“In the culture of the State Department, issues having to deal with such things as women’s rights and children’s health and so on were always — let’s say those were not the centers of power at the State Department,” says Thomas Lippman, a scholar at the Middle East Institute and author of Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy.
But those issues became priorities under Albright — who, for example, pushed for requirements that women’s toilets be located closer to their sleeping quarters in U.N. refugee camps due to concerns about sexual assault. “Things like that, which were easily fixable, were put on the agenda,” Lippman says.