When Vice President Kamala Harris got her first personal intelligence briefings in office, she was not pleased with what the official was telling her.
It was not any specific concerning event or threats to national security that alarmed her, but what she believed was ‘gender-biased’ language in the report.
The intelligence officer briefing Harris was a woman, but Harris requested a system wide assessment of the intelligence community to ensure it would not happen again, according to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, citing anonymous sources in the national security intelligence community.
Harris urged intelligence agencies to provide training for their analysts so that the use of gender-bias would not happen again.
The episode reveals Harris as an executive who continues wrestling with frustrations over how the world treats women in politics.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris specifically called out the United States intelligence community for using gendered language in their briefings
As the first female vice president, Harris has tried to adjust elements of the job to fit her gender.
Some of the changes are easy physical adjustments to change the basic infrastructure of the job.
After Harris took office, her team realized that the desk chairs in her office needed to be replaced so she could fit in them, the New York Times reported, as the vice president is 5 foot 2 inches.
She also made sure her office included significantly more women on her staff than previous vice presidents, signaling her commitment to gender diversity.
Harris has also felt the need to speak out as the first female vice president, leaning into her promotion of gender issues.
In July 2021, Harris delivered a speech in France at a forum hosted by French President Emanuel Macron about gender equality.
Kamala Harris in a situation room meeting with President Joe Biden and his advisors
France’s President Emmanuel Macron, right, greets U.S Vice President Kamala Harris as she arrives for a conference
‘If we want to strengthen democracy, we must fight for gender equality. Because here is the truth: Democracy is strongest when everyone participates and it is weaker when people are left out,’ the vice president said.
In May 2023, Harris spoke at a EMILY’s List gala and condemned Republicans for trying to eliminate ‘gender ideology’ from publicly funded classrooms.
‘Well, so what are we talking about here? Classes that teach women’s history, women’s equality?’ she asked as the mostly female audience applauded. ‘The study of the fact that there are still only 25 women in the United States Senate in a body of 100?’
Her awareness of the idea of government executives as male prompted her to speak about the presidency using female pronouns, as she did during her failed presidential campaign.
‘It’s important for people to understand that they have to really check how they’re thinking about these things. But we have to help along the way, and part of it is about how we use language,’ she told Buzzfeed in October 2019.
Harris grew more despondent as voters increasingly lost interest in her campaign, prompting her to blame voters’ perspectives about her gender.
‘Is America ready for a woman, and a woman of color to be president of the United States?’ she wondered during an interview with Axios, pointing out that she was burdened by her gender and questions of ‘electability.’
‘There is a lack of ability or a difficulty in imagining that someone who we have never seen can do a job that has been done, you know, forty-five times by someone who is not that person,’ she concluded.
As Harris is running for president in 2024, however, she and her political team has shifted away from an emphasis on her gender.
The Washington Post reported Friday that Harris has specifically turned to former aides for President Barack Obama to help her steer away from conversations about her race and gender, which they consider to be a distraction.
Other former staffers for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign expressed regret for focusing too much on her gender, as she experienced a chance to make history as the first female president of the United States.
Some have joined the Harris team with the intent on avoiding past mistakes.
“I feel like I learned really valuable lessons during the Clinton campaign and then in working through a lot of research in the eight years since about the kind of questions we have for women candidates and how you best support them,’ former Clinton strategist Jennifer Palmeri said to the Post.
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