, (he wrote a bomb essay about it!), but that doesn’t mean women on his staff don’t face gender discrimination. Women are constantly being interrupted at work, and that applies even if your office is, well, the White House. When Obama took office, two-thirds of his top aides were men, so his female staffers came up with a genius strategy called “amplification” to make sure their voices were heard.
When a woman made a great point in a meeting, other women in the room repeated the point and gave props to the woman who said it, so that men couldn’t take the idea as their own. Obama’s former aide told The Washington Post that this strategy worked, and everyone in the room noticed. Hopefully there will be a day when women don’t have to use special strategies like this, but for now, amplification is a totally doable way to make sure no (good) opinion is left behind.
