Hadley Heath Manning joins the first She Thinks episode of the new year to discuss IWF’s policy priorities in 2023. We start with an overview of the current work at IWF, including its existing policy centers, as well as big victories in 2022, and then turn to the plans to develop new policy centers focused on energy and safety, the continued efforts to promote women’s rights in this country, and how you can be a part of Independent Women’s Network.
Hadley Heath Manning is vice president for policy at Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice and a Senior Blankley Fellow at the Steamboat Institute. Hadley has testified before Congress and state legislatures on various policy issues. She also appears frequently in radio and TV outlets across the country.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, the first of the New Year, Hadley Heath Manning joins us to discuss IWF’s policy priorities in 2023. We’re going to first start with an overview of the current work at IWF, including its existing policy centers, as well as some of the big victories in 2022, but then we’re going to turn to the plans to develop new policy centers on energy and safety, the continued efforts to promote women’s rights in this country, and this is an important one, how you can be part of the Independent Women’s Network. We’d love to have you part of that in 2023.
And before we bring her on to discuss all of this, let me give you a little bit more info on Hadley. Hadley Heath Manning is Vice President for Policy at Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice and a senior Blankley Fellow at the Steamboat Institute. Hadley has testified before Congress and state legislators on various policy issues, and she also appears frequently in radio and TV outlets across the country. And it’s always a pleasure to have her on She Thinks. Hadley, happy New Year to you.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Hi, happy New Year.
Beverly Hallberg:
I know a lot of times we’re only focused on what’s coming up, but I thought this would be a good time to focus on everything that IWF did in 2022. And I can say this just as being a fellow and being a part of it, I feel like every time I turn around, IWF has a new center, new programs. What are some of the big victories that you think of when you think back to 2022?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Well-
Beverly Hallberg:
I know, where does one start?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Where does one start? Well, we can start with the Women’s Bill of Rights maybe. That’s something we established in 2022, the Women’s Bill of Rights. I encourage people to check out on WomensBillOfRights.com, but this is model legislation that we’ve developed at IWF that would preserve biological sex as a distinct legal category. And we’ve felt that this was important to make sure that women and their rights to privacy and to equal opportunity and to safety are preserved. That’s a big project that we’ve taken on this year. We’ll continue to work on Women’s Bill of Rights in the coming years. Of course, our team on the policy team did a lot of congressional testimony this year, I think at least eight times we appeared to talk about childcare challenges and some other issues, you might call women’s issues. Of course, we say all issues are women’s issues.
We talked about the epidemic of missing BIPOC girls. We talked about extremism, we talked about education. We did congressional testimony on a wide swath of policy issues that run the full spectrum. In June of this year on the 50th anniversary of Title IX, we hosted the Our Bodies, Our Sports rally, which was huge, a big win for our organization, an opportunity to really celebrate women’s sports and stand up for women’s sports. That was a big highlight, I would say from 2022. And of course, we celebrated 30 years in 2022. That was a big anniversary for IWF. We recognized Tulsi Gabbard, Kim Strassel, Vivek Ramaswamy at our Annual Awards Gala, and we gave a lifetime achievement award to Diana Davis Spencer. That was a big event.
And in terms of other highlights, I would just say if you haven’t seen our Identity Crisis documentary series, be sure and check that out. That was something that we launched this fall, and we’re going to keep doing those Identity Crisis documentary videos in 2023, but that’s a great series that’s been produced by our Kelsey Bolar. We’ve been busy, we’ve been doing a lot of work in 2022, lots of victories, lots of highlights, and I’m really proud of our team.
Beverly Hallberg:
I think I’ve been familiar with IWF for probably about 18 years now. You said that IWF has been around for 30 years. Can you give us a little bit of background on the history, how it started and how many people are part of it today? I feel like every time I turn around, there are new fellows being part of it, new people are joining the team full-time. All of us telework, which is great. Everybody works from their homes, which is really beneficial to women. But can you give us a little insight into the origins of IWF?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Right. And I joined the staff 12 years ago.
Beverly Hallberg:
Is it 12? Wow.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Almost 13. I think I started my unpaid internship 13 years ago, but then I officially joined the staff about 12 years ago. It’s been a fun ride. And that’s not even half the life of the organization. As far as I know, and I’ll do my best to honor IWF history here, it started as an ad hoc group called Women for Clarence Thomas. And this was during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. And really the women who came together around that looked at each other and said, “We really need a women’s organization that can stand up for all women.” They felt that the women’s movement in our country, and this was in the early ’90s, had kind of veered left and was now working more or less as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, working to advocate for progressive policy goals and not really standing up and championing all women.
The founders of IWF came together and said, “We’re going to create an alternative vision, an alternative organization,” and Independent Women’s Forum was born. And along the way, we’ve added some affiliated sister organizations. Independent Women’s Voice started around 2010, and that is our sister organization that’s a 501(c)(4) and does some more political, politically active activities. Then Independent Women’s Law Center was just established a few years ago, but that’s our legal arm. And we now weigh in a lot of federal court cases with amicus briefs and participate in some of the debates around our judiciary branch. It’s a really big organization. And of course, I can’t fail to mention Independent Women’s Network, which is our membership arm. If you’re out there hearing this podcast and you’re interested in our organization, a great first step to get involved be to become a member at Independent Women’s Network. I even have my membership card here with me, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
There you go. Pull it out. Let’s see it.
Hadley Heath Manning:
You’ll get a membership card. But more importantly, you’ll find, I hope, a community of women who can support and encourage you to make a difference in your community.
Beverly Hallberg:
As you approach the new year and you are directing so many of the different policy initiatives at IWF, and as you mentioned, you have for a very long time, over a decade, when you look at the upcoming year, how much of it are you able to figure out exactly what you want to do versus we just have to play off what happens? Obviously a lot of the stuff that you have done to promote women in sports has been based on the attacks against that. How do you figure out what to focus on and how flexible do you have to be?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah, I think we do some of both. And we hear a lot from IWN members, “These are the issues that I’m seeing in my community. This is where I feel I need more support. This is where I feel I need more resources to talk about these issues or to effect change or to respond to something that’s happening in my community.” Some of it is bottom-up, and some of it is us looking at what’s going on in Congress and more of the top-down kind of responsiveness that we need to have. For example, we know in 2023, there’s going to be some change in Washington. There’s going to be a Republican-controlled House. That’ll change how we approach some of our work just in terms of how many opportunities we might have to testify in different hearings, what the topics of those hearings might be, how we need to prepare for that, how we need to plan to respond, what we think the topics in major media conversations will be, and how we can participate in that and get IWF’s message out there.
To answer your question, it’s both/and. We are always responding to things that happen. Certainly many things happen that no one knows how to prepare for. The COVID pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine are a couple of examples of things that in recent years we’ve had to respond to, obviously big sea changes in the way our world works. But IWF being there with a message immediately and responding rapidly is one of our priorities. And in terms of advancing our own agenda, we have launched in the past few years, a handful of policy centers, and we are planning to launch a couple more policy centers. These are really just ways that we can shore up and organize some of the work that we’ve been doing for a long time on a wide variety of issues. But we know as we look forward in 2023, one of the points of pain for many Americans has been the cost of energy.
And we want to have a strong energy policy that allows our country to prosper. We know that energy is an input on many things, everything that is made in our economy and in our world. Making sure that we have safe, reliable, affordable energy is going to be a big focus in 2023 and making sure that Americans can afford to keep their homes warm this winter. And another big issue area where we’re going to be, I think really advancing our thought leadership is in the foreign policy, national security space, and really highlighting and elevating some of the work that IWF scholars have long been doing on these issues in a center that I think will be high impact and will get a lot of opportunities to weigh in on the conversation.
Beverly Hallberg:
And as you said, these are issues that IWF has already talked about, has developed policies for. What is the big change when a center is developed? Is it more staff? Is it more funds going to it? What changes when the center is started?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. We try to treat our policy centers almost as if they are small 501(c)(3) organizations unto themselves. It’s a hallmark of IWF that our staff, particularly on the policy side, our policy experts have a lot of autonomy, a lot of flexibility, a lot of freedom. We don’t do a lot of policing of what people say because we know that when people align themselves with IWF, they’re already sharing our vision and our mission. We elevate people to these positions of directing a center and we say, “The world is your oyster. What can you do in terms of making a difference in your issue area?”
And we do try to prioritize giving them the staff resources they need, whether it’s full-time staff people joining that center or adding more fellows. Then of course, we encourage those center directors to think big picture about growth and about impact. We just try to be strategic in terms of how we market those centers to our friends and allies on Capitol Hill and to the public so that we can really make the most of the policy work that we’re doing and be sure that it gets the big audience it deserves.
Beverly Hallberg:
And one of the things I’ve noticed that IWF has really honed in on, and I would say has really developed a very good way of this craft is the craft of storytelling. You mentioned the Identity Crisis video series that’s been done by Kelsey Bolar who just does a tremendous job on this. When you get into the meetings with IWF leadership, is there a lot of discussion about not just here’s the policy, here’s what we think works, but how do we share that story? How do we share that message?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Right. Well, we want to be sure that we’re connecting the dots between the conversations that are had and state legislatures and on Capitol Hill with what’s happening in the real lives of real people. Part of the byproduct or the beauty or one of the great results of our storytelling campaigns is that they help us become connected to many real people who have a story to tell about the way that different policies or cultural changes are affecting their lives, their homes, their loved ones. That informs our work in many ways and helps us to understand the gravity of the issues that we’re working on, the impact that our work can have, and that I hope that it does have, but it also gives us somebody to fight for when we’re having conversations with lawmakers or in the public sphere in the media.
We know people personally who are being affected by the different laws, different policies that we’re attempting to advocate to change. I really enjoy this storytelling aspect of our work. It exposes me to … I get to see a little bit more of the real-world impact of what we’re doing and why it’s so important. And of course, it gives us the ammunition that we need to be able to say, “This is why this is important.” It’s not just important to us because we work in public policy. It’s important to us because ultimately we want to improve the lives of our fellow Americans.
Beverly Hallberg:
The Identity Crisis series I think has just been so important because one of the things that we talk a lot about as IWF Fellows or those who work there is this feeling that there is this erasing of women out there in society. Getting rid of women’s rights instead of actually promoting them. Is that going to be a huge focus in 2023 as well, supporting women’s rights, especially in areas like you focused on in 2022, which is women in sports?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yes. And I kind of think that people talk a lot about women’s sports, and that’s one piece of it, but it’s actually much bigger than that. We’re interested in the safety and privacy of women in a variety of situations, whether they’re seeking shelter at a battered women’s shelter or if they’re in the prison system, or if they’re a college student who shares a dorm room. We want to be sure that women have the safety, privacy, and equal opportunities that they deserve. We’re working on that issue very broadly. But as we like to say, you can’t defend women’s rights if you can’t define woman. We’ve been working to change the culture around this topic as well. Of course, in my lifetime, I’ve seen a lot of changes to the way that people approach conversations about feminism and traditional gender roles.
I think I’ve witnessed a lot of progress, and I’ve enjoyed the fruits of the progress that previous generations of women who were fighting for the basic rights to education and entry into different professional fields have fought for and have won. And now I think it’s our task to be sure that those equal opportunities are still available for our daughters and for the next generation. And I don’t think this is a fight that IWF really went looking for, but when your name is Independent Women’s Forum, you have to define what that means. And you have to stand up for the women in this country and around the world. And I hope that we’re doing that justice.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I want to take a brief me moment to talk to you, our listeners. You may know that IWF is the leading national women’s organization dedicated to enhancing people’s freedom, opportunities and wellbeing. But did you know that we are also here to bring you women and yes, men, on the go, the news? You can listen to our High Noon Podcast, an intellectual download featuring conversations that make a free society possible. Hear guests like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin discuss the most controversial subjects of the day, or join us for happy hour with At The Bar, where hosts Inez Stepman and Jennifer Braceras chat on the latest issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture. You can listen to past episodes at IWF.org or search for High Noon or At The Bar in your favorite podcast app. And I do want to talk about that, more podcasts continue to be developed. I think this has been great. Obviously I host She Thinks, so obviously I would think it would be great that we have this podcast.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Our podcast is so great, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
Our podcast is so great. We’ve developed so many more though. And what has been really the reason behind that? I mean, so many people are listening to podcasts these days. I personally just love the conversation, the long form conversation that’s interesting. I find that podcasts take us away from soundbite culture and actually get to nuance. Just interested in your thoughts on that.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah, I mean, people are very busy in the world that we live in. Moms especially are often on the go. You can listen to a podcast in the car, or I like to listen when I fold laundry just because that gives you a chance to think about things while you’re doing something else. It can be more difficult to sit down and read a longer paper or even to watch a show when you have to pay attention to the visuals. Podcasts are nice because you can just do the audio only, and if you are audio only, you don’t see how the sun has really, really come in the window. I look like I’ve been touched by an angel like on [inaudible 00:16:43]-
Beverly Hallberg:
Or your lovely Christmas tree in the background.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah, yeah. I’m glowing, my neck is glowing right now because the sun has come in my window during this conversation. But I do think that the longer form conversations are good too, particularly when you can listen to a podcast with people who share enough in common that they can have a good conversation without becoming too antagonistic, but then also have different enough views that there’s some discussion and debate. And that’s what I enjoy about many of IWF’s podcasts. I personally, I’m a big fan of High Noon. That’s a longer form podcast that we feature at IWF and many of the guests there might share a lot in common with Inez and how she sees the world, but they might also have some areas where they’re not 100% on the same page. And that makes for a good conversation.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. Well, I’ll round out the conversation delving a little bit more into the Independent Women’s Network because that is how people, how women across this country can get involved. I am a member. You are a member. Tell us a little bit about all the different ways the Independent Women’s Network is there to help women and a way from women to get involved.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. Independent Women Women’s Network is really our COVID baby, I would say, at IWF. Because we found that during the pandemic, which was unfortunately an accelerant to many of the worst trends in our society in terms of just the atomization of our culture, people were feeling very lonely, people were staying home often alone. People were very plugged into their computers, but finding it hard to connect with other people in their communities during a time when they felt it was more important than ever to get the right information that they needed and to advocate for the best policies in their local communities. We saw this as an opportunity. Here’s the great policy work that we’re doing at IWF. We have all these resources. We’re often trying to make a difference in the way things are legislated, but there are many people who want to get involved with us.
Over the years, I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people who say, “I want to get involved with the organization, I want to become a member. How do I become a member?” Really there was just a lot of demand for this and an opportunity with the COVID pandemic. We have over 17 chapters now, I’m a member of our Denver, Colorado chapter, which just launched later in the year in 2022. And it’s been really wonderful to connect with women in my local community. And ironically, the way that I connected initially with our Denver chapter leader, she’s a mom who lives in Denver, a former Division One track athlete, and I think you’ve interviewed her, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
I have.
Hadley Heath Manning:
And she connected with me on Twitter first because she saw that I was sharing about my experience with my son’s preschool where masks were required and masks were required at his preschool for long after they were required in most places. And I was really not happy with this policy and doing all that I could to change it, of course, in a polite and continual way. But she found me on Twitter and she said, “I’m a like-minded mom in Denver. I’ve got the same situation going on with my kids. Let’s join forces.” And that’s really what’s so wonderful about IWN, is that women can connect and say, “Here’s this issue. Here’s our community. How can we make a difference? And let’s do it together.”
Beverly Hallberg:
And people can just go to the IWF website to sign up for Independent Women’s Network. We encourage you to go there and take a look at it. But Hadley, I just want to thank you for all the work that you’ve done, not just for IWF, but for women across the country. You said you have been at IWF for over a decade and do amazing policy work. We appreciate what you do and also for joining us on this She Thinks, and a very happy New Year to you.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Thank you. Well, it’s been a privilege to work at IWF and to watch the organization really grow like gangbusters in the last several years especially. I am nothing without the team of women that I get to work with every day. I really want to give credit to all the women who work in all of our departments at IWF. It’s a wonderful team, a growing team. We’ve got something like 40 fellows, I’d have to do an official count, but we’ve got just an enormous number of really wonderful senior and visiting fellows, even junior fellows now, who help us to get our message out in a variety of different audiences, locations, formats, media. I appreciate you, Beverly. You’re one of our fellows, but I am just so thrilled to get to work with this team, and that’s what makes it not just high impact, but also really fun.
Beverly Hallberg:
A lot of fun and a lot to look forward to in 2023. Thank you so much, Hadley.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Thank you.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us today. Before you go, IWF does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. And investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and well-being for all Americans. Please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review. It does help. And we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends can know or they can find more She Thinks? From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.
