Lost in Translation: Mapping Policymaker Assumptions and Knowledge Gaps

Our research uncovered assumptions that many policymakers hold around common WPS approaches, ideas, definitions, words, and phrases. If we want our messages to sink in, we’ll need to better acknowledge the worldviews, frames, and assumptions that these policymakers hold which guide their thinking.

1. Gender = Women. Although “gender” refers to the challenges that all genders face based on norms and biased systems and laws that may constrain their choices or limit their opportunities, policymakers have a tendency to reflexively think that when we say “gender” we’re talking only about women.
2. “Women, peace, and security — say what?” The overwhelming majority of U.S. policymakers and elites are not familiar with WPS; when they encounter the phrase for the first time, they found it a “confusing triad.” Women and men alike heard echoes of sexism or offensive essentialism, because they perceived it labeling women as the more virtuous and peaceful gender.
3. “Add women and stir” is a recipe for success. If you include a woman at the decisionmaking table, women’s perspectives are covered. Box checked, game over. Unfortunately, not only is this not always true, the theory of critical mass holds that underrepresented groups may be less likely to bring up their perspectives when they are the “token” member of a decisionmaking body. Relatedly, many respondents conflated two separate ideas: gender representation across decisionmaking bodies with gendered impacts of policies.
4. The “gender person” has no power. When national security discussions did include someone who represented gender issues, policymakers reported perceiving the representatives as powerless—or in the room only as a PR gesture—and thus easily ignored.
5. Gender is really only relevant to a handful of subjects. Policymakers saw the relevance of gender-differentiated impacts to explicitly gendered policy concerns such as sex trafficking, sexual violence, and sex slavery in ISIS. They perceived a connection between gender equality and stability but couldn’t point to any supporting data or research. Strong majorities felt that gender was not relevant to subjects like economics and trade or missile defense.
6. Gender-blindness is a virtue. The idea that considering gender is akin to  introducing prejudice or bias persists strongly among national security professionals, particularly men. Many insisted that they see the person, not the gender, and that a focus on gender would displace this meritocratic model—or equate to “social engineering” in other societies.
7. Women are just another special interest group. By extension, if we consider policies through a “gender lens,” we risk encouraging resentment from other communities, exacerbating tensions in an inclusivity battlefield. “It becomes a heated debate when you start talking about parsing which communities are worse off, or most negatively impacted by policy,” a respondent with background in both security and human rights told us. “Subsets of a population can end up having outsized influence on policy, and when we don’t have the resources to help everyone, which is basically always, it’s a shitty job to decide who gets the food, the shelter, the protection.”
8. “This stuff is important, but it’s not my job.” Many people in the field thought that looking for data to substantiate why considering gender could affect policy outcomes or incorporating it into existing frameworks was more the domain of people who worked in USAID. They had a vague understanding that such data existed, but weren’t sure where to begin looking for such research and metrics.
9. This too shall pass. Most of the problems related to representation of women across the security apparatus endure because of generational and demographic issues that will eventually shift—in other words, we’ll eventually see fewer older white men in power, and an infusion of people from currently underrepresented groups. Many policymakers emphasized the role of people over systems in changing this reality, downplaying structural barriers that could attract or repel people into security roles over the next few decades.

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