The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

I saw this dynamic play out in powerful ways at the male-dominated United Nations. While men had held the majority of positions during my time working at the NSC, only when I got to the UN did I regularly find myself the only woman in the room. When Obama had nominated me for the job, I went to see Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s UN ambassador during his first term (before she became America’s first female Secretary of State in his second). Albright told me that in 1993 she had assembled the seven female ambassadors at the UN (out of 183 countries at the time) in what she called the G7—the “Girl Seven.” The way she described her gatherings with the women who represented Canada, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Lichtenstein reminded me of the Wednesday Group. Albright’s G7 developed into both an informal sisterhood and a cross-regional lobby that managed to secure the appointment of two female judges to the bench of the UN war crimes tribunal.