The four presenters in this panel were chosen in recognition of their efforts and achievements in pursuit of gender equality on Wikipedia. Adrienne Waterwitz, too, drew attention to the under-representation of women in both the number of articles about women and articles on topics of interest to them. Thanks to Waterwitz and like-minded editors, like the four people in our panels, Rosie Stephenson Goodnight, Annie Reynolds, Cally Brain and Carolyn Phillips, the Wikimedia Foundation energetically supports initiatives to increase the number of female editors. Born in Nebraska on 6 January 1977, the only child of Betty and Nathan Waterwitz, Adrienne Waterwitz registered as a new user on Wikipedia on 18 July 2004. That day, she made her first contribution to Wikipedia in an edit of the article novel under the pseudonym A Waterwitz. Two days later, she added a brief biography to her own user page, self-identifying as a graduate student in English literature, specialising in 18th century British literature. Currently, she wrote, I am working on the relationship between religion and civic virtue in the late 18th century Britain. Over the years that followed, A Waterwitz made over 50,000 edits and because of the high quality of those edits, she became one of Wikipedia's top 10 editors, credited with 36 featured articles, so for anyone that doesn't know, these are articles that make the highest standard of accuracy, fairness, style and comprehensiveness. She was also awarded many barn stars, badges in recognition of her work and other Wikipedia editing awards, all the while under the pseudonym A Waterwitz and all the while not identifying as a woman. On 11 November 2007, A Waterwitz went on record about her identity for the first time in an interview with Wikipedia, Wikipedia witty lama, who some know as Liam Wyatt, for episode 35 of Wikipedia Weekly, titled Secretly Famous. Wyatt introduced her at the beginning of the interview as the wiki authority on 18th century English literature Bar Nun. A Waterwitz is described on the edit page as a grad student who has to hide her activities for fear of jeopardizing her career. In that interview, Adrienne discussed the discordance between being a graduate student pursuing an academic career and simultaneously dedicating her time to Wikipedia editing.  When she revealed her gender after working anonymously, there was a lot more skepticism, she said, and a lot of times when I made arguments, I was accused of being hysterical or emotional, things that had never happened before. Following a 2011 Wikimedia study that showed that 90% of Wikipedia editors were male and that the average Wikipedia was a white educated, computer savvy man who lived in the United States or Europe. Adrienne said that disparity caused a lot of perspectives to be left out. She led initiatives to bring Wikipedia into higher education communities. She recruited colleagues and students to help increase female presence on Wikipedia. As a way of improving the representation of women and topics of interest to women, Wadawitz began to participate in or organize editing workshops which became known as editor-thons and these focused on increasing the representation of women. In 2012 she organized a FemTech editor-thon, also known as WikiStorm, at Claremont Graduate University. The event called for participants to help edit, expand and create articles on Wikipedia while developing or honing their digital humanity skills and learning empowering authoring strategies. Meanwhile, she dedicated her expertise in 18th century English literature to improving and creating biographies of women writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Martha Sherwood and Jane Austen. Wadawitz first edited the Mary Wollstonecraft page in June 2006 and made her last edit in October 2013. She is... Sorry. One Wikipedia editor wrote on Wadawitz's Use the Talk page that her article on Wollstonecraft adds up to a colossal achievement. I mean, what we have here is the equivalent of a book. The thoroughness, attention to detail and discerning study of the best sources simply takes my breath away. Any student of Wollstonecraft who clicks Wikipedia will hardly believe they're like in finding such a treasure trove. Wikipedia at its finest. Another Wikipedia witty lama said that Wollstonecraft article made Adrian Wadawitz the single most cited and read Wollstonecraft scholar ever. The Wollstonecraft article's statistic page as listed Wadawitz as the top editor, having made most of the edits. She is also responsible for adding the most text, having contributed 50,074 bytes out of 83,301 bytes. The Mary Wollstonecraft article received the highest rating feature article, and a show was viewed a total of 3,939,295 times between July 2015 and 16 November 2022. Now, we cannot access the stats before 2015, but do remember that Adrian started working on the article in 2006 and stopped in 2013. And so there was a significant amount of views in that time that we just can't capture. So it boasts a daily average of around 1,565 views on the English language Wikipedia. And over the last month alone, the Mary Wollstonecraft article was viewed in 94 other language Wikipedia's an average of 1,000 times per day. On 8 April 2014, while rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park, Adrian Wadawitz scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedia editor, writer and rock climber, fell and sustained fatal injuries. After that day, Wadawitz tribute editor-thons took place online and at various locations in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia and Africa. In 2017, Wikipedia and Matthew Vetter reported that over 280 Wikipedia editor-thons had been hosted since April 2014. In October 2014, a group of editors from around the world of Wikimedia, recognising that only 15.53% of English Wikipedia's biographies were about women, decided to focus on reducing systemic bias in the Wikipedia movement. On 18 July 2015, the women in red Wiki project was born. So I ask you now to join me in welcoming our first speaker in this panel, the co-founder of Women in Red, Rosie Stephenson. Good night. Hello everyone and thank you for having me here. Thank you especially to Bunty, who I've now known for a few years working together on the Affiliations Committee. I'm Rosie Stephenson. Good night. I'm an elected trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation and a visiting scholar at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where I focus on pre-20th century transatlantic English language women writers and their works broadly construed. I'm also the co-founder of a Wikipedia community called Women in Red, and that's my focus on this stage today. I'm going to talk about what predates women in red so that you understand the connection between what was in the past and what we're doing today and what hopefully we're going to be doing in the future. I'm going to touch on Wikipedia's gender gaps, plural, representation, participation, consumption, and so forth. Wikiproject Women's History focuses on women born before 1950. The project was established in February 2011, the month before International Women's History Month. And the idea was that people would stop what they were working on, you know, lakes, rivers, streams, Pokemon characters. And instead, in the month of March, we'd focus on writing biographies about women born before 1950. And several people decided that's a good idea, and I'll go ahead and do it, including me. Women's Scientists was established the next year, November 2012. And in 2014, I established Wikiproject Women Writers, to include women writers, broadly construed, and their works, broadly construed. Part of that was influence, actually, by knowing who Adrienne Waterwitz was, though I never met her and I never had the chance to interact with her. But I thought of myself as a Wikipedia writer. I've been writing since 2007. My mom had been a writer, my grandmother had been a writer, and I wanted to capture those women who also were writers so that they didn't get forgotten by history. But even before these three projects, Wikiproject Women's History, Wikiproject Women's Scientists, Wikiproject Women Writers, Wikiproject Feminism was started in February 2008. There wasn't a real impetus to write those articles, currently only 8,400 of them exist, but it did exist, and it did help when Wikiproject Women Artists was created in November 2013 and then Art and Feminism in 2014. So you can see a lot of work was being done on English Wikipedia related to the content gender gap. Not all of it very tied together, but we knew of each other, and to some extent we worked together, especially in the month of March, not so much the other 11 months. In December 2014, for the first time, an academic study was published that gave us a number. 15.5% of the biographies on English Wikipedia were about women. It was based on a DBpedia dump of October 2014. We, the editors, kind of knew that there had been a problem with the content gender gap. You could look at the category for Australian novelists and see a lot of men's names and very few women's names and so forth, but until then, December 2014, we didn't have a number, and now we had a number. Two months later, February 2015, a gentleman I had never met before then named Roger Bamken left a note on my talk page, and he said, something to the extent, now that we have a number and we know how few biographies, at least on English Wikipedia, are about women, I think it'd be a good idea for us to write a submission, a proposal for this conference called Wikimania and see if it gets accepted, and then we can go talk about the issue. He wrote something like, you don't have to knock the doors open, come do this with me. And it took me a nanosecond to agree that it was a good idea. Luckily for us, the submission was accepted, and now we had a few months to prepare our slide deck. You know how it is when you're preparing your first slide deck for a Wiki event? You do spend months on the slide deck, and then as the years pass and you've done a few of these, you're kind of doing them on the fly, two and three and four days before. But I digress. So Roger and I are on the stage, or at least I am, and you can see him via Zoom or whatever we were using in 2015. And we talked about the content gender gap, and then we did a segue. We said, this isn't only about addressing the content gender gap. We proposed today, right here on this stage, that we do something about it. There are all of these Wiki projects that have been created, women writers, women artists, women scientists, and so forth, that focus on and off whenever you feel like it, improve an article, create an article and whatnot. But what we propose today is that we focus on creating women's biographies, not just in the month of March, but every day. And that we all do it without regard to your gender. No focus on editathons where we're seeking a group of women to get together to sit and write. We don't care what your gender is. Let's just together deal with society as it's given us the resources we're going to need. Let's together write these biographies every day. And the people clapped and we thought, okay, we'll have 15 minutes of fame and that'll be it. We were wrong. People loved the idea. People started writing those biographies. We had no idea who they were. Everyone has their own username. And it didn't matter to us. We had no interest at that time, at least, to hold any in-person events. Now, 33 language versions of women in red later and 193,000 new articles later on English Wikipedia were very happy with the results of having created women in red. Our main page receives more than 12,000 page views per month. In 2016, a year after it was established, women in red was shortlisted by ITU, UN Women for the GemTech Award for Promoting Women in the Technology Sector. Women in Red's talk page is a harassment-free space. Since its inception in 2015, there have been more than 28,000 comments. Mostly, it's people writing and saying, I just started the article on Jane Doe. It's at Articles for Deletion. It's caught in draft space. It looks like it's okay, but I could use some help. Do I add a header? Do I increase the size of the lead? Do I look for more sources? What can I do? It received 3,000 page views in the last 30 days, and that's about average.  Participants or editors, like I said, we don't focus on your gender or where you live or if you're available to attend some in-person event or hop on a Zoom call. What we care about is that you write the articles when it's convenient for you. How do we do it? Our members have spent a long time developing what we call red lists, a list that has a bunch of red links. Each of the red links for someone who, theoretically, is notable. There are more than 1,000 of these red lists. Here you see on the left the table of contents for the red list index, and on the right you see a list of some of these red lists. These red lists come by occupation, by geography, by time period, by special focus area, by organization, by educational institutions, by dictionaries, by authority control identifiers, by pictures, by awards, by works, by etc. In so doing, these women aren't lost to history. We've captured their name, and hopefully with their name, there's also some reference, some source attached to it too. Some of these come from Wikidata. Some of these lists are crowdsourced. Some of them are based on biographical dictionaries. Others come from URLs, from websites, like the BBC 100 list that's published every November. Here's an example of a red list. This is a red list of missing articles by educational institution. It'll be women who either were alumni or employees of the institution. In this case, it's the National Taiwan University. I looked for the University of Sydney, but no one's created that one yet. Women in red held its first edit-a-thon in September 2015, a couple months after we were established. A Glam organization, Smithsonian, was doing a three-day, what we called Labor Day weekend event on Asia Pacific Americans, and we decided to do Asian Pacific American women. Three days was pretty good. A lot of people were excited, but we thought, okay, they liked this so much, we'll try out other formats. We tried a seven-day event, and then we saw that people liked weekends, so we did 10 days to include two weekends and the week, and then we did a month-long event in November, Women in Stem, with the New York Academy of Science. Finally, after some trial and error, we found a sweet spot. Currently, we run five events at a time, all the time, five different things are happening. One is a multi-year event. We call it hashtag one day one woman, as in every day write an article about one woman. It's the most popular event that we run because people can choose whatever they want to write about. Every year, we also choose something that's an annual event that runs all year. One year it was Women in Stem, one year it was suffrage, this year it's Women in Climate, it's broadly construed. And then we do three events each month that are month-long events. One is always geography focus, and then the other two are whatever the community, women in red community has decided they want to focus on. Currently, we're on event number 247. Here you see an example of parts of the meet-up page for the Women in Science, our annual event this year in 2022. On the upper far left, the top, the header of the meet-up page, these are all on English Wikipedia.  It's all on Wiki. In the center on the left is a list of the different red lists that apply to this particular event, so that if you click on not just the red list, but it might have a Wiki data link next to it, so it's a Wiki data list and a crowdsourced list and so forth. And these are broadly construed, so think women in farming would fall under women in climate and so forth. The third box on the far left side are the people who've signed up to participate. No one has to sign up. You can just participate. And then top right are some of the articles that have been created. You don't have to add your article up there. Wiki data, we have a bot that does something magic and gives us lists every month of the articles that were created, but if you want, you can add your article on the meet-up page, and you can see that in the top right. And then on the bottom right was the logo that was created by one of our volunteers for this particular event. How much money are we spending on this? I'm proud to say... Ah, you're raising your hand. Okay, go for it, question. Zero. That's right. Women in red, all the work that women in red has done since we've been established has been on a budget of zero. Zero grants, zero, zero, zero, zero. All 100% driven by volunteer effort. Here's an example of this month's geography focus. It's on Central and Southern Asia. Underneath the top left-hand side is a list of the different red lists one can click on, and each will have lots of red-linked names, people you can choose to create your article on. The bottom is the list of people who have signed up to participate. Again, don't have to sign up, but people like to put their names. So sometimes people put their name and they don't contribute one article. That's okay, too. Nobody's monitoring it. And in the top right is the start of the two columns, list of names that have been created so far this month for that edit-a-thon. And on the bottom right, someone created this logo for this edit-a-thon. My understanding is it's a woman from Persia. And so that's what we're using for this event this month. We coordinate these events in a place called the Virtual Ideas Cafe, the Vic. And they're editors such as my colleague, Annie Reynolds, whom you'll hear from next, and Lisa, who's sitting this way, help out with coordinating the events. People discuss and make decisions what we're going to do next, who's going to create the Meetup page, who's going to create the invitation or newsletter. That's what you see in the upper right that's going to go via mass messaging on over a thousand user talk pages. Mind you, I've been talking about English Wikipedia, but as I mentioned earlier, this is being done in 33, so 32 other language Wikipedia's, each language Wikipedia doing it its way, whatever works for it. No one monitors that. We collaborate sometimes, and often we don't. I want to turn from talking about representation, the content, and talking about the editors, the participants, and talk about consumption. Who's consuming these Wikipedia articles? A while ago, I think we used the word readers, but readers only captures some of the people who are consuming Wikipedia. Think about the virtual assistants, Alexa and Siri. If they're grabbing content from Wikipedia, you don't hear, according to Wikipedia, the answer is ABC. So there are other ways that people are consuming Wikipedia, and we have found that social media is one of them. We currently can be found on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, and looking to expand into TikTok and Snapchat. For those last two, looking for some help, maybe someone in this room. You can see in the center, the photos are from November's board on Pinterest. The images represent women whose image was put into a new article created in November. So you can click on the image, and it'll take you to the Wikipedia article. Or just look at the picture if you want to stay on Pinterest and not go into Wikipedia. Likewise, on the far right is a Twitter image of someone who had a new article created, and you can see there's her photo. There's one or two sentences about her, and then there's a link to her Wikipedia article. I say this, if all you're going to do is just read those two sentences, I'm satisfied. You have consumed Wikipedia, not in a traditional way, but you've done something, and it's better than nothing. A year ago, we've made more than 30,000 tweets. We have more than 11,000 followers who are reading Wikipedia, but they're reading it on Twitter, although I don't want to go there about Twitter right now. But that's a fact. Why we talk about this is that in 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation Research Department did a pilot study on English Wikipedia regarding readership and found that 70% of the respondents were under the age of 30, and 76% of the respondents identified as men. Now, again, this was 2019, this is 2022. It was only English Wikipedia, so it doesn't cover all the other 318, I think there are other ones. But as you can see, that's information that we had and it's useful to do something with it rather than sit and not. So this is what we've done, is had a big focus on social media as a way of reaching people. What else do we do? We have a lot of people who aren't as interested in writing the articles, but they wish to contribute images, images of women, women's works, so the covers of their novel or images about women's issues or things like the school someone founded in 1850. You can see a sampling there across the page. I can tell you that in 2022 alone, up to now November the 17th, 8,952 new images in this year have been donated to Wikimedia Commons by women in red enthusiasts. I don't want to use the word members, we'd love you to become a member. I don't want to say we don't care, but it doesn't matter. You don't have to become a member, just do it, just upload those images. And then they can be added to Wikipedia articles and so forth, into Wikidata. Where else are you going to find us? Wikidata. And so here's what our item looks like for the Wiki project. There's a separate item for the Wikipedia article about women in red, but for the sake of brevity it's not here. On the far right is the list of 33 language versions of women in red. I've been editing Wikipedia since 2007. In that time, I've created more than 5,000 new articles, more than 1,800 of which are women's biographies. I became an admin, though I don't use the tools so much. My sons, though, say to me, Mom, you can't write all the articles. You have to inspire others. I hope this session inspires some of you to consider improving Wikipedia's content gender gap. Thank you. Okay, now I've got a hard act to follow here. I'm Annie Reynolds, and yes, I'm a supporter and I am a member of Wiki Women in Red. I also convene a group called Women Right Wiki here in Sydney. The origins of the Women Right Wiki group were that Spider Red Gold, Walter and ceramicist, and Annika, a lawyer and founder of the Feminist Legal Clinic together sought a grant for some funds to help get the project off the ground, unlike Women in Red, no money. And they won a grant from the New South Wales Writers Centre. Okay, our name, Women Right Wiki, www.worldwideweb. It's a really nice combination of ideas. The logo, again, Spider had a hand in this. In fact, she created it all together. She created the sculptors that she took photos of in the three circles on the left and did that design for the logo, which is on the Women's Library Newtown's website and also on our Facebook page. So the group was launched on International Women's Day. The aim of the group and the reason we received the grant was because it was held in a library, we were going to write bios of Australian and Pacific women whose books were held in that library. And it seemed like a good combination and that's how we started out. We had a series of training sessions and at the end of June, so only three months later, we celebrated with certificates, badges and food in Wikipedia tradition without even having any awareness that that was the case just happened that way. So I can't tell you exactly how I came across women in red, but I do know that I joined in July 2017 and found it to be a really, really helpful community. Partly because being worldwide, someone's going to answer your question while you're asleep. You come back in the morning and bingo, you've got the help you wanted. Other times it happens, almost while you're watching the page and starting out and not knowing any tame Wikimedians, we needed help. So one of the early articles written by one of the members was about a Sydney Uniting Church woman, Dorothy McCray-McMion, and that article began in the editor's sandbox without our realising it was moved by some other editor, we didn't have any idea who the person was, it was moved to draft space and then it languished in draft space and that's when, as Rosie said, people come, knock on the door, say, help, and the great thing was we got help. We got suggestions, editing help and then someone, and I'm not even sure if they were connected with women, someone moved the article to main space and so bingo, another one of our articles was published. Every time any group member published an article, they emailed us all so that we could rush in and help it along in any way we could. Here's Dorothy McCray-McMion's article yesterday, the day before. She's a retired Uniting Church woman. Interestingly, she was interviewed, she was in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago, sorry, at the beginning of the month, and that's why, when I looked up and saw, that's why this article has received 382 page views this month. It would normally be much, much slower, but in the paper, Google, Wikipedia, bingo. So then another experience we had was how articles change and this is the learning process. One of how you write an article but you certainly don't own it. So one of our members wrote an article, Women's Liberation Movement in Sydney and she wasn't too disturbed when it was moved and renamed and became Women's Liberation Movement in Australia because, yeah, still the same continent makes a lot of sense. But we were a little taken aback when suddenly it appeared as Women's Liberation Movement. Oh, sorry. OK, L&M, yeah, fair enough, manual of style. And then it was moved to be in Oceania. Now, we muttered and ummed an ad about this because, OK, it is a women's movement and yes, but it's not really the same everywhere and... But there again, it exists. The redirects work, so we let it go and we said, OK, you're now in Oceania. That's OK. But as I say, that was the learning process of we don't own what we write. We launch it and off it goes. It had some issues with notability. We had an editor challenging a woman's notability because she was a fellow of one of our Australian academies and they said, but why hasn't she been elected to the British Academy? And we said, well, she's in Australia. Go figure. It is a national award. I mean, I'm not that I said that at the time but that's what I'd say now. You know, it has to be nationally notable and our academies certainly are.  Well, I used to write regimes for people and it was hard not to make things sound possibly a little bit better than they should. And also, I learned the lesson of don't canvas from my dear friend, Kerry Raymond early on because when I got sent, an article of mine got sent for deletion, I had been, you know, Kerry had helped me with something else, edited whatever. So I immediately went to a talk page and said, help. And she said, no, can't do this. This is wrong. And you learn. So at the end of the year, the group, and there were only six of us, six of us, the group had written 17 buyers of women and six pages and the pages included the one on the women's liberation movement in Sydney and one on the Ed Narayan Awards, more of which are non. So we created new articles. We upload images. We write women into existing articles, partly particularly where there are a lot of articles about Australian male politicians that are totally focused on their political career. And it's like they, you know, they hardly even, I mean, they might have their life span in them, but there's no mention of any other life outside politics. So we try to, you know, if we find the information and the women are notable, we make sure they get added in and create the red links so that someone later on can come in and fill in the blanks. I also realised that it's good when you're new to make the article look like it belongs, so you work out what categories to add and add them and you, in those days, copy and paste, talk page stuff and update it with the sort key for the relevant woman. So we've always had support from Women in Red and the best way to get it was to put that little, to tag the talk page, even if you don't put it for the year-long hashtag One Day One Woman meet-up. Just putting the double curly brackets, WIR, helps Women in Red to see when alerts come out about possible deletion and so on. And the group, the other great thing about a group is you get together and meet and chat and give each other moral support both on and off Wiki. So COVID lockdown, that threw us a little bit. We couldn't go to the library, so we went online. We continued the same twice a month meetings and for a bit I was trying to put together some training ideas, but it's really difficult. When you've got a really experienced member attending like Margaret and people who have sort of got a bit of an idea, it's difficult to give something to everyone. We were back in the library to celebrate our four years and Catty came along and it was a surprise visit. I don't know if anyone knew that she was coming, but I certainly didn't know in advance. And that was nice and there are a few of us, including me and two of the other founding members and Margaret and Irma, who's known to prove and others possibly. So COVID lockdown happened again. We went online again and I thought, I've uploaded all these images. Why don't I make some quizzes? And this is sort of how they looked. I didn't do any bells and whistles, glamour ideas, just who are, who have we here? And I, you know, this is one of the images that I'd found on Troven uploaded. And I would say, who is she? And people would choose from the list of suggestions. I was thinking of making you answer, but I'm short for time, so I won't put you on the spot. But in fact, she was three of the four things. And it didn't matter that we didn't know who these women were. It mattered that there was an image. We were challenging stereotypes. We were having a bit of fun and finding out more sharing stuff with each other. And to nearly end, I was really honoured last year. I would have felt more comfortable if the award had been given to the Women Right Wiki Group, but such was not to be. I was really honoured to accept an Edna Ryan award for community activism for making a feminist difference by writing women into Wikipedia. So we've got 37 members on my email list. They'd never all turn up at once, even online. But never mind. They're interested. They have some connection. I love the fact that we can go to Wikipedia and find an image like we can edit and use it. And I have Rosie the Riveter as edited on my user page in Wikipedia. Where do we meet? We meet at the Women's Library the second Wednesday of the month from 11 o'clock. If anyone's interested, you're very, very welcome to turn up. Provided you are a woman, the Women's Library is a safe space for women and, as such, women are welcome. And the other... The fourth Wednesday, we're still online. And if you want to join the group, that's my username so you can contact me there. My email address is also available via my user group profile. And I enjoy working with Rosie and have been creating some of those monthly meet-up pages and other things this year particularly because the being a trustee has taken her... some of her focus away from us at Women in Red. So, thank you.  You often come across... She shadows me and fixes it up behind me. Fantastic. I'd now like to go to Zoom. To Catty. Well, hi, thanks for having me today. I'm in Bantua, Alice Springs, on the traditional country of the R&D people and pay my respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge them as the first knowledge holders of this place and who have their own complex systems of sharing and exchanging knowledge, of course. I also really want to acknowledge the work of Adrienne as described earlier who has so clearly paved the way for so much of the work so many of us are doing. It's such an extraordinary story and contribution so a real honour to be on a panel named after her. Most of you in the room, I assume I probably know, but I'm the former Executive Officer of Wikimedia Australia and a long sort of many-time committee member. But my editing journey actually began in 2016 here in the Northern Territory. I moved to work here as a radio journalist in 2011 and covering most of Central Australia and became increasingly frustrated by the lack of local Wikipedia pages about places, people and histories. And so again, a monthly editing club. I'm just going to share my screen now and show you some slides. A local editing club where we got together over a two-year period and worked on pages about this really, really remote area of Australia. So we held the first editathons in Catherine, Alice Springs, and the one you're seeing now is in Tennant Creek and lots of monthly meetups in Darwin as well. But it was really this page that opened my eyes initially to the complexity of gender on Wikimedia platforms. On the very far left here, this is Sissy McLeod. She's originally from Boralula and she's the first indigenous woman to receive a medal from the Royal Humane Society. In 1912, her adopted mother, who she's standing next to, who's seated, actually fell off the wharf in Darwin and Sissy jumped in and saved her and was eventually awarded a bronze medal for her bravery in 1913 in the town hall in front of about 100 people. And as they say at the time, it was no light thing for this child without a moment's hesitation in the darkness of night to leap into the sea, known to be alive with sharks and alligators to help the one she loved in that classic kind of colonial storytelling kind of way. But this page was worked on at a Wiki Club event and it kicked off a huge debate about gender and equity and also regional notability about what makes someone notable in terms of their existence in a regional or a remote area as well. So there was lots, this page was heavily contested about notability and it really kind of highlighted to me that this is a person from an underrepresented group in an underrepresented part of the country of an underrepresented gender at a time where all of these people really made the newspaper and were really named and Sissy made the newspaper nationally over decades at a time where it was, you know, which is incredibly notable in what was a very segregated and colonial society in the early 19th century. So if Sissy's not notable, I really, really got wondering why William Jackman, who's the man in the other photo is, he's a white guy who won exactly the same medal and did nothing else of note. And so it was the first time I really began to realise how different the rules were for men and women on Wikipedia and without these debates, how rarely we were going to see growth in terms of underrepresented people on Wikipedia. So this was the page that really got the fires burning for me. So since then I've supported a range of gender equity programs in Australia, including Franklin Women, which is this is an image of here that many of you in the room have been involved with. UNSW, WEMISA, and also last year's 24-hour Aida Love Lace edited on that many people on Zoom were involved with. And these all focused on women in a broad range of sciences and have taken place some annually, sometimes biennially around Australia. But the program I want to talk about today is about Know My Name, which was a gender equity on Wikipedia project in partnership between Wikimedia Australia and the National Gallery in Canberra. And I want to talk about it because it's one of the biggest glam partnerships we've ever been a part of. And I think it probably is responsible for one of the biggest national simultaneous editathons that we've ever done a few years ago. So essentially in 2019, I saw a post on Instagram about this new initiative called Know My Name and was so bold just to direct message the director, Nick Mitrovich, as you do, making the case that it's great that the gallery was doing all these gender equity exhibitions and other initiatives.  And so we began a long conversation and what grew out of that is a partnership around a Wikipedia project as part of the project. Little did I know what I was getting myself into at the time. So a little more about Know My Name and a big call out here to our main National Gallery collaborator, Jesse England, for all the work that she has done on this program with us. But essentially it grew from a realisation that the collections and opportunities offered to male and female artists was far from equitable and this was true across the sector. So an audit found that only 25% of its collection of Australian art was created by women. So to its huge credit, the National Gallery was very open and transparent about this and it kicked off this sort of transformative initiative to address this historical gender bias within their institution and collections. And so it was an all of institution project, a long-term commitment and it flowed across all aspects of the gallery's work, programming, strategy, fundraising, all aspect. And it also saw two major survey exhibitions, the first of their kind of Australian women that were spectacular in Canberra over many years and also a very significant publication, a kind of Bible if you like of Australian women's art. And it was a real call to action across the section. So why is it that Wikipedia was such an important part of this? Well, we know that because the content is free and open, it permeates out across the internet and third-party providers of all kinds use the content. And so this means that any content on Wikipedia that is absent or invisible or even problematic ends up in really highly visible locations. It's amplified out across the web with all its issues and its existing bias and knowledge gaps. Wikipedia really mirrors our society and it mirrors the dominant viewpoints. And so that's why initiatives like Know My Name are so important to give female creators their rightful place online. And improving equity on these platforms were also improving equity and representation across the broader internet as well. So what did we achieve? Well, we've now held three editor-thons alongside the major exhibitions at the National Gallery's Secret Library, as I call it. It was the first time they'd opened their library publicly for an event like this. And so we held editor-thons there and we've done so three times now as well as that. We held sort of simultaneous editor-thons on the weekend of International Women's Day at major institutions in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Alice Rings, Perth and Hobart, all on the one weekend. It was massive. And this occurred on the 8th of March 2020. Yep, the best-laid plans. So this is maybe one of the really good things about the pandemic, if there are any, is the kind of boom in online participation that occurred around that time. So essentially this program that otherwise may have been just a one-off or perhaps a yearly thing became a monthly thing and the participation was quite extraordinary. So the National Gallery formed a kind of wiki club that was really driven by a volunteer, Linda Paskell, who had never edited Wikipedia before but got massively passionate about this project and of course the ever-prolific Kerry Raymond who did extraordinary work on this wiki club month after month after month all through 2020 and into 2021. And so what were the outcomes overall? So it keeps growing but of course the program created over nearly 120 new pages. The target was 100 and editing 440 existing pages as well. Over 2,000 new references, of course and engaged with 188 volunteers. So, you know, numbers only ever tell part of the story but for mine, I think one of the things this program really did is it raised the profile of Australia's extraordinary women Wikipedians, many of whom are here today who are so prolific and so skilled and have such expertise. People like Pru Mitchell, Linda and Kerry, who I mentioned, Margaret Donald, Bunty Averson, Louise Mayhew, Caroline Phillips who you'll hear from in a moment, of course Annie Reynolds who's on this panel as well and they're doing hugely significant work here in Australia. So know my name is one of the most significant Glam partnerships that we've ever undertaken. I think it's fair to say but it was also so extraordinary because it was approached from both sides. So not only were we getting together to edit Wikipedia but the publication that they made also became this kind of essential resource that we could then use to help make the case around notability for a lot of these artists. And so that kind of two pronged approach of using that, you know, the profile and the expertise, curatorial expertise of an institution like that at the same time as approaching it from both sides. It's probably conversations around conflict of interest we could have there but the way that they're doing that work in multiple ways made this project really, really successful and it really helped particularly with artists that are just so underrepresented in newspapers and also in terms of culturally diverse artists who are even more poorly represented. So this became a really critical reference material for the project as well. So lots of challenges of course like any project I do like to talk about them because they're the learnings, they're the juicy learnings. And so of course the complexities of writing about living people is something we've all probably experienced and were certainly an issue for this project. There were lots of errors and misinformation that had permeated out across news stories that were used as references that artists disputed and there was a lot of conversation and complexity around that. Conflict of interest as I mentioned, notability and the broader challenges of editor-thons, copyright infringement, overwhelm all of those issues that we've experienced. Anyone who's run an editor-thon is probably experienced. So I just want to leave you with a couple of provocations I suppose and some of the things I've been thinking about as our thinking around this space gets more complex over time and it's perhaps an obvious point but I think we need to say it that editing in the gender equity space on Wikipedia is still really challenging. The culture is still predominantly white male and centered in the global north. It can be very personal. It can be very confrontational and that often has left me with questions around should we be encouraging people and particularly people from vulnerable or underrepresented backgrounds to be engaging in spaces that we know are not always safe for people and so that's why some of the work that we're doing here in New Zealand is so important because it provides a support network around that but there are moments where I have wondered about whether there's sort of the ethics I suppose of encouraging people and being on these platforms that are not always safe for people. So we need more diverse editors obviously but not just in terms of content. I think it's also broadly because of that culture shift that needs to happen on the platforms and the culture is a significant barrier for ongoing editors. I think we can be honest about that. It turns people off their experience of dealing and talking to other editors. I think it's fair that we say that as much as technical or other challenges that new editors have. So we've talked today that possibly 10% of editors are women. I think it's really hard to know sometimes because I know for myself I don't identify one way or the other but we know that it's low and sometimes I think these editors set up an idea that as a woman your job is to edit women's content and really we know that in fact we need women to edit all kinds of content because bias is ever present in the language we use and the depth of content the citations we draw on it runs really deep. So this is not just women's work this is all of our work to do which is a point that Rosie made earlier as well. Language really matters. We've got to think about language all of the time in our editing. A woman is often a socialite or a wife not an entrepreneur or a business person so I think interrogating our use of language is critical. But then I think we also just need to keep contextualising the sort of campaigns that we're a part of in terms of this much bigger sort of ecosystem of reckoning with gender bias across our society. We know that it's much harder to make the case for women in terms of notability because they win awards less they're elected less they hide less into senior roles they're less present in our media in our journals, in our national collections so that's also why the work of No My Name in terms of their publication was so critical. And the last is just extending our thinking a bit beyond this idea of gaps which Heather Ford and the team at UTS are really thinking deeply about at the moment and it's something I find myself thinking about too that we know there's less voters we know there's less representation in references but another area I think needs a lot more investigation is kind of about policies on Wikipedia and so this and I'm in no way would call myself in any way an expert on Wikipedia policies but I thought I would just share this because I think it raises really interesting questions so this is the notability policy for people who play rugby union Siobhan might recognize this one we've talked about it in the past so it specifies that women must have been represented in a women's national team in at least the semi-finals of the women's rugby World Cup so this is not the case for men who just have to go to the World Cup so this raises this you know the kind of argument about targets and quotas and affirmative action to one side for a moment that question of should all policies be equal is a really complex one should the notability requirements be the same for men of women or in what way should they differ to kind of balance or address the broader sort of systemic bias issues that we have and I guess this is the final reason that I think we need more women you know people who identify as women in gender diverse editors to notice these things to ask questions about them and also to have these sorts of debates that I think we need to have more of as well thank you so much thank you Patty and we're over to Caroline Phillips okay so I'm coming to you from Nam in Melbourne from the office of the women's art register and so this is for under the here and just like to acknowledge our indigenous history in this area and I'd also like to say thank you so much for asking me to be on this panel I'm a bit overwhelmed to be following up on such three legendary speakers so thank you very much and I appreciate we've gone a bit over time so I'll just try and be really quick as well I'm here to talk about my work with art and feminism and in running Wikipedia editor funds with the women's art register so we began this activity well first of all the women's art register is an archive of the documentation of women's art practice and we've been going since 1975 so it's a living archive of women's art history with just incredible grassroots artists running background and we had our 40th anniversary in 2015 and as you've heard earlier that was just a short time after the groundbreaking studies about the dark of women on the internet and on Wikipedia and we heard about this art and feminism movement and women in red was just about starting I don't think it had actually started when we first looked at this so we thought we really needed to get involved in this so that we can join this movement and we see it as a way that we can amplify the archive that we have here onto the digital realm and to make it more accessible and also to empower our members and artists and women editors to do research about other artists and to just literally get the names of our archive onto the record so yeah you've heard a bit about art and feminism already so I won't go over it all but basically they're looking at their 10th anniversary this year which is really amazing effort and it was started in the states through librarians and people interested in the arts it wasn't actually started from visual artists themselves and the primary activity that they started with is the annual art and feminism which is hosted around International Women's Day and that's what we did in 2015 but it's actually branched out into quite a lot of other activities now because they've recognised that well firstly I'll just say that I was a regional ambassador a couple of years ago for the Oceania region and they're really genuinely interested in including people from all around the world from different backgrounds and different levels of education and access and representation and really because we all recognise the limitations of it being largely an academic exercise that appeals to a lot of librarians and academics and can be of putting for a lot of people so yeah they started this program of regional ambassadors and I really like to continue but I just found I've just spread so thinly being an artist myself and working on the Women's Art Register and doing so many things that I thought I just can't keep doing that but I still run we still do run Editors Fonds with the Women's Art Register so in a sense I'm still doing the same work anyway and I'd like to give a big shout out to everyone at Wikimedia Australia for hosting our events because I was really the first person that started editing and I didn't really know that much about it and I didn't know how to run an Editors Fonds and it's been so fantastic to have members of the committee crew and Alex and Amanda and Katie's been in that online event and just really imparting Annie's been as well imparting the skills and the knowledge of how to actually conduct it you know good editors and to know about all the intricacies of categories etc and all these things to help train our participants just back to art and feminism there's some of the other things that they do they've had a program about multilingual global communities they've recently started this series of art commissions which is creating new visual materials that can be uploaded on to Wiki Commons and used for campaigns about racism safe spaces and various initiatives that are important to them these are the art projects that have gone up so far things like an article about internalised misogyny there are various issues that are directly commissioning Indigenous artists and other artists to create new works they also provide a huge amount of resources to help people in editing Wikipedia but also to run events as well and just very supportive of people around the world running events so we jumped on this initially and got all our women's art register events on there to help people in Australia to also link up to art and feminism and I think it's just another layer of where the data gets countered in a broader conversation about what gets countered and what gets used for research and reported back to the powers that be and so here's some of the Australian events that have been recorded through art and feminism were involved in the 2020 event and I remember saying I don't think we're going to be allowed out next weekend we literally did it just before the lockdowns so here's some information about the women's art register as well although I'm no longer a regional ambassador I still continue to run art and feminism events and through the women's art register and we're a national membership organisation as well so it's not just about being in Melbourne and it's really fantastic for us to be able to hold an event we're located in the Richmond Library and so we can have our events in the library space we can pull out our files and people can sit there and open the files and have direct citations from newspaper articles or publications in the archive when they're running their articles we've also shared spaces with the historical society which is located next to us as well that's the Richmond and Burnley Historical Society and I love this photo because everyone's just so focused they're just like I've got to get this down I've got to record this information we've done some wiki Wednesdays which were online events during the pandemic and that was really great as Katie mentioned that it was one great thing out of the pandemic that suddenly there was this broader community that could communicate online some of our stats here from the Editor Thon in 2021 and just some photos of I think this is last year's one or the year before at the Richmond Library and it's really great as well for us to partner with the local library here and so we have walk-ins off the street we have our members that we know so we have a friend of a friend of told them and they come along and these are some photos from the one at the NGV which was the 2020 event that Katie oversaw the national event which was really fantastic and we weren't that competitive but we were all like oh we've got to get the best stats we were conscious of that and it was the first time that we'd been at the NGV which was a really great experience for us as well doing our Editor Thon in the great hall and thanks to crew again for facilitating that session I guess the other thing I wanted to say was that it's just been a really great platform for us to not only enhance the archive, amplify the artists that are already in our archive but we have over 5000 women artists representing our archive and talking about the you know my name and the campaign of naming 5 women artists we're just like 5 is that all like we can name 5000 artists and we really would love to have them all online and that might take a few more years but we've been able to partner with so many other groups like there's a group called WikiD which is about women architecture and parlor which is also a network of architects with the historical society as I mentioned the library and Wikimedia Australia so it's just really giving us a great platform to really strengthen our community and just spread the word I guess and get people out there editing and just empowering people to actually take that on for themselves and just I guess really feel empowered that they can make that contribution as has been said today it can just be a few words that you write an incredibly incredible contribution from people like Annie but it's all really important so thanks very much I'll leave it there, thank you Thank you so much, thank you Caroline thank you we've run out of time for the discussion bit but it's sort of okay because the impression that came through very loudly listening to the four of you speak is how interconnected your projects are how supportive the community around them is clearly the Australian community is very supportive and clearly the women in red they're 24 hours a day, they're day and night you can just call on help when you need it which is great the other thing is just how creative how diverse and how far-reaching WikiDee I hadn't heard of them, fantastic I'd like to say thank you to all four women for really impressive work that they do fabulous presentations especially for the work that they do which is just wonderful and it's a tribute to Adrienne and it's a tribute to Adrianna it's a tribute to Rosie that women in red has inspired all these others it's just ripples in the pond and it's fantastic so thank you to all of you it is such inspiring work


Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Vermont State Senate Committee on Institutions. Today is April 27, 2021. I am your host for this afternoon's events. Joe Benning, your chair of the committee. We also have with us committee members, Senator Mazza from Grand Isle. Senator Engels from Essex, Orleans, Senator McCormick from Windsor and Senator Parent from Franklin County. We are continuing our conversations as the session for this committee winds down with getting some updates on various parts of how the capital bill is eventually put together. And today we have to start off the batting order Chris Rup is going to tell us all about the current information about pension plans. The intentions for the edification of those watching on YouTube have something to do with this committee's ability to make payments to the various organizations that come to us because they are part of the process of what the treasurer goes through to figure out exactly how much we can bond for. Keeping the committee abreast of these kinds of external issues is important before we leave for the year. And Chris, that means I'm going to turn the floor over to you and you can educate us on what you came to us with today. Thank you, Senator Benning. For the record, my name is Chris Rup and I'm an analyst with the Joint Fiscal Office. I've had the great pleasure of spending some quality time with Senator Mazza and Senator Engels over in the Transportation Committee but this is a new committee for me so.  At the very end yeah if we see his credibility his credibility just went out the window and he said great time with you two guys.  We take you on a three hour tour. And by the way we do like humor in this. Bring your school bag here. That's great. So welcome to institutions a better committee than transportation. Thank you very much. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. So I have, I don't have a lot of slides today I have my goal here was to really provide sort of a high level overview of about a dozen slides and leave some time for some questions. For members of the public and maybe viewing online or members of the committee who would like to take a deeper dive into pension topics I have done a series of presentations for the other body. And those slides and the videos are available on the jfo website so I can go on and on about pensions but I'm not going to. I'm going to try to stay out of the weeds too much today because like I always say when I'm doing these things, you know I'm not a lawyer an actuary or an investment advisor, you know I'm a fiscal analyst for the legislature. So I came here though I worked for the city of Philadelphia for quite a while, and one of my responsibilities down there was being a voting trustee on the city of board of pensions and retirement so I did that for about two and a half years so I have a little bit of familiarity with how pensions work and sort of the ins and outs of it and some of the challenges that face, you know states like Vermont. Let's just start off with a really quick overview of how the pension systems here in Vermont or govern. The state has three major pension systems, and they each have a board of trustees, according to statute, their memberships vary slightly but the overall theme is that the employee representatives play a pretty significant role in the decision making process. The three boards of trustees along the right side of this slide are tasked with the general administration and operation of the retirement systems, and for adopting various actuarial recommendations. The trustee boards also play a role with choosing members to serve on VPIC, the Vermont Pension Investment Committee. This is a body that oversees the investment and management of all the plan assets, and the treasurer serves on all of these boards, and they all must agree to changes to the assumed rate of return. But at all levels, members of the retirement system the members themselves sit at the decision making tables and play a significant role in the governance of the retirement systems. I was talking about pension so much this session. This slide summarizes the immediate issue at hand. Both the state employee and teacher pension systems are facing significant and growing unfunded liabilities. And as a reminder, the unfunded liability represents the gap between the value of the plan assets and the expected cost of the retirement benefits that have been earned by the active and retired workforce. Right now visors is only 66.4% funded, and the teacher pension is 51.3% funded. The unfunded liability across these two systems is almost $3 billion, and that gap will ultimately need to be closed by the end of the amortization period in 2038. And just recently the unfunded liabilities have increased by approximately $604 million from FY 21 to FY 22, and that increase caused the employers required annual payment to the pension systems called the ADAC to increase by roughly $96 million this year compared to last year. And the number the ADAC payment is the amount the employer must pay in every year to fully fund the normal cost, plus make a payment toward that unfunded liability. So when the unfunded liability gets bigger, the ADAC payment gets bigger too. It works almost like a credit card. The balance on your card is the unfunded liability, and the ADAC is the amount you need to pay to pay down that balance with interest. And these amounts are recalculated every year. So why did these numbers go up so much? It was due to a combination of factors. Economic assumptions were revised, including lowering the assumed rate of return from 7.5% to 7%. Demographic assumptions were also revised. And these revisions were prompted by the fact that in recent years, the demographic and economic experience of the plans has deviated quite a bit from the assumptions. And the assumptions for the future have changed. In other words, we did not consistently earn the investment return we thought we would in the past. And the future investment outlook looks less rosy than it looked in the past. The behavior of the workforce also differed from what was previously assumed. And forward looking assumptions were revised to hopefully be more realistic in future years. So in the bigger picture, the state's long term retirement liabilities have more than doubled since the current amortization period began in 2008. Right now, the total unfunded retirement liabilities, including pensions and OPEB or subsidized retiree healthcare amounts to more than $5.6 billion for approximately $9100 per Vermonter. Pension liabilities alone have increased more than six-fold from $700 per Vermonter in 2008 to $4800 per Vermonter today. And subsidized retiree healthcare or OPEB, which we currently do not pre-fund, adds another $4300 per Vermonter of unfunded liability to the state's balance sheet. Rating agencies look at factors like this when analyzing and determining state credit ratings, and these unfunded liabilities are not trending in a positive direction. As these unfunded liabilities have grown, they've added stress to the budget. The unfunded pension liability must ultimately be paid off, and it has grown much faster than the overall payroll or size of the active workforce has grown. As a result, costs related to pensions are eating a larger slice of the budget pie. In total, our retirement liabilities consume more than 13 cents of every general fund dollar, up from 10.5 cents four years ago. Pension costs now consume almost $200 million or more than 10% of the general fund. OPEB, that subsidized retiree healthcare, consumes an additional $50 million. Most of the general fund impact is related to the teacher retirement systems, because the general fund is for the teacher OPEB and the unfunded teacher pension liability. Visors retirement costs are allocated to the various funds that employ the active workforce, so only about 40% of the visas costs, it's the general fund. So these liabilities and costs are substantial, but it's important to note that this was not always the case. When you go back 15 years before the Great Recession, both of those systems were close to fully funded. Visors was actually 100% funded in 2007 and the teacher system was in the mid to high 80%. But since 2008, when the current amortization period started, future pension costs have grown faster than the pension assets have grown, and the costs have grown faster than the active payroll. As a result, the size of the gap between the asset and liability lines on the charts here, which is the unfunded liability has grown. The unfunded liability represents the debt that ultimately needs to be addressed by the end of the amortization period, which is 2038. It's important to note that this gap has grown, despite the legislature fully funding its required payments since 2007. But closing this growing gap will require higher ADAC payments in the future. Here you can see how steeply the pension payments have grown in recent years. The legislature has fully funded these growing ADACs every year since the start of the amortization period, and in some years paid excess amounts. But the funded ratio has still declined year after year, the hole has gotten deeper, thereby requiring higher payments in future years to make up the difference. As these pension costs have increased substantially, those costs have primarily fallen on the employer. Employee contribution rates have not increased in recent years, and neither has the size of the active workforce. But the cost to the employer has increased significantly, because the employer currently assumes the full risk when assumptions change, or those assumptions are not met through experience. When systems miss their investment targets or their assumptions change, those additional costs fall on the employer to pay by default. And again, I want to stress that these recent increases are not related in any way shape or form to anyone underfunding the pension systems, because the employer has fully met its obligations every year during the amortization period. On the right side of the slide, focus just on the normal cost, which is the amount you need to pay to the pension fund every year to fund the future years worth of benefits that the workforce accrued that year. Employee contributions fund a portion of the normal cost. They do not pay down the unfunded liability, which is the employer's responsibility. In recent years, that normal cost has grown due to changes in assumptions, and as a result, employee contributions now cover roughly half of the normal cost. The other half of that cost, plus the payment toward the unfunded liability are paid by the employer through that annual ADAC payment. So if everyone has been paying in their required amounts, why have the unfunded liabilities grown so much since 2008? The top chart shows you the impacts on both systems since 2008 and includes the impacts of the Great Recession. And the bottom chart shows you just what has happened since FY 11 to exclude the impacts of the Great Recession. At the top here, you can see how the VCIR system was once fully funded. Its unfunded liability was negative $11 million. The teacher system started the amortization period with an unfunded liability of roughly $275 million. The reason why the teacher system had a higher starting unfunded liability was because the ADAC was fully funded during just four years between 1979 and 2006. And until 2014, teacher OPEB costs were paid out of the retirement system, which created additional unfunded liabilities. These things did not happen to the state employee system, but the ADACs have been fully funded for both systems throughout this amortization period. But if you add your way down these columns, you can see here how changes to assumptions such as changing the assumed rate of return or changing your demographic assumptions, investment experience falling short of your assumptions, you know, mainly your assumed rate of return, and demographic experiences deviating from assumptions have had on the growth of the unfunded liabilities over time. And to see just how big the impact of the Great Recession was, compare the investment experience totals in both charts. There are slides at the very end of this deck that break out these factors in greater detail, and that information was also included in a report that the Treasurer released on January 15th. And they're also in the most recent experience studies. So why did this experience deviate from assumptions so much? Well, both systems faced a lot of demographic changes, right around the same time period that the funds were battered by the graders. Both pension plans have matured quite a bit. That means that the number of retirees drawing benefits out of the system is increased a lot while the number of active employees paying in has not increased so much. So the number of retirees on the visa side has increased by approximately 63%, and the increase has been by 77% on the teacher side. Meanwhile, the size of that active workforce is not really grown on the state side, and it actually decreased on the teacher side. So overall, fewer people are paying in and more people are getting paid out. The payments out of those systems have grown faster than member contributions and now exceed payments made into the systems from the employer and from the members. This requires money to be taken out of the investment portfolio in order to fully fund retirement benefits every year, which makes it harder to make up ground and close that unfunded liability gap. The average retirement benefit is also grown, and it's around $21,000 a year. But a lot of this growth is due to the fact that we've seen so many more retirees entering the system at higher average salary rates than people who have been in retirement for longer periods of time. Here we see this dynamic play out in a slightly different way. The systems have seen positive income every year since 2009 from employee and employer contributions and from investment returns, with the exception of the investment losses in those great recession years. However, the amount paid out in benefits has steadily increased too, as more people have retired. This combination, which you can see on these charts, creates a headwind that slows the growth in the market value of assets from year to year and makes it harder for the systems to dig out of that hole and close that unfunded liability gap through investment gains. If you want to improve the funding ratio of the plants and close that unfunded liability, you need your asset growth to not just be positive. You need it to be higher than the growth rate of the pension liabilities. In other words, your money needs to grow faster than your expenses are growing. And that just has not been happening. My final chart shows you the big picture and speaks to the cost of an act. If nothing changes, pension costs to the state will keep increasing between now and the end of the amortization period in order to dig out of that hole. We are looking at a combined total aid act payments for visas and vsters of roughly $316 million in FY 22, which is far higher than it was just a few years ago. This amount will grow to approximately $500 million by the end of the amortization period, and that's assuming that the hole doesn't get any deeper. In other words, we are assuming that all the assumptions are consistently met between now and then, and that current assumptions don't change. These costs are recalculated every year based on experience and will increase if assumptions are not met and decrease if assumptions are exceeded. But this is the most, this is the status quo situation assuming everything goes exactly as planned. And if we've learned anything from looking at the last decade, it should be that things rarely go exactly as planned.  So the ADAC will keep crowding out other budgetary priorities in the future. And on top of that failure to address the liabilities can also have negative impacts in the state's bond ratings, which can lead to additional fiscal pressures. When the rating agencies look at states, they consider things like their fiscal management, economic fundamentals, their demographics, their future growth projections, and the structural budgetary challenges facing the state, the ability of the state to respond to those challenges and to respond to anything unforeseen. Vermont has already had its ratings outlook downgraded due in part to its growing retirement liabilities. Unfortunately, the latest round of ratings has helped steady. It does take decades of financial discipline to build and maintain strong bond ratings and it can be lost very quickly. All of which should underline the importance of taking these liabilities seriously and ensuring that steps are taken to address them. That requires everything on one slide. Since the Great Recession, the retirement liabilities have grown significantly and much faster than the plan assets have grown. Demographic pressures have had a lot to do with this. We've seen a very large growth in the number of retirees and the size of their benefits, though the state's pension benefits on average remain relatively modest. And this happened while the systems were trying to claw back from the impacts of the Great Recession. We've also seen the demographic experience of the workforce lead to higher than originally assumed costs. Changes were made to assumptions that will hopefully lower future risk to the plans, but they've also led to higher costs. As the number of retirees has grown, the systems are paying out more and more and benefits each year, more than employees and employers are contributing into the systems. The employer's assets can be pulled out of the investment portfolios to make up that difference. These factors all combine to just make it harder to dig out of the hole caused by the recession, or to make rapid progress for paying down the unfunded liability. They also increase the risk to the employer of higher ADAC payments when you don't hit your assumptions or the assumptions change. The most optimistic investment assumptions and failure to meet those assumptions certainly contributed to the growth in unfunded liabilities, especially when you include the fact that the Great Recession occurred during this amortization period. Failure to consistently hit those assumptions, as well as lowering the assumptions for the future, both led to higher liabilities and higher ADAC costs. A lot of people talk about the historic underfunding of the pensions, which mostly happened on the teacher side, along with the old practice of paying for OPEB out of the teacher retirement systems. This did contribute to the cost of the ADAC, and the fact that the teacher system has a lower funded ratio than the state system, which again was fully funded at the start of the amortization period. But this history did not lead to the enormous growth in liabilities from FY21 to FY22, or to the vast majority of the growth in the unfunded liability that happened since the start of the amortization period. Rather, the growth was mostly due to those other factors like investment performance, demographic experience, and changes to your assumptions. In many other pension systems, the state systems lower their assumed rate of return to 7%, to more realistically match anticipated investment performance in the future. This might have the benefit of leading to less substantial deviations between experience and assumptions in the future, which would translate into lower risk of drastically higher ADAC payments from year to year. But this change certainly had a significant impact on increasingly unfunded liability and ADAC payments from FY21 to FY22. And it also lowered the funding ratio for both plans, because this change means that the plans expect to earn less from investment gains in the future, thereby requiring higher employer payments to make up the difference. So that's the end of my slide deck. If you have any other questions, I'd be happy to answer them now, or you can also feel free to send me an email at this address at your convenience. I've also added some additional slides at the very end of this deck that Denise can send around with some additional data. And I also have a link here that goes to much more longer and more detailed presentations I give on pensions at session. But I appreciate your attention and look forward to answering any questions that you may have. First, thank you for putting together a pretty succinct set of PowerPoint presentations about what the problem is. I don't know if you can put a period on the end of this conversation yet or want to stick your neck out that far but last year, I spent quite a bit of time telling virtually every witness who was coming into our committee asking for money. A strong possibility the amount of money we were going to be able to bond for was going to be considerably less. Much to my surprise the treasurer came back and gave us exactly the same thing we did last year. Are you able to say whether that may be different next year. That's a great question I think that really depends on what happens on the revenue front. You know, I think in all fronts whether you're talking about pension investments or just the state of the economy in general, I think there's a great deal of uncertainty about what the next you know 24 to 36 months could look like, you know in a status quo situation. If we always hit all of our assumptions you know we always hit that assumed rate of return. The exact payments will increase by roughly 3% a year, and that's because of the way the statute is set up with our amortization schedule so unlike your home mortgage where you might pay the same amount every year for 30 years. We have our we have what's called a level percent of payroll system, where you assume that payroll will grow by three or three and a half percent a year depending on the system, and the unfunded liability payments are structured to increase at that same level. So the theory is that from year to year, it would not consume a greater share of the pie and it would just grow with overall budget growth. Having said that, you know that all depends on you hitting your assumptions consistently and having no risk. So you know it sounds like the the investment performance is pretty good so far this year. It always comes out to how do things shake out on a fiscal year basis, and then we recognize our gains and losses they're smoothed out over a five year period. So you know you might have a rock star year and the stock market one year, but you don't that those gains are recognized 20% a year for the next five years so now I think it's it's hard to say right now, I do think that these changes and assumptions likely lead, you know, are a little bit more conservative in nature, which means there's probably a little less risk of missing some of your assumptions from year to year. And one of the proposals that is before the legislature, it's currently and it was passed out of house, the house last week and it's now in Senate government operations is to move what they call experience studies from a five year cycle to a three year cycle. Those experience studies are when the actuaries take a look at what happened in the fund. They reconcile it with your assumptions, and then they make a recommendation on whether or not your assumptions should change. The intent behind doing them a little bit more frequently is so you don't have as long of a time period where your experience might be lagging what you thought would happen, because a big reason why we've seen these big jumps from year to year is because we did the assessment studies, and then we did our valuation studies assumptions were revised, and this was the result of those revised assumptions. Were there changes in investment strategy that gave give you the impression now that we're doing a little better than we had in the previous few years. Very question this has come up a lot in the respective government operations committees and the chair of VPIC has come in and testified, you know, quite a few times. You know, I think in recent years they've done a few things they've, they've moved to less expensive money managers. Right now that they have a very, very large percentage of the portfolio is is indexed at pretty low fee funds, and the percentile of our performance relative to other comparable pension systems has increased pretty significantly. So, you know, I haven't been around long enough to have the history of all these conversations around how the investment strategy has evolved, but they have certainly improved their performance in recent years, compared to where we were maybe a decade ago, both relative to our peers, and in terms of you know just cutting cutting your costs you know invest smarter invest in less exotic high fee things that are not proven to sort of beat the overall market. But you know this is something that I think the pick really focuses on very intentionally, because you want to hit your assume rate of return consistently within, you know an acceptable level of risk, you know the least amount of risk and volatility that you can possibly Okay. Senator Mazum. That's great Chris I just something to explain to me I can understand this was a great overview. What what Dave coaches my neighbor and he's been promoting a defined that pension plan is that not defined define contribution. Yeah, a contribution would you help me explain that. It seems to be around for a while and what would that do. So there's two big models out there in government there's there's what, and including in these pension systems sort of the dominant models called a defined benefit. And it kind of sounds like it's what it kind of sounds like your retirement benefit is defined by a formula. So that formula is based on things like how long you've worked how many years of service you have what what your benefit multiplier is, and what your average contribution was, you plug all those factors in, and you can get an estimate of what your retirement benefit will be, you know, in retirement, defined contribution sort of flip set equation where your benefit is really not defined by a formula it's not defined by how much money is in your account. So, there will be a system where in a DC plan which is more prevalent in the public in the private sector. The employee may make a contribution to their retirement account out of their paycheck. It may be matched by the employer to some percentage, and then you know your, your balance in your account. So when you retire to determines what you'll have available for retirement. So the risk shakes out in a different way so with a DV plan the risk falls on the employer, if your assumptions aren't met. In a DC plan, the risk falls on the employee. There's pros and cons to both models they appeal to different segments of the workforce, you know, not a DV plan may appeal to somebody who might have a 30 year career horizon, which with the same employer which is likely a little bit more common in the public sector than in the private sector, a DC plan probably offers you a little more portability. So if you might work from place to place, you know that allows you to sort of take your money from place to place. But you know it's at the end of the day that they function differently, the risk falls on on the parties differently. And if you moved everybody over to a DC plan today, it would not solve this overall challenge you know that this unfunded liability represents the cost of really paying for the contractual obligations that the state has made with its active and retired workforce. Thank you. Are we making, are we making 7% now are we are we meeting our goals. Nobody's been able to tell us that. So, so far this year, we're above 7%. And what like I said they reconcile this on a fiscal year basis so so what what percentage you come out at is really sort of endpoint sensitive it depends on what time period you're looking at so for consistency. And they look at on a fiscal year basis, and basically smooth out the volatility over a five year period, because you know you might have a year where you do 12%, you might have a year where you do 2%. You know you don't want your, your budgetary issue, your budgetary contributions to fluctuate that much from year to year so it's pretty common and plans to smooth that out over a period of time. So we have not always been meeting our assumed rates of return. They've sometimes been higher, much higher than they currently are. But you know, one of my slides showed that when you back out the great recession years that that's been a contribute missing our assumptions has been a contributing factor but not nearly as large as missing other assumptions, and and lowering that So whenever they do that assumed rate of return. They take a lot of things into consideration a lot of it is influenced by federal monetary policy you know what are your interest rates going to be, what do you think inflation is going to be, and what is sort of the outlook of the capital markets in the future so it's, it's not as backward looking, it's more sort of forward looking, and it really depends a lot on what what people's outlook of the future market is. And that business for a while is three years looking back too long before you adjust that or what do you think. No I mean it's hard to do one or two, I think three is better than five just because you have the opportunity to get, get to it more often. And I think that probably why we look five further along as after three rough years you probably have tough political decisions to make like 0809, maybe 10. You know I mean but it doesn't make a lot of sense.  Thanks. I'm not a player, obviously, but what, what modest investments, my wife and I have made over the same period with them pretty well. I'm surprised why, why is the, are our pension plans. Why have they done so poorly and part of that question is things were going pretty well. And in 2007 things were still going pretty well then you get the catastrophe and away. And of course Obama inherits that, but that bottomed out in 09 to give credit mainly to the Federal Reserve but also to Bush and Obama who had the good sense to follow there are problems with the bailout, but it did seem to work. And then throughout the Obama and most of the Trump years, the country is in a slow, steady improvement. And it's really until coven that things had itself. So why did, why were our return so disappointing in that context. That's a great question. I'm the, the simple answer is, you know, pension funds, like a lot of other institutional investors invest very differently than you or I would. You know, I'm 34 years old, I'm not going to need my modest retirement savings for a really long time. So I can put all my money in equities and stocks, which, you know, tend to have, you know, over time one of the stronger returns but some of this, the most negative returns are to your volatility and risk. And I can let it right because I don't need that money to work for me. When Europe, and you know, I can afford to have a couple years of negative returns, because I have a long time horizon to make it back. When you're taking a look at a pension system, they're intentionally very diversified where, you know, they don't put everything in domestic equities, though, they need to also put things into, they need to put assets into things that protect you from downside risk, things that are liquid, especially when you're paying out so many benefits right now, and things that sort of act as that ballast in the ship, if you will, that that keeps you afloat when when the waters get choppy. So there are times when you'll have asset classes that might be booming might have, you know, 20 plus percent returns, you'll also have some asset classes that might be in, you know, negative returns or single digit returns. And every single year, who's highest and who's lowest in your asset class will change. So the goal whenever the investment consultants are trying to build your investment portfolio is what it what can we put what strategy can we put together to consistently hit that assume the rate of return over time, because when you're putting so much out in benefits every year, and your funded ratio is down in the 60s and 50s, you can't afford years of negative returns. You know, you can afford years of maybe 5% when you're hoping for 7%, but you need to really make sure that you're being conservative, and you tend to sacrifice risk and volatility in order to get that conservatism so they invest a little differently. It looks to me like that is not what happened with the pension funds. You've described what I understand as conservative lowercase C conservative investment. And what you're doing is you're giving up the big kill in exchange for avoiding the catastrophe that you're looking for something steadier and safer. So, I'm still confused why would, and it looks like our performance of our investments were markedly worse than the economy as a whole. And I would expect that if we were taking crazy risks. I think it's a really fair question and the chair of the pick is a great witness to invite in if you'd like to hear about this in more detail I can tell you that pension systems nationwide, including the one that I came from in Philadelphia. And I think this was the case here too. Now you go back 10 years a lot of people invested money in, you know what are called sort of alternative investments things like hedge funds, things that aren't particularly liquid and tend to be high fee. A lot of plans including here have pulled out of those in recent years, because they've realized that, you know, you tie up a lot of money that, and you pay a lot of money and fees, and they don't always have a proven track record of beating passive investment. That's way, that's way less expensive so I think, you know, this is not something that you can steer the ship completely in a different direction overnight. The state has made some pretty significant steps at, at bringing more of their portfolio into less risky, lower cost investment vehicles, and we have seen the returns improve. Having said that, you know, you're absolutely right that, you know, the economy has done pretty well since the great recession, domestically, you know, global events factor into federal monetary policy and interest rates have an impact on on things, especially when you look at sort of the fixed income market, Brexit has an impact, you know, things that things that happen in Europe and in the developing markets have a bigger impact in sort of domestic pension funds, then they once did 30 or 40 years ago. So, you know, I think it's been it's a combination of those factors but if you want to hear more about the sort of investment strategy over the last few years. I would, I would encourage you to reach out to the chair of the pick because I think he's got a lot of really interesting insights to share about the various steps they've taken in the last four or five years or so.  But my understanding is going forward. It would at least not make it worse, as opposed to a divine defined benefit could. No, I think I think the benefit to a defined contribution plan from the for the employer is that you don't have the risk of an unfunded liability building up the way you do with the defined benefit, you know, you make your, your matching contribution to an employee's DC plan on sort of a pay as you go basis and then you know what happens in the market affects the employee, then the employer is not necessarily on the hook to pay more or less. So, yeah, that, that is the, the advantage on the employer side of a DC plan, you know, it doesn't however do anything to address the hole that we're dealing with now that unfunded liability that that that is due to the people who are who have been or currently working. So, so that that's why it won't do anything for that but as impacts going forward. There is the small, there is the small matter of breaking promises to people making deals of people of what the terms of their employment are, given them the bad news that well maybe not. Or, but that's what it just purely. What's that, or go bankrupt. Yeah, well I'm saying, yeah, from a fine from the financial point of view, the alternative is worse. We're happier we're happy. The taxpayers are happier with defined contribution, I get that. Or you had your hand up I don't know if you still have a question for a comment. Oh, my. Yeah, I do I don't know if my internet middle slow.  But doing analysis on the fees that we did pay for investments for the last 10 years so that we can memorialize it and never, you know, hopefully make the same mistake again. That's a great question. I have not done any analysis on it I can tell you that the fees are typically reported in the treasurer's on the treasurer's website under under pension funds, they put their quarterly performance reports up. And you can see what the fees look like there. Generally, I think the last one I looked the fees are like, less than a fifth of a percent. You know, in terms of the overall size of the funds they're not particularly large. I've not gone back you know 10 years, 10 plus years and and compared them. So I do think that would be an interesting exercise. I just wonder I I'm on a pinch, not a pension committee but an endowment committee for my local hospital we just changed advisors really because you know they were charging close to a point, we were able again to go to a more passive investment strategy and save the save that you know, cost if you will. Yeah, and I and I wouldn't I wouldn't make again you know I'm not a I'm not a licensed financial advisor anything like that I would I would caution that you know what the right approach really varies by every different fund. And you know there are some funds that are very comfortable putting all their money and sort of index passive funds that are really really low fee. And you know there are some funds that are that are more comfortable having a more diversified strategy. You know I think there's a lot of factors that go into that decision a lot of it's just how does your fund behave how mature is it. How, how, how liquid do you need your assets to be. And you know what's your tolerance for risk and volatility, it'll look real different if you're starting a new plan or if you have a plan that doesn't have a lot of sort of drain on the money for benefit payments, as opposed to something that you can kind of set it and forget it and you don't need to take a whole lot of the portfolio but having a having a laser like focus on fees and making sure that you're, you're not overpaying for performance is really is a really really critical thing. And then, you know one other piece that kind of pull out your presentation that I don't know if you can comment on but since I was in middle school I'm about your age, we were down 30,000 students and had we had those 30,000 students in the classrooms. We'd have more teachers working paying into the fund granted somebody to have more a lot of these built around pyramid model population schemes where the population grows, and not the other way around and we're seeing the inverse of that. So, is that accurate to assume that how do we had a growing population and more workers, you know, we potentially would be funding this. Yeah, it kind of cut. It's an interesting question it kind of cuts both ways because you know you'll, whenever you have more active employees you also have more people who are likely to get a benefit in the future. Yeah, I think the key point is, you know, a really, really mature plan where you have more people drawing a benefit than you have actives hanging in behaves a little differently than a newer plan. You know, they don't, they don't turn around quite as quickly. And, you know, their tolerance for risk changes a lot and that obviously impacts your investment strategy. You know, one of the biggest things we've seen really impacting the plans goes back to demographic changes and, and a big factor is that turnover. You know, the prior assumptions thought a lot more teachers would be leaving the profession earlier in their careers. And it turns out way more teachers have have stayed in the teaching profession, and left upon retirement. So those factors, how that deviates from what you thought are pretty significant contributors to how big the liability is grown and actuarial tables have been updated, you know, public school teachers are among the longest lived demographic groups nationwide. According to the Society of actuaries, and you know that, and that's great. But you know, whenever you've got life expectancies that are pushing 90 that does create strain on the pension fund that probably wasn't anticipated when these plans were first designed years ago. That's good. Thank you. Interesting comment I'll have to think about that some more because my wife is a teacher and I don't know. I didn't anticipate she was going to outlive me by my life expectation but that sounds interesting. Chris, I want to thank you for coming by I suspect very strongly we're going to have you back in the future. In the beginning of each session I try to bring the treasure in to talk about how things are going just to make sure we stay on top of where things are developing and how we're going to get funded. But you put together a really good presentation I think you've given us some foundation talking points to talk about moving forward. So thanks for coming. My pleasure.