Part 3: Looking Ahead

The disconnect between gender and security policy illuminated in our 2016 research still exists. But policymakers are newly open to changing the status quo, across gender, ideological, and generational divides.

We propose three practices that have application in and out of government, in military and civilian environments, for think tanks, advocacy organizations, philanthropy and journalism—in some case, practices already adopted in the private sector (such as the ban on employee participation in all-male panels adopted by media organizations Bloomberg and the Financial Times.)

1) Model what we want to accomplish through setting best practices, sponsorship and mentorship.

The data are increasingly clear that diversity practices and gender analysis do not get adopted from the bottom up. As General (Ret.) Janet Wolfenbarger, the head of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services and first American woman to gain four-star rank, told the Halifax Security Forum in November 2018, "in order to make real progress, the change has to be emulated at the senior-most levels within your organization, at which point you can hold accountable all the subordinate levels."

Leaders also need to attend to questions of organizational culture and practice, from promotions to public speaking. Large organizations in the national security space have begun to publish their own diversity statistics. The federal government—or Congress, if the Trump administration is unwilling—should return to the practice begun by the Obama administration of publishing diversity statistics.

Our research highlights the critical role played by mentors in advancing national security careers. Leaders can encourage mentoring for women through formal programming. Research suggests that the most effective mentoring is a sponsorship characterized by a mutually beneficial exchange between a sponsor and a protege: The sponsor looks out for career opportunities for her protege, gives her stretch assignments and promotes her work, and the protege is a dependable asset for her sponsor’s agenda and ideas.

Leaders should encourage, and younger women should seize, opportunities presented by organizations like Foreign Policy Interrupted, the OpEd Project, Women in International Security, or Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security. Those organizations, for their part, could do much more to disseminate international best practices and social science around gender analysis.

2) Build datasets that will allow gender-differentiated assessments, and build policy processes that reward their use.

Policymakers repeatedly said they seek out “all available information and intelligence” in developing policy options and were open to data on gender impacts, yet didn’t know where to look for metrics. Case in point: “The amount that goes into policy options papers, the amount of research, [is] usually turned around in weeks or a week or a day and they have appendices,” one policymaker said. “You pull together anything you can get your hands on.” Gender lens advocates both in and out of government should focus on developing such data, along with training and best practices for using it. Several dynamic repositories of gender-differentiated research and data already exist, from Professor Valerie Hudson’s Womenstats, to CFR’s interactive gender research, or the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law, just to name a few.

Building the datasets isn’t enough, however. Policymakers and academics have an immense responsibility to teach next generations to seek it out and use it. As New America has found in prior studies, currently that isn’t happening—new cohorts of public policy graduates are emerging just as ignorant of gender theory as their predecessors.

In addition, it’s time to think about building a gender lens into reporting and clearance processes. USAID’s experience in this area during the Obama years should be studied for its relevance to other agencies. If the current interagency policy process is unable to support reform of this kind, individual leaders can make a point of building it into their own clearance processes. Congress, moreover, can make a point of including a requirement for analysis of differential impacts on people of different genders into its many reporting requirements and hearing questions.

3) Rethink jargon. Instead, tell stories and connect them to data.

Data is great, especially when it’s paired with narrative: Research shows that people tend to remember arguments and ideas better when they are integrated into a story—preferably one about a person. Organizations like Peace is Loud and the Fuller Project are doing work to translate gender and security research into compelling narratives. Much remains to be done to shift the way major media organizations tell stories about national security, where narratives are gendered male, and women are all too often either invisible or victims.