Who’s Leading The Conversations?
So often, as we discuss the crises facing us today—the climate, inequality, big tech, poor leadership—who gets to lead the discussions is at the root of the problem. As the UN General Assembly concludes in New York this week, I'm reminded of how far the largest annual meeting of world leaders has to go — before the voices of those impacted most acutely by our global crises, are heard.
Who is leading these conversations that will allow us to "build resilience, recover from COVID-19, rebuild sustainability, respond to the needs of the planet, respect the rights of people" (UNGA's 2021 theme).
Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová reminded us of this on the first day of debate: “We cannot save our planet if we leave out the vulnerable—the women, the girls, the minorities.”
The UNGA has always had an embarrassingly tiny sliver of female voices. Less than 10% of the speakers were women in the first 4 days of the summit. Last year, a total of 9 women spoke over the course of the entire UNGA.
Another glaring deficit in inclusion, highlighted by African nations for a long time, was called out by Gambia's VP, Isatou Touray—the powerful Security Council itself, which she called “one of the last holdouts of reform” has no permanent representative from Africa. “How many times must leaders come to talk and not be heard before they stop coming?” was Barbados PM Mia Amor Mottley's warning.
In a very different context earlier this year, I felt the full power of what happens when relevant voices are not only included but centered. In April, Sinan Aral (who happened to be my undergrad thesis advisor) organized the MIT Social Media Summit to lead conversations on why social media is broken, and what we can do. Close to 20,0000 virtual attendees, including myself, dialed in.
The quality, depth and nuance of the discussions left me in awe, and owed itself largely to a brilliant selection of panelists. It wasn't until I heard Sinan talk about his curation process that I learned about his intentional and uncompromising focus on ensuring that every single panel had a 50-50 male/female split, and included people of color, and from countries outside the US. Sinan prioritized doing the research and inviting these voices—because, he believes tech is broken partly because of the narrow experiences and insular perspectives of builders/entrepreneurs, investors and decision-makers.
The reason the women, and voices from outside the US, were the stars of their panels, is because of the broader, deeper perspectives they carry as a result of being at the receiving end of the worst outcomes from broken systems. The harms of bad business models, exploitative algorithms, the danger of 'invent first, see later', the absence of guardrails or regulations—are not distributed equally. When Maria Ressa talks about disinformation, she brings her experience with the Philippine government's abuse of social media, and their convicting her to 6 years in prison for calling it out. When Safiya Noble talks about 'algorithms of oppression' and calls for diversity of not only race and gender in engineering teams, but also of disciplines and experiences ('bring in people who understand society', she says, 'the social and cognitive scientists, people who are trained in different histories and perspectives'), she speaks as someone who is affected personally and deeply by biased algorithms and online harassment.
So, this is a post in support of boycotting those 'manels', of having standards in place for learning actively from women, global voices, people of color and minorities. Of centering conversations and decisions around the hard-earned wisdom of their experiences, and of listening to the ingenuity of their solutions. Of dispelling the pipeline myth. Of looking outside our bubbles to invite the right voices to the table as we grapple with the global crises facing us today.
