GenderAvenger established the GA Futures Project in June 2019 to build vision, set out strategies, and implement tactics for the organization's long-term leadership in achieving gender equity in the public square. The Futures Project set out an underlying audacious and ambitious, but potentially achievable ,aim of gender parity by the year 2025, and it set forth a series of pathways to arrive at the goal. Here, Lina Srivastava, Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the GA Futures Project, reflects on her time leading the initiative.

photo credit: Miguel Bruna, via Unsplash

I often think about power. As someone who advocates for human rights, I think about it in terms of political power — and its other forms, such as economic, narrative, and decision-making power — and I find myself in discussions about who holds power and who doesn't. These days in particular, when the world finds itself confronting so many crises simultaneously and the US is in a state of near-collapse, I spend much of my time thinking about how we should shift power to unusual suspects and the unheard in order to move toward equality and justice.

Over the past year, I had the chance to take a deep dive into exploring questions of power, access, and voice specifically regarding women and underrepresented genders*, by serving as the 2019–2020 Entrepreneur-in-Residence of the GenderAvenger Futures Project.

I went into the role to contribute to the organization's mission and its growth. What I didn’t anticipate is how much I would learn not only about voice and visibility as drivers of power, but also about myself and my own career.

The position was exciting in and of itself. GenderAvenger is a small, lean, incredibly effective organization that has had documented success in using data to highlight how wide and endemic gender imbalance is in the public dialog. It has built a community and a set of tools to ensure that people who identify as women are represented in the public square, and it has grown over time to address its understanding of race and gender. What drew me to work with GenderAvenger was not only this structure and impact, though. It was the organization’s foresight in establishing a Futures Project. How many other small nonprofits have the dynamism to establish an innovation unit or a futures project within their core business model?

“Of the many structural obstacles to women’s career advancement and recognition of our leadership, the persistent feeling of being unheard is a slow drip of erasure. We are in a battle to be heard.”

Essentially, my mandate in leading the Futures Project was to reimagine the future of gender representation in the public square and to create a strategy for how GenderAvenger would facilitate global efforts to reach that audacious goal by 2025. The key was to find the paths to the future while using the organization’s existing tools and methods to build that path. To do so, we used an iterative design approach grounded in listening and research, through interviews, salons, brain trusts, and strategic planning sessions with over 100 people. In synthesizing the results of this deep listening practice, we uncovered the pathways people believe will get us to greater gender parity, including:

increasing education on the issue of gender parity and equity;
increased focus on data and accountability;
building pipelines; and
bringing a justice and equity frame to diversity and inclusion efforts.

The learning opportunity from this work was immense. Before I started working with GenderAvenger, I had a vague idea about how important it was to be visible. I certainly complained about it a lot. Every time I saw an all-male panel, every time I was asked to be a token speaker, every time a man’s voice was prized over anyone else’s, I had something to say about it. And I did, repeatedly.

Fighting to have our voices represented takes up so much of our time. Women are not seeing ourselves represented on stage or in the media. Our absence is too often ascribed or relegated to “impostor syndrome,” but there is a difference between not believing in yourself and knowing the system doesn’t support you. Of the many structural obstacles to women’s career advancement and recognition of our leadership, the persistent feeling of being unheard is a slow drip of erasure. We are in a battle to be heard.

photo credit: Brianna Santellan, via Unsplash

Working with GenderAvenger taught me how integral voice and representation are to justice. While simply being allowed to show up isn’t itself power or equity, we need to elevate voice and representation as drivers of both. This is not a “nice to have” side task. This work is lifelong and systemic. Visibility in the public square is an entry point to shift the balance of power toward gender equity, and we need to address this not just as individuals, but significantly through a community effort.

Working with the Futures Project allowed me to apply all my language, tools, and perspectives from my work in human rights to gender equity and to apply an innovation frame to questions of gender and power. Through this work, we pushed the discussion on gender representation forward for all women. It further deepened my understanding of how visibility and voice are important to me as a woman professional (and especially as a woman of color), and I became a better advocate for women and for myself.

“Any gains we have made in the past regarding women’s voice, agency, and economic and civic participation are at risk of reversing. We will not succeed if we are not listening to women.”

In our current situation — from the pandemic to global uprisings to the state of the US election, which all together is starting to look like a Margaret Atwood novel — we are witnessing the effects of persistent inequalities, including gender representation. As a society, we can’t afford to backslide. Any gains we have made in the past regarding women’s voice, agency, and economic and civic participation are at risk of reversing. We will not succeed if we are not listening to women. We need all hands on deck, all stories from those who are most deeply affected, and all ideas for solutions and progress.

We must act to make sure we are heard. If we keep efforts alive to address gender parity strategically and proactively, we can build towards equity and power.

It's never been more urgent to plan how we want to build our future. And at a time such as the one we are currently facing geopolitically, the ability to do work that is forward-looking and concerned with building a better future, and that holds a sense of joy, optimism, and simplicity, is a gift.

* GenderAvenger affirms that trans women are women

Building Future Paths to Women's Power

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