I had the privilege to talk to a real badass woman about overcoming bias, how she got where she is today and nuggets of life wisdom. You will all get a chance to hear from this trailblazer at the next YWA Speaker Series on August 24th: The first female Travis County Judge, Sarah Eckhardt.
Q. Did you always know you wanted to run for office?
A. No.
Q. What did you want to do?
A. I wanted to be an actress.
Q. Did you go to school for theatre?
Z. I did. I have an undergraduate degree in theatre from NYU and I was in David Mamet’s theatre company for ten years.
Q. What made you make the switch?
A. I was in this theatre company and it had become super political. There was all this wrangling over bylaws and how we were going to handle stuff and I thought to myself, “Well heck, if I’m going to be doing all of this policy for a theatre company, I might as well go back to the family business and do it for real.” My dad had moved back to Texas, and I thought, you know, I’d really like to go back to Texas and go to law school and really do policy for real, so that’s what I did.
Q. And you had been in New York with that theatre company?
A. Yes.
Q. How long were you with that company?
A. I was in New York for 12 years and we did a lot of really good work, but it got to the point where we were doing plays about people who I wanted to help. And I thought, why am I telling stories instead of trying to help change the story line?
Q. That’s profound. And so did you go to UT Law?
A. I did. And I also went to the UT LBJ School for Public Affairs.
Q. And then did you immediately jump into your commissioner role or did you do policy for a while?
A. No. I was an assistant county attorney for eight years first.
Q. What has been the most fulfilling part of your career in public service?
A. When I was an attorney, I really liked working on cases, case by case, but at a certain point I realized I really wanted to work on the larger policy stuff. So, that’s when I left practicing law to start looking at bigger policy things. That’s been really gratifying, looking at systems and what’s going on with the system and how can it be improved.
Q. Is there one accomplishment you think you’ll look back on as the most important thing you’ve done?
A. Right now, I feel like I’ve got a whole lot of service left in me. I’m hoping that I won’t look back and it’ll be one of the things I’ve already done. Although, I feel really good about the stuff we’ve accomplished. I’m hoping there is going to be more to come. But if I’m just looking out over the past year, say, I’m really proud of us having returned in-person visitation to our Travis County jails. I can’t imagine going out and visiting my son or daughter in jail before they go off to state prison and I can’t see them face-to-face.
Q. What do you think is the single most important issue facing Travis County?
A. There is one most pressing issue, but there are many many ways that we touch on it. And it’s really the growing gap in opportunity. The poverty rate in Travis County has gone up and even though our jobless rate is really low, the pay is declining, so it doesn’t meet people’s needs. We have a lot of people who are housing cost burdened. They’re paying more than a third of their income. So these are all really concerning statistics.
Q. How does it feel to be the first woman County Judge in Travis County? How do you feel about the fact that in 2016 women are still having “firsts”?
A. You know, I’m so glad that we have a young woman’s organization because I look back on my trajectory and I realize, I grew up at a time that was just after the women’s movement. My older sisters and my mother were very, very engaged, but you know, by the time I was a teenager – I really thought discrimination based on gender was over. My mom is a real strong woman and had a successful career herself and she’d tell me war stories, but I thought, “that’s ancient history, we’ve moved on from there, its all perfectly fine.” And I have to admit, I was wrong. There is still a conscious and often unconscious bias against women in leadership roles.
Q. Do you think it’s been harder for you to accomplish what you have, as a woman? Do you think you have to approach things differently than a man would?
A. I think that there are different approaches. I really hated that this was true – I had a political consultant who was well versed in how women need to run for office. She told me, these are the type of attacks you’re going to get as a female candidate, and I said, “Well, none of those things are true so they aren’t going to happen to me.” She said, “Yes, they will, because the truth is totally irrelevant. The fact that you’re a woman is the only truth that matters here.” Sure enough, she was absolutely right. She said things like I had to grow my hair out, I had to wear nothing but dresses and heels. I had to be feminine but not too sexy. I just hated that she was right. She said I couldn’t be too technical and I couldn’t be too smart, because then I would come off cold and bitchy.
I remember as a lawyer, I went into a very big negotiation, in which all the lead attorneys in the County Attorney’s office were women – we called ourselves The Coven. We walked into this negotiation, the four of us, and we had a male secretary with us and the lawyers on the other side turned to the male secretary and started discussing with him, and we’re going “no, actually he’s here to help us organize all of our paperwork, we are the lawyers.”
Q. What advice would you give to your younger self?
A. I have a 13 year old daughter and a 15 year old son at home, so this is something I think about all the time. I think, really, it’s simple and trite and everybody hears it all the time, but perhaps they have to be reminded of it – the most important thing, particularly at those years where you’re exploring who you really truly are, what you really truly love, what gets your imagination fired up, and if you can during that period of your life, really nail that down for yourself – then no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you’ll know who you are. You can keep coming back to that, saying “you know, I was happiest between those ages when I was at a party with friends.” If that’s what makes you happy, know that about yourself. Or if what makes you happy is going out in a canoe in the middle of the lake, know that that is what really reinvigorates you, what stokes your fire.
Q. Do you have a motto or mantra that you try to live your life by?
A. I do. And again, this sounds so cheesy. I see this all the time, I see it in myself, you get wrapped up in your ego: I want to be a famous actress, I want to be the first female Travis County judge, I want to have this title or achieve this goal, I want to brag that I did this, that or the other. But, at the end of the day, at the end of your life, the only legacy you have – it’s not the plaques on the wall or how much money you have, none of that – it is the love that you shared with the people that you loved. That’s it. None of the rest of it matters.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
