As mind-boggling world events dominated headlines last summer, an impressive number of women reported first-hand from various hot spots. Sabrina Tavernise arrived on the scene of downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine even as the plane still burned. Alissa Rubin escaped death in a helicopter crash in Iraq. Anne Barnard delivered harrowing dispatches from Gaza. And yet, when it came time for round table analysis, grey suits continued to deluge the discussion.
The male talk fest isn’t just anecdotal. The Washington Post recently noted that in more than 150 events hosted by six Washington think tanks there wasn’t a single female speaker.
Over the past couple years, much ink has been spilled on how women need to speak up and “lean in.” Much of the conversation has focused on media representation — a still volatile battleground for gender parity. According to the Op-Ed Project, in 2011, women authored only 19 percent of op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, 22 percent in the New York Times and 24 percent in the Los Angeles Times. Another way to look at the status quo: a woman over 65 is less likely to be cited as an expert in the media as a boy in the 13 to 18 age group. A report by the Women’s Media Center found that on the front page of The New York Times, men were quoted three times more often than women.
In collaboration with Media Matters for America, we conducted an analysis of foreign policy guests on major news programs. The results read like a time capsule from the 1950s: In 2014, women made up just 22 percent of guests. Of trained experts networks call upon, they are even less than that. If you see a woman on cable news talking about foreign affairs or national security, she’s likely a reporter or news personality, not a trained expert or a diplomat.
How is this possible in 2015?
Brilliant female foreign policy minds exist in spades — it’s just a matter of how we get them on the op-ed page and on television talking about their expertise on a level equal to men. The stakes are high, not only for gender parity, but for our perceptions of the world.
But enough hand wringing. It’s high time we move beyond the social media echo chambers to combat this disparity. Acknowledgement and awareness of gender inequity is key, but we must leverage this conversational momentum into results.
Both internal and external barriers are at the crux of this disparity. As two women foreign policy practitioners, we started Foreign Policy Interrupted last year to combat both bottom-up and top-down inertia.
Externally, news bookers, editors, and producers face the pressures of keeping up with the 24/7 news cycle. So when it comes time to getting an expert’s opinion on breaking news, they fall back on whom they know. Unfortunately, that’s usually a long list of white men.
Internally, women need to own their own expertise. Studies show that women hold themselves to a higher threshold of certainty before they offer an opinion. The Confidence Code explores how self-doubt is holding women back. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In calls women’s self-doubt “imposter syndrome.” In another study, women applied for a promotion only when they met 100 percent of the qualifications. Men applied when they met 50 percent.
To make a solutions-based approach more complicated, this confidence gap doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti writes, if women aren’t insecure, they’re just not paying attention: women’s lack of confidence could be “just a keen understanding” of how little society values them.
The solution then must simultaneously include empowering women and connecting them to power. Women need a network that they can access and rely on just as easily as do men.
In order to fully manifest that environment, we need men to help redefine and remake the landscape. The dominance of men in boardrooms, politics and media is an opportunity to “change the ratio.” Foreign Policy magazine CEO and Editor David Rothkopf is doing so by seeking more female writers but also pledging not to appear on panels that don’t include any women.
To wit, foreign policy, and media representation in general, needs to be disrupted beyond the gender fault-line — ethnically, racially and geographically. That’s not just for diversity’s sake. U.S. foreign policy has become increasingly complex and multi-disciplinary. We need a conversation that reflects the nuance of our modern age. When you incubate diverse voices, you incubate diverse ideas and diverse approaches to foreign policy challenges — and ultimately cultivate more opportunities for solutions.
The best-case scenario is that, in a number of years, initiatives like Foreign Policy Interrupted won’t exist. That women will not only lean in, but that they’ll lean in to a conversation that values them.
Elmira Bayrasli is a visiting fellow at New America. Lauren Bohn is The GroundTruth Project’s Middle East correspondent. They are founders of Foreign Policy Interrupted.