When it comes to recognition and a sense of belonging I am incredibly privileged to work in the organization that I do. Not only do we say we are egalitarian, my assessment would be that we do a fairly good job of modelling this. Five of our eight departments are lead by women, our leadership team is equally male and female, and our staff team is made up of slightly more women than men. This could be due to working in a Christian missions organization and Christian women being generally more religious than Christian men (Pew Research Center, 2016). We also have a department specifically committed to empowering women and creating dignifying opportunities for them. However, as the Catalyst report said, diversity does not equal inclusion (Nugent, Pollack & Travis, 2016, pp. 5 & 12) and there is always room for growth and improvement.

One way that I could foster recognition and a sense of belonging for women in my organization is by having staff share about experiences when they felt included and when they felt excluded, discuss these experiences, and then use these experiences to help form a common vision of inclusion (Nugent et al., 2016, p. 7). Based on the results of this exercise, we could then begin to adjust necessary areas to make all staff feel more included. We could also begin to offer additional ways for staff to give feedback. Our method of feedback is fairly exclusive to a large group context. Staff can always arrange a private meeting with a leader to offer feedback, however, perhaps if we offered a more regular method of feedback we would receive more honest feedback from staff who do not feel comfortable speaking up in a group setting.

Beyond my location, the organization I work for is international. Although I see a lot of women in leadership at my local level, I have often not seen many women in leadership on a national, or international level. I know that in some instances there has been an effort to get more women involved in these levels, but they have turned down the offer. Some potential reasons for this could be due to the amount of travel required, lack of childcare options provided for women who are mothers, or it could be due to an implicit theological bias against women in high levels of leadership regardless of the organization explicitly valuing women in leadership. A good first step in developing inclusivity on a national level could be collecting data about why women who have been offered these leadership positions have turned them down and then revamp the positions to make them more inclusive (Nugent et al., 2016, p. 11). A second step could be dialoguing with leaders about the lack of women in these positions because “talk leads to action” (Catalyst, 2013). A third step could be having the current leaders take a test like the Implicit Association Test offered by Harvard University so that they are able to be ethical leaders who are honest with themselves and open with others (Northouse, 2016, p. 346) if an implicit bias does exist.

References:

Catalyst. (2013, September 3). Talk Leads to Action [Infographic]. Retrieved from https://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/talk-leads-action

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice, Seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Nugent, J. S., Pollack, A., & Travis, D. J. (2016). The day to day experiences of workplace inclusion and exclusion. Retrieved from http://www.catalyst.org/system/files/the_day_to_day_experiences_of_workplace_inclusion_and_exclusion.pdf

Pew Research Center. (2016). The gender gap in religion around the world: Women are generally more religious than men, particularly among Christians. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/03/Religion-and-Gender-Full-Report.pdf