Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Female artists like SZA and Taylor Swift notched the most Grammy nominations, the FDA is proposing a ban on some hair straighteners, and the highest-ranking woman in the Veterans Administration says employers should ask one simple question. Have a meaningful Monday!
- Veterans Day. In September, Tanya Bradsher was sworn in as the Biden’s administration’s deputy secretary of veterans affairs. The new role makes her the highest-ranking woman in the history of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
To mark Veterans Day this year, which was celebrated on Saturday, she urges employers to ask their employees one simple question: “Have you served?”
“A lot of veterans don’t identify themselves as veterans if they didn’t go to war,” Bradsher explains. That applies doubly to women veterans, the fastest-growing group of veterans in the U.S., now numbering 625,000. “Women veterans will compartmentalize their service,” she says.
So employers’ questioning is critical. Without identifying veterans on their staff, they are missing out on the full scope of those workers' “top-notch leadership” skills, Bradsher says.
Women veterans who are married to male service members will sometimes even advocate for their husbands to receive benefits without considering what they themselves might be eligible for, Bradsher says. Over the past few years—mainly through the 2022 PACT Act—Veterans Affairs has expanded health services available to women veterans, including maternity care, mammograms, and abortion counseling.
She views her job at the VA—and employers’ roles—as making sure veterans get access to as much support as they are entitled to.
Bradsher, the fourth generation of an Army family, enlisted in the Army at 23 years old in 1993. She had married young, and the marriage was “not going well." One day, her mom drove her to the Army recruiter’s office. “I wasn’t planning on joining the military,” she remembers. “But it was just what I needed.”
Almost a decade later, she was stationed at the Pentagon on 9/11—and she was pregnant. (She had found out a month earlier). “On Wednesday the 12th, we went back in a burning building and we went to work. And we just never stopped,” she remembers. “That entire pregnancy, I don’t even remember it, really,” she says. “We just worked.” Once the baby was born, she and her second husband—also a service member—worked opposite 12-hour shifts while her mother stepped in to care for their newborn.
In March 2021, Bradsher was named chief of staff for veterans affairs under Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough. At first, she had been asked to recommend other candidates for the job, but she decided to throw her own hat in the ring. “I typically do not nominate myself,” she says. “But [to work] for him, I wasn’t letting this opportunity pass me by.”
That job led to her current role; she is the first woman of color to hold it. “I want to make sure that I’m not the last,” she says. “And that I leave the door open.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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