{"id":27140,"date":"2018-04-20T11:48:48","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T09:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unhcr.org\/innovation\/?p=27140"},"modified":"2019-02-10T15:15:54","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T14:15:54","slug":"gender-imbalance-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unhcr.org\/innovation\/gender-imbalance-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"We need to fix the gender imbalance in our stories on innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s how we\u2019re going to do it.<\/span><\/i><\/h2>\n

Have you ever felt like a hypocrite? Or worse: an imposter? Both emotions have the effect of surprising you when you least expect it. We don\u2019t actively reflect on things we don\u2019t believe to be true \u2013 we think with our gut more than our head and science confirms this. If you\u2019re human, you\u2019re likely to have felt like one or both of these characteristics in your lifetime.<\/span><\/p>\n

Recently, I felt like the former and latter after conducting a small experiment on the team. Inspired by the recently published Atlantic article, <\/span>\u201cI Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories.\u201d<\/span><\/a> I wanted to understand the gender balance (or imbalance) in the stories we have on our website. In the article, Ed Yong, a gifted staff writer at the Atlantic who covers science, reflects on the systemic gender biases in his field as well as the exclusion of women\u2019s voices in his stories. Yong undertook an exercise to understand the gender ratio of those interviewed and quoted and found surprising results. \u201cI looked back at the pieces that I had published in 2016 thus far. Across all 23 of them, 24 percent of the quoted sources were women. And of those stories, 35 percent featured no female voices at all. That surprised me. I knew it wasn\u2019t going to be 50 percent, but I didn\u2019t think it would be that low, either,\u201d he stated.<\/span><\/p>\n

We did a similar experiment \u2013 with the help of our in-house data scientist (or data geek as she likes to be referred), Rebeca Moreno, we used Python to sift through 163 articles on our innovation website checking for pronouns and quotes mentioned in articles. \u00a0In addition, I scraped each article to identify how many authors were female vs. male and understand what the gender balance looked like when it came to who we were interviewing. We acknowledge that, of course, there is a spectrum and this conversation should not be binary – but to replicate the study and to gain a bit of insight into what we\u2019ve published – this experiment focused on women\u2019s experiences and voices in our content. You can look at part of our process and the raw data here.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A total of 89 interviews took place over the period of 2015-2017 that were included in the articles we posted and only 34% of these interviews were with women. Nearly 75% of the team at the UNHCR Innovation Service are women \u2013 so it was not surprising to me that 68% of the articles were written by women. We also have an additional female consultant who supports writing essays throughout the year. And not all team members write stories for our blog but nearly all the men do. In all the interviews conducted by men on our team – only one article included an interview with a woman\u2013 in any article they wrote. Ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

These numbers are not <\/span>good<\/span><\/i> and certainly not <\/span>great.<\/span><\/i> In one article about our Innovation Fellowship that was published last year, we interviewed three Fellows \u2013 all who were men \u2013 to talk about how the program was changing the minds of UNHCR staff. I remember when I worked on this article having discussions with my colleague Emilia, who runs the Innovation Fellowship, and we were both concerned that none of the women we wanted to include were available before the deadline. But I made a decision to move forward. Looking back, I should have changed the deadline or completely changed the article. As I manually counted the three of them and added them to my Excel, that feeling of hypocrisy washed over me again. We weren\u2019t practicing what we were preaching. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In Yong\u2019s article, he quotes his colleague Adrienne LaFrance who completed an initial exercise which inspired Yong to do one of his one. Discovering similar surprising data points for her articles, she reflects stating, \u201cThese numbers are distressing, particularly because my beats cover areas where women are already outnumbered by men\u2014robotics, artificial intelligence, archaeology, astronomy, etc. Which means that, by failing to quote or mention very many women, I\u2019m one of the forces actively contributing to a world in which women\u2019s skills and accomplishments are undermined or ignored, and women are excluded.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This feeling had great resonance with me. We witness day-in and day-out stereotypes play out around those working in humanitarian innovation. Blockchain, drones, biometrics: the high-profile innovations associated with the white men at the top talking about them. While we\u2019ve been very vocal that \u201cTech is not innovation\u201d \u2013 I think we have also ignored part of the puzzle and the story here. \u00a0Our colleagues who are supporting the more technical aspects of our work \u2013 predictive analytics, data science, artificial intelligence \u2013 are only women. Rebeca, who I mentioned previously, is an absolute data-innovation-computer loving star. Then we also have our colleague Sofia who is supporting our team as an Artificial Intelligence Engineer. They are working in fields that are outnumbered by men and we haven\u2019t been doing a good job of telling their stories, capturing their voices or those women in similar backgrounds in our organization. I\u2019ve witnessed firsthand the ugliness that men have shown towards women working in these areas and I know we have a long way to go in changing this narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n

So we did this experiment and we realized quickly we needed to make changes.<\/span><\/p>\n

UNHCR Innovation Women Series – a starting point<\/span><\/i><\/h2>\n

Okay before we move on, let\u2019s address the elephant in the room – yes we do have a series on women that we launched last year. <\/span><\/p>\n

In October 2017, we wrote a blogpost titled <\/span>\u201cWhy we\u2019re doing a series on women in the humanitarian sector.\u201d<\/span><\/a> The series originated from a conversation my colleague Hans and I had with a senior female colleague at UNHCR. It started out as any normal conversation does prior to an interview: here is the concept, here is our approach, here are some questions, this is lighting we have, etc. But when we began asking her what she wanted to speak to us about (and not what ideas we had in our own heads) we discovered that the stories she wanted to tell focused primarily on the challenges she faced being a woman in the humanitarian sector.<\/span><\/p>\n

We found the perfect angle for our new series: Innovation and women. In the article I write, \u201cOur experience is that innovation is often associated with technology, and technology often associated with men. The Innovation Service and its partners have worked in innovation collectively for years, across different sectors and locations, and we all recognize that innovation is not only about technology and certainly not about men. Technology alone will never be enough for humanitarian innovation \u2013 we need collaboration and cross-disciplinary fertilization that enables new ideas and ways of thinking.\u201d I mentioned this idea above \u2013 it\u2019s crucial to the messaging we use as a team and our brand. And we thought we were going to do this right and we were going to address some of the biases we had about women and innovators in the humanitarian field. And you know what else we were going to do? We were not just going to talk about these challenges but start linking action-oriented goals focused on gender equity to our content. Aren\u2019t we great and progressive?<\/span><\/p>\n

In reality, the series was focused more on giving voices to women we had worked with (at HQ and in the field operations) and the women our interviewees had also worked with, than actually speaking about innovation. They wanted to speak about their experiences and identify actions that can help us address the biases in our day-to-day work. And that\u2019s okay. We love the series and we\u2019re going to keep doing it. We believe there is a gap in the humanitarian space and these stories should be told. The majority of women we have spoken with are also innovators and have been at the forefront of transforming the organization. But we believe that there is a larger focus needed on women innovating in the humanitarian sector and ensuring that their voices are contributing to the current trends and conversation. And on a separate note – why did we box these leaders into the \u201cwomen category\u201d to acknowledge the impact they\u2019ve had in the first place? <\/span><\/p>\n

In a way, this is exactly the problem. In order for us to speak and write about women (or women as innovators), we needed to make a series on its own. And that really bothers me. As Yong states in his article for the Atlantic, \u201cI\u2019m not asking people for their opinions because of their gender; I\u2019m asking because of their expertise. Every single person I contact is qualified to speak about the particular story that I\u2019m writing; it\u2019s just that now, half of those qualified people happen to be women.\u201d And this is where I, as a communicator, have failed in our stories and directing the conversations and contributions. There are women who are experts in this space – but we haven\u2019t been focusing on their stories or interviewing them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The faces of humanitarian innovation i.e. the number ones and number twos in the media are <\/span>usually<\/span><\/i> white men. It\u2019s easy to go back to the usual suspects featured in Fast Company or at SXSW every year – but we can do better. This is the current master narrative and we want to help change it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying everyone is on the same page here – there are those ahead of us. \u00a0But I would challenge you to do this same experiment as a starting point and see what your numbers look like over the past few years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before we move on, I also want to be very clear that we have not addressed the separate issue of the total number of refugee women that were included in our content. We also calculated this: 13% of our articles had refugees that were direct authors or specifically interviewed for the article itself. This deserves a separate article that undertakes not only the question of including refugees voices in the humanitarian innovation conversation (because we all know they are the true innovators) but also defining what meaningful journalism and stories are that include \u201crefugee voices.\u201d Ideally, these are stories written and led by refugees themselves. But again, this is for another day. <\/span><\/p>\n

So what are we going to do about all of this? <\/span><\/i><\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s go back to diversity in teams and let me give you a few examples of how we\u2019ve made changes:<\/span><\/p>\n