Women in development: Melissa Leach on how to create a supportive workplace for all

LONDON — Melissa Leach, head of one of the United Kingdom’s leading development research institutes, has worked hard to create a workplace that is supportive of women. But, a social anthropologist and mother of four, she stresses that a supportive environment should work for all employees, and that women’s empowerment initiatives must be “part of a broader movement to out discrimination of all kinds,” avoiding a narrow focus on women alone. “I would absolutely encourage women to be ambitious and go for it, but it’s not possible unless we as a society … argue for the policies and the practices and the cultures within workplaces that enable and appreciate flexibility, encourage equal sharing, and that recognize that these are issues that are really important for men as well as women,” she said. “We urgently need to encourage that culture shift that makes it as acceptable for men as [for] women to leave work early to go to the school play, or [to] work flexible hours … This isn’t something just for women.” The director of the Institute of Development Studies spoke to Devex about her experience of working as a woman in development, and shared her tips for how development organizations can foster the kind of flexible and supportive workplace that allows all of its employees to thrive. Opportunities and perspectives Leach joined the IDS in the 1990’s as a junior fellow and has since worked her way up to the top, taking on the role of director in 2014. Originally trained as a geographer, she later switched to social anthropology, initially focusing her research on remote communities living in the rainforests in Sierra Leone. This coincided with the rise of the environmental agenda within development, as part of which Leach helped to set up an environment group at the IDS. But she spent most of her time abroad, working with her husband and research partner James Fairhead to examine forest cover change and management among local people in West Africa. This work “exposed the enormous gulf between their perspectives and those driving global environment and development policy at that time,” she said, adding that her work was “fueled by real anger at what went on under the rubric of environment and development [which] just rode roughshod over the perspectives of local people. It ignored the ways they were often already managing … resources in sustainable ways.” The perspectives of local women and girls were often “doubly marginalized,” according to Leach, so “the initial part of my career has been seeking to bridge those gulfs between the local and the global … by bringing gender differentiated forms of knowledge, experience, and understanding into finding solutions to environment and development problems.” Leach said there have been times in her career when being a woman has “opened doors and created opportunities” she would not otherwise have had. She described “using my position as a woman to experience injustice and inequality first hand, and reflect on them.” Her gender made it possible for her to work directly with women in diverse parts of the world, “to understand their experiences first hand in ways that would not have been open to me as a man,” she said. At the same time, she is clear that “I don’t have the ability to unlock women’s experiences just by virtue of being female,” and that her experiences have always been conditioned by her position of relative wealth and privilege. “We need [... people demonstrating different practices] while creating alliances and solidarity with each other. Crucially, this means working with men and with people of different genders rather than seeing this as a women’s issue.” --— Melissa Leach, director at the Institute of Development Studies It has helped that, since she worked with her husband, they could take the children with them on some of their trips. “While our children were young we did a great deal of fieldwork together and took them with us before formal schooling kicked in,” she said. That enabled us “to engage as a family with other families and created additional insights.” Having four children has also “opened up directly experiential ways of thinking about the relationships of production and reproduction, some of the challenges around caring and care work, around multitasking and dealing with multiple identities as a mother and a parent as well as a worker,” she said. This is something she has used directly in her research to engage with the perspectives of women — but it has also been part of her experience working within the development sector, she said. The experience continued back at IDS as Leach took on more responsibility within the institution, including founding and directing the ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre between 2006 and 2014. Now, as head of the institute, Leach is determined to keep pushing for a supportive and flexible workplace, and outlined some of the policies and approaches that can make the difference. 1. Travel and child care “IDS was already a relatively flexible family and gender friendly place,” she said, but it took a step forward in 1997 when it introduced a child care fund for parents who needed to travel for work. The fund helps cover the costs of taking their child with them, or can pay for child care at home or abroad. Recalling the key meeting about the fund, Leach said she had been off on maternity leave at the time but decided to attend the meeting because she felt it was so important. “Travel is one of the big challenges for women working in development … I came in to the meeting with a six-week-old baby which started fidgeting and crying, so I put him to the breast and carried on with my talk about why we needed the policy,” Leach recalled. “It demonstrated so clearly why women can’t just leave their small babies.” 2. Flexible working policies However, it is about more than help with child care costs, Leach said: There need to be formal flexible working policies, such as equal forms of parental leave for women and men, to allow for child care responsibilities. This then needs to be combined with “informal cultural acceptance that very often meetings won’t happen during school holidays … and so there’s a culture of friendliness and acceptance of caring roles that is really important,” she said. Furthermore, child care is not the only care role, Leach said, and it is important for organizations to acknowledge that “many staff are not parents but have all sorts of other caring responsibilities,” such as elderly relatives or other vulnerable people in their networks. “I like to think we’ve created an environment which can enable people to really balance these really important caring roles while still being able to work productively and effectively,” Leach said. 3. Encourage collective solidarity within the workplace Achieving change across the sector will require “encouraging collective solidarities within an organization that can begin to push for changes in policies and practices,” Leach said. “We need lots of bottom-up micropushes for change” and people demonstrating different practices while “creating alliances and solidarity with each other,” she said. “Crucially, this means working with men and with people of different genders rather than seeing this as a women’s issue.” In the same vein, Leach would like to see the #MeToo movement — which has spawned an #AidToo branch, campaigning for a zero tolerance approach to sexual misconduct in the aid sector — go beyond its current focus on women. She lauded the movement as “thoroughly positive ... inspiring a new generation of young people to take questions of harassment and discrimination seriously and feel they can talk about them.” Such movements now need to become “part of a broader movement to out discrimination of all kinds,” Leach said, adding that “it is really important to see the links between #MeToo and other rights and exposure movements.” At the same time, she was clear that recent sexual misconduct scandals involving aid organizations should not be allowed to fuel anti-aid sentiments in politics. “I worry there is a pincer movement between #MeToo and some of the negative pressure against the U.K. aid target and political moves to close down aid,” she said. “The negative attention … risks overlooking the extreme good that aid workers and development research … are doing across the world,” she said. While the allegations are shocking, “the message is, we need to work together more strongly to ensure the rights and dignity of vulnerable people are protected.”