I. VISION

• A Women's Lens on Foreign Policy, while respecting the need for national security, sees foreign policy as a means to ensure "human security" -- the security of people -- their health, their potential for work and learning, their livelihoods, their environment, and their rights as human beings.
  
  
• A Women's Lens puts values at the center of its vision. This lens is not exclusively a woman's. Men can and do see through that lens, even as they adapt it. The challenge of the lens is to promote values that benefit all.
  
  
• A Women's Lens questions prevailing assumptions, and looks for a different set of solutions. Women tend to "think outside the box", challenging what we assume cannot or should not be changed. A Women's Lens re-thinks, re-imagines, and re-conceptualizes.
  
  
• A Women's Lens recognizes and seeks a balance between the power of the state and the rights of the individual. There is no better, or more accurate, or more telling standard of how a society functions than how it treats women.
  
  
• A Women's Lens often focuses first on the woman, and then looks at her relationships with the world around her. Look through a kaleidoscope at a woman's life and it will show different patterns and perspectives: you will see the many spheres in which she lives and works, and the multiple relationships she forms in each, and the consequences for so many others -- families, communities, nations.

II. VALUES

• If the security of people is at the center, then a Woman's Lens encompasses these values:
  
  -- the dignity and human rights of the individual
  -- the welfare and well-being of the community
  -- equality, social justice and economic security within and between nations, as well as between and for individuals.
  -- respect for the self-determination and autonomy of nations balanced by protection of human rights and dignity.
  
  
• A Women's Lens focuses on the commonalities of poverty, violence, illness and environmental degradation that are shared by countries in the North and the South -- and on redressing injustice at their sources.
  
  
• A Women's Lens demands that a top priority of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century be redressing the inequity that exists between countries in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
  
  
• A women's lens shows that woman's rights are human rights, and that investing in women ensures self-determination, as well as the security and well-being of women's families, communities and nations.

III. OPPORTUNITY

• Recent polling conducted for the International Women's Health Coalition by Lake, Sosin, Snell & Associates found that both women and men want to see a U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century that is based on the security of people. A majority (59%) of Americans (64% of women and 53% of men) said they prefer a foreign policy that focuses on the alleviation of poverty, protecting the environment, and ensuring health, education and human rights, to one that emphasizes trade, military defense and nuclear arms control.
  
  
• Policy Change: Women have transformed international policy on human rights, population, and development (at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, making the irrefutable case that "women's rights are human rights"; at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, striking a balance between the social good and individual rights; and at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, defining gender equality and the need and means to realize it).
  
  
• Leadership: Our current Secretary of State and powerful First Lady are not only highly skilled professionals but also deeply committed to gender equality. Women who look through a Women's Lens also head key U.N. agencies (UNICEF and UNFPA) and are in senior positions at the World Bank.
  
  
• Innovation and Imagination: In a recent poll, half of U.S. voters said that it is important to have more women making foreign policy decisions because they "often bring a different perspective than men, and it is important that our foreign policy incorporate that perspective".
  
  
• Energy: Thousands of American women who went to the Beijing Conference in 1995, or followed it in the news, experienced -- many for the first time -- what it is like to be a global citizen. Since Beijing, there has been sustained energy and activism by U.S. women around the goals and commitments made at the Conference. These women, and men, want to take action to see the promise of Beijing made real in the lives of American women, and women throughout the world.

IV. ACTION

• Educating the American public about what is meant by human security, how the values mirror theirs, and why it is in their self-interest to challenge isolationist tendencies and promote foreign policy centered on the security of people around the world.
  
  
• Mobilizing women and men to build the political will for change by pressing Congress and the Executive Branch to transform U.S. commitments made at recent U. N. conferences into policies, programs and budget priorities, both internationally and in the U.S.
  
  
• Increasing the number of women in the foreign policy establishment, so that women's values and perspectives -- and women themselves -- are full partners in the policy making process. In recent polling, 73% of American voters said that increasing the number of women making foreign policy decisions is important, and 50% agreed that increasing the number of women "would make it more likely that we would find new ideas and new solutions to the problems facing the world."
  
  
• Supporting more women to get the necessary education and experience to attain senior positions in the foreign service, and promoting curricula in schools of international affairs and public policy that put a strong emphasis on human security.