Source: IRIN
When long-time humanitarian Margie Buchanan-Smith was interviewed for one of her first field posts - in Sudan in the 1980s - she was asked: “Will you burst out crying when you arrive?” “No,” she replied - and got the job. But when she arrived she was one of few women on the ground, and was always questioned if she was up to it.
Things have moved on since then: There are thousands of women working at all levels of the humanitarian sector, but when it comes to the top positions, at least in Western international NGOs and particularly in the field, staff are too often white and male, said humanitarian leaders IRIN spoke to, and a 2011 ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action) study on humanitarian leadership.

IRIN spoke to NGO staff whose headquarters were respectively in the UK, Johannesburg and Geneva, as well as to staff at headquarters in the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

Proactive schemes to diversify leadership help, say practitioners, but do not tackle the heart of the problem: a workaholic culture that is not conducive to families, and in some cases, latent discrimination against national staff and women.

Gender parity in leadership at the field and HQ levels is a long way off, but NGO headquarters tend to be better at it. When it comes to national staff leadership, UN agencies perform better than NGOs, according to individual agencies and ALNAP.

Among UN agencies and international NGOs, some do better on gender parity than others. Oxfam GB and Care International’s humanitarian management lines are all-female; 41 and 43 percent of UNICEF’s and ActionAid’s senior staff, respectively, are women; and four of ActionAid’s six directors are female. Statistics on national staff who have made it to top positions in the humanitarian sector are not available, but according to interviewees, are low outside the UN.

Benefits of diversity

Literature outside of the humanitarian sector shows diverse teams are more creative and better at problem-solving. “That would logically transfer to the humanitarian situation - the more diverse you are, the more likely you are to come up with a workable solution,” said Kim Scriven, co-author of the ALNAP report.

According to Margie Buchanan-Smith, the report’s principal author, diverse team members will bring different perspectives, approaches - even values - into the work, which is suitable in the humanitarian environment where agencies have to work together or alongside such diverse actors, from local communities to recipient governments to the military.

As CARE International’s senior gender in emergencies specialist Mireia Cano Vinas put it: “When we do emergency assessments we separate focus groups into men and women as they… bring different issues forward. The same applies to senior leadership.”

Susan Nicolai, who has worked in emergency response for 12 years and is deputy coordinator of the global education cluster, working for Save the Children, hypothesized whether historic male leadership may also have sidelined some response sectors - notably protection and education - which are female-dominated, and consistently severely under-funded in Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) appeals.

Unconscious discrimination

The reasons why women and national staff are under-represented in leadership roles remain hypothetical: As yet, no official studies have been undertaken. Given this, interviewees identified two major problems: latent discrimination and the humanitarian work culture.

Discrimination is not deliberate, stressed Buchanan-Smith. Rather, where it is present, it is “unconscious and implicit”. It may emerge in indirect ways, such as what qualities agencies prioritize when hiring staff. A national field staffer who is excellent at dealing with local communities, negotiating access, and setting up programmes, may not move up because he or she lacks strong written English, which may be prioritized by head office.

People can make discriminatory assumptions, and have prejudices, about the priorities, experience and abilities of national staff, notes ALNAP. Those national staff and women who do become leaders often have had to work harder than their internationally-recruited counterparts to establish credibility. A Senegalese humanitarian worker with 10 years of international experience in NGOs and UN agencies, told IRIN: “It is very difficult to move from a local to an international position because there is a lot of internal resistance to it… Agencies do not necessarily put in the time and effort to train them in international systems, and they are not open to it.”

 

Diversity in statistics:
	OCHA: Some 31 percent of OCHA’s senior positions (P4 and P5 grades) are held by women; 34 percent of P5s are women. Three out of five of its most senior positions are held by women, including the head, Valerie Amos. “That is a good start in terms of setting the standard, there is of course much to do at all levels… we don’t need more gender policies, we need more commitment to implement them,” says John Ging, director of operations at OCHA.
	UNICEF: About 30 percent of recruitment is for emergency positions. In the top 10 countries where fast-tracking staff and recruitment are a priority, 41 percent of international emergency roles are held by women; one third of these are at the highest leadership level. However, most of those applying for such roles are men. “For those [women] who have spent a long time in the field, you have options - whether it is your family situation that’s changed, or you’re just tired of hardship duty stations… We often see more women in leadership positions at headquarters, or in family duty stations,” says Bintou Keita, deputy director of customer relationships and human resource effectiveness at UNICEF.
	WFP: As of August 2011, 37 percent of the 388 people at senior or mid-management levels were women, with an equal split between field and head office positions. The agency has a gender parity policy.
	CARE International: In Europe and the US there are more humanitarian female staff than male; but women rarely dominate senior management teams or at board level, with the exceptions of Austria and Denmark. Peru, Canada and Thailand have a 50:50 gender split in senior management teams. Everywhere else, women are in the minority.
	ActionAid: The NGO has a “federation” model: Each office is set up as a national entity, run by a national and with a board with 50 percent gender targets, and a diversity target that should reflect the population make-up in each country. Diversity is reviewed and reported on annually. “Our approach means we’ve got a head-start on some other organizations,” says Judith Davey, director of performance and accountability at ActionAid.