Some moments are so terrible and so clear that they spur change and demand action. The murder of George Floyd at the hands of officers of the Minneapolis Police Department is one of those moments.

Millions have already sent a clear message, through their words and by protesting: Black Lives Matter. And they’re absolutely right.

Beyond the protests, many Americans are telling pollsters that they have changed their understanding of who we are as a country. In 2017, 57% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Black Lives Matter. Now, 53% support it. Now, a majority of Americans (57%) say that police officers facing a tough situation are more likely to use excessive force if the culprit is black, while in 2016 only 34% said so.

That’s a good shift, and long overdue. But it’s only the beginning. Now comes taking action, as workers, companies, and citizens, to bring our reality into line with who we want to be. Now comes the hard work of change.

At Valutus, our work has always been deeply personal, rooted in what matters to us. That’s why we focus on values as well as value,[1] and on the connection between them – for example, the connections between structural racism and economic opportunity and the fact that environmental harms hit Black Americans harder here in the US in addition to being harder on the most vulnerable elsewhere.[2]

Because of the importance of living our values, these times have spurred us to do some self-examination and to look harder at our place in addressing racism. We know we don’t have all the answers, so we’re doing more listening, seeking to understand how we can help make America and the world more just. We’re also looking for ways we can help amplify Black voices so they reach more people. And we’re examining what we do to see how we can be more effective catalysts for change, in our work and in our personal lives.

We believe combating inequality is an essential part of creating a sustainable future.[3] There are practical reasons for this – for example, we know that equality makes societies more willing to preserve the natural world, and we understand that we need to inspire everyone to pull together, and only a more just world will do that.

At a deeper level, though, justice and equity are simply fundamental values, part of the definition of the world we want. And we need to bring them to life through action.

References:
[1] In fact, we chose the name Valutus because it is the Latin root of both “value” and “values”
[2] The New York Times, Read Up on the Links Between Racism and the Environment, June 5, 2020
[3] The New York Times, Black Environmentalists Talk About Climate and Anti-Racism, June 3, 2020

I was only five, but I remember the hunt for the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman after the Freedom Summer murders in Mississippi in 1964. I recall watching the search on TV, my parents’ anguish, how sickened they appeared. A local Black man and two Jewish men from New York City had gone missing, abducted it appeared, and believed dead.

The two Jewish boys, we learned later, were shot at close range and buried under an earthen dam. The young Black man, James Chaney, appears to have been buried beside them while still alive. It was the first time I knew anything about racism or its effects.

I didn’t know it then, but the lynch mob that killed them was composed of “members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office and the Philadelphia (Mississippi) Police Department…”[1] 

That was 56 years ago. And here we are again.

The three young men were working to register Black people to vote as part of the civil rights movement. They were doing extraordinary things and were killed for it. But the lives of those whose names we’ve heard intoned like a litany, a dirge these past few weeks, were Black lives casually taken as they jogged, played, slept in their beds, snacked, barbequed in their own backyards, sat in their living rooms and their cars, or did any of the other quotidian things all people do.

James Chaney’s name, and the names of hundreds of others, belong among them.

Last week, as we all know, soldiers and police were once again out in force – and using force – in the streets of a dozen major American cities. This time, as we all know, the dam burst under the shock of watching a police officer slowly, painfully, and seemingly indifferently, snuff out yet another Black life. Crack!

There were no pointed hoods, no abduction in the dead of night, no attempt to hide the evidence. This one happened in plain sight, in daylight and in front of witnesses, by officers in full uniform.

For 8 minutes and 46 horrifying seconds onlookers tried to intervene in the death of George Floyd while three other policemen looked on.

Despite a constitution touting equality, far too much of the U.S. – and global – economy has been built upon a substrate of injustice, wealth inequity, and racism, all of which have been on full display since George Floyd took his last, tortured breath.

In fact, members of the U.S. armed forces had to be told, last week, that it is inappropriate to display the battle flag of a group whose goal was to continue and perpetuate a slave-based society.

Crack! A torrent of boiling, raging, furious magma was released onto the streets in the form of grief, rage, peaceful protest, sometimes even violence, as bottled-up emotions exploded into full view. The country saw, in raw, unequivocal terms, that to those policemen the Black life of George Floyd did not matter. But it did matter. It does matter.

This is not the piece anyone wants to be reading or writing. We want to read about how we’re solving the pandemic, and how we’re making progress on climate change, and about a new innovation that may be the answer to our power needs, or anything other than the news that this week yet more unarmed Black men have been shot by police or were found hanging under mysterious circumstances.

We have a global virus and a global climate emergency and without unprecedented action at unprecedented speed, they will overwhelm us. But we can’t do so right now, when there are armies in riot gear breaking up legal protests rather than an army working to save the coastlines, working to move the hundreds of millions who, as we report in R.O.I. this week, will have to relocate as the seas inundate their communities.

The one ray of light is that very thing: the speed and scale with which we now know the world can act together to tackle major disruptions.

There is one other thing that is different this time. This time there are marches around the world. White people. Brown People, in dozens of countries, all marching, all demanding justice, all committed.

My daughter is the same age I was when Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were killed. She has seen me watching, and she has seen the anguish on my face. She is the child of two races, half Asian, half Caucasian. It is impossible for me not to wonder if she will be writing something like this in 2076, when she is the age I am now.

We cannot go on like this. Black lives matter and our society can’t be truly healthy until everyone in it understands that. Until no one needs to be told the Confederate battle flag has no place outside a museum. That flag, of course, hung over a short-lived confederacy founded “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” according to that entity’s Vice President.[2]

We can fix this, and we must. The climate is not holding still while we confront our demons. There are matters at hand that require the attention, and the best efforts of all of us. This could still be our finest hour. It could be.

I won’t be around to see what my little girl, Kailin, has written some half-century hence. I can only trust it will be the story of how we saved the planet and warded off pandemics and of how she saw the Confederate battle flag somewhere, a relic, as she wandered in a museum, and wondered what it represented.

References
[1] Wikipedia, Murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner
[2] The ‘Cornerstone Speech’, from an address given in in Savannah, Georgia, by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens on March 21, 1861

In one very important sense, women have come a tremendous distance. The image of women as primarily domestic companions is no longer culturally prevalent.

Television now showcases many brilliant and powerful women. The speed, power, skill, tenacity, teamwork, aggression, and competitive spirit of women are now as clear to see in women’s sports as they are in men’s.

And what is on TV can matter. Indeed, a 2009 study reported rather dramatic improvements in women’s equality across numerous statistics once cable television – portraying women in more powerful and equal roles in domestic and business life – reached towns in rural India.[1]

In recent years, we’ve seen the ranks of doctors, combat pilots, astronauts, scientists, raconteurs, executives, administrators, fighters, judges, and more swelled by women.

There is no greater showcase for the skills and character of women, however, than in the role of head of government. 

It could legitimately be argued that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is now ascendant in global politics.[2] By many accounts she is the most powerful woman in the world, and she has occupied that role while steering Europe’s largest economy, dominating the European Union, and going toe-to-toe with U.S. presidents – in particular the current White House occupant.

With a doctorate in quantum chemistry[3], a fluency in several languages – including German, Russian and English – and having weathered a number of global and local crises, Merkel has once again proved herself in the current pandemic, one of several female national leaders who can make that claim. Indeed, the nations with women at the helm have done remarkably well battling or preventing COVID-19.[4]

Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwanese president since 2008 – a law PhD. from the London School of Economics – took immediate steps once it was known there was an infectious virus on the mainland. She rapidly developed “124 measures to block the spread.”[5] As of the end of April 2020, only six had died from COVID-19 in Taiwan,[6] an extraordinarily low number for a nation of 23 million.

New Zealand, led by Jacinda Ardern, has also done exceptionally well. A self-styled progressive who, at 37, became the youngest woman ever to lead a nation – and only the second with a child born while in office[7] – Ardern’s country has managed to keep the novel coronavirus at bay. As Forbes put it, “clarity and decisiveness are saving New Zealand from the storm.”[8] Ardern’s public approval holds at around 80% and her country had lost only 19 people to the virus by the end of April.[9]

The Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, held a televised, children-only, town-hall-style press conference,[10] calming and validating children’s fears and explaining the pandemic. As Aviva Wittenberg-Cox, writing in Forbes, points out, “The originality and obviousness of the idea takes one’s breath away. How many other simple, humane innovations would more female leadership unleash?”[11]

As The Guardian succinctly put it, “Plenty of countries with male leaders – Vietnam, the Czech Republic, Greece, Australia – have also done well. But few with female leaders have done badly.”[12]

As to why, theories abound. Countries that elect women are more likely to respond well to government; the sample size is too small to draw comparisons; men are trapped in male expectations of leadership, and so on.

Of the contrast between these women and male strongmen like the Brazilian, American and Filipino presidents, Wittenberg-Cox says, 

“Generally, the empathy and care which all of these female leaders have communicated seems to come from an alternate universe than the one we have gotten used to. It’s like their arms are coming out of their videos to hold you close in a heartfelt and loving embrace. Who knew leaders could sound like this? Now we do.”[13]

Quick. Decisive. Smart. Strong. Good communicators. Warm. Empathic.

“Who knew?” Everyone should have.  

[Note: this concludes our 5-part series on International Women’s Day 2020]

References:

[1]The National Bureau of Economic Research,  Cable Television Raises Women’s Status in India
[2] The Independent, Angela Merkel is Now the Leader of the Free World, Not Donald Trump, Feb 2017
[3] Wikipedia, Angela Merkel: Education and Scientific Career
[4] Forbes, What Do Countries with the Best Coronavirus Responses Have in Common? Women Leaders, April 2020
[5] Ibid
[6] Our World in Data, Total Confirmed Deaths by Country, Updated to April 25, 2020
[7] Wikipedia, Jacinda Ardern,Updated 2020
[8] Forbes, What Do Countries with the Best Coronavirus Responses Have in Common? Women Leaders, April 2020
[9] The Guardian, Why Do Female Leaders Seem to be More Successful at Managing the Coronavirus?April 25, 2020
[10] HuffPost, Norway’s PM Holds Coronavirus Press Conference for Kids, Says it’s OK to be Scared, March 2020
[11] Forbes Editors Pick, Aviva Wittenberg-Cox, contributor, What Do Countries with the Best Coronavirus Responses Have in Common? Women Leaders, April 13 2020
[12] The Guardian, Why Do Female Leaders Seem to be More Successful at Managing the Coronavirus?April 25, 2020
[13] Forbes Editors Pick, Aviva Wittenberg-Cox, contributor, What Do Countries with the Best Coronavirus Responses Have in Common? Women Leaders, April 13 2020

In the United States, female teachers vastly outnumber male[1], and around 72%[2] of public-school principals are women. Yet that is where the parity stops: Superintendents, as of 2019, were more than 85% male.[3]

Once again, the Big Chair proves largely elusive.

At the college level, women have clawed their way to representing significant portions of college professors, yet there is still an imbalance in tenured and top-ranked positions.

India’s universities have about 27% female full professorships, much higher numbers for lower teaching positions[4], a paradigm that appears to be true across the global board.

More than half of Japan’s junior college instructors, for example, are women, but at the university level that is cut in half, to just under 25%. Just about half of all college instruction in the U.S. is done by women, but for full professorships, that number falls to about 39%.[5]

This – as appears to be the norm across disciplines – rolls upward to college presidents as well. Currently, less than a third are women, and those women generally serve shorter tenures.[6]

While women have made tremendous strides in education and academic administration, there clearly is room – a lot of room – for more.

References

[1] Education Week, Education Statistics: Facts About American Schools, Dec. 2019
[2] Ibid
[3] Bellweather, Ahead of the Heard, Where Are All the Female Superintendents?
[4] Catalyst, Women in Academia: Quick Take, Jan. 2020
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid

For a hundred years, March has hosted International Women’s Day, an event to recognize the achievements of women – and their struggles to make those achievements into reality. It is a day to remember how far women have come, and how far there still is to go, in terms of true equality.

Yet this March also hosted something less worthy of celebration, something so vast and all-encompassing that International Women’s Day may have been subsumed by it.

While we’ve taken due note of the current pandemic elsewhere, we wanted to ensure the struggles and triumphs of women were not lost entirely because of it; hence the special focus of this issue.

This ‘Day’ is no stranger to great forces working upon the world. It was born in the crucible leading to the Russian revolution[1], when women not only fought for freedom from the Tsars, but also for the right to vote and have an equal say in Russian life. They won the vote although, as elsewhere, the power it should render has largely eluded them since. 

American women were guaranteed the vote three years later, and the first International Women’s Day in March 1911 drew “more than 1 million people to rallies worldwide.”[2] That was quite a feat without social media, telephones, television, or radio.

Legally guaranteed rights, however, do not guarantee equal treatment on the ground, and the playing field is still far from level.

In many parts of the world, women have not progressed much beyond their lot in the time of Abraham – and Sarah. A 2016 UNICEF report found that women and girls devoted 200 million hours per day to simply fetching and carrying water, a “colossal waste of time.”[3] 

We also know that “more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut [by some form of genital mutilation] in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.”[4]

In Afghanistan, only one of every three girls attends school regularly.[5]

As of 2018 there were only 20 female heads of government,[6] in a 196-nation world – under 11%. As of October, 2019, national parliaments were just shy of 25% women.[7] 

“We have created a world where women are squeezed into just 25 per cent of the space – in parliaments and in other critical decision-making spaces,” UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said, adding, “Yet we know that more women in high-level political decision-making positions leads to policies that benefit the whole of society.”[8] Indeed, it should be noted that her own organization, the United Nations, has yet to be led by a woman.

As paltry as the numbers above are, they still represent some measure of progress. A map of women’s role in politics shows that women are making political strides, from heads of governments to ministerial roles. (In the latter category, by the way, the United States currently ranks 107^th in a field of 191, and 82^nd in parliamentary posts right behind Armenia.[9])

Saudi women voted[10] for the first time in 2015, a change perhaps made in an attempt to raise that nation’s rankings from “141 out of 144 countries for gender parity.”[11]

It is not just politics, however – there is plenty of economic inequality too. At the top, in the billionaire ranks, there is a vast disparity: of the 2,095 on Forbes’ list this year, a mere 243 are women, some 11.6%.[12],[13]

On the other end of the spectrum, more than 530 million women cannot read or write, north of two thirds of the global illiterates.[14] As Wired noted in 2018, “Although the education of girls in a small number of countries is at, or approaching, parity with boys, for most of the planet, this remains distressingly elusive. Poverty, along with community traditions, tends to hold back girls as boys are prioritized.”[15] 

As we have highlighted in the past, when a family member is sick, it is generally a girl who stays home to provide care, missing school or her own work to do it.[16]

In the West at least, as Wired points out, women have come a long way in the educational arena. In 1940, 3.8% of U.S. women graduated from college to 5.5% for men.[17] Today, a shade more women graduate with a degree (36.6%) than men (34.6%).[18]

After years of mismatched gender population rates “over half (11) of the Top 20 business schools in the world have now balanced their MBA student populations[19], and more are nearing parity. This should positively contribute to a continued knock-on effect in company leadership, salaries and pay gaps in the coming years,” according to Forbes.[20]

Let’s be clear, there has been tremendous progress, and progress is good. Yet a hundred years after the 19^th amendment was ratified, is that enough? Women are now integral parts of government, courts, armed forces, and the workforce at large, and have thoroughly proven their value in each. Yet they are still dramatically outnumbered at the tops of those institutions.

In honor of International Women’s Day 2020, we’ve devoted this issue to the distance women have come, and the challenges women face: day in and out; in the workplace and out.

REFERENCES:
[1] History, The Surprising History of international Women’s Day
[2] Ibid
[3] UNICEF, Collecting Water is Often a Colossal Waste of Time for Women and Girls, Aug 2016
[4] World Health Organization (WHO), Female Genital Mutilation, Feb 2020
[5] The Borgen Project, Top 10 Facts About Girls’ Education in Afghanistan, July 2018
[6] First Ladies International, 2018 – Women and Political Leadership – Female Heads of State and Heads of Government, Feb 2018
[7] Archive.I.P.U., Women in National Parliaments, Oct 2019
[8] Inter-Parliamentary Union, In 2020, World “Cannot Afford” So Few Women in Power, 2020
[9] Inter-Parliamentary Union, Women in Politics: 2020
[10] BBC News, Saudi Arabia’s Women Vote in Election for First Time, Dec 2015
[11] Wikipedia, Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia
[12] Forbes, The World’s Real-Time Billionaires List, 202
[13] Wikipedia, List of Female Billionaires, 2019
[14] Wired, To Stop Climate Change, Educate Girls and Give Them Birth Control, Feb 2018
[15] U.N. Women, Facts and Figureshttps://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/commission-on-the-status-of-women-2012/facts-and-figures
[16] Valutus, Impacts Science Part II: Submerged Value, Nov 2018
[17] Statista.com, Percentage of the U.S. population who have completed four years of college or more from 1940 to 2018, by gender.[18]Ibid
[19] Defined as a maximum of 60% of any gender
[20] Forbes, Business Schools are Balancing, At Last, March 2020