 Thank you very much and good morning. My eyes were opened to this field of women peace and security six years ago when I attended a military joint women's leadership symposium and listened to the ambassador at large for global women's issues, share a story about the critical role of Haitian women during humanitarian assistance efforts following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. I remember learning that if relief workers excluded women and only gave the men food and first aid items intended to be on behalf of the entire family, the men tended to hoard the items for themselves and not share with the family. When women were included in the process, children no longer starved or needlessly suffered from injuries and the entire family prospered. That message was so powerful to me that I immediately became perceptive to watching and learning more about how everyone, families, communities, workplaces, and countries can benefit from women's involvement. Shortly after that conference I moved to Washington DC and became the aid for a three-star female admiral. If my eyes weren't already opened to gender related issues, both from my own personal experiences and from discussions at female leadership conferences, then they were definitely open in that job. Having the experience of being a female aid to a female admiral prompted me to research and explore the topic I'm going to share with you today, the unconscious gender bias. Prior to that job, I had been aware of the prevalence of unconscious, hidden, implicit thoughts and actions against females. Like when I'd call a hotel to make lodging reservations for my admiral and the receptionist would ask for his name. And I realized the same concept applies in the corporate world with people associating the male gender to titles such as boss, doctor, CEO. Or like when I would see sailors not giving my admiral the same military courtesies and respect that they would afford male admirals, like not addressing her as ma'am, but yet addressing a male admiral as serf. But before I continue with more specific examples of this unconscious behavior, let me set the foundation for my remarks. Both corporate America and the military have realized that diversity is a defining attribute of a successful organization and that what began as an ethical effort to curb discrimination has led to a key talent management tool which allows businesses to flourish. Organizations across all domains have reshaped, redefined, and published diversity policies to set the tone and advance the belief that creating diverse, inclusive environments is critical to mission success and organizational growth. In fact, just two weeks ago, Admiral Harley, the president of the Naval War College, promulgated his diversity way ahead, communicating that a more diverse and robust workforce whose academic rigor, intellectual capacity, and broad experience base will challenge our students to enhance their critical thinking skills and expand their perspectives. I submit, however, that despite best efforts, there's still a barrier to achieving full diversity efforts, especially in gender, and this is the unconscious gender bias which causes people to inadvertently favor one demographic, males in this case, over another demographic, females. Moving the WPS agenda forward in the next decade, it's a strategic imperative for leaders, both civilian and military, to confront this unconscious gender bias barrier in order to maintain a high quality, diverse workforce where women can thrive and maximize their full potential. Today, I will quickly explain the psychology behind the unconscious gender bias and describe their consequences and limitations, and then I'll more fully offer effective resolutions to the problem. To begin with the psychology behind the unconscious gender bias, even though it's a relatively new concept to me, it goes back to ancient times. So unconscious biases are rooted in our brains as a safety mechanism for humans because in ancient times, beings who were different than humans were perceived as dangerous. The biases are inherent in engraved patterns of brain activity, which prompt our brains to assign tags or characteristics to certain identity groups. So for example, a tag of good or bad may be assigned to an identity group different than the human being, or lazy or productive or intelligent or foolish and so on. In ancient times, fight or flight from a diverse being was a matter of life or death. Now though, we know that diversity is not a matter of life or death. It's a matter of a company or an organization achieving its goals and reaching success. Next, I'll move on to consequences of and limitations from the unconscious gender bias. In general, biases could cause female employees to underperform, which negatively impacts the entire organization. This can be seen in an economic implication. A 2015 McKinsey Global Institute report contends that $12 trillion could be added to the GDP by 2025 by advancing women workforce equality. The unconscious gender bias serves to stim the best efforts of diversity policies. For example, leaders may tend to incorrectly and unconsciously assume that men welcome challenges more than women do. So leaders may develop careers of men more than they do of their female employees. Females sometimes need to display that they want to challenge. They might like to ask for more jobs or tasks or more challenging assignments. Or, if they choose not to ask, then they remain stagnant in their opportunity and they don't grow as an individual and nor do they contribute fully to the organization. Another limitation of unconscious gender biases is a lack of emails and top leadership positions. A June 2017 study reports that only 6.4% of Fortune 500 companies had a female CEO in 2016. Military statistics are similar. In May 2017, study shows that every service organization has 10% or less female representation in flag and general officer wardrobes. This becomes a self-perpetuating problem because females tend to not see other females in top leadership positions and then they thus don't see how they could fit into that organization. And they may assume that climbing the corporate or military ladder is not a viable option for them and they exit the organization. Overall, an unwillingness to challenge practices and procedures that no longer optimize the company's goals will not allow diversity to produce options for new solutions and for new growth. But I have good news. So unconscious biases can be unlearned through recognizing what they are through their existence and through understanding this process and this theory. We can halt our brains from processing in this way. Training and education is always a great first step. One example that I have from a recent classroom setting is one of my Air Force male colleagues in passing made a comment about a commoner who wanted to go fly with his boys. And I just interjected, hey, aren't there any female pilots that the commoner is in charge of? And I tried to do it in a non-threatening way. And he seemed to react well. And so if we are able to challenge events like this when they happen, whether it's in a corporate setting or military setting, then it can educate everybody in the room. In response to the December 2015 Department of Defense decision to allow women to serve in all military roles, the Marine Corps has actively started training their Marines on the unconscious gender bias. They dispatch training teams to all their commands to go over these concepts. The other services can follow suit. Leadership, buy-in, and open dialogue between upper level management and leadership and members of the demographic is very important also. Social media and networking groups such as Facebook groups. I belong to a female Navy officer Facebook group. That's a great solution to this problem also. An example that I saw from the female Navy officer Facebook group has to do with uniforms. And I've shared this example with some other colleagues of mine, and I feel like it's a very impactful example. So the Facebook group brought up the fact that if you walk into a uniform shop, typically the uniform shop displays two models, two mannequins, and typically there's a male uniform on one mannequin and a female uniform on another mannequin. Typically, and anecdotally of course, the male mannequin tends to be wearing a uniform of a higher rank than the female mannequin. And or the male mannequin tends to have several more ribbons and medals than the uniform of the female mannequin. I sincerely don't believe that the worker at the uniform store has consciously decided to make the male mannequin an admiral and the female mannequin a chief. Unconsciously, people assume males achieve a higher rank and achieve more medals and ribbons. Another solution is that leadership needs to view qualities as gender neutral. There was a catalyst study called the Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership, damned if you do, doomed if you don't, that explains how men are viewed to have leadership qualities seen as taking charge and women are viewed to have leadership qualities seen as taking care. The Double-Bind, the dilemma comes into play that when women do display the desired qualities of taking charge, such as delegating, influencing, problem solving, then they're viewed and penalized as being too masculine. So they're either viewed as being too soft and incompetent or too masculine and unlikable. They're rarely seen as the ideal of being both competent and likable. Another solution is to neutralize human resource processes, such as hiring, promoting, interviewing, and making these processes gender blind. You may have heard of the study that illustrated how gender blind editions helped in orchestra overcome the unconscious gender bias. The blind editions accounted for a 50% increase in the likelihood of a female advancing out of the preliminary round. And of course, promoting mentorship is always a great solution. Both, it's important to have both males and females to mentor junior employees and organizations. Some may argue that there's a challenge to this, that we don't want to disempower men, we don't want to have the male employees feeling excluded or marginalized. However, leaders need to stress that diversity is about inclusion and integration and bringing together both genders to form a better organization for everyone's benefit. In conclusion, leaders need to take this theory and translate it to action in order for organizations to function at their peak and capitalize on increased and sustainable results. Leaders can break the barriers and instill improvements to the workplace by the development, retention, and advancement of women. Finally, organizations will prosper in ways never thought possible through enriched creativity, innovation, and teamwork that diversity brings to the organization. Thank you. Well, I want to say thank you to Mary and the Naval War College and to also our partner, Peace is Loud, for being able to come together and think about piggybacking actually off of the Women, Peace, and Security annual conference to do a consortium that we did yesterday bringing together a few people from across different sectors to talk about women, peace, and security curriculum and higher education and training and to think about the future of the field, basically. And I'm going to just say from the outside, it was the first time that we've ever done anything like this and I'm responsible for reflecting back to you the work of the entire group. So I'm going to apologize in advance if I missed a nuance or an important point and ask my colleagues who were a part of the discussion yesterday to jump in and correct me where I'm leading you astray. The reason why we wanted to focus on looking at curriculum in education, higher education, and training, professional training on women, peace, and security is because our organization realized through many different consultations and conversations that there were a couple of things emerging in the field right now. One is that there are a decreasing number of education and training programs and resources that are happening all over the place, but we're quite disconnected from each other and there's a lack of information sharing due to silos in our own sectors and time and lack of resources to come together and share our work and discuss with each other. And secondly, there is also an increasing demand both by students at all levels who are interested in this content and who see themselves having a future career in this field and also an increasing buy-in from faculty members who are seeing the importance of talking about the issues under the umbrella of working peace and security within their content of whatever courses that they're teaching. In fact, we found it was quite multidisciplinary the interest from faculty members. So we thought this was really an opportunity and time to bring together people from academia, from military, people who are practitioners, people who are scholars to share what they've been doing and just begin a conversation about how we are talking about women peace and security in the classroom and how we're training our future leaders. And this very much fits with the theme of this year's conference of amplifying the women peace and security agenda for the next decade. And I'm just gonna take a minute to step back and tell you a personal story or anecdote which I shared with the group yesterday when we started because this is in a bit of a contrast to the perspective that Riza Brooks presented to us this morning. We went around the room in the beginning and we were asked to give one word about how we felt before starting the conversation and a lot of people said curious and grateful and sometimes a little frustrated with the way things are and sometimes very excited to be in the same room and finally start the conversation. And I cheated a little bit because I had two words actually. It's one phrase because recently, last year I moved to Colorado and I've been exposed to many outdoor activities there and I've noticed there's a preponderance of professional athletes that do a lot of cycling and the Ultraman races and things like that. So I was very curious about this phenomenon and I started reading about it and I learned this term called draft legal and I don't know if there's any cyclists or racers in the audience but I learned that this term when I read it of course because everything in my mind connects to women peace and security, why wouldn't it? Draft legal, the term is when the cyclists are riding together and their momentum increases because the front riders are cycling fast enough that they create a wind pocket and all the other people who are cycling in the same direction can get into that wind pocket, they ride together and in fact their momentum increases and their speed increases. And I felt like when I read that I was like hey, that's what we're doing. That's where we are. We are all working together for many years and continuing into the future picking up the momentum with each other's work in all of these different fields. And so I still feel very inspired and encouraged by the work that we're all doing but I think the advantage of conferences like this and the consortium we did yesterday is to bring people together outside of their silos and to really recognize where we really are in the field not how much we have advanced but to also combine our energies together and find those synergies and alignments and those places where we also disagree and diverge so that we can actually pick up the momentum and really advance this agenda forward. So, given that backdrop the questions that we asked ourselves and really set the day for exploring were three. We asked ourselves what is the current state of Women, Peace, and Security education and training? What resources, what examples can we share from our own work and what is our current work looking like? What is the current state of Women, Peace, and I'm sorry what kind of community of practice can be felt or even strengthened within this group? And third, how can the Women, Peace, and Security and gender analysis be incorporated into other fields of study versus having a separate Women, Peace, and Security course so that we can reach more people with this agenda and content? And so we had a very rich and wide-ranging discussion and many issues and many topics and a lot of work was shared across institutions and across sectors. And what was very interesting in my perspective was that the experience in the Civilian Academy is mirroring the experience in the military education sector and it's also mirroring what's happening in the policy field among practitioners. And so we found about four places where we felt there were both challenges but the challenges represented real opportunities for us to set priorities to actually take action and move the field forward. So the first one, and this is not necessarily in order of priority but taken as a whole, right? So we recognize we have an opportunity to create and strengthen a network that can bridge across disciplines and across schools and sort of create a professionalization of the field through strengthening a network of community practice. A couple of recommendations we had collectively among ourselves was, hey, your institution did a mapping exercise. Your institution did a mapping exercise of the field and of strategies or curriculum. What if we did this collectively? We could start by mapping the field collectively and taking an inventory of strategies that have really worked in different institutions to create a culture that's more open to teaching women peace and security and more open to including gender analysis in a broad range of courses. Second, we recognized the growing demand for this content and as I said at the beginning that is something we already knew in the conversation. But we also talked about a little bit about the reasons for the demand in this content. Why is there an increase? And one is the prevailing political landscape right now which is presented in opportunities and new interest in this field. The other is that there are actually an increasing number of jobs in the policy world and in government that are requiring the skill of gender analysis and some knowledge of women peace and security which is unlike what's happened in the past even a few years ago. So we recognize as a recommendation that there's an opportunity for institutions to develop their own competitive advantage and look at the do a market analysis basically of what are the jobs that are coming up in the field in the future and what are the skill sets that the students really need to have to match that. And it went beyond just training in terms of skill set. It really is about shifting mindset I think as Naila used that term in terms of broadening the lens of what is security and answering the question of why are we teaching women peace and security? What is the point of this? And many of the strongest points I think of Brooks brought up this morning is because we want to succeed in the human world a more peaceful place and have real impact and real people's lives on the ground. Third, we recognized the need for discussing and perhaps agreeing at a minimum to a minimum core competency in women peace and security if there was going to be any credible course or education or training given on women peace and security what would it have to at minimum have? And I'm going to go back to that point later because we did find some agreement which I thought was a huge victory considering we had many different institutions represented and many different points of view represented yesterday along the 25 of us. Fourth, we recognized the opportunity to use multiple narratives and entry points to raising the topic of women peace and security and to getting more buy-in from different sectors. We talked about shifting from advocating gender specific courses to actually integrating into other existing courses by national security or IR theory or heart security and then we also there was also quite an interesting discussion about engaging broader audiences using gender analysis as a power lens or a power framework and from that position talking about masculinities and femininities and the role of masculinity and femininity in conflict and in peace and security is an entry point. And then finally I will say that as a fifth opportunity or challenge that we saw we recognized that there's a real need to connect women peace and security domestically. We have in the US at least have been very outwardly focused in international arena but there's a real opportunity to capitalize on a domestic connection what's happening locally to international agendas and to look at this through a more transnational lens. So the second part of our conversation was actually started to become focused more on let's talk about what teaching women peace and security really would look like what is the minimum core competency for any sector really, whether you're teaching a college student, a graduate student or the soldier that's going to go out into Afghanistan what do they at the minimum need to know and again we had a very rich discussion very far ranging topics but it was very interesting to me that this group was able to agree on a set of three to four basic things that we expect to see in a women peace and security course of training and those things were at a minimum the person needs to understand what is gender the terminology that's a starting point two, and this was universal among the whole group everyone who goes through any kind of education and training program in women peace and security needs to know how to do gender analysis what it is and how to actually apply it and that actually had universal agreement in the room third we had a lot of discussion about where does the women peace and security policy framework discussion come into this, is that a core competency and we agreed that knowing about the women peace and security policy framework the resolutions, national action plans things like that was very important but equally important was having a basic history and understanding of where this agenda emerged from, why it emerged that it actually is a social, tied to a social movement and political project of gender equality was equally important content for people to know at a minimum to inform their work and unfortunately we had a lot of discussion about this principle in women peace and security of consultation with women and the inclusion of women's voices and perspectives in a meaningful way and we did feel that that was very much part of a core competency anyone walking out of a training should understand that women's voices need to be included in terms of participation and informing decision making but there were definitely a range of other topics and a range of other issues that belong in this mix in this soup and I want to mention a couple of them and I think my colleagues who were there yesterday please jump in with others if I missed out on anything but we talked about using a transnational lens in courses and connecting U.S. domestic movements to women peace and security internationally we talked a lot about how can in these courses we talk about broadening the lens of what security means and shifting the perspective on what security means one more minute and then just real quick the listening to movements this is another point with listening to movements and movement builders that aren't squarely in women peace and security that agenda so just to conclude basically we are really looking forward to continuing this conversation in the future with the group that started yesterday and expanding it out to others that were not able to participate yesterday we were limited by timing resources in terms of how many people we could bring into the conversation for yesterday but we're very interested in continuing that engagement and we did talk about community of practice and how important that was that is to the future of the field and so we left on the table a discussion of would it be something that people in this group would be interested in convening again next year in this professional network to develop, continue developing and sharing our work and so I welcome you and I'm sure Jane and Mary as well welcome you to talk to us offline about continuing the conversation with that would an annual meeting be of interest to everyone we would like to expand the group and also capturing the challenges and opportunities that we're facing right now in terms of developing the field because as I said in the beginning I think everyone recognizes this is a real window of opportunity for us and that we're just getting started and we're building the momentum and we want to really put our heads down and focus and move very fast and forward in the field so happy to take any questions afterwards thank you very much the War College, she's the first student we've had represented on a panel she is a Navy helicopter pilot so I think it made her stories you may not know that about her and her paper was asked for by the Chief of Naval Operations so I'm really pleased to hear it shows a little bit of how it's starting to get implemented within our student body so Lena thank you very much for the War College, thank you thank you please my question is for mostly for thank you so much for your uncautious advice we agree that that's one of the most challenging obstacles we have to overcome because it's literally affected on our brains you mentioned the example of blind auditions and orbit stress which is such a great example because it's such a simple change that completely has changed the face of work stress and it's used I think a lot in the field of organizational design and behavioral design and these people who believe that it's close to the possible to actually change our internal biases that we should focus instead on changing organizational structures through things like hiring practices evaluating people or trying to eliminate the possibility for bias because it's so difficult to change and so I'm curious about whether you have seen successes in the approach of training or actually being able to change people's minds or for anyone else if you think that that is possible to do or whether it's also a valid approach to sort of try to just eliminate the possibility for that well I haven't seen anything, it's kind of a new topic to me I just started really learning and researching it a few months ago but I have noticed that I've changed myself so when I first started learning about this I didn't realize that I held these biases also so and I did mention in my remarks that it's not just males holding unconscious bias against females or whatever demographic we're talking about females can hold it against other females and I realized that I was and I did and so now that I'm aware of that I've tried to stop and tried to change my behavior and I do know that a lot of my classmates here at the War College have seen very receptive to learning about it people that knew that I wrote the paper but that didn't have to ask to read it have asked me to send it to them and people that are going my colleagues are going into leadership positions have asked hey what can I do when I'm in command to not fall prey to these concepts but I have I haven't I can't answer your question directly I'm sorry I have two questions one for Rachel one for Sahana Rachel you have a lot of military advisors who are out there doing admissions how do they do the NGOs that are out there doing a lot of the same great work as far as dividing the roles and responsibilities we're going to have to see what they're doing the work you all did yesterday sounds great you did a lot of work for one day and I'm just wondering how did you get a chance to talk about how you're going to execute the plan as far as implementing these core curriculum and particularly the military institutions and maybe that's going to be what we talk about in the next work we do just interesting your thoughts on what you talk about as far as what you do so I guess I have maybe a two or three part answer to your question to answer directly we yesterday was the first time we ever brought people together that we ever had that kind of conversation to answer Rachel's question about how do we choose people it was really who have we in our universe and three partners have we been talking to or that we know about who might be interested in joining this conversation and treating it like as it is an exploratory first step in sharing the work that we're doing and it's the beginning of a process of planting seeds and I do agree I was quite impressed with the courage and the commitment of the group yesterday to actually do so much work and actually come to agreement on some things because usually you can sit in a room for ten days and have so many different perspectives from so many different sectors and walk out with nothing or except for frustration but I was quite impressed with that in terms of implementation I think that's on the table because it's still up for discussion because that was our first conversation and I think what I've seen from that conversation other conversations like it and other gatherings like this is that there is a real hunger for the community that Rachel are talking about there's a real hunger for conversation and for sharing of information and a real acknowledgement that we aren't going to accomplish anything in our silos anymore we can, we could probably keep going along the way that we're going along but really the collective brain power and the collective work of this group and all our other colleagues around the world is going to have a much greater impact and that's why they have sort of a two part answer because the depth to answer your question directly but also in the bigger strategic vision of women peace and security we talked a lot yesterday about what is this agenda it really is about it's a transformative agenda gender equality you can't limit it to just yes that's why having numbers is so important because even that little step transforms the environment that you're in and transforms the lens through which you're looking at security and so I would say this is my own view of perspective and I've been accused of being the person that sees the glass actually overflowing and never emptying is I believe that we collectively everyone in this room and everyone of our colleagues around the world are working on women peace and security and whatever sector they're in we are in a state of great ambiguity because we're in a state of great creative chaos we're in a creative process of evolving and I would say it's not just evolution but it's revolution and what really the call for unity from so many different sectors and different people to me is quite interesting because it shows to me this is an organic movement we often talk about we need top down and bottom up pressures to change things but the conversation itself has started to shift to where is our unity of vision where is our unity of effort how can we share more how can we collaborate more on the same page and so my interest and I think my partner's interest in doing the conversation yesterday was to say okay let's take some of that energy and see what we can do let's just plant the seed and now I think it's up to all of us to say we want to continue the conversation and we may not be sure about what that's going to look like but let's try it let's just try it because that's the state we're in women peace and security didn't come about with people saying we're going to strategize we're going to have this network and we're going to do it this way it came about because these women in these conflicts we're all facing the same issues and we're saying this doesn't work anymore we need to change it and it was I think through their courageous action and vision that they were able to say we don't know what that's going to look like but we have some ideas about what we want to see change we have some strategies we want to try to push that forward and because they did that we're all here today so I think we can pick that ball up and we can say and admit to ourselves yeah we're in a state of ambiguity but we're doing it we're doing the work and we can do it better if we did it together so I know that doesn't answer your question about what's next what's the implementation but this is also a question we had in the very beginning what is the outcome of this do we need to have a concrete action outcome does it have to be very specific but I think what I learned yesterday from my colleagues is that just the fact that we started having a conversation with kids we reached some agreement on some things and also agreed that we want to further the conversation in professionalizing the field and perhaps having a network and how do we extend that to other people in itself is an outcome and I think a very positive positive point