Diversity and Inclusion within our organizations: why we can't achieve equity in education until we have diversity in our organizations

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Making empowerment sustainable

Proposal

Quantum Impact is on a mission to increase social impact around the world by helping implementing organizations and researchers be more diverse, inclusive and equitable. We believe that just like private sector companies see more profit if their teams are diverse and inclusive, social impact organizations (including global development organizations) will see greater impact if their teams are diverse and inclusive.

How exactly is the global development industry doing? Not so well. Through a review of over 200 global development organizations - including all of the leading education global development implementers, we found over 50% of these organization’s headquarters teams had not a single person of a color serving on their leadership teams. Additionally, 20% of organizations do not have a single women on their leadership teams, despite calls for gender equality in all the work that we do. Moreover, we found that 2 out of 3 organizations did not have gender balanced leadership teams; that 8 out of 10 organizations did not have racially or ethnically representative teams and that board composition was even worse. Finally, when we compared the drop in percentage of women and people of color at lower levels of an organization’s hierarchy compared to their executive teams, we found that the global development industry is at par with the tech industry and other industries. Our full results, analysis and supporting literature review can be found at: https://www.quantumimpact.org/2018-report/. In our presentation, we will review our research and our findings.

Why is this so important for the work that we do? In our presentation, we will discuss how the savior complex and the notion of white man’s burden underpins the core of global development work, and how global development is the successor to the larger colonial project. The composition of leadership teams – those who are making financial, resource and strategic decisions for these organizations – continue to reflect these rationale and premises. We will argue that until we directly and explicitly address these issues, global development will never be able to achieve equitable or inclusive development programs, and that we will not be able to achieve our greatest potential for development results or social change around the world.

Author

• Michelle Sandhoff, Indiana University of Pennsylvania