Gender politics suck. First, we get the whiny litany from Anne-Marie Slaughter about how this 50-speech-a-year, former policy planning director, Princeton dean and mom can’t have it all. Thanks Anne-Marie. Who has it all? Then we get this tripe from some Progressive Policy Institute woman who’s grumpy there aren’t more women at think tanks. Even at the “venerable” Brookings Institution, she moans, there aren’t too many women; but (duh) “right-wing think tanks” are the “worst offenders.” We “look like the membership of Augusta National.” Oh please. I won’t speak for Heritage, but at AEI, we don’t give a damn what your gender or your color is; we don’t care how you put on your pants in the morning, whether you wear a skirt, or if you once played French horn in a Barcelona band. (OK, that’s unacceptable.)"We care about the work people do, the quality of the product, the difference we can make in Washington and for the nation." -Danielle Pletka

We care about the work people do, the quality of the product, the difference we can make in Washington and for the nation. We don’t set aside seats for women any more than we set aside seats for women in our Congress. Why are some people so obsessed with counting up their seats? What do they think they’re missing? Would they rather be women in Rwanda, the Seychelles, Angola, or Belarus — all cited by our PPI accuser as having more women in government than the rotten old U.S. of A? Are we going to be better served by more women economists? More chicks in foreign policy? More high heels pondering the education mess? Tell me, what are you looking for here except more entitlements, more special treatment, more set asides, more demeaning quotas?

Who wants to be hired because she is a woman? I’ll tell you: A woman who knows she isn’t the best for the job and is looking for preferential treatment. You want to work here at AEI? Great. Send me your awesome resume, show me your platinum degrees, hand over your testimony, your writing, and your collection of super op-eds. Oh, don’t have that? Then sit down, and shut up.