Women in leadership won’t solve development’s equality problem

Nyla hadn’t been at her job for long before she was told that there was only space for one woman “who looked like her” on the team. Her employer, one of the largest USAID implementers in the world, was actually filling two positions in the business development division where Nyla would ultimately land a job. The hiring process, her colleagues said, had come down to Nyla and another Muslim woman of color. “But we didn’t need both of you — we just needed one,” Nyla recalls them saying. Nyla, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, said comments like this became par for the course. She lost out on one promotion to a white male colleague with less experience and fewer degrees than her. For another senior position, she was told she was not “the right face” for the role. “I have an actual performance review that says ‘You should smile more,’” she said. In general, women are well-represented in global development: Around 70% of the workforce across multiple sectors, from public health to the multilateral development banks, is female. Women have even made gains in reaching leadership positions — 53% of CEO roles in the U.S. development sector are held by women; among multilateral agencies like the United Nations and the World Health Organization, 41% have a woman at the helm. But a closer examination reveals a far less rosy picture. Only 8% of the women leading U.S.-based global development institutions are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Across management positions in the same space, that number is at 19%. If one of the goals of international development is to fight poverty by eliminating inequality, discrimination, and injustice, what do these figures say? While multiple industries have similarly dismal levels of representation in their upper ranks, Nyla insists this is explicitly an international development problem. “It is not just a gender thing. There's an intersectional lens to it,” she said. There’s a widespread belief that working globally toward ostensibly well-intentioned goals means it’s impossible to be discriminatory. But the numbers show that isn’t true. As Nyla pointed out, “Just because you were in the Peace Corps for two years doesn’t mean you aren’t racist.” Death by a thousand cuts The trajectory for women in development may go something like this: You’re hired at an entry-level role, and you work hard at it. You travel where you’re asked to travel. You take on more responsibility and more significant assignments. As time goes by, many women are confronted with challenges — husbands are less likely to “trail” their wives than the other way around. The biological realities of parenthood mean being pregnant, or pumping breast milk, in inopportune places. There’s a chance that at some point you’ll face harassment, a problem that’s exacerbated for women of color. Some of these issues, like the burden of care, are societal; some, such as the need to take a remote field posting to advance your career, are unique to development, Eeshani Kandpal, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and co-author of a series exploring gender equity in international financial institutions, told Devex: “There is this sense that it's sort of the price to pay to work in a large organization.” But these hardships add up, and the ranks of women climbing the ladder begin to thin — a process Kandpal calls “selective attrition.” This attrition begins early, and by the time a woman reaches the middle ranks, “those elbows get a little bit sharper,” she said. Combine the competitiveness of the job with the personal sacrifices women find themselves making, and in many cases, continuing on no longer seems worth it. “A lot of women either choose to opt out, or fall by the wayside at that point,” she said. “It’s death by 1,000 cuts.” The women who do make it up the ladder have to be strategic about how they get there. Fatema Sumar, the executive director of the Harvard Center for International Development, recalls the early days of her career in the State Department, when the demands on her time were fewer and she was less willing to push back on long hours and a grueling travel schedule. “It can be very hard to disrupt change when there really is no mandate for change.” --— Fatema Sumar, executive director, Harvard Center for International Development “I would largely adopt the system in which I was inheriting and give it my all,” she said. But as she got married and had kids, her time became increasingly not her own. The trade-offs she was making grew in significance. For Sumar, it became about finding “an ecosystem that allows you, without penalty, to make those trade-offs,” she explained. “You find that match.” Similarly, Kandpal cites the trajectory of the World Bank’s Human Development Vice President Mamta Murthi, who has spoken publicly about veering off the management pathway into an analytical role when she had children, and then returning when they were older to continue her rise. “But that doesn't happen to every woman, especially in organizations where operational roles are much more prized than analytical ones in terms of career trajectory,” Kandpal said. And of course, not all women face the same trade-offs — the composition of those 1,000 cuts varies greatly. For Nyla, her experiences were born of a double burden of gender and race. “I would love it if the thing I had to navigate was childcare,” she said. For Bridget Snell, who has held multiple high-level roles across organizations such as Oxfam and Save the Children, she learned early on that achieving her goal of holding a leadership position at an NGO wouldn’t be achievable through the standard route. “My first career, my first love, was going to be the foreign service. That’s what I really wanted to do,” she said. But as a queer woman in the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — when being gay in the U.S. was not openly discussed — she knew she had to find a different way. “That got me to try and figure out how to slalom myself into a career that I really wanted.” Snell’s career has been impressive. Her resume is littered with titles that include words like “director,” “head,” and “chief.” Even so, having to chart an alternative path has cost her. “Being gay and then being a working mom probably held me back at least 10 or 15 years,” she said. “It impacts your ability to rise up.” Navigating an entrenched path Contrary to popular belief, simply installing more women in leadership roles will not solve the problems further down the chain. “A lot of the constraints are baked in institutionally, not individually,” Sumar said. That’s why the goal is not just to get women to the top — it’s to create space for diverse thinking to rise, Snell said. “We're [working] in international NGOs to create a more equitable world. It's in our mission. It’s in our values. But you don't see nontraditional leaders who really think deeply about this, and are trying to change this, lasting in the C-suite.” In Snell’s experience, many of the women — including women of color and those from low- and middle-income countries — who successfully establish themselves in the upper ranks do so by surrounding themselves with a cohort of what tends to be more “traditional” leaders — often white Europeans or Americans. When that happens, their nontraditional leadership style seems to dissipate. “These organizations are full of amazing leaders and practitioners who are trying to change development and how development is done, but I believe there's a ceiling for how much they are actually trusted to run the organization,” she said. “It is really hard to lead differently.” Sumar agrees that simply having women in leadership roles is not enough to change how an organization is run. “When I was younger, I had this assumption that if … I worked in environments where there were more women, it would make my life easier,” she said. But though she’s had some inspiring female bosses and mentors, “I've also been surprised that it has not resolved any of my difficulties or made those issues go away.” Many women who do make it to executive positions have had to endure such difficult circumstances that by the time they arrive in their C-suite office, they’re exhausted, or jaded. Or they feel like even within their roles, they’re still powerless to change the culture around them. As Sumar put it: “It's sometimes hard to think outside the box when you yourself have never been outside the box.” For all the good it professes to do, the reality is that global development is an intensely political space. Board members and trustees are often donors, funders, or golf buddies of senators and prime ministers. “It’s the political and financial elite that still run this world, even in the development sector,” Sumar said. The need for change at the top If the goal is to create change on a systemic level, experts say the first thing to acknowledge is that it’s going to have to come from the top, not the other way around. Creating change on an institutional level requires sincere institutional investment, said Kandpal. The mere existence of a racism subcommittee, or a diversity, equity, and inclusion task force, is not enough — these efforts have to have the attention of senior leadership, and they have to be empowered. The road to get there will be difficult. Development agendas are rife with talking points about empowering leaders in low- and middle-income countries. But what is continually modeled, over and over, is the primacy of traditional thinking. “We say all these things. I genuinely think we mean them — and I think we often don't really understand or appreciate what it will take to get there,” Sumar said. Despite promises of empowerment, non-Western, nontraditional perspectives are often relegated to the role of a stakeholder to be politely acknowledged, but ultimately not given the final say. “I think there's still a lot of lip service to frontline leaders and frontline women leaders who sound different, who look different, who maybe don't make decisions through traditional processes like memos or paper writing or conference calls,” Sumar said. If an argument is formed without the aid of, say, a PowerPoint, a Western-minded development practitioner may not recognize it as valid. Continually placing the onus on those outside the prevailing power structures “can get really discouraging for those who are looking for a more equalized world,” she said. To change the system from the top, everyone interviewed agreed that transparency is key. How are shortlists for board seats, presidents, and C-suite positions drawn up? On what basis are people being hired, and crucially, why do they leave? Sometimes, it’s for standard reasons, but often, it’s for a cultural or institutional issue that isn’t being addressed, Sumar said. “There are so many stories of senior leaders that leave because there's something really troubling at the institution that's never going to make it to a LinkedIn post.” To Kandpal, the goal isn’t simply to see women holding 50% of leadership positions. It’s for women to feel like they can be their authentic selves in the workplace, regardless of their identities. “Each of these data points is an individual,” she said. Institutions “owe it to these people who spend their lives working really hard to make sure that they're doing justice to their talents, to their hard work, to their effort, and really enabling them to thrive, rather than sort of being constrained by societal norms, by lack of awareness, by lack of accountability.” Ultimately, the organizations that will succeed are the ones willing to grapple openly with the messiness that systemic change implies. “We put a lot of burden on those at the bottom of the base to be the change agents, with very little accountability to the top to change themselves,” Sumar said. “We need to go beyond this simplicity that if we just have more women in the workforce, or more diversity in the workforce, that that in itself is enough to change the culture.” “It can be very hard to disrupt change when there really is no mandate for change.”