We are doing it! (Page 4 of 1)

“We’ve donated to each other’s campaigns,” says Kuhlman. “I think if anyone from this group gets elected to public office, it is icing on the cake but not the focus.”

Kuhlman, Bryant and Broyles want to change the gender balance on the county commission, which currently only has two female commissioners, Elaine Davis and Victoria DeFreese, serving in the body of 19 representatives. The PWC members share support in each other’s campaign struggles as well.

“They wanted to fight me once on including childcare as a campaign expense,” Broyles told her fellow commission candidates at one point during the meeting. “It’s a very legitimate campaign expense. When you figure $870 of childcare, that’s 87 hours of knocking on doors.”

Though Broyles says PWC was not created to be an endorsement organization, she felt it was necessary to form a group that would respond to the lack of resources and camaraderie for women seeking leadership roles in a world where “the ole’ boys’ club” still exists.

“They’re groomed for it from the get-go,” says Broyles. “We’re saying we want to open up potential and possibilities for women. We want to plant that seed.”

The PWC members hope to interface with existing women’s organizations like the League of Women Voters but differentiate their focus with a mission strictly to promote female representation, whereas LWV champions issues like land use, the environment and other broader issues.

The organization’s first anniversary is this June, and almost one year into its work, its Web site, www.pwcoalition.com, provides a current tab of how women are counted among current elected positions: two of 19 county commissioners, two of nine city council members, three of nine school board members, one of 16 judges, zero of seven area state representatives, one of three state senators, one of four fee officers, one of three Farragut aldermen.

In an impassioned moment of the retreat, UT sociology and women’s studies professor Suzanne Kurth said: “It’s not about female domination. No, I want my piece of the pie. And now women have some of that, and it’s because someone older paved that path for that — now do something with it.”

A ‘first’ at UT Medical Center

For the first time in UT Medical Center’s history, women head up all six of the hospital’s strategic initiatives.
In 2005, the medical center filled two of the six service lines’ vacancies, completing the coincidentally all-female executive positions.

Ann Giffin, Renee Hawk, Peggy Hotz, Teresa Levey, Sandi Madden and Cynthia Marquart are the acting vice presidents of the Brain and Spine Institute, Cancer Institute, Center for Women and Children’s Health, Heart Lung Vascular Institute, Emergency and Trauma Services and Physician Practice Development initiatives, respectively.

Levey, who began her career as a registered nurse, worked her way through administrator positions until reaching her current position as vice president of the Heart Lung Vascular Institute.

As a young girl, Levey says she had her mother and grandmother as role models to show that women could do anything they wanted in life, including have careers. Her grandmother was an assistant postmaster in an East Tennessee community, and her mother was a schoolteacher.

In her career in health care, she’s seen gender roles change throughout the years.

“I am a nurse by training, and that has been a predominantly female profession,” she says, “and medicine was predominantly male, and you did see those divisions. But today, that has radically changed. Medicine is almost equal male-female, and even nursing is seeing more men.”

Peggy Hotz, vice president of the Center for Women and Children’s Health, agrees with that observation. “When you speak of health care as being male-dominated for many years in those administrative roles, I see things as very different today,” she says. “Women are becoming much more prevalent in those roles, and there are broader choices as they continue to prove they’re competent and capable.”