MLK: What role did you play in promoting gender equality in the U.S. government?

JB: The role of the Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment at the U.S. Agency for International Development was to oversee and guide USAID’s work on gender equality policy and programming. Situated in the Office of the Administrator [the head of USAID], my role was to coordinate gender equality policy and programming and to serve as the Agency representative on these issues. I worked closely with the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Hub [GenDev], which served as the Agency’s central technical hub on gender equality priorities, and with gender advisors based in bureaus and USAID missions around the world, who served as the technical experts for their sector, regional, or country teams.

SM: [The Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment position at USAID was created] during the Obama administration. Carla [Koppell] was the first Senior Gender Coordinator [from 2011 to 2013]. [USAID] needed a new gender policy, and the thought was that there needed to be a high-level position in the Office of the Administrator that cut across all the bureaus. As the policy was created, it was important to get buy-in, so creating the policy was a long process. It is fortunate that President Obama was elected to a second term, because the policy wasn’t released until 2012. Carla, Caren Grown, and others worked on it that whole first administration. There was a lot of experience across the agency [in terms of] people who had been working on gender and Carla and Caren worked very hard to engage them in the process.

When I joined in 2014 [as Senior Gender Coordinator], one of my main tasks focused on how the new gender strategy was implemented. [During my time at USAID,] we did an evaluation of the implementation of the policy and worked to integrate the policy guidance on how to implement gender in programs into ADS 205. We worked through the program cycle, and what we found was that there was a lot of uptake in the earlier stages of program design, but then as activities went through the program cycle, there was less focus on gender. Gender might be in the budget. It might make it into the program implementation. But then no data was collected regarding the program outcomes. That’s what we were finishing up in 2016 — an evaluation of the implementation of the policy to lay the groundwork for the next term.

I had written a transition memo about that. The day after the [2016] election, I said to Gayle Smith: Can I take back my memo? Because it was really a roadmap of how gender worked at USAID. They said: They’ve already been FOIA’d [requested through the Freedom of Information Act]. You can’t change it now. We were a little freaked out about that. Although I felt a little better about who they named as the head of USAID, because Mark Green had been from IRI [the International Republican Institute]. We felt like he was a reasonable guy.

When Michelle [Bekkering] was there [at USAID during the first Trump administration, working on gender from the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment], we were like: Okay, at least we have her cell phone number. She was not an unknown. She was implementing USAID policy as directed by the Administrator, but at least we could call her and say: What’s the backstory? What can we [as civil society] push for? When they released the revised [gender policy], it was so late in that cycle that we knew that if we could win the election and have a new administration, it wasn’t ever going to be implemented.

JB: During the first [Donald] Trump administration, they shifted the role of Senior Coordinator out of the Administrator’s office into the Bureau [for Inclusive Growth, Partnerships, and Innovation] where GenDev [the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Hub] sits. The Senior Coordinator helped with the launch of the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (WGDP) Initiative. It was an overarching framework on advancing women’s economic leadership around the world that included interagency commitments and investments.

At the start of the Biden administration, we assessed that structure. We looked back at the lessons from the Obama administration. We determined that it would be an important step to bring the role of the Senior Gender Coordinator back into the Administrator’s office. This best served the goal for the role of working across the Agency, having a seat that was not linked with any specific bureau, but could connect and work across bureaus, across USAID missions.

I stepped into that role, working very closely with the new Deputy Assistant Administrator who worked on both the Gender Equality Hub and the Inclusive Development Hub. It was well-situated to be able to think about the linkages between those different priorities and opportunities to help support advancing both across the agency. Bama Threya had that hat with the head of GenDev, Diana Prieto. The Biden administration added gender staff to USAID, recognizing that there were critical full-time staff roles needed to provide technical expertise.

MLK: What was your background going into the role at USAID?

JB: I started my career at the grassroots level with public health NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Ethiopia. I then worked at the UN (United Nations) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York, Ethiopia, and Iraq (based in Jordan). During the Obama administration, I was a civil servant. I joined the State Department as a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF) in the Office of Global Women’s Issues under the first Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, under Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. The role of women in peace and security and gender equality in Africa was my portfolio there.

With the PMF, you do rotations, so I [also] worked for six months at the Department of Defense (DOD) to stand up their first Women, Peace, and Security working group, to help them prepare for DOD’s participation in the first National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security. I was then detailed to the White House, to the National Security Council (NSC) staff, to serve as the Director for Human Rights and Gender, where gender equality was one of my focus areas. I served as the NSC representative to the White House Council on Women and Girls.

I then left the U.S. government and spent over five years at the Council on Foreign Relations in the Women in Foreign Policy Program, where I did research, lectured, and published widely on the role of gender equality, prosperity, and security. I testified before Congress to share my research and recommendations, which I also [used to] brief departments and agencies across the U.S. government. I then rejoined the U.S. government as a political appointee in the Biden administration as the Senior Gender Coordinator.

SM: I started working in U.S. politics, running political campaigns, and then moved to Washington, where I continued to do electoral work. I worked at EMILYs List to help elect Democratic, pro-choice women across the country. My master’s thesis had been on women in politics, so I came full circle back to — as we called it, the mothership — at EMILYs List. After EMILYs List endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 [and she lost the primary election], I became a little — I don’t know, discouraged? — about the U.S. political system. I thought, well, what can I do to help women around the world with their democratic movements? So I went to the National Democratic Institute, NDI, where I became the director of women’s political participation, working with women as voters, civil society members, candidates, political party members, and government officials to help democracy work better.

Then I got a call from the Office of Personnel [Management] and they said: We have this position at USAID. It’s open and we think you would be great for it. I said: No, thank you. I love my job at NDI. I don’t want to leave. And they said: Well, the president is asking you to apply. Of course that was not true, but still, they used that line. I was like: Alright, fine. So I did it. I didn’t get the job for a year, because you have to list every country you’ve been in, tell them what you were doing, and then the last question at the time was: Have you ever sought to influence the actions of another government? And I was like: Yes! Over the previous five years, I’d been in like 50 countries, so they had to do all this background research about my activities. For the last country, they asked: So, you said you were in Yemen, and you met with the president. The president of what? I had to answer: Of Yemen! So it was a very long clearance process. I didn’t start till 2014, almost a year after I’d applied, because of my background check.

MLK: In your view, what were the main accomplishments while you were at USAID?

SM: When I joined USAID, [my colleagues] had already started implementing the gender policy and working to create Gender 101. It was an online course where everyone in the agency within their first year of employment had to take this online course. We were tracking who was taking it. We really tried to make sure people had done it. We also created an in-person class where people could come in twice a year, whether they had gender in their title or not, to go more in-depth about how a policy would be implemented.

That was the beauty of the office of the Senior Coordinator, or the office as it existed then. There were only four of us, but there were gender people all over the Agency, in all the offices, all the bureaus, all the missions, and so we would bring them together as a functional group [for example, on education or agriculture]. Then the next week, we would bring together all the regional people. Once a month, we would try to bring them all together. This was before COVID, so we were doing these online meetings with very low technology. But the idea was that I wasn’t the boss of any of them. I wanted them to answer to their director, but we also wanted to build this community and give them the resources they needed to be successful. That’s what I spent a lot of the time on.

There was not really this funding push. We weren’t focused on increasing the budget line for gender programming as much in the Obama years. For us, it was about meeting the mandates of Congress, as opposed to pressing Congress for more. Our biggest struggle was explaining to them [for example] that in order to address child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM), you had to have a program. You couldn’t just say: We’re going to put out flyers about this. We were preventing CEFM by keeping more girls in school. We were doing it through our global health programs. We were doing it through working with religious leaders. Explaining to Congress how, if we were addressing child, early, and forced marriage, that was a part of preventing gender-based violence issues. For us, it was more about explaining to Congress what we were doing and trying to track within USAID’s own budget how much was going towards programs addressing gender equality and women’s empowerment. We were never advocating for [more funding]. That was a big change between the Obama years and the Biden years.

JB: [While I was at USAID], the aim was to help the Agency accelerate its understanding of investment in gender equality, both as a valuable goal in itself, and because of the research and recognition that progress in gender equality unlocks progress across the full global development priorities. Through that process, nearly every bureau added, if they didn’t have it already, a civil servant role on gender, who were technical experts on both gender equality and the work of the given sector. That helped to bring technical expertise formally into each bureau to help continue to do the work of saying: How do we strengthen the tools that USAID has to be able to invest, shape its policies, shape its programs, and invest resources in ways that help to advance gender equality and unlock its promise for global development outcomes?

We also continued the dedicated resources for women’s economic leadership that had been started in the [first] Trump administration. We shifted and broadened the frame a little bit so that it became the Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund, the GEEA Fund. It incorporated a few of the core priorities of the Biden administration. We kept the anchor frame on women’s economic leadership and included attention to investing in care infrastructure as essential to women’s economic leadership as one of the areas of attention by the Biden administration. We also looked at the relationship between women’s economic security and climate, recognizing how women entrepreneurs could be drivers of climate solutions. We brought those dedicated resources forward and continued that in the Biden administration, across USAID and the State Department, in coordination with the White House.

The third big commitment that we made in the Biden administration was to look at lessons across the Obama administration and the first Trump administration to say that the work that’s being done to integrate attention to gender equality across the work of USAID would be facilitated by setting an anchor for that work. Because USAID works in resource planning, that anchor was one in the budget, and it’s called attributions. We set a target that we would, and this was across USAID and State with the White House, that we would double the foreign assistance resources attributed to gender equality in the next budget process, from what it had been at its highest in the Obama administration. That brought us to the goal of attributing $2.6 billion to gender equality and women’s empowerment across USAID and [the] State [Department].

By setting that as an anchor in the budget, it was then a prompt for USAID bureaus and missions, State [Department] bureaus, to look at what portion of that $2.6 billion they would be responsible for — as well as the opportunities across their specific priorities, their specific programs, to bring in more of a focused lens on how investing in gender equality would advance the priorities of that program or that bureau. That was a budget prompt that helped strengthen the attention to gender equality across our programming. We combined that with tools to say: We have created this prompt. Let’s have a conversation around it to make sure leadership teams are thinking about it ahead of time, so that they can thoughtfully bring that lens in, but be available as a resource for technical assistance or other tools to help teams think about where the opportunities are for them to bring attention to gender equality into their programs.

One of the tools that we created to help support that was USAID’s first gender equality marker. This is a checklist, taking lessons from others in the field that have used gender equality markers or checklists for teams. We adapted that to create a tool for USAID that would focus both at the development of a program and in its implementation, so that the teams in charge of that program, not the gender advisor in a mission or a bureau, but the teams in charge of that specific program, now had a checklist that they could review with their team manager and say: Have we thought about these questions as we have shaped this policy? Have we done the gender analysis? Have we looked at gender disaggregated data? Other prompts for them to think about across the development of the program, and then in its implementation. And they could say yes or no, and review with their team manager where the answers were no. Why was that the case? What could be done to help shift that and bring that lens in?

We tied that to how they were filling out the marker with tools of how they thought about whether the program was at the threshold of being counted towards the gender attributions that they were required to do. It was a tool to say: Let’s take this budgetary commitment, which is a good prompt, but there is certainly a risk that someone could say we have integrated attention to gender, but it may be done at a surface level in the program and not as deeply as it might be. And let’s follow that with more technical experts with the gender advisors. We’ve put more trainings and resources and tools like the gender integration marker that teams can now use to say: Let’s take this budget prompt and turn it into more meaningful gender equality programming led by USAID and State bureaus.

We continued to increase the budget commitments from $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion and then $3.1 billion. We were building momentum in the Biden administration to commit to ways that we both maintained the dedicated resources that we had for women’s economic leadership through the GEEA fund. We were also ramping up support for the agency to be able to invest more of our general development, foreign assistance resources in ways that would think about how gender affected different programs and priorities in different countries around the world.

An example that the budget commitments help to unlock was the GROW initiative, which was led by USAID’s Food Security Bureau. Their bureau leadership and their bureau team and staff across the agency working on food security recognized that women farmers and entrepreneurs are doing essential work in the food industry in producing food and in helping to build the agri-food industry. But they did not have equal access to tools, to resources, to the training that they needed to be as productive as they could be.

FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, released a study that essentially found that if you closed the gap in access to resources and tools between men and women farmers, it would feed an additional 100 million people. The Food Security Bureau took that on, made commitments, and created an initiative to say across how USAID invests in food security around the world. Let’s take a focused lens here to make sure that we are helping close that gap between women and men farmers and helping women farmers get the tools and resources they need to be productive, recognizing the effect that that would have on our food security goals.

SM: That program built on a great partnership that we had had in the Obama years with — they didn’t call it food security then, but with the agriculture team, we created the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, WEAI, which was the first attempt to measure women farmers’ empowerment, so it wasn’t just like: Do you have access to seeds and other materials? But: How do you use your time? Who speaks at public meetings regarding these issues?

The WEAI was such a great investment, building on previous investments that the people who work in agriculture. They always say: I work with farmers, and they’re men, right? If you didn’t work in agriculture, you didn’t realize that the majority of farmers in many countries are women. I just loved so much that program that Jamille was talking about. There was an already existing, strong framework that needed to go that next step, and they did that in such a powerful way.

MLK: The Senior Gender Coordinator was a politically appointed role. What are you doing now?

SM: I served until January 19, 2017. Then I started a consulting firm called Smash Strategies with a former State Department colleague, Stephenie Foster. We’ve been doing consulting work for civil society organizations, for the UN, ranging across both organizational development and program implementation. For instance, if an organization focuses on gender in their programs: How are they actually doing it in the way their organizations function? I’ve written a lot of training materials for UN Women, both for women candidates and women office holders. And Stephenie and I wrote a book on feminist foreign policy during that time.

JB: I’m advising on global social impact opportunities. I am also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

MLK: What advice would you give to those of us who want to advance gender equality in the current context?

JB: It is important to understand and address the variety of reasons at the root of resistance to gender equality, as well as find new ways of expanding the movement working toward gender equality. As we think about U.S. foreign policy and foreign assistance moving forward, I hope we build on the evidence of how important it is to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute to the economic prosperity, security, and well-being of their societies. Investing in gender equality will have benefits for everyone.

SM: I think it’s important for there to be both political appointees and government civil servants working on advancing gender equality. I think you have that technical expertise that exists. These positions need to continue. (I’m just assuming that some sort of USAID structure will come back, or a development structure, even if it’s in the State Department, probably not in this administration.) By the end of this Trump administration, we will start seeing the devastating impacts. Obviously, we already are, but I don’t think the American people or the politicians in DC are having to confront this yet. Just the long-term lack of partnerships, relationships. There’s a reason we created [USAID] before. We’re going to have to probably do more and rebuild some of it. Having a balance of people who are technical experts in civil service, in the missions, working on development, balanced with political appointees who are trying to help the administration implement that in a realistic way.

I also think that — if possible, if we are rebuilding a gender architecture — that we do have a balance of a stand-alone office, such as the Senior Gender Coordinator at USAID, and gender experts in every office. In the State Department, having the Global Women’s Issues Office became so much more impactful when they started having people in every other bureau and office over there. I thought that was a strength of the USAID architecture, which was that we didn’t create a huge senior gender coordinator office. We had the senior gender coordinator, we had the GenDev office, and then we really pushed for gender people in every office, and people without gender in their title understand the gender issues, as Jamille laid it out.

I thought we were moving in the correct, right direction. We have to think holistically. One thing we learned from the Obama administration to Biden’s was that for a long time, we said: If you are doing gender correctly, it won’t cost you any more money. If you fully integrate it from the beginning of the program cycle, it’s just the way the implementation happens. We just totally cut our nose off to spite our face when it came down to Congressional budget negotiations, because we said it wouldn’t cost anywhere, but gender integration does need funds if you’re doing it well. The impact is strong and real and positive when you do these things. Let’s own that. Let’s invest in that.