Seeing the World Through Gender-Tinted Glasses
A few weeks ago, I was one of many people across Australia who read with great interest a report released by Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA), Gender, Climate and Environmental Justice in Australia which explored the intersectionality between these important topics.
This report firstly explored the extent to which women were disproportionately impacted by climate change, in particular those from vulnerable groups. It painted a pretty terrifying picture. Apparently, globally, women are fourteen times more likely to perish in a disaster and represent 80 percent of people displaced by extreme weather.
Whilst these statistics are shocking, I admit to not finding them particularly surprising. I was actually working in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2010 when the country experienced a 7.0% magnitude earthquake near to the capital city. It resulted in over 200,000 losing their lives and left more than 1.5 million people homeless. The sheer scale of destruction to core infrastructure meant that many people found themselves living in hastily built Internally Displaced People’s (IDPs) camps. At the time, I had heard horrifying stories of growing cases of gender-based violence in these camps and these stories have since been backed up by research which showed that both physical and sexual violence importantly were higher among women in IDP camps than the general population1.
The second main area of interest for me to come out of the WELA report was the research that showed just how important gender diverse leadership and intersectional viewpoints were in solving these major environmental and climate related issues. Ultimately, the report demonstrated that applying a gender-lens to problem-solving is crucial to help mitigate the climate crisis.
For me, this raised an interesting question around the work we do at GoodWolf, and my role in that. We spend a lot of time working with non-profits and funders, exploring how they can do more to contribute to a more equitable society. In spite of that, we spend very little time exploring whether applying a gender2-lens to our discussions around the design, implementation and funding of interventions in a deliberate and thoughtful manner could lead to better outcomes. I am little embarrassed to admit that, as a self-identifying feminist, I actually don’t pose the question to our clients more often.Often when questions arise around gender equity, and gender-informed decision-making, I immediately question whether there is sufficient representation of women, particularly in leadership positions. That representation is an important indicator of gender diversity as it shapes policy and policy shapes lives is not in dispute. When women have a seat at the table, and an equal say in policy and legislation, it will more likely lead to being able to address some of the huge challenges that scar or limit the lives of so many3.
I am aware, however, that when we raise the question of participation in, and leadership of, solution-making, and how we ensure women are sufficiently represented, the discussion invariably starts to focus on what women lack. These are seen as deficit models. This will invariably lead to interventions that try to fix women rather than address structural factors that are the root of gender inequalities4.
Instead, we need to understand the role that context, culture and entrenched systems play in maintaining these inequities and influencing the unconscious bias that drives our decisions.
I have spent a little time thinking about what my role might be in supporting non-profits and philanthropies to build in an awareness of their unconscious bias and deliberately applying a gender lens to the way they design, implement, evaluate and fund programs.
Consider, for example, the traditional way we might approach the evaluation of a program or service delivered by a non-profit organisation. Our normal starting point would be to assume that the provision of services leads to participation in these services by the intended cohort. We would then engage with the different program participants to capture what has changed, for them, as a result of being able to access the valuable services offered by the program.
What is overlooked in this scenario is consideration of those people who are not accessing the services and the barriers that might exist which prevent them from doing so. Without a clear understanding of those who are missing out, the resulting picture of the outcomes delivered by the program is only informed by those people who have been able to participate. It only tells half a story.
Despite this, we don’t often spend much time thinking about who has not accessed the services and why, because we really care about making sure the people who do use the services get the best possible outcome. Connecting with people whom we don’t know and may or may not exist can be quite tricky and time consuming. For non-profits, this might be an additional investment they just can’t afford.
For us, however, applying a gender lens to how services are designed and set up can help challenge the assumption that provision automatically leads to impact. And applying a gender lens to the way civil society measures and evaluates its programs can help identify the unconscious barriers that might prevent or hinder program participation. This might be achieved through using co-design methods or drawing on advisory groups of people with a specific lived-experience in the area. This can then help inform innovative ways to remove any systemic barriers that might hinder better access for women.
Luckily for us, our anecdotal experience of the above has recently been substantiated through a much more credible source of research that looked at housing and homelessness through a gender-lens.
Research commissioned by Australia Investing In Women (AIIW)5 shows that older women and single mothers experience a much higher risk of homelessness and severe financial stress. The concern, however, is that traditional approaches to housing will not be sufficient as they do not consider the unique context in which women experience homelessness. This research puts forward a case backing the need to apply a gender lens to housing innovation to properly tackle the root cause of an issue that is increasingly impacting women. Without this deliberate application of a gender lens, interventions are unlikely to be as effective.
Our second point looks to those on the other side of the fence.
Philanthropists, funders and investors have considerable influence in terms of being able to address inequalities through how they put their capital resources to work.
Only 4% of total startup funding put forward in Australia between 2018-2021 went to all-female teams6. I have experienced first-hand the wonderful work that women-led ventures such as Sisterworks, iSTEM and Fitted for Work do and the huge impact they are having not just on women but on entire communities. And the research shows that that women-led startups are a significantly better financial investment7. Given this, I admit to finding this low investment statistic slightly baffling.
In the past, my immediate response would have been to question the gender representation amongst the leadership of the investment committees making these decisions. After all, research has found that female investors are more likely than their male counterparts to invest in female founders8.
This would signal that philanthropists, funders and investors should consider the gender representation of those committees with significant influence over decisions around investment and funding allocation to help them address any unconscious bias around such decisions. (It is not lost on us that the Endowments for Impact Challenge organising committee is predominantly women).
What I recently discovered, however, is that these same women-led firms whose first round was raised exclusively from female VCs were two times less likely to raise a second round. This was because there was an underlying assumption the women-entrepreneur was funded due to their gender rather than their level of competence9.
For me, this unconscious bias that is driving important decisions is informed by cultural norms and perceptions which cannot be overcome by focusing only on representation.
Given the above, I see the challenge to funders and philanthropies as being twofold:
Firstly, we challenge you to deliberately and proactively voice your unconscious bias when making decision around how you leverage your assets (both financial and non-financial), making a conscious effort to seek out a diversity of viewpoints, particularly when making key decisions which affect women.
Secondly, we would encourage you to question whether programs aimed at supporting vulnerable people you are being asked to fund have been considered through a gender-lens and are openly addressing any barriers to access that might exist.
If I think back to my time in Haiti and to the design of the IDP camps I can’t help but wonder the extent to which the various organisations took the time to apply a gender-lens to how they were set up, the services that were provided and how they removed any unconscious barriers that might prevent women from accessing them10.
Not everyone, however, is onboard with this need to be more deliberate in applying a gender lens to how we tackle some of Australia’s most wicked problems. There is increasing discontentment amongst some groups about gender equity getting so much airtime. Research undertaken by King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership11 revealed that that 60% of men aged 16-27 felt that “women’s equality has gone too far”. To the point that 46% of respondents now feel discriminated against.Considering that in Australia, the national gender pay gap in 2023 was 12% in favour of men12, women can expect to earn 88 cents for every very dollar on average men earned13, and nearly 80 per cent of CEOs in Australia are male14, I can't help but feel that this concern from young men about them potentially missing out feels a bit ridiculous. And trying to “bring them along on the journey”, helping them to see how efforts around gender equity can actually benefit everyone starts to feel a little more like pandering and perhaps unnecessary.
One option is to forge ahead regardless, loudly pushing the need to apply a gender-lens to how we design solutions whilst simply ignoring those people who complain we’ve already done enough. This runs the risk of polarising these groups even more but may have the benefit of creating space for marginalised voices to be heard.
And, as the WELA report highlighted, there needs to be a diversity of voices and perspectives informing decisions to drive real change including First Nations women, women of colour and women living with disabilities. Given the inequities that still exist in the world, and not forgetting that women are fourteen times more likely to perish in a disaster (this felt important enough to mention twice) I can’t help but feel like this is the right way forward.
Or should we see the rise in popularity of the far-right political parties in Europe and the US as a warning that ignoring these more marginal voices could have seismic implications for gender equity in the future?
1Source: Did internal displacement from the 2010 earthquake in Haiti lead to long-term violence against children? A matched pairs study design - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014521342030048X#:~:text=Both%20physical%20and%20sexual%20violence,Weitzman%20%26%20Behrman%2C%202016).
2 In speaking about gender in this article we focus primarily on women. This is due to our work predominantly focusing on this group. We acknowledge the importance of doing more to deepen our understanding of how all genders are impacted by the design, implementation and funding of programs.
3 https://chamberuk.com/gender-equality-have-we-gone-far-enough/
5 You can read the full report here - https://www.aiiw.org.au/news/a-home-of-ones-own-philanthropic-and-social-sector-solutions-for-womens-housing/
6 https://scaleinvestors.com.au/
8 https://hbr.org/2023/02/for-female-founders-only-fundraising-from-female-vcs-comes-at-a-cost
9 As above
10 I am acutely aware that I didn’t know enough about the topic to ask this question back in 2010 – it is highly possible the humanitarian community were doing their best to create best-practice, gender-informed camps in a hugely challenging environment
11 Emerging tensions? How younger generations are dividing on masculinity and gender equality” https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/emerging-tensions.pdf)
12 https://www.wgea.gov.au/data-statistics/ABS-gender-pay-gap-data
13 As above
14 https://giwl.anu.edu.au/news/australia-s-gender-pay-gap-widening-here-s-how-action-can-help-close-it