NEW YORK (Press Release) — Addressing five causes can make significant progress in closing the persistent and large gender gap among CEOs at Jewish nonprofit organizations, finds a new report released by Leading Edge, which works to influence and inspire dramatic change in how Jewish organizations attract, develop, and retain top talent.
Conducted in partnership with The Starfish Institute, The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View is the culmination of an ambitious 18-month process that engaged over 1,200 individuals, included a crowdsourced computer game, involved a structural network analysis, and more to uncover the causes of the gender gap in leadership at Jewish organizations.
Qualitative research into people’s experiences and expertise in the Jewish nonprofit sector identified 71 causes for the significant underrepresentation of women in CEO positions. Quantitative network analysis then revealed that five of these are “keystones”—causes with the most potential to make an outsized impact across the entire Jewish organizational landscape. These keystones have broad reach, affecting many other issues but influenced themselves by few other issues. This combination of attributes makes the keystones relatively less complex to solve and means that solving them would have a large ripple effect on the other causes.
The Five Keystones:
1. Cause: Boards, funders, and others in power don’t always hold Jewish organizations accountable for addressing the diversity of their top leadership.
Opportunity: These powerful stakeholders can hold Jewish organizations accountable and incentivize them to elevate diverse leadership teams.
2. Cause: Many Jewish organizations have no talent strategy for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Opportunity: Jewish nonprofit organizations can implement talent strategies to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
3. Cause: Some members of search committees and boards hold biases about what makes a qualified leader.
Opportunity: Search committees, and the boards that appoint them, can implement processes to ensure that the work of the search committee is professional, equitable, and fair and that the most qualified candidate is chosen for the role.
4. Cause: There is a perception that you cannot be both a top leader and a primary caregiver.
Opportunity: Community members can work actively to shift our cultural assumptions about the capacity to be a leader and a primary caregiver at the same time.
5. Cause: Not enough men speak out about or prioritize addressing the gender gap in top leadership.
Opportunity: Institutions can give men the knowledge, support, and incentives to speak out and address the gender gap in leadership (and DEI more broadly).
“The persistent leadership gender gap means that we are not leveraging the talent, experience, and perspective of all the leaders in our community,” says Gali Cooks, President & CEO of Leading Edge. “We’ve long known that, in our sector and beyond, but now we have a much more specific map for how to change it. This exploration builds on so much great work that has already been done by others, but what’s new is that it identifies five clear priorities that can move our field toward the ultimate goal of gender equity. Achieving that long-term goal will take partnership and creativity from a lot of different people and institutions, so let the conversation and debate about those efforts begin.”
Over the coming year, Leading Edge and partners will convene discussions, launch pilots, and release further resources with more detailed recommendations and explorations. These efforts will build on “first steps” and examples of success detailed in the report, connected to each opportunity.
“By mapping the reasons for the gender gap like an ecosystem, this analysis gives the field important new knowledge for remedying this problem,” says Jill Smith, a senior adviser to the chairman and prize committee member at the Genesis Prize Foundation. “Whether someone is a funder, board member, CEO, or other member of the community, the findings show numerous ways to create change.” The Genesis Prize Foundation is a supporter of this project, along with the SRE Network, Jim Joseph Foundation, and The Donald and Carole Chaiken Foundation.
While there has been incremental progress in closing the gender gap in recent years, longstanding problems persist. Most people working at Jewish nonprofits are women but most CEOs of Jewish organizations are men, and the gap is especially stark in the organizations with the highest budgets and largest staff sizes. Almost two thirds of JCC top executives are men. Out of 17 Federations serving large metropolitan areas, 16 top executives are men. The COVID-19 pandemic may make the picture even worse, as nearly half a million more women than men left the workforce during the pandemic, and women’s labor force participation has dropped to levels not seen since 1988.
About the research process
In this exploration, Leading Edge partnered with The Starfish Institute, an organization that has developed a methodology for applying network science to understanding complex social problems at a systemic level. That approach is laid out in “Ending Teacher Shortages with Network Mapping,” an article by Talia Milgrom-Elcott and Eric L. Berlow in Stanford Social Innovation Review. They first applied this method to better understanding the challenges of building the K-12 STEM teacher pipeline and have since also partnered with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, AARP, Dell, and Johnson-Johnson to map different challenges and uncover opportunities.
Together, over the course of 18 months, Leading Edge and The Starfish Institute engaged over 1,200 people to define as many distinct causes of the persistent gender gap in top leadership at Jewish nonprofit organizations as we could identify. They then mapped how those causes likely interact with one another as an ecosystem. The process included reviewing relevant literature, conducting in-depth expert interviews, convening half-day workshops and peer-led listening sessions, fielding surveys, a crowd-sourced computer game, uncovering positive deviants (bright spots where things are going well), and more. To understand this research process in detail, see this document for a full explanation of the methodology.
Qualitative research into people’s experiences and expertise helped Leading Edge posit 71 causes of the gender gap in top Jewish leadership; quantitative network analysis suggested five “keystones” among them. “Keystone” is a technical term, short for “keystone species.” The Starfish Institute borrows this term from the science of ecology, in which “a keystone species is an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem. Without its keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether.” (National Geographic.) In the ecosystem of factors mapped in this research, keystones are factors that have high “reach,” which means they affect many other issues, and high “leverage,” which means they are influenced by few others. Solving them may be difficult, but doing so could create a large ripple effect on other causes of the problem.
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Preceding provided by Leading Edge