The materials below provided by the Independent Women's Forum reflect the conservative voice among women, and examine areas of disagreement between liberal and conservative positions. This section concludes with a May 23, 1997 interview by John A. Quintus with Anita Blair, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the Independent Women's Forum.

The Independent Women's Forum (IWF) is a non-profit, non-partisan, Washington-based group which seeks "to raise a voice of common sense and reason" on issues of concern to women. Begun in 1992 by a group of women in Washington, D.C., the IWF founders said they were disappointed with the portrayal of women as one large monolithic "liberal" interest group. Rather, they wanted to provide another voice of women to show that not all women think alike, and that women are concerned about more than so-called "women's issues.

The IWF does not take a position for or against abortion, but rather focuses on other topics that interest women. The organization publishes a journal entitled The Women's Quarterly and a newsletter called Ex Femina. IWF also becomes engaged in landmark court cases, filing briefs for example in the Virginia Military Institute case (the Supreme Court ordered VMI, formerly a men's military academy, to enroll women) and a Brown University case involving the allocation of financial resources between men's and women's college sports programs under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. IWF argued that single-sex colleges, such as VMI, should be permitted to exist, and that it is counterproductive to require proportional representation on college athletic teams without considering interest and demand. In all its legal appearances, IWF tries to define a position it considers "best for society as a whole, not only `women.'"

Two examples from the December, 1996 issue of Ex Femina give evidence of the IWF's position on subjects of concern to a wide variety of organizations devoted to women's issues.

The Independent Women's Forum asked Diana Furchgott-Roth, economist at the American Enterprise Institute, and Christine Stolba, a women's history specialist at Emory University, to produce a handy, readable, reliable source of facts about the economic status of women (in the United States). The result was Women's Figures: The Economic Progress of Women in America.

The authors brought together voluminous data from authoritative sources, such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Labor. Evaluating popular claims of systematic discrimination against women in the workplace, they uncovered some surprising information. Many well-known "facts" about women in the American economy turn out not to be true at all.

Take the "Wage Gap," for example. For years we have heard that women are only paid 59 cents, or 72 cents, on the dollar compared to men. In fact, the so-called Wage Gap all but disappears if you compare "apples and apples." Among women and men, aged 27 to 33, who do not have children, the ratio of women's-to-men's earnings is actually 98 cents on the dollar.

Our authors also examined the ubiquitous "Glass Ceiling," that invisible barrier to women's advancement in corporate America, and discovered that it has equally invisible factual support. Women's Figures shows that the sources of this myth, the federal Glass Ceiling Commission, and similar studies, have ignored the reality that not all women are qualified to be senior managers.

Typically, a man competing for a senior management slot needs to have a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree and about 20-25 years of business experience. Yet previous Glass Ceiling studies do not take qualification into account and treat business advancement as a matter of pure luck.

The truth is that during the past decade, the number of female executive vice-presidents more than doubled, and the number of female senior vice-presidents increased by a staggering 75 percent. These trends indicate that women will take their places in executive suites and boardrooms as their experience in the workplace qualifies them.

Besides puncturing these unsupported myths, Women's Figures provides encouraging facts about women's progress that we seldom hear. For example, did you know that 8 million American women are already CEOs--of their own companies? Women-owned businesses employ one of every four American workers, and account for $1.4 trillion in annual sales. And did you know that women today earn 55 percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and 40 percent of all first professional degrees?

Women's Figures has certainly attracted welcome attention. We think it is high time to engage in a new national conversation about how women can help America prosper, while America encourages women and families to pursue their dreams.

Still another piece from the 1996 December issue of Ex Femina deals with a poll of 1,200 adults in America. Its findings are summarized in the following:

What explains the differences between women's and men's status in the economy and in the workplace? Women earn more college and graduate degrees than men, and have proven themselves capable of performing the same work. It turns out the factor reducing women's pay and advancement seems not to be the patriarchy but the "pediarchy"--in other words, children rule!

We at the Independent Women's Forum wanted to learn more about what men and women prefer, if given the opportunity to work or raise a family or both. We found first of all that most people believe educational opportunities are equal for men and women in America (62 percent felt this way, while only 26 percent thought there was an educational bias against women). Further, we learned that most people would rather start their own business than work for a company (64 percent favoring personal ownership while 30 percent favored working for a company), and that the polled population overwhelmingly favored a hiring policy which would neither discriminate against nor grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.

American women and men favor flexibility and independence. Many would like to own their own business, even if it means additional risk. Many want the option of part or full-time work, from home or office, as a way to balance the demands of work and family. A majority of people, especially younger people, and most especially younger women (81 percent), are willing to trade seniority or pay at work in exchange for more personal time.

Americans also regard themselves as individuals, not tied to group interests. And a large majority, given the facts about women's educational progress, do not believe that girls are "short- changed" in school... Americans have a strong sense of what is fair: They insist that opportunities should be available to all, but think quotas and preferences for some are discriminatory to others.

The Independent Women's Forum, like the President's Interagency Council on Women, also has a website and welcomes opinions and queries. The following addresses are offered for the reader's use:

Q: Tell me something about the Forum's constituency -- what kind of people are members and active in your organization?

A: Our members and subscribers include men and women of all ages; all situations in life; professional, mom-at-home, businesswomen, lady truck drivers. We have one deputy sheriff that I know of. They are bound by a devotion to common sense. The people who are interested in what the IWF has to say have an interest in seeing that our public policies reflect intelligent positions based on facts and common sense. One thing that we are very interested in is eliminating the notion that women, as such, are an interest group in favor of women. We think that the proper role of women in society is to improve society, which includes men and children.

Q: What current issues is IWF focusing on?

A: We have a continuing interest in the status and progress of women in the economy. And associated with that is an interest in making sure that women have choices in the way they will spend their lives -- that they have access to education, but that a woman who wishes to be home with her children has an effective choice to be able to do that; that she is not forced into the workforce by reason of high taxes or the high cost of living.

And likewise, that women who wish to enter business or have a career have that opportunity, but it is not a necessity for them.

Another issue we've been very active in is the issue that started in California as the California Civil Rights Initiative. We're interested in the issue of civil rights generally; we believe that people should be judged on merit and character, not on skin color and, in our case particularly, gender. And we have been active in promoting the idea that preferences and goals and quotas are a perversion of the original goals of Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action ought to be understood as increasing opportunities and as giving people access to the tools they need to succeed.

Q: How do you feel, then, about President Clinton's remarks when he says affirmative action needs to be fixed but not eliminated?

A: "Now mend it, don't end it." Well, unfortunately, the world has become so politicized that a slogan like that simply says to me that he wants to continue to engage in group-identity politics. And we believe very strongly that we need to get away from group-identity politics and into politics based on ideas instead. And we need to have our economy and our country based on principles of merit, hard work. We need to bring back a sense of morality into the country. And when you identify people purely by extraneous characteristics or purely by skin color, purely by sex, then you are not looking at the importance of ideas and the importance of thinking good, better, best -- as opposed to pretending that everything is morally neutral. He simply doesn't have a lot of credibility to me when he says "mend it, don't end it." I still hear that group-identity politics is going to be the basis of whatever kind of mending he has in mind. What I have in mind for affirmative action is to go back to the original aims of Dr. Martin Luther King and the people who were involved in the Civil Rights Act of 1964: to permit individuals to thrive and succeed based on hard work, merit, good character.

Q: Does the Forum have a special relationship with the Women's Caucus on the Hill [Congressional Women's Caucus], and, what role do you play in terms of legislation, in terms of influencing legislation?

A: We don't have any particular, special relationships with anybody on the Hill. There are a few Members whom we happen to know, mainly because they've contacted us and said they're interested in the work that we do. We're a nonpartisan organization. We direct our efforts at educating the public about policies that should be of interest to them. Our jurisdiction is anything that concerns women which, generally speaking, means anything. We don't limit ourselves to so-called women's issues and we do try to provide a voice to be heard in the general media of intelligent women saying sensible things. We're not lobbyists but we try to get the facts out so that people who are making decisions, whether they be voters, or legislators, or anybody else can make good decisions.

Q: Could you tell me what you think will be the dominant issues concerning women a few years from now?

A: I think that the notion of choices in life for women is going to become increasingly important. I think that we will see substantial changes in our tax and labor laws to enable people -- we are not limited to women -- to live and work in ways that are more satisfactory to them individually. I think that Bill Gates, with the personal computer, has made an incredible contribution to civilization. The PC enables us to have our own businesses, work from home, if that's the choice, say, of a mother with small children, couples who want to have a small business. Computers are important because they free people to live the kind of life that they want, to make that kind of choice whether they want to be part of a large corporation or work on their own.

We find that women like to be able to move in and out of the workforce, depending on what the needs of their children are. I think that the desire to be with one's children is kind of hard- wired into women's brains and I don't think that we're ever going to reach a society in which women just routinely drop the kid; place them in daycare and send them off to school for 18 years, and then marvel at what a great adult it became. I think that basic desire of women and families to be together with one another is going to overcome the type of the philosophy in which there seems to be a big push among the people that favor big government and lots of publicly-financed programs to simply eliminate the need for child care by mothers.

We think that all of the economic pushes -- the economy which reflects the desires of the people in the marketplace -- are moving in the opposite direction. That instead, people just want to have flexibility. They want to be able to be with little children. They want to have flexibility to run their own business, not be at the mercy of restructurings and downsizings and big corporations. And that will be the wave of the future, in our view.

Q: Will it become increasingly easy, with the personal computer and other inventions, for women to balance agendas between work and family? And given new company or corporate policies that allow flextime and that sort of thing?

A: Most of the inhibitions on companies from giving their employees flextime derive from our tax and labor laws. Most of what prevents people from doing the things that they say they want to do are laws, not ugly, overbearing employers. It's very disingenuous of the big-government crowd to say that we need more government. What we really need is less government to permit people to make the choices that they want to be able to make.

I don't think there's a single employer who is eager to have unhappy employees. But they are forced into it by virtue of antiquated labor laws and a tax system that is so immensely complicated, that tries to push people into large corporations where the I.R.S. [Internal Revenue Service] can keep better tabs on them. The I.R.S. doesn't want us to work at home because it's more difficult for them to get their piece of our income. When they have to track down a whole lot of little people, they'd rather track down a few big people. I think people will wake up to the fact that government is the thing that's tripping us up. It is not going to be a solution, but it's really part of the problem.

Q: Do you think that issues like Wage Gap and Glass Ceiling are fading?

A: I do, because I believe that with experience we are learning that it really is not possible to have it all at one time. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, the rallying cry of feminists was "You can have it all; you can be a superwoman." We have a generation of young women coming up now whose mothers tried that. And it's really remarkable, if you go into a high school or a college setting you will see that the girls have a very clear-eyed idea of what is possible to accomplish. And they understand that if they want to be a captain of industry, that takes a certain set of choices. To be a mom at home, that's another set of choices. And if they want to combine the two, that's still a third. And they want to have those choices, but they are very realistic about what's involved in each of them, because they watched their mothers struggle with trying to be all things to all people.

Q: The high cost of education, when middle class families are sending kids to school and facing costs of $25,000 a year....

A: Education to me is like the tulip bubble; it's got to burst because you just don't get that kind of value out of an education. That's another area in which the "information society" is obviating the need to go to college. And indeed we have a lot of virtual classrooms; out, for example, in the West, in places like Montana, you can sit in your classroom at home and take college courses for credit.

Q: Distance learning?

A: Yes, all that kind of stuff is going to push out the notion of the extremely expensive college education. And there are a lot of women who are forced into the workplace in part because that's the only way the family is ever going to be able to get the kids in college. That extra income. And those women resent that. They resent the fact that college is so expensive. And that when you get out, all you can get is a burger-flipping job anyway. It's one of the little-noticed undercurrents of society that's driving a lot of people and creating a lot of resentment.

I'm on the board of the Virginia Military Institute [VMI], so I know not only about bringing women into a military setting but also about the financial constraints on colleges. And a lot of that, too, is due to just excessive regulation. A large percentage of our employees at VMI spend just their whole day filling out forms, various government-mandated information requirements. If the government would just step back from that, I think we could be more efficient in delivering education.

Q: Is there anything more you would like to say about the Forum?

A: We've also been quite active in the issue of women in the military. And that issue to us is a great example of the disconnect between elite women and "normal" women. You've got a lot of elite careerist women in the officer corps who have a certain set of desires usually related to their career. Then you've got enlisted women, who are far more numerous. They're looking to get a different thing out of their military service and unfortunately, the whole thing is driven by the needs of the career officer women. And we're overlooking the enlisted women who are not able to speak out. So the Forum has tried to be a voice for the other women. Just as in many cases we try to be a voice for the ordinary working woman, not so much the professional with the nanny and everything, but other people who just want to have a normal life.

Q: Do you feel there's still a place for single-sex education, such as at VMI?

A: Yes, absolutely. What most people don't realize about the VMI case that went to the Supreme Court is that there was abundant testimony from educational experts about the value of single-sex education. But the Court did not consider that testimony. Single-sex education isn't for everybody, but for a significant number of both boys and girls, it's the best way for them to be able to concentrate on their education, by having the absence of the opposite sex that enables them to focus on what they're supposed to be doing. It also allows the educators to work on what one sex or the other might be a little more deficient in. So for example, at VMI, you can walk into an English class and hear boys talking in a very heartfelt way about poetry. Which they would probably be reluctant to do if the class were half women.

Likewise, I went to an all-girls high school and we did everything for ourselves. When we put on a play we did the scenery as well as the makeup. So we learned a lot more self- reliance. And so I'm a very strong proponent of keeping the option for single-sex education.

(The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.)