Seeing Women

Originally written for https:www.g2g5.org.

I’ll be starting my blog with a series of posts that frame my research going forward: Why a focus on women’s leadership as a pathway to international development?

In doing so, it’s important to discuss the perception of gender equity, as there is a wide gulf between the perception of gender equity by men and experienced reality by women. In 2015, the World Economic Forum published an article that highlighted this gulf by pulling together a range of gender equality perception data. Some data points include:

• Former Corporate Woman columnist for the Australian Financial Review, Catherine Fox, conducted a study that revealed that 72% of male senior executives agreed with the statement that much progress had been made towards women’s empowerment and career progression. And yet, 71% of surveyed female executives disagreed with that statement.
• Chuck Shelton’s study on White Men Leading Through Diversity and Inclusion revealed a divide in the perception of diversity effectiveness. 45% of white male leaders in their companies gave their diversity efforts positive ratings. Only 21% of women and people of color agreed with that positive rating.

Contributing to – and potentially compounding – the issue is an unwillingness of some to acknowledge women (and their experiences, perspectives, approaches, etc.) as different from men. We want to believe so firmly in equality, that “I don’t notice if I’m working with a man or a woman” has become a statement I hear quite often these days. Slate recently published an article by Elizabeth Weingarten on why gender- and color-blindness is an obstacle to equality. In essence, ‘blindness’ to age, gender or race allows the dominant group to continue functioning as-is, “If we believe that we’re blind to identity, that absolves us of any responsibility or imperative to reflect on ways that we might be bringing bias to the table,” stated Colleen Ammerman, the director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. It also removes an obligation to reflect on the structures and systems in place that are advantaging some and disadvantaging others. Eric Uhlmann and Geoffrey Cohen’s research, “‘‘I think it, therefore it’s true’’: Effects of self-perceived objectivity on hiring discrimination”, found that the more people believed they were unbiased or blind to these differences, the more they were likely to make biased decisions.

What happens when we insist that we “don’t see” gender? An organization or individual that refuses to acknowledge gender (or race or age), is masking their own bias (purposefully or unintentionally). But regardless of intent, the end result is the same: structures and practices that promote and sustain inequality aren’t able to be raised and subsequently addressed. The cost of not ‘seeing’ women is not just the lost opportunity for equality; it is not simply a moral or ethical loss. Weingarten points to a brilliant 1996 article by Robin Ely and David Thomas in the Harvard Business Reviewthat outlines the critical value that diversity brings to organizational effectiveness. Ely and Thomas state that bringing women and people of color into our organizations is not enough; we need to work to understand and elevate marginalized perspectives, otherwise an organization misses out on “a potential diversity of effective ways of working, leading, viewing the market, managing people, and learning.”

While this research looks specifically at these impacts on an organizational level, we should extend these concepts to our work of nation-state building and development. As development professionals, we need to think about who is and is not at the table helping to shape the programs we deliver. We are a profession grounded in the belief that equality and opportunity for all is possible and worth working toward. And yet, I’ve sat in countless meetings with ministers and national program teams comprised almost entirely of men, designing programs that lack the value of female insights. We need to elevate local women’s voices in building development solutions. To be fair, I think we do this well at the rural and village level. But when we get the national level, we seem to have a blind spot. At the policy level, the funding level, the national-scale implementation level, local women’s voices are missing. We simply don’t have the diversity we need to design, deliver and sustain truly impactful programs, so why aren’t we building programs that bring these critical voices to the table? If we are truly committed to sustainable social change, isn’t this an effective – even catalytic – use of development resources?