Add women, change Lansing

When the going gets tough, the tough go hunting.

That's where our lawmakers are this week, on a two-week hunting vacation while the people who pay them -- the rest of us -- crank through another short-staffed work week or, for the unluckiest, face layoffs and home foreclosures.

You read that right. While the United Way and other local humanitarian organizations are begging people to give more this year as they face a tsunami of demand from struggling Metro Detroiters, our lawmakers are out hunting. Then they are back for two weeks, before taking another two week break for the holidays.

The state budget is a mess. Schools are facing deficits and even bankruptcies. And the Legislature still hasn't passed legislation that would position Michigan to win an extraordinary half a billion dollars in competitive federal grants for education and Michigan kids -- free money waiting to be taken.

Nope. Too busy for that. Gotta to go drink beer in the woods, "hunting."

To my gentlemen readers, forgive me, but what are these men doing?

You can bet if women were the majority of Lansing lawmakers, our Legislature wouldn't be on "hunting" vacation.

Spa vacations?

That's just one thing that would be dramatically different about our state if women were running it, I came away thinking after an event sponsored last week by the White House Project in Detroit to raise money for its Michigan work.

The White House Project is a national organization committed to advancing a diverse and critical mass of women into public leadership positions.

If women made up the Michigan legislature's majority, they wouldn't be on a shopping or pedicure vacation, either. That's because generally women make fundamentally different decisions than men.

Don't believe it? Consider: When women are making key budget decisions in a household, cross-country research shows, they make radically different decisions on how to spend money. Overwhelming they invest it in enhancing their children's well-being and human capital -- their skills and abilities -- such as in schooling, extra tutoring and nutritious food.

It's a big reason why countries that empower women to earn their own money see long-run economic gains; women's investment pays off by producing adults who are higher skilled, more productive workers later in life -- bolstering a country's economy and society.

Men, on the other hand, are much more likely to spend on things such as a wide screen television or (ah-um) hunting -- things that are fun, but don't add up to long-run socioeconomic benefits.

That difference applies to public policy decisions, too. Women leaders would make more family-centric budget decisions, I suspect.

Imagine: Michigan legislators who put their state's children first, getting their work done instead of going to fool around in the woods with their guy friends.

Please, change Lansing

Americans seem to intuitively know this. Eighty-nine percent of Americans say they are comfortable with women as leaders, according to a recent GfJ Roper poll commissioned by The White House Project and released last week.

Yet today women account for only 18 percent of our country's top leaders, across a wide variety of fields, from academia to law, film and politics. (To read the report, go to: http://www.thewhitehouseproject.org/">http://www.thewhitehouseproject.org/)

To produce a true transformation in decision-making, women need to make up a critical mass -- defined as one-third of leaders, research shows.

There are huge benefits to reaching such critical mass, whether the sector if state politics or business or journalism, says Miriam Muley, author of "The 85& Niche" and CEO of a Michigan-based company by the same name.

"Companies who have women in key leadership roles have a 35 percent higher return on equity for shareholders," says Muley, partly because such companies understand women's needs, how to market to them and how to support their sales forces geared toward serving women.

The White House Project's motto is: "Add Women, Change Everything."

I would settle for: Add Women, Change Lansing.

Amber Arellano is a Detroit News editorial writer who writes a weekly Monday online column about cultural and political change. Reach her at aarellano@detnews.com">aarellano@detnews.com.