Participating in the discussion from Leading Edge were Mordy Walfish, COO (and Acting CEO while Gali Cooks is on parental leave), and Danielle Natelson, Director of Special Projects. They joined Chava Shervington, Yocheved Sidof, and moderator Dr. Guila Benchimol for a discussion about both the findings in Leading Edge's groundbreaking 2021 report The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership and some findings from some new research into gender and leadership in Orthodox Jewish communities.

See more information and videos from SRE Network's 2022 convening here.

As part of “Return to Basics: 2022 SRE Network Convening,” Leading Edge team members shared some of what we've been learning about gender and leadership in Jewish organizations and communities.

Video: Unpacking Gender Equity Research Findings from Leading Edge at SRE Network’s Convening

Gender Equity

In Tractate Megillah, Reish Lakish teaches that God doesn’t afflict the Jewish people without first creating a remedy. That idea doesn’t justify bad things happening. But when we face complex challenges, we might already have helpful insights within and around us.

Like the entire Jewish nonprofit field, Jewish day schools have a gender equity problem. But they also have a vital piece of the solution.

This problem manifests most measurably in salary data, where men are generally paid more than women for similar roles. When it comes to school leaders’ genders, we don’t have precise data, but we know that women and people who are transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming are significantly underrepresented.

This isn’t unique to day schools. As Leading Edge reported, out of 376 Jewish nonprofits surveyed between 2016 and 2021, 55% were led by men, 45% by women, and none by anyone openly trans or nonbinary. Among organizations with the highest budgets, 92% were led by men.

This issue matters for schools - for students now, and for our future later. It matters if the people making key decisions don’t adequately represent the entire Jewish community. It matters if students who aren’t male, and/or aren’t white, and/or aren’t cisgender, don’t see themselves reflected in the identities of their principal, head of school, or rosh yeshiva. That impacts how hard students try and, more importantly, who they feel they can become.

But day schools also uniquely have the opportunity to widen the leadership pipeline.

As an alum, I credit Jewish day school for deepening my Jewish literacy and helping me cultivate a clear and confident leadership voice. I was chosen to sing and lead holiday celebrations, pushed academically in Jewish and secular subjects, and recognized for my leadership in classrooms and in sports. I know what it feels like to be seen and noticed for my talents, challenged to reach my fullest potential, and encouraged to speak up about my and others’ needs. I benefited tremendously from role models of all genders who nurtured my growth and magnified my view of my power, while modeling the centrality of humility and constant learning in effective leadership.  

And yet, not all of me was seen or noticed. As a Jewish Woman of Color, I only saw part of myself represented in leadership (though rarely at the highest ranks), and I missed an opportunity to develop an integrated and holistic sense of self that values all parts of my identity rather than solely prioritizing one. I know day schools, like many Jewish institutions, have more work to do.

Today, day schools might be missing an opportunity to help students develop character in ways that advance gender equity and equity more broadly - but that’s within our capacity to change. Day schools already know how to weave values and middot (character traits) into everything from curriculum to lunch menus, from classrooms to tetherball courts. We have an opportunity to make gender equity, along with other kinds of equity and inclusion, part of, and central to, visions of character development. 

Leading Edge identified “keystones” for gender equity progress, including developing DEI talent strategies, shifting perceptions around leadership and caregiving, and the importance of men speaking up around gender inequity. These factors can absolutely inform how we educate tomorrow’s heads of school while they’re children today.

Whose stories are we telling? What images depict our ancestors? Surely the Israelites in the desert looked more like me than we typically see illustrated. In my day school, there were many Persian Jews in the student body. Yet we rarely learned anything about Persian Jewish culture or history. What might it look like for all students to see themselves represented in what they are learning about who we are as a people? What might it look like for all students to see what our community really looks like regardless of whether or not that diversity is present in their immediate class?

Who do we hold up as heroes - present or past? Is it always men? There are many women, People of Color, and people of various gender identities—both historical and contemporary—whose stories belong in our canon of exemplary Jews.

When we do showcase men, what behavior do we elevate? Are we exemplifying male allyship, showing men leading in ways that name injustice and courageously and humbly make space for others to shine? Is being an advocate for equity part of our vision for what it means to be a “mensch”? A strong leader? A proud Jew?

IS OUR MENTORSHIP AND LEADERSHOP DEVELOPMENT INCLUSIVE? 

School is often students’ first exploration of leadership, whether in student council, a club or a project. Are teachers and administrators aware of who is—and isn’t—being encouraged, mentored and developed for leadership? I am incredibly grateful that my potential was seen and cultivated, that my voice was amplified, and that my leadership was prioritized. All students deserve to feel empowered and invested in - to know that their skills and talents are a gift, and that the community is incomplete without their perspective. This point also extends to teachers: Is the teacher pool diverse? Are there inclusive development pathways and mentorship opportunities for teachers of every identity to advance toward becoming school leaders?

DO WE MODEL LEADERSHIP COINCIDING WITH CAREGIVING?

Countless educators balance caregiving with their careers, but are they talking about it? Do heads of school in particular, who are major examples of leadership for students, showing the time and energy they put into family and caregiving roles alongside their careers? Do we talk to students of all genders about caregiving being part of their future, or only some of them?

These questions are just starting points for longer processes of reflection and change. Progress isn’t solely possible on the timescale of generations. There are things day schools can do today to advance gender equity. And as a proud day school alum myself, I hope this movement will take the opportunity to see generational change as something they are uniquely positioned to lead. If they succeed, the whole Jewish community will reap the benefits.

Writing for Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, Leading Edge's Director of Special Projects, Danielle Natelson, discusses why when it comes to gender equity in leadership, Jewish day schools have a problem—but also a vital piece of the solution.

Problems, Solutions, and Generations | Danielle Natelson, Leading Edge

In the nonprofit world, most of us don’t paint. But we do tell stories, whether in the form of an annual report, an email newsletter, a slide presentation, a fundraising letter, or an article like this one. And whenever we tell stories we make choices about what—and who—is inside the frame.

I want to tell you a story of a framing choice that was and remains formative for me.

In August 2021, Leading Edge (the organization I lead) released The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View. This report presents an 18-month research process into why cisgender men are still a majority of the field’s top leaders, especially among the organizations with the most resources. This is the case even though men are a distinct minority of the field’s workforce; of the more than 11,600  employees of Jewish nonprofits who took the 2021 Leading Edge Employee Experience Survey, just 20% identify as male, while 69% identify as female and 2% identify as nonbinary, genderqueer, or “prefer to self-identify”. We wanted to find out why the sector’s leadership is so imbalanced by gender relative to the sector’s people. Our research eventually found 71 interrelated causes of that gap and identified five of them as “keystones”—causes which, if they were solved, would drive the most progress on the whole group of 71 causes.

Our report focused on those five keystones: what they are, how we determined them, and how they can help our field move forward toward gender equity in leadership. That’s what we wanted to keep inside the frame, because that seemed to us to be the core message that could drive progress in the field. I made that call, because I wanted everyone with power in our field to be able—and willing—to hear it and act on it. This includes leaders, funders, and other influencers in our sector who represent a broad range of viewpoints and backgrounds—including the full religious range from Orthodox to secular and the full ideological range from left to right. In order to maintain that focus on the keystones, we kept the story simple.

Too simple, perhaps. Because my decision erased a slice of the picture. A number of trans and nonbinary friends and colleagues reached out to me to say that they felt hurt by the way the report presented gender as a binary, without discussing the specific and unique experiences of transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people in our community. They felt unseen and unvalued. They asked why we had made these decisions, knowing full well we had engaged 19 trans and nonbinary Jews in a series of listening sessions as part of the research precisely so that we could learn more about how gender—across the spectrum—manifested itself in leadership in the Jewish nonprofit sector.

I regret the decision to leave this outside of the frame. In a world where the simple fact of someone’s identity—being transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer—often gets automatically and unfairly tagged as being polarizing, I had wanted to keep things simple by focusing on the binary—man or woman. But that’s not the world we live in—or the Jewish community we need. The Jewish community needs vibrant, diverse leadership to thrive. Everyone working in our field will benefit from a situation in which every individual is free of the constraints of gender bias and gender barriers. That’s true for transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people, but emphatically also true for cisgender women and men. To achieve that kind of freedom and justice, we must tap into all of our talent and potential. So I want to say now, to anyone who read the report and felt erased, unseen, or unvalued: I am sorry. I let you down, and I will work to do better.

As one very small part of that effort, I want to share some of what we left outside the frame. 

During the course of our research, Leading Edge conducted peer-led listening sessions with groups that we felt had been underrepresented in the workshops, surveys, and interviews that had informed the research thus far. And while we didn’t include these insights in the main body of the report (they are in a methodology appendix, accessible here), they did inform how we crafted the map of causes that informed our network analysis. 

Among them were three peer-led listening sessions for transgender and nonbinary Jews, facilitated in partnership with Keshet. In inviting participants, we worked to include a range of participants, some of whom work in the Jewish nonprofit sector, some of whom have left the sector, and some of whom have not considered working in the sector. We wanted to understand the barriers transgender and nonbinary people perceive within our field that may be keeping them from joining it, thriving in it, or advancing in it. 

The participants in these listening sessions shared numerous insights with us, all of which are outlined in summary here. But I want to call special attention to four of them that particularly spoke to me:

Transphobia—as well as a lack of education around trans issues—is persistent in the Jewish community. 

Camp and youth groups are a huge pipeline for work in the Jewish professional field. If these spaces are not trans-affirming, this pipeline is virtually closed to trans people. 

People make assumptions that if you’re trans, you automatically have a certain political agenda. 

People often assume that it is the job of the marginalized person to “educate” the organization and that can be exhausting. 

These insights are painful and important to consider. Cisgender women are not the only people harmed by the biases, habits, and structures that keep men disproportionately in charge of our institutions. Transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are part of our workforce and part of the constituencies organizations serve. Leaders, boards, funders, and professionals should all be concerned with ensuring that transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary staff members feel fully included and valued at work—and right now, to the field’s detriment, that isn’t always the case—with our own report being, unfortunately, a case in point.

External data echoes and enriches much of what our listening session participants have told us. McKinsey has found, for example, that more than half of transgender employees say they are not comfortable being out at work. Fully two-thirds remain in the closet in professional interactions outside their own companies. Cisgender employees are paid better, even accounting for educational attainment. And employers are less likely to hire and promote trans people.

Of course, gender also intersects with other forms of identity. We also conducted listening sessions with Jews of Color, men (underrepresented among our research participants), Orthodox women, people with disabilities, and women at different stages of their careers. Summaries of all their insights, along with those listed above from transgender and nonbinary people, can be found here.

In this era, we’re all learning together what and whom we often leave out of the frame, the impact of those choices, and trying to do better as time goes on. I appreciate the honest, direct, and kind manner with which friends and colleagues reached out to me to engage in a dialogue about the impact of my framing choices around this report. They demonstrate a combination of honest feedback with kindness and connection, and both sides of that combination are vital to the task of effectively expanding the frames that encompass our community. It isn’t always comfortable or easy to break apart an old frame and construct a new one together, but the picture is always more beautiful, more fair, and more powerful if it includes everyone in the room.

Sometimes I look at famous paintings and wonder what’s just out of frame. Not just the classic question of who the Mona Lisa is smiling at, but what else is on the other side of the room? To paint a picture is to choose: where do you draw the frame? Something is in—and everything else is out.

Beyond the Frame, Beyond the Binary: A Gender Gap, a Report, and an Untold Story

In a presentation for JPro moderated by Laura Herman, Leading Edge COO Mordy Walfish discussed Leading Edge's findings on the gender gap in top leadership in Jewish nonprofits.

Video: Mordy Walfish Speaks to JPro on the Gender Gap in Jewish Leadership

In the article, entitled “How can we close 'persistent' Jewish NGO leadership gender gap?  — Study”, Eve Young discusses Leading Edge's new report, The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View.

An article in The Jerusalem Post highlights Leading Edge's new report sharing the five “keystones” to addressing the persistent gender gap among Jewish nonprofit CEOs.

Jerusalem Post: How can we close the Jewish NGO leadership gender gap?

In the article, Asaf Shalev begins by describing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's involvement in funding the project, before summarizing the findings of the report, The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View. 

An article in JTA covers Leading Edge's new report sharing the five “keystones” to addressing the persistent gender gap among Jewish nonprofit CEOs.

JTA: How Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped an effort to promote female leadership in Jewish institutions

Addressing five causes can make significant progress in closing the persistent and large gender gap among CEOs at Jewish nonprofit organizations, finds a new report released today by Leading Edge, which works to influence and inspire dramatic change in how Jewish organizations attract, develop, and retain top talent. Conducted in partnership with The Starfish Institute, The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View is the culmination of an ambitious 18-month process that engaged over 1,200 individuals, included a crowdsourced computer game, involved a structural network analysis, and more to uncover the causes of the gender gap in leadership at Jewish organizations. 

Qualitative research into people’s experiences and expertise in the Jewish nonprofit sector identified 71 causes for the significant underrepresentation of women in CEO positions. Quantitative network analysis then revealed that five of these are “keystones”—causes with the most potential to make an outsized impact across the entire Jewish organizational landscape. These keystones have broad reach, affecting many other issues but influenced themselves by few other issues. This combination of attributes makes the keystones relatively less complex to solve and means that solving them would have a large ripple effect on the other causes. 

While there has been incremental progress in closing the gender gap in recent years, longstanding problems persist. Most people working at Jewish nonprofits are women but most CEOs of Jewish organizations are men, and the gap is especially stark in the organizations with the highest budgets and largest staff sizes. Almost two thirds of JCC top executives are men. Out of the 17 largest Jewish federations, 16 top executives are men. The COVID-19 pandemic may make the picture even worse, as nearly half a million more women than men left the workforce during the pandemic, and women’s labor force participation has dropped to levels not seen since 1988.

“The persistent leadership gender gap means that we are not leveraging the talent, experience, and perspective of all the leaders in our community,” says Gali Cooks, President & CEO of Leading Edge. “We’ve long known that, in our sector and beyond, but now we have a much more specific map for how to change it. This exploration builds on so much great work that has already been done by others, but what’s new is that it identifies five clear priorities that can move our field toward the ultimate goal of gender equity. Achieving that long-term goal will take partnership and creativity from a lot of different people and institutions, so let the conversation and debate about those efforts begin.”

Over the coming year, Leading Edge and partners will convene discussions, launch pilots, and release further resources with more detailed recommendations and explorations. These efforts will build on “first steps” and examples of success detailed in the report, connected to each opportunity. 

“By mapping the reasons for the gender gap like an ecosystem, this analysis gives the field  important new knowledge for remedying this problem,” says Jill Smith, a senior adviser to the chairman and prize committee member at the Genesis Prize Foundation. “Whether someone is a funder, board member, CEO, or other member of the community, the findings show numerous ways to create change.” The Genesis Prize Foundation is a supporter of this project, along with the SRE Network, Jim Joseph Foundation, and The Donald and Carole Chaiken Foundation.

Board and funder action to hold organizations accountable,  institutions incentivizing men to speak out about gap, and other “Keystones” are revealed in a groundbreaking structural network analysis released by Leading Edge.

New Report Identifies Five Key Causes of Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership—and Opportunities for Change

In the article, entitled “What Would Ruth Bader Ginsburg Do? Finding Answers to the Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership”, Drew Lindsay discusses Leading Edge's new report, The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View.

An article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlights Leading Edge's new report sharing the five “keystones” to addressing the persistent gender gap among Jewish nonprofit CEOs.

Chronicle of Philanthropy: Finding Answers to the Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership

In the article, Helen Chernikoff discusses the work of The Gender Equity in Hiring Project and recent steps by Hillel International to increase salary transparency by implementing salary bands. She also speaks with Leading Edge President & CEO Gali Cooks about the business case for salary transparency.

"Leading Edge has significantly changed attitudes when it comes to salary transparency and hiring.” — Mimi Kravetz (Chief Experience Officer, Hillel International)

An article in eJewish Philanthropy highlights efforts to boost salary transparency in Jewish organizations, and explains some of Leading Edge's impact on the field.

In the News: Salary Transparency in Jewish Nonprofits

The Safety Respect Equity Coalition announced a capacity building grant to Leading Edge for groundbreaking work to advance women’s leadership and address gender inequity in Jewish organizations. 

Despite an emerging consensus that the Jewish community suffers from a paucity of women in leadership positions, there is little validated research that looks at this challenge from the perspective of the system. In fact, this lack of information may itself play a role in perpetuating the gender gap in leadership. In order to lay the foundation for new initiatives to tackle this gap, Leading Edge will undertake a rigorous research process that asks: “Why are there so few women in senior leadership positions in the Jewish nonprofit sector and what might be done to close the gender gap?”

The SRE grant to Leading Edge will allow us to launch a rigorous research process that will address the root causes behind why the Jewish community suffers from a paucity of women in leadership positions. The SRE Coalition works to ensure safe, respectful, and equitable Jewish workplaces and communal spaces by addressing sexual harassment, sexism, and gender discrimination.

The three main objectives of this project are:

1. To engage a broad range of stakeholders in a rigorous process to identify the keystone factors that are inhibiting gender parity in leadership. This process will include a literature review of previous research on this issue.

2. To create a platform to share this data and embed the findings in the public consciousness of those who hold power within the Jewish nonprofit sector.

3. To lay the groundwork for implementing the highest-leverage opportunities for impact.

Leading Edge believes that not only is achieving gender parity in leadership the right thing to do, it is also critical to solving the complex problems facing our community today. The Jewish community needs a multiplicity of voices to lead us into the future and we need to deploy all of our available talent in service of achieving our mission as a community.

Leading Edge Undertakes Groundbreaking Research to Address Gender Disparities in Jewish Nonprofits

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