I used to believe this. Then we started @lawfareblog. With respect, let me tell you a little bit about why my experience with @lawfareblog convinces me that what @Susan_Hennessey is doing with #SourceList is really important.
When we started Lawfare, we were three guys (me, @jacklgoldsmith and @BobbyChesney). I make no apologies for starting a site with two close friends/colleagues with whom I had written a lot and had common thought—both of whom were male. There were no similarly situated women.
Early in the site’s life, we were accused of being a “boy’s club”—an accusation I thought (and think) was really unfair. That said, as we started to grow, I was acutely conscious of not being a site in which talented guys replicated ourselves.
The field of national security law was a weirdly bifurcated one: *So* many of the great practioners, in and out of government, were female. Outside of the human rights arena, however, very few of the important public voices were female.
So as we grew, we made a point of not leaving female talent on the table. We were active about it. The explosion of female voices in the public aspects of the national security law and policy conversation that followed has been one of the features of the site I’m most proud of.
This has happened at the senior levels—with practitioners and scholars like Ashley Deeks and @carriecordero and Ingrid Wuerth and @MiekeEoyang and many others doing major work on the platform.
It has also happened at the more junior levels. Lawfare has been a launching pad for a truly incredible group of female national security voices. The most important of these was @Susan_Hennessey herself. She began working with the site as a law student.
The key point here is that we did not see any of this as in any way in tension with quality or insight. We did it as an expression of the search for quality and insight—a simple openness to tapping talent that was available to us and not failing to notice it.
is so much better as a result of this attention over time to gender that it would be unrecognizable—and in no sense better—had we acted otherwise. It would be dramatically less good than it is.
#SourceList is an attempt to make it easier for people with limited time and energy to pay this kind of attention.
We can all pretend that simply looking for the people who are “most qualified [and] insightful” will yield the natural order of things—and will maximize quality. It doesn’t do that and it won’t do that. It will yield self-perpetuation.
I know I’ll be accused of virtue signaling for this thread. Bring it on. It’s not about that. It’s about having tools to notice the sort of talent you want to cultivate. #SourceList is such a tool.
