There's something disconcerting about listening to Dee Dee Myers discuss female empowerment in an entirely pink room.
The 46-year-old is no stranger to making her voice heard in unusual settings: She was press secretary in Bill Clinton's White House from 1993 to 1994.
But it's hard to imagine any man with her political connections, experience and smarts being offered up for interviews in the Pink Suite of Toronto's Park Hyatt.
And seeing as Ms. Myers was in Canada promoting her book, Why Women Should Rule the World, perhaps that is the point.
'I think asking women to act like men is exactly the wrong solution,' says author and political veteran Dee Dee Myers. (Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail)
"I think asking women to act like men is exactly the wrong solution," she said.
Ms. Myers first became a household name during another set of primaries, back in 1992 when she acted as press secretary for the first Clinton struggling to shore up the Democratic nomination.
Part of her book serves as a memoir of the years that followed, after she found herself - at age 31 - as the first female press secretary to a U.S. president.
In that role, Ms. Myers came up against obstacles she attributes to the insipid sexism of a male-dominated political culture. She was named press secretary as part of a campaign promise to fill the White House with women, but was not given the power usually associated with the role, seeing it handed instead to colleague George Stephanopoulos.
She also discovered she was earning less then a male West Wing employee with less responsibility, but was denied a pay bump on the rationale that he was raising a family at the time and she was not.
But while Ms. Myers is righteous in her indignation about these slights, she has a harder time pinpointing the solutions to such injustice.
For the most part, her book is filled with statistics about income disparity and studies showing that companies are more profitable when they have more women in senior management.
Beyond her regurgitation of Women's Studies 101, much of Ms. Myers' core argument (and the timing of its release) could be read as campaign material for another Clinton, one with her own experiences with gender bias.
"My book is not an argument for one woman - to elect Hillary Clinton - although I think the optics would be significant," Ms. Myers said. "When you empower women, things change in ways that benefit everybody."
Currently working as a Washington-based talking head and public lecturer, Ms. Myers says she has not officially endorsed Ms. Clinton because she does not want to be seen as working directly for the candidate. (And because she worries about embarrassing her sister, chief operating officer of the Barack Obama campaign.)
But if Ms. Clinton is not the message of Why Women Should Rule the World, she is definitely the medium through which its thesis can be read.
"Toughness is the ante for being president and I do think that's a higher bar for women," Ms. Myers said. "We have to call people out on this and say 'Barack Obama can say we can negotiate with the leaders of North Korea and Iran, and a woman ought to be able to say it, too.' "
The problem is, Ms. Clinton has said she would obliterate Iran rather than negotiate, a statement that Ms. Myers says came from the misguided idea that women must act like men in order to succeed.
Pressed on how else women can effectively infiltrate the corridors of power, Ms. Myers said she does not believe in a "one size fits all solution" or even hope for 50-50 representation in every endeavour.
She respects countries where governments have actively sought to install women in high-profile and highly powerful positions, such as Spain, which recently introduced a majority female cabinet.
But quota systems are violently unpopular in the United States, she said, even though they are used in most countries that have achieved gender parity in their legislatures.
"Different cultures and different countries are going to get there through different routes," she said. "But I think the power of examples [is] very important, and if Hillary Clinton were to be president ... that would send a very powerful signal to girls and women around the world."
Ms. Myers, who is married to Vanity Fair national editor Todd Purdum, is mother to a boy and a girl, and said that watching her children has made her confront the reality of biological differences between genders.
She does not believe men and women necessarily have the same skills, priorities or goals, and said she is advocating that women be given more respect.
"You have to acknowledge that there are differences, but what women bring to the table is every bit as legitimate as what men bring," she said. "It's that change in perspective that has to precede all the other changes."
And if that shift can occur by learning about the first female press secretary, or by electing the first female president of the United States, all the better.
"No one would ever argue that all the obstacles to her success were gender-based, but obviously some of them are," Ms. Myers said of her former boss's wife. "And I hope this leads to a vigorous conversation so maybe we can avoid them the next time."
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