Getting more women into positions of authority is good for everyone, insists a longtime advocate who is critical of Gov. Linda Lingle's lack of female appointments to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents.

“;It's about having everybody at the table. Not only is it fair, but you get better decisions that way,”; said Amefil “;Amy”; Agbayani, 67, a co-founder and board member of the Hawaii Women's Political Caucus.

Agbayani, director of the UH Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity program, has been honored for social justice advocacy, including being named a 2008 “;Living Treasure”; by the Honpa Hongwanji Betsuin and receiving this year's Hawaii Peacemaker Award from Church of the Crossroads.

The East-West Center brought Agbayani to Honolulu from her native Philippines in 1964 as a graduate student; she earned a doctorate in political science from UH-Manoa and immersed herself in local political and community causes. The former chairwoman of the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission and the Judicial Selection Commission is an honorary co-chairperson of Democrat Neil Abercrombie's gubernatorial campaign.

She lives in Kalihi Valley with her partner, retired engineer Gus Gustafson, and continues to run for fun and exercise, although not with the same intensity that got her through four Honolulu Marathons.

QUESTION: You've talked about the lack of women on the Board of Regents. But if we could start a little more generally, with the political status or the social status of women in Hawaii. Where are we, 30 or 40 years after the feminist movement?

ANSWER: We have come a long way and one marker of that is Patsy Mink. When she started, she was really very lonely. She was ahead of the majority, which was the name of the documentary on her. So we do have Title IX, but the fact that those Maui girls had to bring their situation to court indicates that we still have so many little fights and big fights to deal with. ... We have supposedly done fantastically by having a female governor, that's technically an accomplishment.

Q: ... You're a Democrat. She's a Republican. But her 17-member Cabinet does have seven women in it; nearly half. Isn't that also progress?

A: I did indicate that it was progress getting her there and progress with members of her Cabinet. But the expectations then continue to be high. That doesn't excuse the lack of women now (on the Board of Regents.) You can't hide behind “;they didn't apply.”; Those are barriers that I think can be overcome. And there are some incredibly competent women who are interested and were passed over. It's a real missed opportunity. We can't obviously rely just on elected officials. We have to keep changing the culture and the values all over the place.

Q: I looked at eight Hawaii commissions, boards and councils for membership by gender and it seems that there are a higher percentage of women on those that are elected than on those that are appointed. ... Do women (generally) do better in elected positions than appointed? Is that something you see in your study, or was this just anecdotal?

A: It's anecdotal. I'm not really sure that women do better in elected rather than appointed. It depends on lots of things. For example, if you look at Congress and the numbers of women probably appointed by President Obama, it's pretty good. I think it's not clear whether going elected or appointed is going to make it better. That's why you have to change the culture and values of the people making the appointments, of the voters and of the people running. ... Some people have said that some women will not run unless they were asked to run by someone, while many men actually came up with that decision themselves. So we have to do different things to encourage more women to get appointed and to get elected. We have to encourage both.

Q: How do you think you can change the culture? What are some ways to do that?

A: It's kind of disheartening to other women when good, competent women are put on lists and then don't get appointed. There were women on those lists that Gov. Lingle received earlier. ... We have to have sort of a farm team, so that women can have many opportunities to get strong mentors and support.

Q: Why is wanting gender balance not the same as favoritism?

A: I support diversity, not just for the gender balance kind of thing, for women, but for Filipinos, Hawaiians, gay and lesbians, persons with disabilities, all of that, for a couple of reasons. One: It seems fair and it's sort of part of Americans' aspiration to try and give everyone an equal opportunity. That's sort of the goody-goody philosophical justification. But the second thing why we do all these things is because it's smart. The results of the decisions usually are better. They've done little studies at Harvard Business School: When it's a mixed group of people the solutions they come up with are different and oftentimes better.

In terms of scholarship and research, when you have women doing research, for example, on health affecting women, sometimes the results are actually different and they had been ignored by male researchers. When you have businesses having women at the table, for example, I'm not sure that they would have come up with the name iPad. They may have come up with something else. Women who are engineers come up with wonderful solutions for the car (interior) that benefit everybody. So the reason we have diversity, the reason we want women at the Board of Regents is I think we are going to get a better type of policy. ... If you have a bunch of guys talking about athletics, for example, the tone is different. Having different people at the table actually changes the conversation, changes the solution, and I believe we will have better policy and better programs because of that.

Q: The other part is when you're only one out of 10 it's harder to speak up.

A: Oh, definitely. There's a lot of research that shows that tokenism makes it easier to say, “;Oh, we got a women and all that,”; but that woman has a difficult time, or that individual, if it's a black person, has a difficult time expressing themselves, (is) more intimidated. ... There's a real problem that you're not taken seriously all the time. They know they can outvote you. So there's a lot of research that shows there has to be a critical mass.

Q: Does the situation at the Board of Regents point out the flaws in the appointment process? Maybe this isn't the model the Legislature should be following to revamp the Board of Education?

A: It's very hard. An election process or an appointed process. It's terribly hard to predict what will be fairer. That's why we have to tinker with it. I don't think that they're going to be bold enough to come up with a mandate. For example, the Democratic party because it can and because it believed it was important, said that there is a equal division rule for the delegates. You have to have nearly 50-50. So if there are three delegates, then two are male and one is a female and the next time it might be the other way. ... You can put in things like that. At the Judicial Selection Commission, by the way, I was the chair of that one, we had a requirement that we had to have one person from every island. So when one vacancy came up, the appointing authority wanted to put someone from another island on it and then the reading of the rules said uh-uh, you have to have that other island person even if you think that the other one, from say Honolulu, is more qualified. So you can put restraints on it, but I don't know if we have the political will to do that.

Q: That's what it always comes down to, isn't it?

A: That's exactly it. It's political will, philosophy. ... By the way, it's men who also want women on the board. It's not just women who think this way. Some of my best allies are men. Because they have been impressed with the quality of our participation. ... Not only do you get good decisions, but you get buy-in when you include everyone.