Fields like microbiology that have traditionally been dominated by white men have a lot to gain from a more diverse workforce. (Photo by iStock/Valentin Russanov)
Sexism, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics
ARTICLE | Leaky Pipelines or Broken Scaffolding? Supporting Women’s Leadership in STEM
As advances in medicine, artificial intelligence, and other tech sectors continue to shape our world, social change leaders must ensure that the STEM field is poised to reduce, not deepen, inequities. Contributors Linda Calhoun, Shruthi Jayaram, and Natasha Madorsky offer three strategies—“reframing the face of technology, scaling up early career interventions, and reforming recruitment and workplace culture”—that executive directors, school administrators, university deans, CEOs, and others involved with STEM institutions can take to create change.
Preventing Gun Violence
ARTICLE | We Know How to Prevent Gun Violence. Now We Need to Scale It.
Former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has spent the last six years leading the organization he founded, Chicago CRED, which is dedicated to preventing gun violence in the city. How? By “engaging directly with those most at risk of shooting or being shot and giving them a reason to put down their guns.” The organization’s methods have shown impressive results. The challenge, Duncan writes, is how to scale the intervention: “Chicago needs something in the neighborhood of $500 million per year in public and private dollars for at least five years.”
Metric Monomania
ARTICLE | Beyond ‘X Number Served’
“Nonprofits too often receive (well-intended) guidance from stakeholders like funders and board members to disproportionately zero in on a single goal: serving the maximum number of beneficiaries,” writes contributor Mona Mourshed. But “excessively defining and valuing programs by the number of people they serve can give rise to unintended consequences.” How to get past this metric monomania? “The right way to expand a nonprofit’s impact is to build programs on three pillars: breadth, depth, and durability. Scaling means advancing all three of these dimensions simultaneously.”
Reducing Traffic Deaths
ARTICLE | A New Model for Saving Lives on Roads Around the World
India, despite being home to only 1 percent of the world’s motor vehicles, accounts for 11 percent of global road crash fatalities. In 2020, the country reported 366,138 road crashes and 131,714 fatalities. Most road crash fatalities, though, are preventable. Krishen Mehta and Piyush Tewari of the SaveLIFE Foundation write about a new solution, the Zero Fatality Corridor (ZFC), that has dramatically reduced road deaths on some of India’s most dangerous thoroughfares. How? It applies a set of interventions that are “designed specifically to accommodate the realities, resources, and existing infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries, which are vastly different from their developed counterparts.”
Social Change Psychology
ARTICLE | What Makes Narrative Change So Hard?
Do nonprofits and funders often go too far in pointing fingers at their own shortcomings? Yes, argues International Resource for Impact and Storytelling’s Brett Davidson; the reality is they are playing on an inherently uneven psychological field. That’s because of something called “system justification,” which is a tendency for humans to see the existing order not just as the way things are, but as natural, or even the way things ought to be. This inclination makes us more likely to accept unwelcome social and political situations and reduces motivation for activities that challenge the system, even among groups who are disadvantaged by the system.
Read more stories by SSIR Editors.