 So, welcome to Newport and thank you for joining us. It was great to see a lot of you last night and begin to reinvigorate our WPS network. For those I didn't meet, I'm Carol Hottenroth. I'm the co-organizer with Brenda Opperman for this symposium and I've been the lead of what we call internally at the U.S. Naval War College of our WPS Steering Committee for about the last three years. So we are delighted to have reached this milestone of once again hosting a Women's Peace and Security Symposium. If you look at our program cover, we've recommenced counting and have called it the eighth annual symposium, but we are delighted to welcome you to Newport and to be meeting once again in person. So before we dive in, a few admin remarks. First we are a hybrid forum. So we have a good sized in-person audience, but I just lose my, okay, that because we have some experiential learning in the afternoon. So we were very focused on our in-person attendance so that we can move into the afternoons in this design thinking approach to wicked problem-solving. We also are in a hybrid format this morning. So we have a virtual audience online in a Zoom chat room and we had about 170 people register virtually, so we're expecting that number to grow. In that event, we ask that for the in-person audience when we get to the Q&A sessions of our panels or our keynote speaker, there will be a microphone for you to use so that you can articulate your question and you can be heard on that Zoom call. And as well for our virtual audience, we wanted to be able to track your questions as well. So what we have done for the virtual audience is establish a Q&A titled person. And we ask our virtual audience to address their questions to the Q&A person in a direct messaging, one of those private chats. And that'll pop up in our window and we can see that question. And that's what we really want to focus on is getting the questions. Then our chat monitor will be called upon in the room to relay your questions to either the panel moderator or the keynote speaker. We note if you're in that virtual Zoom call, you do not have your video functionality, nor do you have a hand raised function. You are simply being able to view the screen here from the in-room presentation and you have the chat function that you can use freely. But again, if you have a question, please direct it to that Q&A monitor who will be able to capture it and relay it to the moderator or the keynote. So for all, both our virtual and our in-person audience, please recognize that the session is being recorded on Zoom and the transcription service should be on. So we're looking forward to being able to present some synopsis and summaries as we go through the two days of events. For those participating in the afternoon design thinking sessions, you probably have a form. You should have a day one and a day two form in your blue folders. And I just draw your attention to that right now because it is something that we'll use this morning and to jot down some thoughts as the panels and the keynote progress through the morning. And that'll be collected. There's a table at the lunch break that you can drop the form off on. And it'll just be utilized in the afternoon session. It's not graded. It's not for anybody else's review. It's just a simple note jogger for the afternoon sessions. And finally, we do a bit of moving. We were upstairs last night. We're downstairs this morning. We'll be upstairs for lunch. So I just encourage you to take your folders and your belongings with you. So the staff will come through and clear the tables. And we want to make sure that you can keep track of all your belongings. And that means probably moving them each time we move in person for a meal or another event. And finally, just a reminder about phones. And I'm sure that's all that needs to be said. And so now to really get started. But always a good moment to check. To really get started, it's my distinct honor to introduce Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the 57th president of the US Naval War College. She's a graduate of Boston University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and French Language and Literature, and was commissioned through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps in 1988. A career naval helicopter pilot, she flew a variety of airframes and deployed in helicopter detachments to the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf. Assured she served on the Joint Staff in the Central and Eastern European Branch of J5, Plans and Policy Directorate. She was a deputy assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, senior military assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and the US Deputy Military Representative to the NATO Military Committee. Admiral Chatfield attended the Kennedy School of Government, receiving a Master's of Public Administration from Harvard in 1997. And in 2009, the University of San Diego conferred upon her a Doctorate of Education in Leadership Studies. Admiral Chatfield commanded at all levels as well as the Joint Provincial Reconstruction Team in Farah Province, Afghanistan. And most recently, she commanded Joint Region Marianas from January 2017 to August 2019. Admiral Chatfield, thank you for your leadership and vision on this important subject. And thank you for joining us today. Welcome. Thank you, Professor Hotmott, for that really generous introduction. Wow, it is so good to be here among friends in Newport, Rhode Island. Good morning to you all. We have so many distinguished speakers and so many experienced scholars and practitioners here in the room to address this important topic. Welcome to our eighth annual Women, Peace, and Security Symposium. I'm grateful to all of you who were able to make the trip to Newport today. And I'm doubly proud to see the registration for our online portion of this conference. I believe that wherever we can make a hybrid choice, we will bring in more voices and enriching the conversation on this topic. I'd like to thank Carol Hotmott, Dr. Brenda Opperman, for all the hard work you did to organize this event. I'm also grateful for Dean Peg Klein and our newly arrived WPS chair, Dr. Sarah Yaman. We have also Alicia Carvalho, Mike Magriff, and the United States Naval War College steering and general committees who put so much work in effort into this event. Thank you. And I'd also like to commend Dr. Mary Rahm, our previous Women, Peace, and Security chair, for the many years of her effort in this area. As always, we are grateful to our United States Navy War College Foundation, the Naval War College Foundation, for their generous support of this important symposium. And I think that the Wyndham Hotel has done just a fabulous job accommodating this conference and providing a really nice venue for today. This year, we've been charged to facilitate the integration of women, peace, and security throughout the Department of Defense by considering the role of organizational culture in affecting sustainable institutional change. The Navy has long recognized the importance of command culture in every unit that we have throughout our Navy. We go to great lengths to try to understand the culture of every organization and to take steps to improve command culture. But even in units with what appears to be a good command culture, we sometimes find an undercurrent of activity that is not conducive to women feeling comfortable and valued in the organization. Within the military, we have many more tools to gauge our command cultures and to influence the culture in the workplace. And so when we see those informal structures and those trends in an institution, what should we do? Coming together in a group like this one to inform decision makers about that topic is precisely an activity worth doing. Like me, I know that many of you have also experienced organizations where cultures were less welcoming for women. And throughout my career in the Navy, which has spanned currently 34 years of active duty, I am grateful for improvements that I've seen along the way. I remember being a young naval aviator, and I remember the things that caused me to feel differently. And at that time, many of those things were memorialized in United States law or policy. And so it might have been difficult, more difficult, during that time, to actually achieve the same level of competency as a male counterpart because of the law or policy. But there may have also been organizational factors that, although less welcoming, were also barriers to advancement. I'll give you one example. So in my first squadron, well, let's just take a comparison between today and 34 years ago. Today, an aviator will come out of flight training and proceed on and all be given a school that's called Sear School in the Navy Seary School, I think, in the Air Force. And this is a type of advanced training where you learn how to survive and evade and escape. And in that day, that training was withheld for me. I had gone to a squadron that was shore based. And the squadron had a short budget. And the schoolhouse in the United States Navy was closed to women because of the combat exclusion law. The United States Air Force did have a school, but it was in Washington state. And so going there would have required an airline ticket, temporary duty, and a fee. And so the squadron said, well, you're on shore duty. You don't need to go. And I said, well, but I want to go because I want to be just as qualified as every other pilot in the squadron. And they said, well, you don't really want to go. You know it's not fun. But some know it's not fun. It's a way to get qualified to do my job. And they said, no, but we can't afford it. And so I mean, this was in the early 90s. It was actually before the Gulf War. So when the Gulf War occurred, the squadron immediately surged to provide helicopter detachments to go and assist in our military efforts. And I wasn't qualified. So now they thought, wow, she's a volunteer. We've got to get her qualified. And so literally the Navy school had just opened. And so to prepare to go to augment units that were serving in the Arabian Gulf, I went to Brunswick, Maine, many feets of snow, freezing temperatures, big parkas, bunny boots, no shoes, and learn how to survive, evade, and escape. And you think about that today. And you think, well, that just isn't possible. It doesn't make sense. But in that era, that's how it was. So I like to acknowledge that we have come a long way to remove those barriers and to iteratively improve opportunity for women in the United States Navy. But I also acknowledge that we have a long ways to go. This symposium is an opportunity for us to understand these problems, communicate with others about where the problems and challenges lie, and develop inclusive solutions to improve organizational culture across our nation. But I'd ask you, as you discuss these issues this week, I'd like you to also consider this topic in the context of our international partners. I spent a year in Afghanistan in command of a joint provincial reconstruction team. During the training for that deployment, we had 12 commanders of 12 provincial reconstruction teams. My team had women assigned to it. And I was grateful. I thought that this would really, really help. Other teams did not have women. And some teams that had women had commanders that had great concerns about going downrange with women. In fact, they offered me trades to take their women and replace them with men that were assigned to my team. And I was all too happy to do that because I knew that women made my team stronger. I had on my team a female physician's assistant, two female corpsmen, a female yeoman, and three other women of various rates. So when we got to Afghanistan, we had a way to conduct physical searches of everybody who came on to our camp because we had women who could greet women and perform that search. We were able to provide medical care to women because we had female medical practitioners. And we were able to connect with women on the women's council because we could sit in a room with them and have a conversation. And I think as I reflect back on that time, I'd reflect back also on my concern about being too personally attentive to the women's programs because I felt that I needed to remain strong in my role as commander and not dilute it by spending a disproportionate amount of my time with women's programs. And so I had men also working in those women's programs. And I stayed elevated at the role of commander. These are hard choices about leadership positions in areas where working with communities is very important but also very fragile. The conflict in Afghanistan is still fresh for many of us. But as we look back, we can think about those many perspectives, things that we did to improve the lives of Afghan women, their health, the health of their families, small business, opportunity through education. And we can hope that there is a memory in that culture that connects to their cultural past, connects to the stories of their ancestors, and continues to inspire them as they work through a much different political reality today. At the Naval War College, we are addressing these types of issues through our support of the United States strategy on women, peace, and security. To quote from the law itself, the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017, we recognize the diverse roles women play as agents of change in preventing and resolving conflict, countering terrorism and violent extremism, and building post-conflict peace and stability. This strategy is designed to increase women's meaningful leadership in political and civic life by helping to ensure that they are empowered to lead and contribute, equipped with the necessary skills and support to succeed, and supported to participate through access to opportunities and resources. In that act, the Department of Defense was tasked to be one of the primary implementation departments. Accordingly, the Department of Defense published an implementation strategy. And the first of these were the first of these to lead, by example, in publishing such a document. So now we think about, well, what is the Navy doing? And I am very happy to report to this group. And we've got people in the room. So where is my dozen rep? We do have somebody I know. There we go from the Department of the Navy, who is right now working on this issue for the United States Navy. Where will we place our accountable person for this program within the Department of the Navy? And our Secretary of the Navy, in February, signed out a memorandum directing us to mainstream women, peace, and security in our PME in the United States Navy. And so I'm thankful to have this law and policy trail to reinforce our efforts here at the United States Naval War College on behalf of our Navy and the nation. This week, you will get the opportunity to meet our new chair, Dr. Sarah Yamin, whose task at the Naval War College is to work this integration and mainstreaming of women, peace, and security across our many departments and curricula. My vision for the program is that it will expand to be ingrained into every course we teach and touch every student who attends a Naval War College course in any capacity. If you've been to the Naval War College, you know what the law says, what the Department of Defense directs, and what the Navy is doing about women, peace, and security. We will continue as an agent to collaborate with other institutions both in the military and across higher education and here in Rhode Island. Through these efforts, we are committed to ensuring that we're able to increase the share of meaningful leadership by women and ensuring that as the national policy dictates, they are empowered to lead and contribute, equipped with the necessary skills and support to succeed, and supported to participate through access to opportunities and resources. This initiative is important, and this symposium is an opportunity to take action, to co-create a different future. I am confident that the issues we identify and the solutions we generate here will help make our services, our nation, and our world a better, more inclusive, and more equitable place for the generations that follow us. Thank you. Admiral Chatfield, thank you for your most wonderful and very thoughtful remarks, and thank you for the kind introduction. Distinguished guests, friends, colleagues, greetings. I'm Sarah Yameen. I'm the Women, Peace, and Security Chair at the Naval War College. It is both a privilege and pleasure to have you with us in person and virtually, to collectively reflect on the importance of organizational culture and institutional change. WPS is a transformative vision. The symposium represents our best efforts to bring some of the best ideas, some of the best minds and talent here, along with all of you, to collectively reflect on the imperative and opportunities for organizational change, such that it enables women's meaningful participation in building lasting peace and security. Before we start our discussions, I would like to also thank some of my colleagues, many of whom you've met, but some who've been working behind the scenes tirelessly over the past several months and several days to make this event happen. They include our WPS committees, the General Committee, the Steering Committee. They also include our Protocol and Events Team, our Public Affairs Team, and many more whom you haven't met. I would also like to thank the Naval War College Foundation for their generous support. And now to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, Ms. Siri Chilazi. Ms. Chilazi is a research fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Her life's work is to advance gender equality and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Ms. Chilazi is an internationally renowned scholar practitioner, a prolific speaker, and a much sought-after advisor. Welcome, Ms. Chilazi. The floor is yours. I'm going to go rogue and start moving. Good morning, everybody, both here in the room and virtually, thank you for joining us. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here with you today, particularly in person. This is actually my first time in front of an audience of live humans in the same room in over two years. I don't know if some of you have the same experience. So it's really, really a pleasure to be here to talk about organizational culture and gender equality. I am a behavioral scientist, which means I study how humans behave, why they behave the way they do, and how we might go about changing humans' behavior, others and our own, if we so choose. And so with that lens in mind, I want to share with you some of the latest research on what behavioral science has to suggest about how we might advance gender equality more effectively in our organizations and change organizational culture. But first, in order to do that, we, of course, have to define what we mean by both organizational culture and gender equality. So, and let's see if the clicker will work. It does not look like it's cooperating today. So could we do next, please? Go to the next slide. Thank you. There's a lot of different frameworks for thinking about organizational culture. And I'm just going to use this very simple one today, the three piece, people, processes, and policies. People are the humans that show up and the ways in which they interact with one another in organizations. Processes are the practices through which we do things like hire and evaluate people's performance and promote them and put them on teams, right? And then policies are the formal rules and regulations that are written down in the HR manual that govern things like leave taking, assignments, policies around trainings, how harassment and disputes are dealt with. And all of these three things interact. So if we're trying to change organizational culture and we can click on next one more please, you'll see the organizational culture text pops up. All of these things interact. If we try to change how humans behave but the rules remain the same, it's unlikely for this behavior change to stick. We can change a policy on paper, but if people don't behave differently, there's not really change on the ground. So if we're trying to make comprehensive change on gender equality, we need to address all of these three pillars. And I'm going to talk about them today not in the context of the military because that's not my specialty, but more so in the context of organizations generally. And I hope that that will give you some fodder for thought and inspiration for your own work as well. So if this is organizational culture, then what about gender equality? Let's click to the next slide please. Here we have three people who have come to see the mountain. As you can see, they are different in terms of their heights. And currently, because of the fence standing in their way, the shortest person can't see the mountain. This is just the world we live in because people are different. Anytime we have two or more individuals gathered together, there's some kind of diversity represented. But of course, we have to do something about this because currently the shortest person can't see the mountain. So what's a typical response? Next please. It's this. It's fixing the people. It's saying, oh, it's too bad you're so short. Let's put a couple rocks underneath you so we can lift your head above the fence and you can now see the mountain. I would argue that this is not the world we want to live in. And for the purposes of today, I would like us to live in this next world over here, which is where we fix systems instead of people. Next please. Suspense, right? This is the world in which we identify the barriers that are unnecessarily standing in some people's way and preventing them from doing what they've come to do, which in this case is see the mountain, but in a different context, it might see providing their expertise or simply just doing their best work. And we instead find a way to create a genuinely level playing field where everyone can show up as they are and not encounter barriers that are needlessly holding them back. So to me, a world of true gender equality is this one. And with that in mind, our task today is to understand what those barriers are, figure out how we can dismantle them, and then make sure that that change actually sticks. So that's where we're going. Next please. I wanna take us on a journey by starting with the problem that research shows remains one of the biggest sources of those barriers today in organizations around the world, and that's unconscious bias. Then we'll talk about behavioral design, which is an evidence-based approach and a science-based approach to changing human behavior in a lasting way. Out of curiosity, how many of you are familiar with behavioral design as a concept? Couple, lovely, wonderful. And then at the end, of course, we'll talk about how to make this change last for good. So let's dive right in, because this is a lot to cover. We can go forward two slides please, and we'll get to a checkerboard. You'll see two squares labeled A and B. My question for you is which one's darker, A or B? You can just call it out. A, most people are saying A, I would agree. If we click forward about seven or eight times, keep looking at A and B. We'll just cover up the surrounding squares, and by right about now, some of you might wish to change your answer. So let's go back, please, and take the blinders off one more time, because I wanna convince you that truly all we did is we covered up the surrounding squares. There's no mind games going on here. What we're experiencing in this simulation is unconscious bias in action. Our brains are bombarded by about 11 million pieces of information every single second. And it turns out the conscious part of our brain is only able to process about 40 pieces of information. So it's the unconscious part of our brain that's actually tasked with the vast majority of information processing, and then decision making based on that information. And research tells us that this unconscious part of our brain is very prone to shortcuts, to patterns, to relying on heuristics in order to do this overwhelming amount of information processing. And that's exactly what happens here. So the moment you just flashed in front of your eyes, your brain recognized a pattern that it has seen many times before, light square next to a dark square on a checkerboard, and you determined unconsciously, is my guess, and pretty much instantaneously, that square A has to be darker than B, which of course now you know is not true. So the first takeaway from this little simulation is really quite simply that unconscious bias is just a fact of how human brains operate. It's something that affects all of us. It's not per se good or bad, it just is. But where it becomes problematic is when our biases lead us astray, when they cause us to see things not as they really are, or when they cause us to make incorrect or suboptimal decisions. One more question before we move on. How many of you still see A as being darker than B, even though now I've told you already, I've proven to you that they're the same color? Anybody? Me too. And I've seen this 10,000 times. So I think this is actually the more important takeaway here. And that is human brains are incredibly stubborn, merely being aware of the fact that you have bias or acknowledging even the effects of your biases is most often not enough to overcome them or overcome their effects. Our stubborn brains need some additional help, some more heavy hitting interventions than just awareness raising. In this case, that help is the blinders that quite literally take away the pattern. And the moment the pattern is gone, and we can bring the blinders back one final time, thank you, your brain suddenly has no trouble seeing that A and B are actually two squares of the same color. So we'll return to this idea of help for our stubborn brains in a moment because it's really important. But I first wanna give you a few quick examples of what this bias looks like and the effects that it has in real life because of course, most time in our organizations we're dealing with humans and not with checkerboards. So with that in mind, next please, I'd like to introduce you to Heidi Royson. Here's Heidi. She is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, a very successful investor in Silicon Valley. And Heidi is also the subject of a case study that we use in business schools and graduate schools and executive education programs around the world to teach students about successful entrepreneurship and how to leverage your network for success. And often when we teach this case, we run a little experiment with it. We give half of our students the original case study with Heidi's name on it. And then we give the other half of our students exactly the same case, but with Heidi's name switched out for Howard. Students have no idea this is happening. They get the case, they go home, they read it, and the night before they come to class ready to discuss, they take a survey about their perceptions of Heidi and Howard. Some of you are smiling knowingly because you can guess where this is going. So on the next slide you'll see what our students have to say about Heidi and Howard. It turns out our students actually find Heidi and Howard to be equally competent, which is somewhat reassuring because they're the same person doing all the same things. One would hope, right? But our students do not find Heidi and Howard to be equally likeable. In fact, the exact same behaviors when they're perpetrated by Heidi are seen to be more power hungry, more self-promoting, more disingenuous, are perceived that way than when our mythical Howard is doing the same things. This is an example of one type of unconscious bias, which is stereotypes. Those widely shared over-generalizations of what people are like based on their membership of a particular group. So you tell me in our culture, what's the stereotype for women? What are women like? Nurturing, love it, what else? Hungry, yep. Emotional, yep, what else? Nice, caring, friendly, collaborative, exactly. See, we don't have to be gender scholars to know these things. These stereotypes have seeped into our minds. I mean, studies show that children as young as four or five, six years old internalize society's gender stereotypes and other kinds of stereotypes, racial as well and others. So whether we consciously endorse those stereotypes or not, and my guess is most people in the room don't, right? I don't think women are monitoring or should be more caring than anybody else, but this is the programming that our brains have received. These are the patterns through which we filter information and look at the world. So when Heidi is being very assertive and aggressive and not shy about the fact that she wants to make a lot of money and she's pounding the table doing the deals, she's acting in accordance with the stereotype for leaders, right? Because she's assertive, dominant, all of those things. So we say, okay, that's great, she's competent, but she at the same time is violating our expectations for how women should behave because she's not being particularly friendly or nice or collaborative or nurturing. And we unconsciously, often unintentionally penalize her by finding her less likable. And the reason this is a particular barrier for women is because the stereotypes for masculinity align pretty neatly with the stereotypes for leadership, right? It's being the loudest voice in the room. It's being assertive, it's taking charge, it's being dominant, it's being aggressive. So for men, when men display those characteristics of leaders, there's congruence, but for women, there's this dissonance where you violate the feminine stereotype, you're in accordance with the leader stereotype or vice versa. Let me give you just one more example. We'll go to the next slide, please. This comes dressed from the world of stock brokerage firms. My colleague, Jenice Fanning-Madden at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania a couple of years ago, studied the two leading stock brokerage firms in the United States. And she found that at these firms, the female stock brokers brought in on average only about 60% as much revenue as their male counterparts did. So when you hear a piece of information like this, your natural conclusion to draw is, oh, they're just not as good as the men at their job. For whatever reason, they're not doing as good of a job. Would you agree? I would, right? But things get more interesting because when they dug deeper into the data, they actually found that the women and men performed equally well. So let's think about that for a second. I'm telling you objectively, the women are bringing in less money, but I'm also telling you that they're performing equally as well as the men. How can this be possible? Does anybody have a guess? Playing the long game? Not totally, but that's a great guess. Yes, other guesses? Boom, you hit the nail on the head. It turns out the female stock brokers were assigned by their managers, historically worse performing accounts and smaller accounts. So they were doing as good of a job as the men, but they were working off of a lower base. The issue wasn't the performance of the male or the female stock brokers. The issue was the unconscious bias of the managers in assigning the work and the organizational process whereby it was determined who would get to work on which portfolio and which account. Thank you. So this is what we're up against. I could give, you could give 100 more examples. I could give 100 more examples, but we understand the flavor now. This is often subtle these days. It's no longer the overt barriers of, oh, you're banned from voting. You're banned from having a credit card. You're banned from going on this training course. It's moved a little bit under the surface to be more subtle these days. So the question is, what can we do about it? Let's go to the next slide, please. Some of you may be familiar with the story of how symphony orchestras in the United States have dramatically gender diversified their ranks in the last four or five decades or so. These orchestras were about 95% male musicians in the early 1970s, only 5% women, and they are about 40% women today. Now, News Flash, they didn't accomplish this transformation by giving additional training to the women musicians because they were playing just great all along. The problem wasn't the quality of the female musicians playing. They also didn't accomplish this transformation by sending the orchestra directors to hours and hours of diversity training or unconscious bias training. We'll talk about that in a moment. Instead, what they did is they made a very small and simple process change. They started auditioning new musicians behind a curtain so that the orchestra directors who were hiring could hear the music and could judge the quality of the performance, but they weren't distracted by seeing who was playing so that those unconscious patterns or expectations that they might have had about what a good orchestra musician is supposed to look like just didn't come into play. And I think it's clear from the evidence, from the fact that very different people were selected with the curtain compared to without the curtain, I think that tells us quite clearly that there was some bias going on in the decision making before we were able to liberate the orchestra directors' brains. And this is very similar to what the blinders did on the checkerboard for us. By obscuring the pattern, they liberated our brains to see what squares A and B were actually like. Those blinders and this curtain are an example of behavioral design. Behavioral design builds on the tickets of research that we've done in fields like psychology, social psychology, economics, neuroscience. It takes everything that we know about how human brains work and how humans actually behave. And then using those insights, it allows us to design systems, structures, processes, policies, even physical environments that allow our inherently biased brains to make better decisions. So instead of trying to de-bias us as humans, which actually there's no evidence to suggest that that's possible, a lot of interventions have been tried and tested and none of them have proven effective at fundamentally changing how our brains operate. So instead of focusing on that and banging our head against the wall, we say, okay, our brains are gonna continue to be biased. But if we tweak the surroundings within which we operate, we can get ourselves to make different decisions and to behave in better ways. Here's another quick example. Some of you might have stayed at, next please, in a hotel room like this, we're next to the door. There's a contraption where you pop in your key card and it automatically turns on the electricity in the room. And then when you leave the room and you take your key card with you, the lights turn off. I didn't see one here at the Wyndham, but I'm sure many of you have encountered these before. If you are a hotel manager and your goal was to reduce your energy consumption, and I think most of us can agree, right, that it's kind of wasteful to have the lights on when no one's even there, you could attempt any number of interventions. For example, you could post signs everywhere saying, please, remember to turn the lights off when you're not there. You could offer it an incentive when people check in. You could ask them to take a pledge that says, I promise to turn the lights off when I'm not in my room. And then I get an extra loyalty points or a gift card to the bar. Well, these have all been tested. And it turns out this is much more effective. A small change in the environment that helps you do something that actually you already think is a good thing to do anyway. But when you're rushed, you're stressed, you're distracted, you're rushing out of your room and the phone is ringing and oh, you've just forgot something across the other side of the room, those are the moments when, despite our best intentions, we forget to turn the lights off. And a small change in the physical environment can help us deliver on those virtuous intentions. This is the magic and the power of behavioral design. And research suggests that not only is it highly feasible and often either very low cost or even cost less, but it's actually the most effective way to change human behavior. So now I'm gonna then bring this back to the organizational context and share with you some examples of how we can leverage this principle of behavioral design to change people, to change policies and to change processes. This first example, next please, relates to symbols and role models. Researchers at the University of Washington did a fascinating study a couple years ago where they went into the computer science classrooms at the university and they encountered pictures on the walls like this, literally, Star Wars pictures, video games, very masculine imagery. And of course we all know that computer science already is a field that's heavily male dominated at the moment and we're desperately trying to get more women in at all levels. So the researchers did a very simple intervention. They went into these classrooms and without telling anybody, they switched out the pictures on the walls and what they put in instead, next please, was things like nature landscapes that are gender neutral. And just from this small change two incredible things happened. The first is female students' self-reported sense of belonging in the field of computer science went way up. They could see themselves being in this field, being successful in this field, feeling like they belonged. And the second thing that happened, which is even more incredible, is female students were actually more likely to continue with their computer science studies and take future courses in this field, which to me as a behavioral scientist is the ultimate thing, because people can say whatever and they do. When you ask people in surveys, oh, what are your intentions, blah, blah, blah, people will say anything. The rubber meets the road in what they actually do. So what a small intervention, what a small change, what massive repercussions. Seeing is believing. These symbols and role models, whether it's pictures on the walls, whether it's actual real humans in power, in positions of power and authority that we can see and look up to, whether it's the names of streets, buildings, ships, conference rooms, whether it's the pictures of people that we highlight on our website, in the marketing materials, in internal communications, you get the idea. These are all opportunities for us to communicate who belongs and who doesn't. Whose work is worth highlighting, whose accomplishments are worth celebrating. And this is really low hanging fruit to make more inclusive, right? By changing our symbols and our imagery to communicate to all people that they can succeed and can belong. Let's go to the next slide, please. Now I invite you to take a look at these two beaches here and tell me, which beach would you be more likely to drop a piece of trash on? The left or the right? Left, most of us are saying left. Why? You've never even been there. It's obviously acceptable, exactly. We humans are incredibly attuned to social norms, to signals, shared but often unspoken signals about what type of behavior is acceptable in a given context or what kind of behavior is expected. So the moment you looked at the left beach, you can not only tell that people have clearly been littering there before, but you also have a reasonable expectation that if you now were to drop a piece of trash, probably nothing would happen because that's the norm. It's what everyone else does, too. Whereas on the right-hand beach, not only is it evident that people haven't been littering there before, at least they've been picking up after themselves, but there's some chance that if you were to drop a piece of trash, someone would actually call you out on it. Say, hey, whoa, you gotta pick up after yourself. We don't do that here, right? And we humans do not like to get called out. Studies show that even in groups of 100 or so people, four or five individuals can shape the norms for that group, which is remarkable. So I want you now to think about your work environment, maybe your department, your team, the people that you work most closely or most regularly with. Is that a dirty beach or a clean beach environment? Let's say someone interrupts another person in the meeting. What happens? Let's say someone makes SXS joke. Or an off-color comment. What happens? Let's say you get invited to an event and you see the invite list and you notice that several people who kind of should be there logically are not included on the invite. What happens? These are examples of everyday moments that present opportunities for us as individuals to shift from the dirty beach to the clean beach. Or there's this lovely concept in academia in the literature of micro-sponsorship. It's exactly this. Microsponsorship is the small daily acts of support and affirmation that we provide to colleagues. It's when we are doing our part to make sure that we are living on a clean beach as opposed to a dirty beach. So it could be things like interrupting, the interrupter in the meeting and say, excuse me, I'd love to hear Brenda finish her point, please. Or this is a classic one. Let's say that Carol mentioned something five minutes ago and no one picked up on it in the meeting. And now, right now, James says the same thing and everyone thinks it's James's idea and it's the best idea in the world. Has this ever happened to anybody? It happens all the time. So as a micro-sponsor, you could chime in and say, yes, James, thank you for building on Carol's amazing idea from five minutes ago. Love what you did there, right? It's nice. It's not aggressive. We're not trying to be mean, but we're just correcting the record. We're just making sure that Carol gets the credit and then James gets a little credit too for building on Carol's fabulous idea. Being a micro-sponsor could be directing opportunities to people that wouldn't typically get them. Maybe you get a lot of invitations to speak on panels, to go to conferences, to go to trainings, right? To present to your senior leaders. Maybe every once in a while, you channel that opportunity to a more junior person or to a person who looks different from everyone else in the organization or the person who's been toiling silently behind the scenes, but who never gets credit. All of those are small examples of how we can change culture. It sounds really small, right? Those individual actions, but the whole point about social norms is small actions have big ripple effects precisely because humans are paying attention to each other. So those are a few ideas for how we can change people's individual behavior. Let's turn our attention now to organizational processes. Next, please. There's another fascinating insight about how human brains work that has massive implications for how we run our organizations and how we do things like hiring, promotions, how we make compensation decisions. And this insight is that human brains are naturally comparative. We have a really tough time judging things in isolation. We have a much easier time judging things in comparison. So how hot or cold you're feeling right now has something to do with the temperature of the room that you came in from. Did you come from your super toast, your room upstairs? Did you walk in from outside? How good the coffee taste that you're drinking right now has something to do with the coffee that you're used to drinking and how this compares, right? So if I ask you to judge one candidate in isolation and say, here's Jane, on a scale of one to 10, what score should Jane receive for her performance evaluation? That's really difficult for our brains to do. If I give you Jane and nine other candidates and say, compare these 10 people against each other and now let's give all of them their performance evaluation scores, our brains are much better able to calibrate. And research shows we rely less on our biases in that decision-making process, but incredibly we also generate more diversity in the actual decision-making. So let's say as a simple example, you were gonna hire three people this year for your team or for your division and ordinarily you would have hired one person in March and the next one in June and the final one in October. Research would suggest to us that it would actually be better to hire for all three of those positions at the same time, even if the positions are very different and the candidates are all totally different because we now have more candidates overall to compare against each other and allow our brains to calibrate and we're making three decisions simultaneously instead of just one. So think about that for not just hiring but also promotions, things like decisions around bonuses and compensation. If someone just walks into your office and says, hey, I wanna raise. First of all, who is that person likely to be? Who is it socially acceptable for to advocate to assert on behalf of themselves? I don't have to tell you, right? But also, if we're making those decisions in an ad hoc manner, we're gonna end up with people's salaries all over the place with no consistency and no calibration. It's just based on who happened to ask, not necessarily people's actual accomplishments or track record or what pay they really merit. So again, standardization, having one time in a year or two when you are looking across everybody's compensation, getting in all the raised requests and then evaluating comparatively against each other would be a much better strategy given how our brains work. Next please. Another place where bias creeps in big time is performance evaluations. I'm showing you here data from more than 81,000 performance evaluations of more than 4,000 individuals in the US military. The words that are used to describe men in these performance evaluations are on the left-hand side. The words used to describe women are on the right-hand side and the blue columns include positive words and the yellow columns include negative words. And I'm sad to say that this graphic pretty much sums up everything that research tells us about gender bias in performance evaluations. The first thing is that women receive less feedback overall than men, which is a problem because it's really important to get feedback both on what you're doing well but also what you need to do better in order to improve and in order to continue to succeed. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that women tend to get more negative feedback, more words in the orange column than the blue, and I look at some of these specific words. We have my favorites, selfish, gossip, excitable, panicky. I mean, I would wanna laugh at this word that tragic in reality, right? These are words that have nothing to do with accomplishments or actually observable results. These are comments that are purely subjective and actually based on these individuals' personality. So this is the other thing that research tells us. Women are much more like to get subjective, personality-based feedback than men. And again, that kind of feedback is not helpful because someone says you're vain and I say, well, I'm not vain, but where do we go from here, right? And how does this relate to my performance anyways? So research tells us that one of the best things we can do to minimize this bias and to prevent these dynamics from occurring is to have a consistent preset set of criteria, which means before we start evaluating anybody, we actually write down what it is that we're looking for if we are hiring people for a position, if we're moving, if we have a promotion, if we're considering sending someone on assignment, right? What are the specific things that they need to demonstrate? And then it needs to be specific. Oftentimes I hear of criteria like great communication skills or demonstrated leadership. So you tell me, what are good communication skills? I think if I asked 10 of you, I'd get 10 different answers. If I asked 10 of you, what are leadership qualities? What's a good leader like? I would also get 10 different answers. So these criteria, these evaluation rubrics have to be specific enough that different evaluators would actually have the same understanding of what we're looking for and how we can judge whether someone actually has evidenced great leadership skills or good communication skills. And then the second part is we have to hold ourselves accountable to applying these criteria consistently across all the candidates that we're looking at. Oftentimes in organizations, for example, an international rotation or some kind of rotational assignment is viewed as a positive and maybe it's baked into the criteria and someone needs to have done that rotational assignment in order to get the promotion, but maybe not. And if we've in fact decided that having that rotational assignment is not necessary for this next promotion, then it would be unfair to give someone a leg up if they've done that rotation because we just determined in our criteria that it's not actually required. So that's where the rubber meets the road is in actually applying these criteria consistently across people in evaluation. Next please. Finally, I wanna share with you two examples about organizational policies. And this is where we come back to this question of diversity training that I was teasing earlier. Diversity training on conscious bias training, whatever you wanna call it, is incredibly popular. By some estimates, organizations in the US spend $10 billion a year on these types of programs. And it horrifies me because based on five or six decades of research that we've been studying in these programs, there's nothing to suggest, no evidence that they actually work to change behavior. I'll let that sink in for a moment. No evidence to suggest that unconscious bias trainings actually change behavior. If you ask people right after they leave an eight hour training session, did you learn something new? Absolutely, oh yes, they learned all this, maybe you already have even learned a tidbit or two today that you didn't know before you came in. So people's awareness does increase. Now they forget some of it soon, but still. But when we actually follow up and see if people behave differently in three months, six months, 18 months time, if anything changes in their behavior, sadly we don't see an effect. Now I'm not suggesting that all training is futile, of course it's not. Based on, in fact I have several research projects going on right now that are trying to identify specific ways in which we could make diversity training more effective if we're gonna do it. But what we know already today is that the magic formula or the best formula for success is to combine any training that you do with process changes or policy changes that help people with the new behaviors, that support them in doing the new behaviors. So let's say in your hiring process you were gonna move from unstructured interviews where any interviewer can ask any questions they want and you get the person's resume and you say, oh, I see that you also went to the same school or I see that you also like to skydive on your free time and then from there the interview proceeds. Studies show that that's one of the most biased ways in fact to evaluate people because it's very far from being objective. What would be a much better, much better approach if you're gonna interview is to conduct what we call a structured interview. You select the questions that you're going to ask ahead of time, then you ask all your candidates the same questions in the same order and you grade your candidates and their answers as you're going through the interview instead of waiting all the way until the end of the 30 or 45 minutes, because by that point you've forgotten half the stuff and if there was one good answer it's gonna color your whole picture positively. You're gonna overweight the candidate in a positive direction and if they fumble that one point you're likely to kind of negatively it's gonna negatively predispose you. So let's say that this was a process change you are making in your organization, right? This would be a great opportunity to couple the process change with training and train the interviewer team and the recruitment team on how does unconscious bias show up in hiring? Why is it important to make this process change? What specifically is this process change gonna help us do and how is it gonna make our process more objective going forward? That's a great example of not doing training just for the sake of training but actually coupling it with a new process that will help people stick to those more objective behaviors because they now have those interview questions that they need to follow. And finally next please, I wanted to talk about policies including specifically flexible working, remote working, part-time working and leave. Many, many organizations have policies where women for example get three months off or three month maternity leave when they have a child and fathers get let's say two weeks. Many organizations have policies where by special request you can work part-time or you can flex your hours so that it doesn't always have to be nine to five or whatever it is. What happens with these types of policies is even with the best of intentions they paradoxically serve to exacerbate inequality, right? I see a lot of people nodding because if women consistently are gone for longer periods of time from the workplace whenever they have children, men are going to advance faster at work. Men are also not gonna have an opportunity to become full contributors at home because the parent who's at home with a newborn baby who learns the baby's different cries and what to do is more likely to be the parent who takes the primary responsibility for those care-taking duties even going forward. And research actually shows that when fathers are involved at home in the early days of their children's lives, it has very positive consequences for the division of labor in the household as well as for the children's development. So research suggests very strongly that in order to help close some of the gender advancement gaps in the workplace, we should seek to make all these types of policies gender-neutral, meaning everyone gets the same amount of leave and is actually encouraged to take it. If we have policies around part-time work or remote work, they should be default policies that are available to everybody instead of bi-special petition when evidence shows women are then much more likely to petition. And in fact, sometimes as organizations we need to work extra hard to get men to take advantage of some of these policies because it hasn't been historically seen as appropriate. The part-time track is the mummy track or the women's track and it has this negative connotation that people who don't work full hours are somehow less ambitious or less committed. The only way that stereotype and that perception is going to change is if we have more men working part-time as well. So next please. I wanted to just quickly summarize. I think we might have skipped over one slide. There was a quick summary of just all the points that we talked about here. We go, oh no, can we go back to? Oh, maybe there wasn't a summary slide. Never mind, thank you. So we talked about the importance of symbols and role models. We talked about the importance of social norms and being a micro-responsor. We talked about evaluation processes and having pre-selected and set criteria to ensure fairness in evaluations. We talked about training and the need to couple training with process changes if it's gonna stick and then we talked about the gender neutrality of policies. And finally I wanna leave you with a framework to help you think about when we're making these changes, when we're looking to do behavioral design in our organizations to advance gender equality. How do we make sure that it sticks? How do we make sure that we actually change people's behavior? And this framework now we can go to the next slide. Thank you very much. It's called EAST. EAST stands for Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely. This is a framework that was developed by the behavioral insets team in the UK about 10 years ago. And based on decades of behavioral science research, we know that if we're gonna get humans to change their behavior, we need to make it easy, attractive, social, and timely for them to do so. So here's a few examples of what that means. Making things easy, next please, could be things like making it simple. Making something a default. The contraption for the light switch next to the door in the hotel room, that's an example of something that's very simple. We make it easy for people to do the thing that we want them to do. Default. Studies show that if we want people to sign up for retirement savings through their work, if they have to sign an extra form, fill out an extra form to enroll in the 401k plan, the general rates of enrollment are in the low teens, 10 to 20%. If instead as a default, everyone when they start a new job, they're enrolled into the 401k plan and they have the option to opt out. If you don't wanna participate, no problem, you can fill out this form. The rates of participation jumped to 90 to 95%. So defaults are very powerful and they don't take away the freedom of choice. Anyone can still participate or not. We're just helping people, nudging them in the direction that we think it would be most productive for them to go in. Checklists. The world's most experienced pilots still have a checklist that they need to go through for every takeoff and landing and various other things that are involved in flight because our human brains are fallible, we forget, we get overwhelmed, we panic, we get stressed, the checklist helps. That's another example of making things easy. Next please, making things attractive is all about leveraging the fact that we humans like to follow the herd. We don't wanna be the odd one out. We don't wanna be the only person going left when everyone else is going right. So we like to be celebrated. We like to be recognized for doing good things. You can have awards for gender equality. You can call out managers and teams, programs that have managed to do great things in the area of gender equality. On the flip side, if that's the carrot that works, there's also the stick that works. Just like we love to be celebrated as humans, we also hate to be shamed and called out. In the UK they did this very successfully in the last 10 years or so in their efforts to get more women onto corporate boards. The media undertook a concerted effort to start calling out the companies by name that didn't have a single female director on their boards. And it worked because no one wants that bad publicity, especially when there's something pretty simple that they can do to avoid it. Next is social. Social is all about, we talked about social norms already. This is leveraging the fact that we humans are consciously or unconsciously always comparing ourselves to each other. So we talked about social norms, competition. Very effective way to get people to move in the direction that you want them to move is when there's some kind of competitive setup where you can see how you are tracking and stacking up against other people. Also accountability, making things public, sharing data, tracking data, releasing data on an annual basis. Whether it's public inside an organization or fully public in the eyes of the whole world. We know that goals and targets are some of the most effective ways to drive behavior if you're really trying to get something done. Set a goal and tell someone about it so that there's an accountability loop created. And finally, timeliness. Goals are up here again. But it's also very important to speak to people in the right moment when they're paying attention. Let's say we are tackling the issue of gender bias and performance evaluations and in our organization, performance evaluations happen every November. If you talk to people about this in July, you're wasting your time. Because between July and November, they will have forgotten everything that you just said. If you want people to be mindful of how bias might be creeping into the evaluation, you have to talk to them one day or two days before they're actually filling out their performance evaluations and that process is happening. Because that's when we're paying attention. That's when there's a sense of urgency that gets us to act. And I want to conclude with a quick little story from the real world, a little example of how this all comes to life with some pretty remarkable consequences. Next, please. The story, oh, here's the guidelines. Look at that. We can just breeze through these because we already covered them. Thank you, and we'll go to the next one here. The story comes to us from the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. And they have a very ambitious global effort underway to equalize the representation of women and men in all of their media. What this means is if you watch an hour of BBC television, you should see 50% women and 50% men appearing on screen. If you read an article on the BBC's website, you should see 50% women and men named, with a bold name, in the article. You get the idea. This effort started with just one person, Ross Atkins, the gentleman on the left. He, I like to call him the Anderson Cooper of the UK. He hosts a nightly primetime news show. And he started having the sinking suspicion in 2017 that his show was featuring a lot more men than women, but he didn't have any data. So he didn't actually know. It was just a gut feeling. So he decided to collect the data. They started counting him and the production team at the end of every night's show. They would tally up who did we feature on screen, how many women, how many men. At the end of every week and month, they put those numbers together for an average that they would track over time. In four months, they had gotten their representation of women to go from 39% to 51. They've stayed there ever since. Once they had proven the concept on their own show, they had the track record to say, you know, we've done this. They started sharing the approach with other teams. They made it attractive by making it voluntary. They said, no pressure, but this is something that has worked for us. We're gonna make this very easy for you by giving us all our tracking templates. Here's the Excel spreadsheet. Here's the process. We'll teach you everything we know. And then when teams started signing up and collecting their own data, they made it social and timely by releasing all the data monthly to all the participating teams. So all the teams could see how they were stacking up against each other. They never shamed anybody. They took a relentlessly positive approach. They celebrated teams wildly for signing up to the project and for making improvements. And over the last five years, the results have been absolutely remarkable. In terms of the thousands and thousands of journalists and teams around the world that are participating, in terms of the numbers that, you know, about 20% of the teams when they joined the 50-50 project are actually hitting 50-50 representation. Within a year to 18 months, 75% of teams that are tracking their data hit 50-50 consistently. And even more incredibly, audiences have noticed. They've noticed the fact that the content is more representative. They find the content to be more interesting and they're actually watching more, which the BBC is thrilled with. So small changes, starting with even just one person in a massive global organization can have huge ripples and huge effects. Next, please. I wanted to leave you with a couple of resources. In case you're interested in further reading, I highly recommend the book What Works, Gender Equality by Design by my colleague Iris Vanette at Harvard Kennedy School. That's about this exact topic, using behavioral design to advance gender equality. There's also Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Taylor, which talks more broadly about using behavioral design in all kinds of contexts to shift human behavior. And for those of you who are really interested in the psychological underpinnings of how the human brain's work, I recommend Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Kahneman. And my co-authors and I have also written a lot of articles in Harvard Business Review that provide very specific and actionable suggestions for organizations based on research of things that they can do to advance gender equality in the vein of what we've talked about today. So you can check those out as well. And finally, next, please. My office at Harvard, the Women in Public Policy Program, maintains a free open access database called the Gender Action Portal, which summarizes academic research on advancing gender equality, not just in the workplace setting, but also in health, in education, and in political participation. And so the purpose of that database, that site, is to make academic insights more easily accessible to practitioners, to journalists, to policy makers. So I highly recommend that as well. And with that, I say thank you very much for having me and for listening. I am really eager to hear what's on your mind. I know we have a couple of microphones that are gonna run around and I can run this around as well. So questions, comments, challenges. Oh yes, thank you Carol. Heidi, do we have any questions from the virtual audience? Yes, thank you. We do. One of them is, when gender equality is questioned, some organizations have pointed to proportional representation demonstrating a fair weighted, a fair share weighted equality. What research addresses the appointments of those already in place that set the biased baseline? There's an additional question here that asks, is there any thought about removing names and pronouns from hiring evaluations and awards? Thank you. Thank you. I'll address both of those quickly. Let's start with the second one. There's a ton of evidence on anonymizing resumes, taking people's names off, maybe even the names of their educational institutions, the names of their past employers. The long and short of it is, if currently the hiring process is discriminating against certain groups, when you, based on let's say gender or ethnicity, when you remove the names, you remove people's ability to discriminate based on those characteristics. So it helps. It helps to devise the process and it helps to increase diversity in outcomes. The only time it doesn't work is if the organization is currently using the information contained in the names to positively discriminate, right? And consciously pick women. There's a great study in France where the one place that it didn't work was the government agency that was purposefully seeking out ethnic minority and immigrant employees. And they were using people's names to identify who those immigrants were. So when the names were blinded and anonymized, they couldn't do that anymore and diversity actually went down. But as a de-biasing strategy, yes, generally it's very evidence-based. The first question about proportional representation, I'm gonna understand the question this way, which is that if we are currently in a situation where there's very little diversity in organizations, it's very male dominated, let's say, and we're trying to get to gender parity and more proportional representation, how can we do that because we're starting from such a low base, right? Actually, one of the articles that I recently wrote was on this exact topic and we propose this idea of the gender proportionality principle, which is that quite simply in most organizations we have more diversity and more women at the bottom and with every rank that we go up, it decreases and decreases. If we indeed believe that women and men are equally suited to work at all levels and there's no fundamental differences that would make women unsuited to positions above a certain level, then there's no reason why women and men should advance at different rates or at different speeds to the organization. So the simple goal that we propose for organizations is if, let's say at level one, you're at 50-50 and currently at level two, you're 60% men, 40% women, your goal should be to make level two mirror the composition of level one in some reasonable timeframe. One, two, three years, let's say. Because that's your pool. After all, people from level one are rising up to level two. So over time, if you are pulling people up from level to level in proportionate numbers, we should see with time that 50-50 representation get pulled up all the way to the top. I hope that answered your question. Now I'm gonna say thank you. It's been really a pleasure. I so appreciate your engagement and your wonderful questions and I hope you have a great rest of the conference. Thanks. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Siri. It was a wonderful presentation. I'm sure it gives us a lot of food for thought and how we can work on implementing WPS and our people processes and policies. We are running an aggressive schedule, I know. So we would like to keep on track and introduce that zero, nine, 50, panel one. We'd like to go ahead and get them set up. WPS and defense support of civil authority. WPS is not just over there, but here too. The panel moderator is Dr. Lauren McKenzie, Marine Corps University. If that panel would come up, she'll introduce them and we'll keep moving. Thank you. Okay, once again, we're ready to start here. Our next panel one, Dr. McKenzie, over to you. Good morning, everyone. I'm so pleased to be able to introduce our first panelist morning. The WPS professionals on this panel represent not only the breadth and the depth of the WPS effort, but they also have great experience at the operational, tactical, and strategic levels. For those of us who have been invested in advancing the WPS agenda over the past several years, we know that it's often more accessible and relevant to folks if we can situate it into a context. And so the folks on this panel have experience with Operation Allies Welcome, which some will mention in their remarks. But I know you can already read their bios in the program. So I'll just say that we're going to begin at your far right. So we'll begin with Ms. Tiffany Phillips, Northcom gender advisor, followed by Ms. Monica Herrera, the WPS curriculum designer for Indo-Pay-Com and we'll conclude with Ms. Corey Flesser, the senior WPS advisor for OUSD policy. So thanks so much for your attention this morning and Ms. Phillips, we'll begin with you. Great, can everyone hear me okay? Fantastic. So as is mentioned, I'm Tiffany Phillips. I actually serve as the Security Cooperation Integration Deputy at US Northern Command or Northcom. In that role, I oversee our development of security cooperation, a significant security cooperation initiatives and our security cooperation assessment, monitoring and evaluation. And then in an additional duty capacity, I serve as US Northcom's gender advisor. I think it's important to note that because that's some of the organizational change, the lasting change we're trying to create. Some of the change that I think OAW demonstrated there's a need for and that's a permanent presence at the combatant commands and other key DOD organizations that oversees women, peace and security. And so the way we currently develop and organize our workforce didn't allow for us to be as effective as we could have in Operation Allies Welcome. And so that was one of the lessons we learned in our learning and hopefully we can integrate that in. So hopefully next time someone is up here representing Northcom, you hear a little bit different introduction and that will demonstrate that we've created some lasting change. So with that, I don't wanna assume that everyone knows what Operation Allies Welcome is or what specific portion of that is that we're going to talk about. So I'm gonna give just a brief overview of Operation Allies Welcome. So it is a presidentially directed and Department of Homeland Security led operation to resettle Afghans into the United States. So a couple of key components there, you didn't hear DOD mentioned in that and that's because we served in a unique capacity in Operation Allies Welcome. It was a defense supportive civil authorities mission. That meant that DHS remained the lead federal agency. They made specific asks of what the department would provide them in the context of OAW that was transportation, temporary housing and support of the Afghan guest population, medical screening and general support. And we did this at Northcom. So DOD was requested to provide that support. Northcom was directed to provide that support. And then we did that for over 80,000 Afghan guests across in the first phase. And that's the phase we'll focus on today at eight different task force locations across the United States, all military installations. So with that really brief introduction, I was gonna make an assumption about the audience I'm speaking to, but I'm gonna take advantage of the fact that we're actually in person. And I'm gonna make this a little interactive. Hearing that brief introduction of the mission, who thinks there's a role for women, peace and security and Operation Allies Welcome? Raise your hand. Fantastic, my assumption was right. And that's that speaking to a room that's here to talk about women, peace and security, you would see that obviously there's implications for women, peace and security and there's opportunity for us to make an impact on that mission. And we, the WPS team at Northcom, saw that as well. And to get after something that was just mentioned in our keynote address, I wanted to recognize someone who's participating virtually today so that you won't see her face, like you'll see mine, but Ms. Claire Snead, who is our women, peace and security advisor, who works this program day in and day out, but is contract support, which is what we rely on in the department overwhelmingly to implement this program. And we'll talk about the challenges of that structure as well and how it played out in Operation Allies Welcome was just instrumental to making this happen. And our whole team of gender focal points across North and Northcom and then across the different GCCs, other organizations and OSD and joint staff. So the team came together. So I mentioned that it was, implemented eight different task forces. Each task force was so different. They were different based on the location. They were different based on the size of the Afghan guest population at each of those locations and their access to interagency and departmental resources. It was vastly different at each of those locations. And that really impacted how we were able to provide gender advisory support. It's also, I think, going to be really interesting when we look back and as we are now and reflect on lessons learned from how we implemented gender advisory support. So it's really exciting because while it was one operation, we're gonna see really more than eight, but at least eight different ways that that was implemented and learn lessons from that. And we'll talk a little bit about some of those ins-dried lessons learned and for reference of those eight installations, you have three represented here. So each of us spent at least some time at some of the task force installations with, I think, Monica carrying the most days of anyone out at the task force installations. So she'll talk really at the tactical level for you. So I'm really hopeful. I'm really optimistic. I'll ask another question to the group. Who thinks that it was, there was a compelling need for us to support these Afghans as they resettled to the US because of the commitment they made to us in operation supporting us for two decades in Afghanistan? Again, pretty resounding, right? So I mean, it was just exciting to be able to support the population itself. It was, and that was a no-brainer. Everyone that supported this mission was excited to be able to support that population. But I kept myself also focused on and worked very diligently at the operational level to make sure that this wasn't just an opportunity to support that population, but that we could learn some lessons and actually make some changes that helps us support and look at women, peace, and security differently going forward. And so when we're talking about creating organizational change, OEW did that in a very foundational way. If you look at the strategic framework and implementation plan, and if anyone who's been around women, peace, and security for a short period of time, you know that it was born out of security cooperation. I'm the security cooperation integration deputy. If you look at the SFIP, two of three defense objectives are focused on how we do this with our partner nations. Even if you look at that other objective, it's really a diversity and inclusion type of activity that we're encouraged to do. It doesn't compel us to do women, peace, and security outside of those contexts. We were fortunate at Northcom. We recognized this early, actually before Operation Allies Welcome and took a more expansive view of how we could implement women, peace, and security. And Northcom has that, I guess, opportunity. We have a unique mission set. We do Homeland Defense, we do defense support at civil authorities, and we also do security cooperation. But we have smaller, really deliberate, focus program in that area. So I think that allowed us to be a little more creative in our approach. So we had recognized, hey, there is opportunity here. One thing that I think, and I won't say I think, I know that helped us make a compelling case for Operation Allies Welcome though, was the cultural context. We had for some time been trying to make a compelling case for why you need to incorporate women, peace, and security in defense support of civil authorities. Even when you're operating within a domestic context, because anytime there's conflict and crisis, anytime you disrupt the normal structures that protect a population, you're going to create vulnerable groups that are gonna be exceptionally exposed in those areas. So it's gonna happen after a natural disaster in the United States with an American population. But it, for some reason, made it much easier to see it when you were talking about the Afghan culture and some of the dimensions of that culture that made it literally visually able, people visually able to see what differentiated women from men. But we took advantage of that and we used that to be able to make these, make this possible. And so I'll talk a little bit about kind of two phases that I worked in. So we talked about the first phase of the operation and there were really two phases to our gender advisory support. The first was just getting approval to get out there and then it was sustaining it once we were there. So I know that the Women, Peace and Security Warriors in the room are gonna hear me a lot on this one is that one of the biggest challenges early on was just the awareness, the misperceptions about what women, peace and security really is. I asked you a question about who sees the need for WPS and OAW and you all raised your hand? I guarantee if I asked that question at Northcom early on in OAW I would not have had everyone in the room raise their hand. I had to make a really compelling case for why it was necessary. And I think what is also really helpful is what was mentioned is kind of that collective. It's not, sometimes it can be a challenge and not only talk about the need for the program but how it will enhance your operational effectiveness. I'm not telling you to include women because it's gonna make women feel good to be included. I'm telling you to include women because your task force operations are going to be better when you do. And so I think that unfortunately it took just some challenges actually being raised. There were an overwhelming number of pregnant women arriving at the task force locations. There was gender based risk factors present at the task force locations. So it took the fact that some of these gender related issues were already bubbling up for us to be able to articulate the need for the program. And there was another misperception. There was a misperception that WPS was this nice thing to do after the fact. Not that it was a necessity and not that it was part of life saving support. So it's really hard to articulate the need for a gendered perspective or a gender advisor early on when they're like, we're just trying to save lives. We're just trying to get people out. We're just trying to get a roof over their head and food into their mouths. And we're saying, but we can help you better get that roof over their head, structure that and get food into their mouths if you're considering this. So one thing that I would say, one takeaway from that is if you're not successful in the first phase, that doesn't mean you can't interject yourself in the second phase. So we were pretty close to done with the build phase. It was about as we transitioned into the maintain phase that we were able to get gender advisory support out there. Now it didn't happen as quickly as Tiffany wanted, but as Corey highlighted to me yesterday, it still happened relatively quickly if you look at the pace of the operation. So the operations really started having very late July and by September we had gender advisor supports at some of the locations and by early October we had them at all eight task force installations. And then there was another misreception. And it's a joke that I like to make that it's everyone's, there's a role with the IG plays in the military culture or the inspector general that sometimes not everyone appreciates, right? And so people thought we were gonna be like gender inspectors. They thought gender advisors were gonna go out there just to spy on what you were doing in the women's peace and security space or even more importantly, what you weren't doing and we had some kind of scorecard that we were gonna like post nationally for everyone to see to embarrass what wasn't being done or highlight some of the gaps that we're gonna, if no one's lifting up the rock to look under it then we can all pretend that there are no issues. So what we had to demonstrate and what I encourage you to do, especially as we shift as a department towards a real focus on gender analysis is make sure that you're talking about what your gender analysis will do, what you will inform. So it was very important to say we're not going out there to identify problems. We're going out there to identify problems and help find solutions. So make sure that you're not, I think that this is a really compelling thing that we need to do within the department. You're not just identifying what's broken. You're helping them fix it. And so that was really important on the awareness and like the getting in phase. And then there was this real tension and there always is in defense support of civil authorities missions where the department doesn't want to overstep its role with the lead federal agency, kind of what the department should provide, what roles they should fill and what roles the interagency should fill and what they should be doing as lead federal agency and other departments that were supporting. So there was a little bit of a worry that if we're stepping in with gender advisory support that we're going to be accepting responsibility for all gender related needs, all gender related problems that might bubble up these task force locations. So just saying that no it's, these things are already happening and we're already providing services that have a very gender related dimension. We're just, we're still going to stay within the purview of transportation, temporary housing, medical security and general support. We're going to help you apply a gendered lens in those areas so you do those things more effectively. Once we got past the authorization, it happened 24 September and I think we sent people up the same day that we got the actual fragmentary order that allowed us to send gender advisory support personnel to all task force locations. It was just, it only took three weeks before we had DHS actually send an exec sec memo requesting us to extend gender advisory support for the entirety of operations at all eight task forces. So I think that that is huge. Once we were there, they wanted us to stay. Getting there was hard but once we were there we demonstrated our value to the operations and that we were asked to stay on for the rest of the operations and as they transitioned into phase two, I didn't have to ask the question in phase two. I didn't have to say should we have gender advisory support or WPS baked into phase two of operation allies welcome. Everyone assumed that we would and it was just who was going to do it and how was it going to look and that's a huge win. That's organizational change. It's not lasting yet. It's still a flash in the pan but that's organizational change. Another thing it offers that it was organizational change that was then ponied up by the interagency. They said, wow, this is a tremendous perspective that you brought to this operation and we're going to invest our own time and resources and make sure that it is carried on in the second phase of operations. And then phase two couldn't look like phase one. We were very delivered in phase one. There was a little bit of not a little bit. There was a lot of risk to the program and we had to make sure that we were sending out the best of the best. We had to make sure that these people could operate very independently not just in the task force but in the women's peace and security space which can be a really funny space to work in sometimes difficult to kind of step around all of the communication challenges and the information space, you know, just the messaging. So we sent out people that could really navigate well in that space but we didn't have enough of those people to sustain for the entirety of operations. We didn't have enough of those people within Northcom. We didn't have a permanent women's peace and security workforce like I just mentioned. We had a lot of contract support. So I had to do really creative things. I had to basically transport contract oversight responsibility of those contractors while they were at the task force locations. I had to work with the contracting office to figure that out. There was a lot of talk about request for forces and everyone wanted a request for forces in order to have OPCON and TECON and just having to explain that you can never have operational control or tactical control of a contractor because they still work for the company that pays them every day, right? So, but putting in place some sort of mechanism to make the task forces feel comfortable that those people were coming to support their needs and not necessarily the needs of the organization they came from. And so I think that it was, Operation LA's Welcome was very helpful from a proof of concept standpoint. It helped us kind of disrupt how we thought about and how we employ gender advisory support. And then I'm going to turn it over to the rest of my panel to kind of elaborate on how that played out for them. Excellent, thank you so much. Over to Ms. Herrera. Thank you so much and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today, to be here today. It is truly such a pleasure to be in this room with what I consider our gender network across DOD, interagency, multi-sector, WPS implementation just to be able to see so many of you in person and knowing how many of you are dialed in virtually as well. And it is just a pleasure to be on this particular panel with some of my distinguished colleagues. So a special thanks to Tiffany, Claire Snead and the Northcom team, OSD and joint staff who really made this happen, who got us out the door and on on the ground. So I'm going to talk two things. I'm sure many people are very interested in knowing, okay, what was it actually like on the ground? I will get there. But I do want to start with a kind of overview of why did Indo-Pacific command, which is the command I'm assigned to, why did we send so many people and by so many, four? We sent four personnel to support OAW. It seems not like that many, but for eight task force locations, those first few out the door, our Indo Paycom team, we are four strong, four full-time personnel contractor personnel, three out of the four of us were on that very first rotation to the eight locations. So supporting different ones, including our command gender advisor, Sharon Feist and our WPS analyst, Dr. D. Sawyers. And during phase two support, we were able to send another one of our gender focal points, Major Clint Winland. And so we went to all, to four different locations and I'm really excited to kind of talk a little bit more about what that looked like. So why did we prioritize this for our program, sending three fourths of our entire workforce to support out the door in the get-go? And some of this is, what we've learned is that each combatant command really has a tailored approach to WPS based on our strategic objectives. And so for us at Indo-Pacific command from the very get-go, our primary focus has been operationalizing gender perspectives to our military mission sets. And so we believe that that kind of drives everything. How gender functions in communities, in societies, in organizations, institutions, broader culture, within defense, that is foundational to our approach to really implementation of WPS in any area within our region. OAW really represented a human-centered, humanitarian crisis and response efforts. At Indo-Pacific, we have 36 partner nations. The number one guaranteed thing that military operation that we are guaranteed to support and that our partner nations support are humanitarian crises. These are vast in our region. And so these are the security challenges our partner nations are facing. This is exactly the kind of training our partner nations want more of. An interesting story. Literally the first few weeks that I was out there, I don't even think all of our components knew that we had deployed to help support this, but we received a request from our US Army Pacific command that said, hey, this partner nation has just come, we're doing this engagement with them and they specifically want to know if we have any experience with managing refugee camps or operations. I was like, well, we did it before and these are not refugees, these are evacuees, but talk about timely real world experience on the ground experience for our team to actually operationalize these concepts in a real world scenario. And as Tiffany mentioned, DOD is not typically the lead US agency for humanitarian response, but for our partner nations, many of their militaries, they are often the lead agency. So for us, and they partner directly with defense institutions, so for us to have this experience really goes a long way in building our own credibility to provide this capability and partner with other nations. The other thing, and Tiffany had mentioned the kind of culture piece, we really tailored this response to the specific population culture that we were dealing with and that is exactly the kind of implementation. We need to be modeling out with our other partner nations. There is no one size fits all application of gender perspectives. You have to tailor it to each of the affected population that you're dealing with. So again, kind of that opportunity for us to practice that. And then of course from a strategic competition perspective, this really provides us an unprecedented competitive advantage in this space that we have this experience and that we can really be the WPS partner of choice in our region. And then of course my primary job as a curriculum developer, this was a really great opportunity to validate whether the training that we are providing our gender focal points and gender advisors is actually the most relevant to a real operation. And I was very pleased that that was the case. Okay, so that's some Indo-Pay-Com overview. So on the ground, Tiffany mentioned every task force was very different. We had different resources. So I was at Task Force Liberty, which was at Joint Base Maguire Dix Lakehurst. We were quite close to a number of large hospitals. So in the initial, the very initial phases, it was like emergency just to get people over. But as we started realizing what different resources each task force had, that population demographics that were being sent to each task force actually was kind of shaped based on the resources available. So the population demographics of the Afghan guest population was different in every task force location. And then Tiffany mentioned the personnel and the actual stakeholders on the ground, DHS, DOS, DOD, UN, the International Rescue Committee, NGOs, those were all different. There was no, whoever could make it, right, was there. So we really did need a gender advisor at every location for that initial assessment of again, what are the gaps and then how do we partner and be a truly a solution, be a gender advisor, be a solution. So what was our real mission then at the Task Force location? For Liberty, kind of our tagline for what we were there to do and not just DOD, but in general, was to provide safe, secure, dignified and equitable access to information, goods, and services required for folks to complete their processing into the United States. And so that's complex. It involves every agency that involves all the stakeholders on the ground. So as a gender advisor, not just going there to support the DOD part of the mission, but really holistically looking across all those aspects. So let's kind of break that down, safe, secure, dignified, equitable access. So safety, and this is one of those, what do people think that a gender advisor is coming to do and versus what do we think we're doing versus what did we actually do? What did people think we were there to do? Primarily, oftentimes gender is conflated with women and then that's conflated to vulnerable population. And there is a truth to that. Women are at more risk, women and girls to different forms of violence. They have different security means, we know that. But our job as gender advisors, that protection piece is a very important part of the WPS portfolio, but not the only part. And gender advisors, we're not trained protection advisors or case workers who have the expert knowledge and experience to deal with that individual cases on the ground. So I was very fortunate when I landed at Liberty, there was already a protection working group that had DHS, Department of State leads. And so for me, it was integrating into that existing working group, not taking it over, leaving it to the protection professionals, but providing the gendered lens to protection issues. Okay, that's just the safety piece. We'll get to the security piece and who defines security in a moment. But let's talk about equitable access. And I really appreciate Dr. Chalazzi's remarks earlier that equal is not necessarily the same as equitable. So treating everyone the same does not necessarily lead in equitable or fair outcomes. And I really also appreciated kind of looking at organizations, processes and people because we were literally building physical structures, organizational structures and processes. And we were constructing a culture in and of itself at each of these locations. And so part of our job was to ensure that in the building of that, we weren't building fences that some people couldn't see over. We weren't gonna be responsible for building institutional barriers, but recognizing that cultural barriers or cultural norms also very much affect the way people think and behave. And recognizing that some of those fences already exist, how do we now create more equitable access to information, goods and services? So getting through some of those barriers. So let's talk information, goods and services. Let's talk information. I love talking information because I was active duty Air Force for 12 years in the reserves now and I'm an information operations officer. So of course I'm going to tell you that information environment is the most important environment to the mission, but that was actually true in the case of these safe havens because ensuring that the population knew when their medical appointments were, what the process was actually like, how to get to and from where they needed to go to shepherd, that was the mission, was getting them through the resettlement process. A lot of moving pieces. Let's talk about the culture as far as information dissemination is concerned. For us, like, hey, let's throw up a Facebook page or a chat group. We'll just get all of this out via mobile devices. There was a good chunk of the population that had cell phones. I did an informal poll at one of our women's council meetings. How many women have access all the time to a mobile device, a smartphone? Informally, did not do a full survey, but less than 20%. So this is not a form of information dissemination that's going to work for the entire population. Okay, what about print flyers? Well, literacy rates are significantly different between the male and female population and among different rural populations versus urban populations. So we're looking at, we have to look at that comprehensively. And then, okay, so then verbal communication through town halls, very important. Well, now we start looking at who comes, who participates, who actually has access to all that information that is critical. So we had to devise different mechanisms to disseminate information. Goods, things like supplies. This is a great example of where Equal is not equitable. So we had these basically donation warehouses that fed or sort of supply shops where the guests could go and acquire items, clothing, diapers, at any kind of baseline needs that they needed. And it was like, okay, every guest, you have a badge number and you get a certain amount of time in the supply shop. Put the gender lens on, how many, the men might be going to the supply shop on their own. The women are mostly going with their three or four or five kids. So they need more time actually in that supply shop to get the things that they need for their family. And so this is just, again, it kind of seems simple, but Equal is not equitable. So looking at those kinds of things, services, lodging, transportation, faith-based support, education, cultural orientation, right? We were preparing these folks. This is, we were not recreating Afghanistan at these locations. We were not recreating the United States. This was really a bridge between where they were coming from and where they're going. And it requires a certain degree of orientation to new norms. New norms like changes in the way men and women are treated and laws about what is or is not allowable or against the law when it comes to behavior. These are gender norms that are changing for these populations. Changes in gender dynamics do not only affect women or girls, right? They affect men, boys, minority gender populations as well. So making sure that when we're providing this information, it's not just going to one population. Hey, women, did you know that these are your rights now? Right? Hey, men, did you know this is the way women are treated? This is, these are the way our laws look, et cetera. And helping through, that can be, I mean, it's a huge culture shock on top of a huge trauma that many of these folks were coming with. But some of the other services, like lodging, seem gender-neutral, but really they can be gender-blind without that gender perspective. And so that, again, was looking across all of these different functions within a task force, attending different working group meetings, understanding who the network was to ensure that gender perspectives were really being taken into account holistically. And with that, I do wanna just highlight one of the huge ways that helped that at our task force location. And thanks to one of the airmen who was on the ground, Major Madison Skachia, before I got there, who had a WPS background and was part of our kind of informal gender network, helped establish a female engagement team early on to, one, help build trust among the women's population so that we could better understand their security needs to respond to gender-sensitive issues. And three, run the women's council meetings where when we talk about security, we are hearing directly from the women on what their needs are, what is gonna make them feel safe, what are their requirements, so that if we could learn anything from the WPS agendas, don't assume what somebody else needs, ask them, and the meaningful participation was extremely important. And so that is kind of, I will stop there because I know we have a limited amount of time. So if you have any questions, any of those many different things that we were all doing that we all touched at the task force locations, I look forward to the Q&A after I'm hearing. Hearing your thoughts. Thank you so much, Monica. And to our last speaker on the panel now, turn it over to Ms. Corey Flesser. Okay, fantastic. So it is so lovely to put so many faces to email addresses. I was looking at everybody's name tags and I was like, this is great. I finally know what you all look like after spamming your inboxes for the last two years. So it's great to see those of you in person. I think thanks to those of you who decided to join virtually today. I hope at some point in time that we can also see you in the future as well. So I have the lovely task of really bringing the policy perspective to this. And I think, I'll state upfront that after having worked at AFRICOM as a gender advisor and supported WPS from the joint staff side of the house, having gone to Quantico as one of the gender advisors for OAW, that's the cool job. This is the one where you really get to see like the rubber hit the road and see things in real time that are happening very quickly. And I think when I come back to my policy job and I reflect on what Dr. Chalazi was saying in her opening remarks of people, policy and process, like this is what I do in policy nowadays is trying to make sure that they continue to keep doing the cool stuff that really is that important impactful work on the ground in real time. And so a lot of my comments really reflect on what was going on from a policy perspective at the time when we were figuring out is this the right move for the Department of Defense given our supporting role to the lead federal agency that was DHS for this operation? Does this fall within the DSEA mission? And I agree with all the hands that were raised. Yes, indeed it does. But more importantly, how and how do we make that happen through the people and the processes that we have available today? Because I think we all can appreciate that when you're in a real time crisis response scenario you're not trying to coordinate a policy document. You're not trying to write doctrine at that point in time to reflect the environment that you're currently operating in. So you're really trying to make these decisions given where you're at today and say, how do I use those tools that I have, the people and the processes to really get after what is happening on the ground and be able to affect the thing that is needing some work? So at the DC level, what was particularly interesting to experience, I was participating in a lot of the sub IPCs led by the National Security Council with DHS representatives, Health and Human Service representatives. I've never participated in an interagency meeting with almost every single interagency partner there. It was truly, truly a case study in interagency coordination for starters. But what was interesting is that across the board at the DC level, we kept hearing of these different sort of gender and protection issues arising that definitely needed some sort of visibility and tactical level support. But one of the challenges that we were facing is that, one, we couldn't get collective guidance written because all the challenges were different based on the location. As Monica and Tiffany highlighted, the demographics were different, the populations were different, what they were experiencing was different in orders of magnitude. So trying to write high level policy guidance that empowered people to sort of take action, that just became very challenging. And I think the second challenge that we faced is that everybody wanted to do the right thing. There was general agreement across the board that we had to do something we wanted to support those Afghans that supported us for so many years. But not one individual organization owned the full solution. And that, I guess, maybe is interagency coordination in a nutshell, right? I think that's, we work on this on a daily basis. But specifically to deploying gender advisors, I'll admit it first, when Northcom was discussing this idea, I was kind of sitting back and forth and rocking in my chair like, is this the right move for the department? Because the implications, like Tiffany highlighted, were so stark. It was a big risk. We'd never done this before. We'd never tried to do this before. We have based our model for gender advisors in the department of defense based on NATO's deployed gender advisor concept. But you all know, as well as I do, that when we look across the department, our gender advisors are at operational combatant commands at the headquarter levels. They sit inside the J5s and manage things like security cooperation. They integrate into planning working groups. And maybe I'm reflecting on my own career here. You know, we do more steady state things. No one's asking contractor Corey to deploy to a tactical level operation. We have service members for that. But what we don't have is service members who we can find in our system that have gender advisor qualifications and training. And I think Tiffany has highlighted that, which I'll speak to in a second. So while we were really considering like, is this the right move? This was sort of this policy decision of, do we want to, like, is this the right time to use this as a proof of concept? And I think as we engaged in more intentional conversations with the joint staff in Northcom, we really did realize that Northcom was doing the hard work of narrowing down the concept of gender advisory support into the DOD lane, such that we weren't trying to take on issue areas that one, our gender advisors weren't qualified for. And two, things that were outside of the DOD role anyways. And so we realized that, again, in true DOD form, we can actually, and I know Tiffany thinks we didn't do this fast enough, but at least from a DOD perspective comparatively, we did the thing that DOD does best. We mobilized people and resources to get to the fight and we got there first in many ways. There in some instances across the board were different interagency partners that were already on the ground highlighting these issues. But what I really think is a true testament to sort of our gender advisor workforce, is quite frankly, the way they get in there, assess the situation and start moving out swiftly. And that is a very unique characteristic that I think the DOD has generally speaking. And I think a characteristic that many of our gender advisors have taken on. And when we were considering, how do we support this? How do we get the people to the fight? One key consideration was who's it gonna be? Where do we find those gender advisors? Cause like I said, we don't have service members that we can RFF request for forces for. But we do have folks at IndoPaycom who we know and we trust and have been involved in the gender network at DOD. We do have Aaron Cooper, shout out to my colleague in OSD policy, and also shout out to my colleague, Sienna Chickarelli, who also deployed. We do have gender advisors who are currently serving in this capacity and sort of know what you are supposed to do at this operational level. And I think one of the things that I found so incredibly profound is that their ability to take what they could do at the operational level and immediately translate that to a tactical level, it was like a switch. Like it was just a switch. There was no sort of like pause or consideration. There was no additional training needed. We didn't have to write doctrine in real time. But there was this, I know what I am supposed to be doing as a gender advisor that immediately became applicable and more tactically sound, I think, and relevant once they got on site to each of these installations. And I think, I bring up a lot of these things because I can't overstate enough how much this proof of concept shifted the way the department thinks about our gender advisor workforce. Who they are, what they do, how they're trained, how this aligns to our support for the broader WPS legislation, and how this is one way the department gets at that famous phrase we all know and love, operationalizing a gender perspective. Because I think when we, and I look across the room and I'm looking at the familiar faces and I see the name tags, and we've all heard time and time again, well, you implement the Women, Peace and Security Mandate by operationalizing a gender perspective. And all of us walk into the offices of our senior people or our colleagues and we say this with confidence and they look back at us and they say, yep, we buy into it, but how? And I think this proof of concept gave us one example, not the only one, but one example of how you can actually operationalize this because of the examples that Monica gave, where we weren't simply looking at a program and trying to increase the participation of women in the training, but rather, we were having people on the ground in real time provide advice to leadership and staff about the different ways that Afghan men and women were sort of processing their resettlement process, receiving information, accessing goods, and we were doing it across the entire population for both men, women, the younger men and women, the children in particular, and we were doing it in real time in sort of rapid fire gender analyses. So that was another kind of interesting thing, right? Where we didn't take out a lovely Pemisi framework at the staff meeting and start writing out how a gender perspective is all good to go in the Pemisi framework. We had Monica crunching information in her head and being like, okay, cool, we got this, let's do an informal poll, and we'll call that our sort of rapid gender analysis until we have time to maybe go back and revalidate. That was another interesting proof of concept that was happening in real time with our gender advisors because this elusive thing of a gender analysis that we know is so transformative and powerful to our processes was now being done sort of very rapidly and quickly in real time without guidance telling people to do it and without a standardized template. Although I do agree with the idea of having a checklist for gender analysis, by the way. I think that really helps clarify things. So I think when we think about and link this back into organizational change, I can tell you right now the immediate impacts of this deployment and I think the hard work of the gender advisors like Monica and Tiffany, but also like Tiffany and Claire, the WPS team at Northcom, they're sort of forward leaning visionary approach to be the first combatant command to figure this out. Really did immediately shift the way we wrote the department defense instruction on WPS. It had already been in the process. It had been sort of like in different versions and iterations based on the last decade of things that we've learned about WPS from the DOD perspective. But what it really did is shape how we wrote what the different roles and relationships and functions are for our gender advisory workforce. And importantly, I think we thought about the implications of not being able to request for forces back into the services for gender advisory support because what we operated on was a list of people who had attended a gender focal point course in the last two years and had to email them to say, hey, are you available? That was our RFF process. And that is not typically how the department does this but in real time, knowing that we needed the people to be on the ground to support the mission, this was sort of us putting together these different things. And so it is one of those examples where being the first provides us an example of what we don't know and need to fix because we wanna make sure that the next time we have to do that in a different theater, you come as an example. We have sort of thought through in advance how to get those people to the fight because that's sort of the important part and exactly what they'll do once they are in the fight. We figured that out. Monica outlined it very wonderfully just now. And she has more thoughts on that, so please ask her. But from like a policy perspective, this is, it was a, I'll just, I'll close there. I just can't overstate sort of what it did for shifting the department and sort of taking the more steady state gender advisor roles and really showing that you can take those folks, deploy them more tactically. They can support more tactical operations. And then interestingly, you know, we did it with contractors. Again, contractor Corey. We did it with contractors. And I think when we look to the future, we need to, we're gonna start figuring out what this blend of deployment looks like when you have a large cadre of this capability being in a contractor status, how you get that there. And then also how you start training up more service members or civilians, quite frankly. We could use civilians too to make sure that capability is sort of ready to deploy if and when we can do it. So thanks. Oh, thank you, thank you, sorry about that. Thank you panel one. I think that's one of the stimulating discussions that gives us so much food for thought and we can rest on some accomplishments while we're all thinking about the next thing. And it's a good point for us note takers on the recommendations and the ways ahead. So I think there was a lot in there to work on. So next we'll have, congratulations. We've worked our way to our first official break. We'll take 10 minutes please from, I have about 1106 now. So we can try for 1116 or so. And we'll be back in switching out panel two, WPS and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility. And the moderator will be Mr. Warren Yu. So if you can bring your panel up, that'd be great. Thank you. If I could just, if you could wrap up with your extra coffee cups and take your seats again, we'll recommence, reconvene with panel number two and I'll turn it over to Mr. Warren Yu from the Naval Postgraduate School. Good morning everybody. My name's Warren Yu, I'm the Chief Learning Officer at the Sibrowski Design Studio on the campus of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. I'm the moderator for the second panel in which we'll discuss the intersection of women, peace and security with diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility to achieve mutual goals. Access to the resources mentioned in today's remarks are available three ways by scanning with your smartphone's camera, the QR code in the lower left of our campus photo or by typing into an internet browser, the web address below it, or if you're joining us via Zoom, clicking that same link in chat. Before turning it over to our three panelists, I'd like to share with you three reflections on our nation's workforce, why I think it's so important and what I hope you'll gain from this week's symposium. Reflection number one. In 2021, 423 companies with 12 million workers participated in a McKinsey and Company study on women in the workplace. The top three takeaways, two years into the pandemic, number one, women are significantly and increasingly more burned out than men. Number two, women under served minorities, LGBTQI plus and disabled affinity groups are burgeoning centers of, by and for equity and allyship, but their efforts are going unrecognized and unrewarded, which risks losing them when we need their leadership the most. And number three, women and in particular, women of color continue to experience microaggressions and othering behavior and we fellow employees are no more likely than in 2020 to speak out against discrimination or to mentor women or to sponsor women or to advocate for women. So, perhaps a question for the panel to consider, how might DOD best apply these insights to advance DEIA and WPS? Reflection number two. Last summer, Silicon Valley Tech Sector Initiative named the ACT Report calls for a paradigm shifting blueprint grounded in values that indivisibly links DEIA and business strategies. Like they did with DEIA, how might DOD bring an operations approach to inclusion and gender and an inclusive gendered approach to operations? Final reflection number three. Education directly impacts employment opportunity, full stop. We must intervene early and at scale to drive equity from cradle through career. That means tackling educational inequity generally and accelerating access to STEM education specifically. The question is, how might DOD best use education to further operationalize WPS while also advancing DEIA? Although DOD has endeavored to not pigeonhole WPS in EEO or DEIA, worthy as they are, the progressive approach the American workforce is taking toward DEIA today may prove instrumental in promoting a gendered WPS approach throughout the DOD tomorrow. We should illuminate these challenges, facilitate their authentic conversations and foster ecosystems for learning, action and resources. Our humble contributions toward learning, action and resources are displayed throughout the symposium with new icons for women, peace and security, our design thinking guide to help provide a new framework for tackling wicked problems, which Carl and his team will be teaching us about this afternoon and a resource guide to the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal internships, scholarships and jobs that can specifically empower women and underserved affinity groups while fueling WPS and DEIA. I'll close with this. I've been with the US Navy for 37 years. Today's sea story was actually a career inflection point. In 1992, in the Sea of Japan on the Pacific Fleet flagship, I was accused by my executive officer of witchcraft and black magic. For something I did with technology he didn't think was possible. Here's the lesson learned. It had nothing to do with technology. It had everything to do with culture. My exo felt scared, he felt threatened, he felt insulted, so he collapsed the program. That day we both lost, the Navy lost and our adversaries advanced. Our system didn't work because it failed to cultivate creativity, to nourish innovation, to harvest new ideas, to embrace risk, to evolve, to change. And that's why I'm here. My hope this week is that you depart inspired by three ideas with six words. Number three, how might we? Number two, yes and? Number one, change. Because if we don't profoundly change, however scary, however threatening, however insulting our conversations may have to get, the Chinese or another adversary will gladly make that profound change for us. Today we are blessed to have three experts on our panel. We'll start with Dr. Harriet Lewis who will talk about her experience with DEIA in the private sector and her leadership in helping redefine national security with women of color advancing peace and security. Interesting anecdote while traveling through Turkey 20 years ago on a rotary group study exchange, Harriet proudly taught herself the Turkish language in three weeks to deliver a talk to 400 Turkish citizens. Dr. John Rajinsky of West Point will talk about how the US Military Academy is taking a different perspective on DEIA through respect and interestingly, he also sang backup for Billy Joel. And finally, Dr. Jeanette Gojri Haney will share her perspectives on implementing DEIA throughout the Department of Defense, AKA Solving World Hunger. It's truly what we call a wicked problem. Fun story, Jeanette along with her daughters and 100 other friends proudly paraded in Mardi Gras celebrations earlier this year while all dressed as Princess Leia. Harriet, we'll start with you. Thank you for that introduction, Moran. Karadenizden Akdenize, that is all I remember in Turkish and hopefully the people in the room who speak Turkish know that I was trying to say from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. That's it, and that's the area that we traveled. So I am honored and privileged to be in this space with you as a civilian and in this space talking about something that's very important to me, WPS. I've been in this space of women, peace and security as a civilian in different spaces with nonprofits, NGOs, and Nigeria. And so I am excited to be in this space with you to talk to you a little bit about WCAPS. We call it WCAPS. It's Women Advancing, Peace, Security, and Conflict Transformation, as well as some strategy to further DEI in different spaces. And okay, great. I wanted to make sure the slides are up because I'm trying to navigate this as well. So as I've heard from the conversations this morning, it is not only challenging to talk about, if you think it's challenging to talk about WPS, in many spaces it's even harder to navigate conversations talking about DEIA. It's a little bit challenging right now in this space. So we're gonna talk about this a little bit more. Change slide. I have slides and so I'm gonna have to say change slide please. There we go. Wonderful. Change slide please. Next slide please. Next slide please. Oh, okay. So the next slide, we'll talk about WCAPS. WCAPS was founded in 2017 by Under Secretary Bonnie Jenkins. There she is. Under Secretary of State Arms Control and International Security Bonnie Jenkins. She had the vision to understand and vision and insight and experience of understanding that intersection and the challenges as it relates to WPS and DEIA. The current executive director is Shalanda Spencer. And also I want to acknowledge in our audience, we have a board member, Dr. Carolyn Washington as well, who is the co-chair of WCAPS's Defense and Intelligence Working Group. Next slide please. Next slide please. And I'm gonna be kind of going through these slides pretty quickly because we have a tight schedule. We have one hour. And the challenge is we don't have the clicker. So the vision of WCAPS is to advance the leadership and professional development of women of color in the fields of international peace, security, and conflict transformation. At WCAPS, we believe global issues demand a variety of perspectives. And that's why we created the platform devoted to women of color that cultivates a strong voice and network. WCAPS at its core is a professional development organization that furthers the opportunity and accessibility for women of color in the peace and security space. While the global community is faced with issues related to worldwide health security, peacekeeping, weapons of mass destruction, non-proliferation, and the intersection of national and international security, there was no significant or sustained voice from people of color, particularly women of color, who are often the most affected, and who are also community leaders in many parts of the world. And WCAPS changed that. Next slide please. WCAPS has chapters in many spaces. We have chapters in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Georgia, Ghana, New York, Nigeria, United Kingdom, and the West Coast. Next slide please. So WCAPS creates opportunities for women in various stages of their experience, a professional experience as it relates to peace, security, and international development and intersection of that. We have women from, primarily from women, I'm sorry, women from a military, from diplomacy, from international development. And we have working groups in multiple areas. And I apologize for the blurriness on this, but some of our working groups include Asia and Pacific, chemical, nuclear, working group, climate change, and I can't read them myself right now. So I am the co-chair of the working group to redefining national security. We have other working groups. We have a working group that's coming on that we're right now thinking through on outer space, Latin America, Caribbean, Suana, Southwest Asia, North Africa, and many other working groups to engage women of color, young women of color, and opportunities to further advance conversations around, again, advance peace, intelligence, as well as opportunities to have a voice. Some of the ways that we do this, we do this through policy papers. We create opportunities for women to have the space to present at conferences, conferences like this, as well as to participate in other ways. We get requests from organizations, requests for opportunities for career advancement, such as job opportunities, internships, and I'm putting a plug up right now. If you have opportunities for jobs or internships, please send them to WCAPS. We are always looking for opportunities for women to participate. Next slide, please. So WCAPS, what I love about this organization, and I wish there was an organization like this, 30 years ago when I was starting out in the field of international development, WCAPS is at the intersection of women peace security and DEIA, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. We actually address all of those, both of those challenges of WPS and DEIA in our myriad of programs and opportunities. Next slide, please. So when we think about redefining national security, many issues traditionally included in the definition of national security do not reflect those that are most challenging and that have more negative impact on diverse populations, particularly women of color. Focusing on the increasingly thin layer of distinction between global and local issues is imperative if we are to meet the global challenges today as a global community. We need to view these challenges holistically and include the security concerns of different populations in the United States and around the world, and that was from Under Secretary Bonnie Jenkins. Next slide, please. And so the purpose of the redefining national security working group is to examine the way in which Americans define national security, to understand how definitions of national security capture perceptions of vulnerable communities and to engage in discussions on international scale. Next slide, please. So when I see this slide, and when I think of, sorry about that, when I think of space, I'm tempted to say space, the final frontier. These are the voyage of the Starship Enterprise. It's five years, I'm not gonna go on, go on. I used to watch it just show all the time in the 70s. But no seriousness, I put this slide here because this is an important issue. I participate each year, like some of you in this room, maybe, Foreign Policy Association to have this study group each year called Great Decisions. And I like to participate in Great Decisions because I like to connect with people, with strangers, with, have conversations around foreign policy. And so if you're familiar with Great Decisions, it's like a workbook that has, it's like a journal. Has eight articles and people get together on libraries and different spaces and talk about foreign policy with your neighbors. Typically most people come with a background in international something. So this year, I was going through this study group and the topic of outer space was the weekly topic. And we had a great discussion on outer space and international security and colonizing the moon. I believe this is a picture of the moon. Colonizing the moon, there's no policy around that. What do we do? Companies that have, that are funded to, to participate in space exploration and research around, just around space in general. And I was, as we were having this conversation and reading the article in the book, it focused on one company that pretty much has, has sole source in the space exploration as it relates to our country's national security. And so I was thinking about competition. What does that look like for our country? You know, where are the opportunities if this company right here is sole source, sole sourced, how are we innovating? How are we reaching people who are at the margins of society? And so I was posing this conversation, this question to the group. How can we inspire education? How can we reimagine education that's more inclusive to those who are typically marginalized so that they have access so that we increase our national security so that we remain competitive because this is a challenge. And because we are human beings and I wanna note that I was the only black person in this group posing this question, and the question was multi-generational. Another person in the group who had her own experiences and biases, an older woman, her first response, and it was a micro salt to me, but I navigate micro salts and micro aggressions all the time. And I say micro salt because she was intentional, but her response was black parents don't care about their children's education. My response though, because I received this and I know that, I know that there are people who believe that, was to continue to engage and continue the conversation with that. And that's what we have to do. We have to continue the conversation because we know that these people have these opinions about education, about populations. We have to continue the conversation, the uncomfortable conversations, the conversations that we're going to talk about and the uncomfortable conversations, the courageous conversations, if we're gonna move forward and addressing our issues of national security. And I say that because we know that there are countries like Russia, like North Korea, like China that exploit our racial challenges, exploit the fact that we have inequities in this country. And so therefore if we're not intentional about the intersection of WPS and DEI or intentional about DEIA as it relates to our military, to our national security, we're gonna continuously be at a weakened state as it relates to furthering national security domestically as well as internationally. And I know, and we have to continue to engage because we know that a lot of this is led by fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of replacement, fear of, I'm not sure what's gonna happen. It fear of, basically that fear, it comes from, what am I gonna say? It comes from, I have it written down here somewhere, comes from a restricted mindset. That's not the word I'm looking for, but a scarcity mindset. And we need to have more of an abundance mindset. We are not at a loss for resources. There is an opportunity to expand. We need to create more, like we need to create more opportunities for women. We need to create opportunities for a broader experiences, demographics, geographical backgrounds in order to further national security. And in order to do that, we have to reimagine how we engage education and other areas. Next slide, please. So when we reimagine our education or reimagine how we engage communities, we need to reimagine this within the context of national security. DEI is not over there. DEI is here. It's in this room and it's in communities. And if we're thinking about from this perspective, a DEI in national security, we want to begin as young as possible. We want to begin with the girls and STEM programs. We want to reimagine what secondary school looks like and what college looks like or trades look like that could support strengthening national security such as cybersecurity. And we've talked about these and this is not the context for that, but we want to make sure that we do this and be thinking about this because we want to create more opportunities and create more major citizens. Next slide, please. So in another aspect of my life really quickly, I'm going to go through these next two slides really quickly. I provide training and support in the area of DEIA as well. And so when I talk to groups of people about how to think about what they should be doing to further and to develop an equity initiative, I like to share this acrostic. So when I think of, in the process of developing an equity initiative, it needs to address economics. It needs to, I say economics, it needs to involve money. There needs to be some type of resource exchange, whether it's an investment in a community, whether it's pay increases, whether it's jobs, it needs to address economics. We want to make sure that it is measurable, hence quantitative, qualitative. We want to make sure that it is fair, that there are fair policies and procedures, therefore that's the word uniformity. And that's also where we have equality within equity. You need equality within equity. We want to make sure that whatever the equity initiative is, that it's inclusive, that all voices are included, that marginalized voices are included, that the end user is included, most importantly. And then we also want to make sure that the equity initiative is both transparent and transformative. Oftentimes, good intentions, good intention people, will create an initiative to further equity, to further inclusion, but they will create it in a silo. They're like, I know what to do and I'm just gonna create this over here. Unfortunately, when people are not included, when it's not transparent, people will imagine what others are doing. And sometimes when it's also not transparent, it's not as effective as it could be. So we want to make sure that the initiative is transformative, that's transparent, but also transformational. I think, in my opinion, my humble opinion, I believe that we cannot continuously take baby steps, that again, time is changing extremely fast. Our demographics are changing, security is changing, and so therefore we need to reimagine something that's transformational. And then finally, youth. Youth not necessarily for young people, yes, we want young people involved, but youth meaning that we want it to be sustainable, we want it to be long-term. Next slide, please. And so I'm not gonna go over all of these. Again, when we're talking about furthering equity, looking at things internally as well as externally, on the internal side, this is basically internal HR, initiatives that we're very familiar with, and then externally, reimagining what, how the military can engage community in order to further opportunities and programs that further equity and inclusion as it relates to WPS as well. Next slide. And so again, we would invite anyone in this room to join WCAPS, and this is the landing page of the website. And so the brown box, how to become a WCAPS member, that's where you click. And the final slide, please. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to continuously engaging with you over the next two days. Thank you. Great, thank you. John. Thank you Harriet, thank you Warren, and thank you to the Naval War College team for hosting this critical event. It's a big deal, and we have the opportunity to make a profound impact. So thank you very much. What I would like to start with is an observation. It's an observation that we talked about in the social last night, and it's been echoed through the conversations here so far. And it's that there is an imbalance of a very critical resource that's out there right now, and that critical resource is power. So we have an imbalance of power that exists in our operating environment. And unfortunately, as Harriet mentioned, that imbalance of power is coupled with fear, and it's the fear of where that power is going to go. And so the question that I have is, how do we balance that power in an equitable fashion? How do we provide access to appropriate privilege? And how do we include each other in a way that celebrates diversity? And so to do that, in today's society, what we really like to do is to fight. We like to fight, and where we perceive in inequity, we like to take the power back. And I would posit to you that in a peaceful transfer of one kind of power from one entity to another, fighting about it isn't really the way to go. I grew up on a farm, and so I have farm analogies until the cows come home. But the way that we deal with horses, or mules, or donkeys, if you will, is you can't take a mule to anything. The thing that a mule likes more than anything else is a sugar cube. And so if you extend your hand and offer a sugar cube to a mule, you're gonna get a friend very, very fast. And they're gonna love you and they're gonna come trotting over to you every single time that they see you. But if you grab that animal by its bridle and pull it towards the sugar cube, it'll resist, and you'll never be able to budget. Even though the thing you have in your hand is the thing it wants the most in the entire world, you are never going to be able to move it. And so what we have to do is we have to have some kind of a compromise. And in order to transfer power from those that have to those that have not, it needs to be a compromise and it needs to be a giving from one entity to the other. Otherwise that conflict will last a very long time. And so how do we further that? Well, my experience as a leader in the operational environment, in the economic environment, in the corporate environment, it's led me to believe that there is an elegant solution. And that solution starts with the word respect. And what do I mean by that? Obviously we all respect each other in the room. We say yes sir, we say yes ma'am, all of these things. What I'm talking about isn't the respect born of military courtesy. Rather, it is the respect that we extend to each other on a basic, very human level. And we might all think to ourselves, like, well of course I respect everybody all the time. But it's just like our congressman, right? We all know that everybody in Congress is corrupt, except our congressman. He or she is great, right? And everybody believes that way. So what I would ask is that if we're able to be introspective and think about how we can be open-minded and observe our own behaviors in the way that which we demonstrate respect to each other. And so I have a couple of quotes that I'll begin with. The first one is it helps us to guide what we can do about bringing people into our organization. The idea comes from the book Legacy by James Kerr written about the New Zealand All Blacks. It's basically 15 rules from the rugby pitch that apply to corporate America. And what Kerr says is that the best people make the best teammates. And so when we're looking at filling our organizations and bringing people into our organizations, in the military especially, we hate having holes in our organization. We must fill them. And in many cases, we fill them with people that we know may not be the highest quality, but boy, we just need to fill that hole. And I would ask you not to do that, right? Be conscious about who we bring into the organization so that the people that we bring into the organization are aligned with our vision, aligned with our culture, and make the organization better. Because to have a zero in that table of organization and equipment is better than having a negative. So start there with getting those people that believe in the same things that we believe in and we can advance. The other thing is Ray Kroc's idea that all of us is better than any of us. That quote in that idea is echoed in Sarweki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, where it is better to have a crowd of, I guess, normal folks than one caped superhero that can do absolutely anything. Sarweki's idea of a smart crowd has to do with real diversity. You have to have diversity of thought, you have to have diversity of ideas, and we have to be able to not only bring that team together, but enable them to move forward as a team focused on whatever goal it is that we have. And so if we have this kind of diversity, if we live the kind of respect that it takes for us to not only assemble a team like that, but invest in the team and leverage the team against our problems, then we have an opportunity to move forward. So we're doing this at the United States Military Academy in many different ways. When I first got there, we have all of the military training about the isms, extremism, racism, sexism, sexual assault, all of these things. And they're all very stovepiped and knee jerk, and we've all been to these trainings. But over the course of the last few years, there's been a shift in the way that we interact with those topics, and it surrounds the idea of respect. So if we have an atmosphere and a culture in which we do fundamentally respect each other as humans, well, then we don't have the impact of extremism, because I'm not discriminating against one group of people, one group of ideas, one set of ideologies, because they're different than my own, because I have that kind of respect. If I as a man respect a woman, then I don't objectify her, and we don't have a sexual assault, sexual harassment problem. And this idea extends across all of the other really paradigms. And so that's what I would like to leave with you, is that as we're talking about these ideas in here, think about the balance of power that exists. Think about what our end state is. Think about the fear of those people trying to hold on to the power, and then think about how we can actually invest in the idea of human respect, demonstrate that, and use that idea as a combat multiplier in our organization just to make ourselves our best selves and our best organizations. Thank you. Thank you, and thank you all. I should note at the start that we didn't randomly dress as Princess Leia's. It was part of the mystic crew of Chewbacca's, a sci-fi dork parade, and we were Leia Girets, which is Princess Leia Majorette's. So my daughters and I are proud members. I grew up in New Orleans, family's from New Orleans, lived in New Orleans for a long time. I should probably check the time to make sure I don't talk forever. So what I'd like to start off with a little bit is, yes, I am at DODN right now in the Under Secretary of Defense of our Personal and Readiness's office. But I also come from the Marine Corps, I retired Marine Corps. So my stories today, or my lessons for you all, will come from both of those experiences, from the two-plus decades of Marine Corps time, and then from what I'm observing now at DOD, and from the work I'm doing. And so we start off with a little bit of a story. And the first part of that is, it's probably not gonna surprise most of you, if any of you, but anyone remember Marines United in 2017? Yes, I see some hands going up. So for those of you who do not, there was a closed social media group. It was not complementary towards women. There were some picture violations, things like that. No female Marines that I know were surprised that it existed. I think what I was surprised by at the time was that there was actually an institutional response. And at the time, I had just wrapped up my dissertation. I was still in uniform, serving in the Marine Corps Commandant Strategic Initiatives Group. And as the news broke, I walked over to the director of the SIG, and I said, I need to be part of the institution's response. And for the first time, I'd been a Marine there for, I mean, a Marine at that point for like 19 years. I actually told someone in uniform in the Pentagon that my dissertation was about gender and terrorism, not just cultural determinants of terrorism, which you probably all understand as well, not wanting to identify as a woman in uniform that you're working on gender issues, which is also part of the problem. So I was part of that response and ran into a peer, a post-command friend who had just come back from a tour in Afghanistan in the Pentagon a couple weeks later. When I told him what I was doing, he rolled his eyes and he said, oh, when can we cut that stuff out and get back to the business of war fighting? And again, nobody here is surprised, right? But at that moment, I really, I think I really started to understand how far we had to go on just integrating women, understanding the value of WPS, which at that point was kind of the framework and foundation of my research, and how far we had to go on that. Well, fast forward a couple years. I'm at DOD now. I think for everything that we are doing on WPS right and wrong, we have a lot further to go to operationalize for lack of a better word, DEIA. And I'll get to that point here in a minute. So what I wanna talk about today for a few minutes is three things, really. One is the similarities and differences that I see between DEIA and WPS. Two is communication on both and strategic communication, but also how we think about it, write about it and talk about it. And three is what to do with that information next. So first, I mean, you're gonna hear some similar themes from all of us, I think, from the morning panel today, tomorrow, in the sessions this afternoon. But I think obviously WPS and DEIA are both critical to understanding and building a comprehensive security picture and doing our job in the department. And it's an interesting shift from my perspective from what we have seen as a traditional kind of state-centered security thinking to a more human-centered security, which potentially has been more accurate all along, underlying everything. But I wanna point out that if you go to the DOD website right now, the mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the forces to deter war and ensure the nation's security. So what we've been doing is every time we talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility is in order to provide the forces to deter war and ensure the nation's security and communicating that as the first step. So similarities, like WPS is centering the experiences and consideration of women and girls around the consideration of security, DEIA is similarly considering how different group members may experience events, strategies, laws, plans, policies, things like that. To do it right, we have to have that security context across everything. Some differences. Obviously WPS is centered on women, although we've all spoken about how women are not the only members of the gender. Everybody's got gender. But WPS, I sense from an operational standpoint, because of the research, feminist IR, what it's done for WPS, I feel like it's more established, making those links between WPS, obviously security's in the name, but making those links between integrating women's perspectives in the consideration of security is more advanced than when we talk to EIA, which, here's where we get into one of the differences, has primarily, if not solely been in the realm of personnel, human resources, personnel management, which is problematic when you're working on national security. Sorry, I'm jumping around a bit. I made a bunch of extra notes this morning, so I wanna make sure I'm capturing these. We've all seen different versions of a Venn diagram about thinking about security, and that overlap is significant. It's probably more like amoebas than circles and how they touch. But the difference when I look at DEIA is that we just have to do a far better job of doing the research and communicating the stories and kicking it all the way up to the strategic level on how we communicate diversity as inherently part of the department's mission and part of what all we're doing, everything we're doing, and it moves it from, I heard this phrase a couple weeks ago and I'm gonna keep using it, from looking at this as a form of compliance to looking at it as a form of commitment in the organization, in every organization. So how do we talk about it? I mean, there's a lot of ways. We've heard storytelling this morning. I am a huge fan of storytelling and I think that is probably one of the most important things we can do while still doing all the research and everything else that is very needed. But I think when we do our storytelling, we really need to do it with something big in mind. And Siri's great talk this morning talked about the three Ps, policies, policies, processes and people, I can't speak. And I would say for DOD specifically, anyone working in the security context, when you talk about those policies and processes, we really need to get NDS, DPG, get those documents that dig into how we think about induced security as a department and inside all of your organizations and think about where diverse perspectives enhance or add to our ability to understand the context and how those can help us develop better strategies. And my sense is that by understanding the value they bring to doing security will help us all also talk about the value of incorporating DEIA more broadly. And here's where, and we've all talked about the branding problem that WPS can have in the department. I think Tiffany had some comments about this during your talk as well. And I often lead off classes that I give on gendered security or WPS about and DEIA now saying if you zoned out, as soon as you saw the first slide, please raise your hand. Only one time I had someone actually raise their hand and more power to them, they were actually kind of being a professional, but it's okay. So when you get into those core functions, that's where the storytelling needs to focus. I come from the operational background too. I flew Cobras, I fly a Honda Odyssey now, it's 12 years old, it's not as cool. Some of you have heard me talk, have you heard me say that before? Because it tends to take what can be seen as a, I guess an unusual experience and boil it down to everyday life. And that's what we need to do with our storytelling. You know, I'll back up a little bit more. My husband is a retired infantry marine, and he started off like you would think most infantry marines do. Didn't necessarily understand or really support the research I was doing, understand why I was doing it. He had a set of experiences over his career as well that helped him change his mind, but he was the fire support coordinator in Haditha in November of 2005 when the Haditha massacre happened. He was controlling fire throughout the city that day, but as a result was part of the big investigation, helped contribute to some of the body of knowledge that was known about that incident. He and I since then have done a deep dive into the events, not just of that day, but into the culture of that battalion, his battalion that he belonged to. And to really understand what brought those marines and everyone in that situation to that day, the moments that happened and the moments that followed. And this is really where we get down to like how diverse perspectives can enhance our ability to understand the operational picture, to choose strategies that adequately or effectively respond to it and potentially move us a little bit closer to security and stability and peace. I know I'm talking a little bit longer than I planned, so I will wrap up briefly. We talk about our language. I often bring to the story Lieutenant General Reynolds. She's retired Marine Corps three-star. She's fantastic. I see Sharon in the back nodding her head. She's a hero of mine. I was talking to her once and she said, well, what if we turned it on its head? And she would do this sometimes in discussions with people and potentially in discussions with a lot of people. She'd say, you know, prove to me that a more homogeneous force, a more homogeneous group or unit can figure out this complex problem in a quick time, faster and more effectively. Prove to me. And you can't, because you recognize almost instinctively that there are critical voices that are silenced and missing. And so I try to use that story as well. When I communicate it, I encourage you to find things like that. I'm sure you already have plenty of them as well. One last thing. When I talk about this, I also, who's seen the Lego movie? Okay, if you haven't, don't. It's terrible. I know, I see. Okay, you can disagree with me. I've probably seen it like 30 times now. I have three kids. So the one thing I love about it is there's a scene towards the end where the lead character Emmett, who was a generic kind of Lego guy, is trying to connect all of these, he spent the whole time trying to figure out how to be a master Lego builder. Well, all of a sudden he figures it out and he starts looking around and he's seeing these connections between things that he's never seen before. And they're all there, laid out in plain sight for him now that he understands how to look. And so when I talk about this, this is what our stories need to try to do, to operationalize it, to show the war fighting and the security need for not just WPS, but DEIA as well, what they are aligned, they are not identical, but they are aligned and they're reinforcing. And so as you tell your stories, try to help people see those different connections and try not to see the Lego movie. Thank you. Excellent, thank you. Okay, and what we'll close, we don't wanna stand between everybody and lunch. Let me just close with this because I can see in your eyes, you're thinking about, oh my gosh, I gotta go back to work Monday morning, like where do I begin? I cannot recommend the act report enough. That's the one on the Silicon Valley, the tech industry. Think about the tech industry, very male dominated, very focused on mission, has a drum beat to have results, sound kind of familiar. They, and so the group, the DEIA professionals had pieced something together. So a CEO who's got a report to stockholders and the media and everybody else has to be convinced. How are you gonna help Apple, Google, Facebook advance these issues? And so they put it in super plain language, they integrated it, I think it's very well worth a look, call the act report, all the links are in the QR code that we shared. With that, Alisha or Brenda or Carol, okay. That will close the panel and I'll hand it back to our host. Okay, thank you, panel number two. Again, I like the connectedness of themes. So I think we're working towards a great overall program and we're gonna have lots of good recommendations at the end I know tomorrow.