Oh, Madeleine, don't be so emotional

From Colin Powell to Madelaine Albright when she was secretary of state. The whole quote:

"He said, 'Oh, Madeleine, don't be so emotional, you don't know anything about the military,'" Albright said, joking that Powell would show up in full military garb with medals dangling from his chest. "I just had a little pin on. ... I was just a mere mortal woman."

Madelaine Albright repeated this at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week during a panel discussion called "Women and American Politics".Carolyn Sackariason had an interesting article in the Aspen Times on this discussion, and it got me thinking ... as the Aspen Ideas Festival is intended to do.
Here are three facts:

16% of the House of representative are women.
17% of the Senate are women.
50.9% of the US is a woman.What if these two bodies, the House and the Senate, were 50.9% women?

What would our schools look like? What would our military look like? What would our jails look like?

I was reading the article, itching for a full transcript of the discussion, when I came across a name that I had done a blog about, Margaret Spelling. Here's what she said at this year's Aspen Ideas Festival:

"U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said it's true that women face double standards in politics, but she said it's not all gloom and doom.
"I can silence a group of male hard-liners if I'm prepared," she said."

That sounds pretty gloomy to me. That she needs to silence them. What are male "hard-liners"? Are there women who are "male hard-liners"? Was there a bit of equivocation when she just didn't come out and say "males"? Does she need to silence groups? What is her intra personal relationship with individual men like?
My thoughts were running wild. This crazy Aspen Ideas Festival.

As a weird aside ... there is a blog on the Atlantic on the Aspen Ideas Festival. All of the blog writers are all white males (Ross, Cory, James, Clive). The Atlantic is a "partner" with the Aspen Institute for the Aspen Ideas Festival.