Investing in change: Why we must support women and gender-diverse leaders

12 April 2024

• Monica Aleman, International Program Director, Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice

When it comes to the most urgent challenges humanity faces today—from climate change to digital safety to economic inequality—effective solutions must include women and gender-diverse leaders across all areas of society. The numbers don’t lie: There are tremendous advantages to doing so, and equally large costs to bear if we don’t.

Let’s look at Sweden, an international leader in employment gender parity. Research shows that if the rest of the world’s nations increased their female employment rates to match Sweden’s, the global GDP would rise by 12% annually, up $6 trillion. But unfortunately, we don’t yet live in that world; financial inequality runs distressingly deep around the globe. Women still earn an average 23% less than men, which translates to a global loss of $160.2 trillion in human capital wealth annually. That’s a staggering amount of money not reaching workers, not supporting individuals and families, and not being put back into the economy. When we’re still over 100 years away from closing the global gender gap, and 140 years from women having equal representation in leadership positions in the workplace, it’s an incalculable loss.

Just as we cannot uplift any society or nation without acknowledging how deep financial inequality runs, we cannot hope to solve the issues plaguing our world without considering the specific ways these problems affect women—aka half the world’s population. Any strategy that considers an issue as a monolith, without evaluating its interconnected circumstances, is doomed to fail.

Fortunately, women and gender-diverse leaders are rising around the world, joining together to uplift each other and create real change. Through their collective efforts, these movements are shaping more just economic and democratic systems, but much more is needed. Delivering gender justice, and creating an environment where it can be achieved, takes all of us. One can make every economic or practical case for gender justice, but a society must be structured and stable enough to support it—and in this tumultuous era, as women experience different forms of oppression and violence, this remains a pressing challenge.

“Delivering gender justice, and creating an environment where it can be achieved, takes all of us.”

At the Ford Foundation, we believe that gender equality is the unfinished business of the 21st century, and that everyone wins when social justice leaders emphasize the needs and experiences of women and gender-diverse people. We also believe that, as a global community, we all suffer when their needs are not met. That’s why we are focusing on gender-conscious solutions in our work and considering the ramifications of gender injustice in our grantmaking. And we are also working with mindfulness of how race, gender, disability, and geography can create systems of compounded marginalization for people.

In every sector we support, from civic engagement and government to technology justice and disability rights to a just future for workers, we are incorporating strategies to end gender inequality—instead of addressing gender inequality as an afterthought. In this cross-programmatic strategy, we take our cues from many of our exceptional grantee partners and their enduring commitment to elevating the leadership of women and people of color across sectors, centering diverse gender perspectives, and more.

This approach is especially effective when institutions support women and gender-diverse leaders from the Global South. Dejusticia—a Colombian social justice research, policy, and advocacy organization—works to establish international rubrics for what constitutes effective democracy, bringing an urgently needed perspective and avoiding the status quo of Global North-led activism for the southern hemisphere. The group has reaped many benefits from restructuring its senior leadership team to integrate broader, more diverse perspectives at their top levels. This meant assessing how their expectations of educational backgrounds and professional experience could be widened to bring in more gender-diverse candidates, as well as introducing new human resources practices to facilitate the participation of women in their workforce.

These efforts paid off quickly: With this new leadership, Dejusticia was able to bring fresh gender and racial justice perspectives to their research on the impact of drug policies and incarceration in Latin America. They also expanded their policy guides for decision makers on issues with specific effects on women, including care work and climate change.

Craig Barritt / Stringer | Getty

Another such pioneer in our network is Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN), a coalition that advocates for land protections and sovereignty for over 2,000 Indigenous communities across Indonesia—more than 17 million people across 21 regional chapters. Recently, AMAN launched an ambitious leadership transition to elevate women leaders, and it was a complex process: It required adjustments of their bylaws and other organizational changes. 

The results were profound: Rukka Sombolinggi, an Indigenous Toraja, was elected AMAN’s president, marking the first time that an Indigenous woman has led this powerful and far-reaching organization. AMAN now has new might to foreground the specific needs of women and children across all of their operations, resulting in a new educational campaign that tackles discrimination against Indigenous women and girls and a fund that works to fight human rights violations toward women and girls defending their land and territories. They have also created a new women’s division that has received its own operational funding, including from Ford.

Women Enabled International, a nonprofit that works at the intersection of disability rights and women’s rights, benefitted from diversifying their leadership, too. The Washington, D.C.-based organization works internationally to center women with disabilities inside the disability rights movement, a group of people that has been historically overlooked within the larger advocacy community. The group has also sought its leadership from the Global South, which has been pivotal in expanding reproductive justice programs for women and gender-diverse people and connecting these programs with the disability rights movement. These initiatives favor a community-centric safety approach, which requires a local understanding of those communities.

Our grantees and partners also know that the best way to achieve economic equality is to trust the women and gender-diverse leaders who know how to foreground those essential perspectives. By now, it’s clear that the global pay gap directly impacts a country’s GDP and correlates to women’s independence and bodily autonomy. Being paid less prevents women from being full contributors of society. JASS, an international organization that trains women to lead feminist movements in the Global South, emphasizes gendered analysis in all their processes. This includes the research for their policy briefs, the creation and distribution of their educational and training materials for building power, releasing white papers that study feminist perspectives in coalition-building, and more.

JASS

Numun Fund, the first dedicated grantmaking organization for feminist tech, amplifies feminist perspectives on how the internet should be designed and governed. The fund works across the Global South to ensure that women in technology have access to the same opportunities as men, that women from the Global South are centered in global technology dialogues, and that policies that increase access to technology and/or mitigate harms of technology center the needs of women. 

The Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA) is a global labor and social organization led by women workers in the garment sector. The Alliance has used women-led strategies to set standards for working conditions of garment workers across global supply chains, culminating in the groundbreaking Dindigul Agreement to end gender-based violence and harassment on the shop floors producing for global fashion brands. AFWA’s historic cross-border living wage formulation for Asian garment workers is also the only women-centered formulation of its kind, and it unites gender and economic justice for decent worker wages in global supply chains.  

NurPhoto / Getty

The Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) is a network of rural women’s movements, assemblies, grassroots organizations, unions, and federations across 10 countries in the Southern Africa region. It works to convene rural women and ensure their representation in international discussions, including the United Nations’ COP conference. RWA coordinates events and meetings alongside major global events in which these women have been historically excluded.

RWA holds annual schools in African feminist strategy for rural women, farmers, and producers, both young and old. In these, speakers present theories and organizing tactics in ways that are relevant to their audiences, while also incorporating and respecting these women’s existing expertise. In doing so, RWA educates and supports new feminist leaders, ultimately working together with them to return to traditional agricultural and farming practices that will help end ecological destruction and reduce climate change.

At Ford, we know that the fight to end all forms of inequality cannot succeed if we don’t keep the rights of women and gender-diverse people at the center of our conversations. It’s why we’ve supported so many organizations with these communities at the heart of their work, and why we knew it was essential to broaden our focus and see gender as inseparable from the many other forms of inequality. This is an evolution of our long investing in gender equality, which began in 1965 under the framework of women’s rights, and informed our support of such pioneering organizations as Planned Parenthood and the Global Fund for Women before also expanding to support LGBTQ+ rights. Simultaneously, in our grantmaking, we’ve supported organizations focused on issues like education, economic empowerment, legal justice, and more—though in these areas, we didn’t always consider how these issues can dovetail with gender inequality.

“At Ford, we know that the fight to end all forms of inequality cannot succeed if we don’t keep the rights of women and gender-diverse people at the center of our conversations. ”

Today, every program team at Ford is analyzing how power and gender dynamics affect their sectors, consulting leaders in communities who know these issues best, and making these lessons integral to their grantmaking strategies. We are establishing a set of metrics across the foundation to help us monitor our progress and the impact of our gender-focused work on the most affected communities. We’re working with partners to defend gender justice movements around the world, from protecting abortion rights to supporting gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people to ending gender-based violence. 

The work to achieve gender equality is ever-changing, and requires us to be nimble; it also requires us to acknowledge when our tactics need to change. As we look to the future, we are committed to uplifting leaders around the world who are ending gender-based inequality, keeping gender at the heart of all our programs and strategies, and scrutinizing where it connects with other forms of injustice. Together, we can create a world where everyone lives in dignity and safety and realizes their fullest potential.

Related Grantees

• Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society
• The Indigenous Peoples' Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN)
• Stichting Women Win
• International Labor Rights Forum
• Trust for Community Outreach and Education
• Just Associates, Inc.
• Women Enabled International, Inc.

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Fair play: Why centering gender is the only way to end inequality

9 August 2023

• Hilary Pennington, Executive Vice President of Programs
• Jessica Horn, Director, East Africa

In 2016, five star players from the United States women’s national soccer team decided they had had enough. They were tired of a system that did not value their hard work as much as it applauded and awarded soccer when played by men. For years, in fact, the women players had been paid significantly less than their counterparts on the men’s national team—even when they scored much bigger victories, including winning the 2015 World Cup. It was time to change the game. 

In a federal equal pay complaint, the five athletes said they were always paid thousands of dollars less than their male equivalents, no matter the competition or crowd size. In March 2019, after the U.S. men’s soccer team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, 28 players from the women’s team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit over pay equity and working conditions. A federal judge dismissed parts of the lawsuit the next year, but the women’s team players ultimately secured a settlement even though U.S. Soccer was not obligated to provide one.  

In February 2022, after six years of litigation, the women finally had cause for celebration: U.S. Soccer announced that the men’s and women’s teams would be paid equally. Megan Rapinoe, the women’s team captain, called it a “huge win,” adding, “We are really in the midst of an incredible turning point in women’s sport.”

We celebrated this victory off the field and hoped it would create a ripple effect beyond athletics. After all, a growing body of research shows that everyone wins when we advance women’s rights, and a recent global study shows that both men and women are likely to live longer when a country makes strides toward gender equality.

Getty

Closing the gender pay gap in sports—and every other sector—is a powerful step forward. At the same time, we know it is just the beginning of a long, bumpy road toward solving inequality. No single measure will undo gender-based discrimination, which has more heads than Hydra. Pay parity in sports will not, for example, change the fact that gender stereotypes discourage girls from pursuing physical activity so that by the time they are teenagers, many decide that they don’t “belong” in sports. It will not change that there are double standards about sports uniforms as was evident when the Norwegian women’s beach handball team was fined after refusing to wear bikini bottoms while a Welsh Paralympian was told that her briefs were “too short and inappropriate.” It will not change that Black athletes like Serena Williams have endured horrific racism on the court nor will it prevent the media and international sports institutions from publicly subjecting athletes to invasive questions about their sex and gender, as was the case with champion runner Caster Semenya.

We believe gender equality is the unfinished business of the 21st century. The fight for equality is at a critical moment, with issues of gender at its core. We can no longer afford to look at gender in isolation when it’s actually woven into every aspect of inequality. The individuals and organizations we support at the Ford Foundation are making that all the more evident, emphasizing identity in their work and showing us that when it comes to social justice, no challenge is gender-neutral. If we really want to end inequality, we have to recognize that it is not created equal: Specific identities—with regard to race, religion, class, and disability—experience compounded oppression. We know, for example, that while many trans people fear for their safety, Black trans women in the U.S. are exponentially more vulnerable to violence. At the global level, women and girls with disabilities experience ten times more violence than those without disabilities. When compared to both men with disabilities and women without disabilities, women with disabilities are disproportionately excluded from the legal systems meant to protect them. 

The good news is that there is a solution. When we focus on gender-competent solutions in our programs and policies, we get at the root causes of inequality. Leading with gender early and upfront is more impactful than the status quo, which addresses gender inequality as an afterthought. 

Here at Ford, we haven’t always gotten this right, even though we’ve been investing in gender equality for almost 60 years. When we began this work in 1965, it was under the framework of women’s rights, which then expanded to LGBTQ+ rights. We funded instrumental players, from Planned Parenthood to Global Fund for Women. In 1975, we awarded future Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathaai with a travel grant to attend the first United Nations Women’s Conference in Copenhagen. Five years later, we supported the groundbreaking Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi, which affirmed that gender equality is integral to global peace and development. We’ve supported organizations focused on issues like education, economic empowerment, legal justice, and reproductive rights, but we didn’t always connect these issues to the root challenges of inequality. In 2015, when we shared our revised thinking and proposed integrating historically excluded populations into our programmatic work, rather than maintaining standalone programs, a number of our feminist colleagues were so incensed, they walked out of the room. They believed a mainstreaming approach would fall flat without a gendered analysis of power dynamics, accountability measures, and dedicated funds for intersectional gender work. They were right. 

We might, for example, resolve something concrete like pay inequity, but that wouldn’t change the patriarchal systems and culture that allowed it to happen in the first place. We needed to fully understand how gender shapes power—who has it and how it is wielded in public systems, the private sector, and domestic spheres—to consistently disadvantage women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people. These systems are, after all, the real foundation of discrimination, oppression, and violence.

Today, every single program team at the foundation is analyzing how power and gender dynamics play a role in their work and embedding those lessons in their strategies and grantmaking. And we are establishing a set of metrics that will help us monitor our progress and ensure the center holds so that our work can continue. Last but not least, we are putting our resources behind the rhetoric, with dedicated staff and funding at the team and institutional levels.

So what, exactly, does centering gender look like at Ford today? 

It’s spotlighting how large-scale extractives projects disproportionately affect women and girls in the Global South. This year, our grantee partner The SAGE Fund released “Building Power in Crisis: Women’s Responses to Extractivism,” a landscape analysis that documents how women and girls are affected by large-scale mining, drilling, and industrial agricultural production that is conducted without their consent. They experience increased caretaking responsibilities and struggle to grow crops on depleted land. They are subjected to extreme sexual violence and are targeted when they question or protest projects. Their reproductive and respiratory health suffer. And yet, despite such injustices, women in these regions are becoming powerful agents of change, building collaborative, autonomous communities where power is shared equally.

“Today, every single program team at the foundation is analyzing how power and gender dynamics play a role in their work and embedding those lessons in their strategies and grantmaking.”

Centering gender also means building blueprints to fix broken economic systems. In the United States, this means understanding that economic justice is inextricably tied to the care economy, a field dominated by women, people of color, and immigrants who are often unpaid or poorly compensated. Whether they take care of children, the elderly, or people with disabilities, caregivers make all other work possible and yet their labor is invisible and undervalued. 

This is why Ford came together with seven other funders to create the Care for All with Respect and Equity (CARE) Fund, a $50 million, multi-year investment to support a new care infrastructure of paid leave, publicly financed child care and early education, long-term services and support for older adults and people with disabilities, and high-quality jobs for all care workers.

It also means supporting individuals and institutions. Globally, we are resourcing feminist economists from NAWI Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective. These African women leaders are mobilizing women workers to claim their rights in labor markets that support national and global economies. Similarly, we support critical ecosystem-changing campaigns that produce protections for workers creating items we all use. Our grantee partners Asia Floor Wage Alliance and Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum led the Justice for Jeyasre campaign, which was launched following the sexual harassment and murder of garment manufacturing worker Jeyasre Kathiravel in Tamil Nadu, India. In April 2022, the campaign resulted in the groundbreaking Dindigul Agreement to Eliminate Gender-Based Violence and Harassment, which protects 5,000 garment workers and serves as a model for industry-wide change.    

“When we center gender, we disrupt dehumanizing forms of power and privilege and deepen our ability—individually and collectively—to advance justice.”

As we center gender across all of our programs, we are also working with partners to support a global gender justice movement that is under fierce attack. There is great urgency to this work. In just the past year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to abortion that was enshrined 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, making a decision that has had devastating results. At the international level, a highly funded “anti-gender” movement is advancing punitive legislation against LGBTQ+ people and curtailing reproductive freedoms in the Global South. Gender-based violence is currently at epidemic levels. Each day seems to bring new threats to bodily autonomy, from pregnant people forced into childbirth to transgender people who are denied medical treatments or subject to violent attacks. Fortunately, there are many opportunities to support visionary leaders who are working, day in and day out, to fight for reproductive justice and ensure that it is inclusive, intersectional, and does not leave anyone behind. 

We are on a new journey here at Ford, and we are likely to make some wrong turns along the way. We promise to be candid about when this happens, but we do not want to miss this moment. Now is the time to bring creativity, agile thinking, diverse voices, and tactical wisdom to a long-overdue and much-needed conversation. We are inspired by the words of activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who famously said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Today, we know that freedom for everyone requires gender equality. When we center gender, we disrupt dehumanizing forms of power and privilege and deepen our ability—individually and collectively—to advance justice. By reclaiming and exercising that power, we can see the connections we share and help all people—especially those who are multiply marginalized—live a life of dignity and agency.

Related Grantees

• International Planned Parenthood Federation-Worldwide, Inc.
• The Global Fund for Women
• Jobs with Justice Education Fund
• Tax Justice Network Africa Limited

More on Centering Gender

Stories 09 Aug. 2023

Fair play: Why centering gender is the only way to end inequality

Stories 14 June 2022

What the evolution of gender can teach us about equality

Stories 04 March 2020

The Unfinished Business of Gender Equality

Stories 17 Aug. 2017

What happened to the American Dream? Q&A with “Happiness for All” author Carol Graham

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