All right, hi everyone. I'm Elizabeth Weingarten, the director of the Global Gender Parity Initiative here at New America, and Chantale Rebecca, join us. Excellent. We, there have been some security issues at, apparently at the White House. So, sorry, we're getting started a bit late. Some folks had a bit of trouble getting into the building. So, the Global Gender Parity Initiative is a research and journalism project housed in the Better Life Lab program, which is really leading the national conversation on the evolution of gender roles and norms, family policy, and how we work and live. I'm delighted to welcome all of you to this workshop on gender mainstreaming and national security policy. It's a subject that's becoming both exponentially more important and more marginalized with each passing day. So, before we dig into the topic at hand, just one little piece of housekeeping, which is our hashtag for this event, is Beyond the Boys Club. So, if any of you find that you want to tweet, that's great. Please use that hashtag. But first of all, I want to thank my co-conspirator and collaborator on this particular project, Heather Colbert. Heather is the director of the New Models of Policy Change Initiative here at New America. And I also want to thank our fantastic student intern, Carolina Marquez de Mesquita. She's currently finishing up finals at Arizona State University, so she could not be here today. But she is responsible for the really insightful media analysis that you'll find in the toolkit. I'd also like to thank our very generous partners and co-sponsors of today's workshop, the United States Civil Society Working Group on Women, Peace, and Security.  So, our goal with the workshop today is really twofold. The first goal is to share what we've discovered about how to effectively communicate the research and data on gender to skeptical and sometimes uninformed national security and foreign policy makers. And the second goal is to encourage you to share your experiences in the field with us. So really we want to learn from each other today and hopefully take those lessons into our workplaces to really push for more inclusive policymaking that takes into account the experience and perspectives of the entire population. So, you know, you look around today, we really need inclusive policymaking more than ever as policy makers on the right and the left struggle to create national security and foreign policy that encourages stability. Unfortunately, the last few months have been deeply unsettling and discouraging for those of us who are pushing for policymaking that's sensitive to the lived experiences of different groups. So in January, we heard that President Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City policy, which forbids any foreign NGO from accepting U.S. global health or family planning funding to provide any abortion-related services or care. Earlier this week, foreign policy reported that the Trump administration's budget proposal plans to merge U.S. aid into the State Department to slash foreign aid and global health budgets. For anybody who took a look at the questionnaire released by the transition team earlier this year, this really shouldn't be a surprise. Many of the questions on the list were explicitly skeptical and dismissive of development's role in national security. So this budget is not likely to be approved, but it's still a signal of how little it seems the administration understands the subject that we're here to talk about today. And that is you can't create effective national security policy without considering a host of so many so-called soft issues, including the intersections of security with gender, health, and development. We know, for instance, from University of Texas A&M professor Valerie Hudson's research that gender equality and security are intertwined and reinforcing, ignoring that interconnectedness is dangerous. We saw this in Iraq when U.S. policymakers thought very little about how their plan to establish Iraqi stability after forces toppled Saddam Hussein might impact women's rights. And then again in Libya, using the largely gender-blind responsibility to protect framework and the atrocities prevention board formula to guide interventions led to another failure to consider how a military intervention might roll back women's rights and increase the violence against them, ultimately easing the way for ISIS to begin recruiting. We still live in a world where women have less access to opportunities and resources than men do, and a world in which they're expected to fulfill gender roles and duties that are different than men. So as long as this is our reality, it's truly naive and reckless to assume that one policy or strategy can fit all. So to be sure, this one-size-fits-all delusion isn't unique to one particular political party. In our research we conducted in collaboration with the Chicago Council on International Affairs, we found that only 10% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats said they always considered whether a policy would impact men or women differently. 26% of Republicans and 32% of Democrats thought gender was relevant to policy issues associated with conflict resolution and peace building, and 27% of Democrats and 15% of Republicans thought it was a relevant consideration to issues connected with terrorism and extremism. So this is kind of across the board something that we don't see a majority of people thinking about. So the big takeaway is that policymakers, irrespective of age, gender, and ideology, still consider gender to be a secondary issue to policy formation and implementation. In fact, I would guess most of you know that that is not the case and that gender is not a secondary issue but a central issue, and it's a case that we're hoping we can help you make in your workplaces. So really we can start by learning a bit more about what policymakers actually know and what they assume about this subject. So we found that sometimes trying to get on the same page with not only the policymakers that we spoke with but also some of our research collaborators who hadn't focused on gender before felt a little bit like we were speaking a second language. So I'll let Heather take it from here and tell you a little bit more about what we learned. Thank you so much Elizabeth and I'll just start by saying that it is an amazing honor to look out at the audience and see both some of the brightest young women I know in the national security field and some of the stars of the field that I've had the pleasure of working with and looking up to for an amazingly long time. So this is a great event and we're really excited to use the Q&A part later to learn from each other. So look around because you're an amazing group of people out there. When this project got started about a year ago, Elizabeth and I were kind of scheming with each other. This is a wonderful thing about working at New America. What were the different sort of networks and strengths that we had? And I said to her, you know, I feel like why don't we do some polling? I'm not sure how much polling there is out there on this. Oh, and then we wrote the grant and only after writing the grant did we say, okay, so let's look and see how much polling there is out there on this. And we were shocked to discover, I was really shocked and I thought I was not naive about this stuff, that as best we could tell never had American policymakers been asked what they think about gender and never in being asked what the American public thinks about national security foreign policy had gender been introduced to the conversation. So, you know, frankly what we thought was going to be this kind of interesting little side project turned into really groundbreaking research at a really groundbreaking time. We had wonderful partners who enabled us to do this research, both Politico Focus which did our in-depth interviewing which you'll hear about more later from Rebecca. But also the Center for New American Security which agreed to ask some questions of its annual conference attendees which is about as traditional a DC security environment as you could imagine. And also as Elizabeth mentioned the Chicago Council which put a couple of questions in its annual survey or biennial survey which had never happened before. And the LBJA Public Policy School at UT Austin which does, timed with presidential elections, a survey of elites on national security attitudes. And again, in each case, so this is part of the good news, in each case when we called the partner organization, they said, oh yeah, gender of course. Yeah, we'd love to ask questions about that. So, you know, one I think finding is that there are some open doors to be pushed on that we as a community have not, we haven't knocked on all the doors that are out there yet. And actually just, you know, in the green room, Shantel and I were brainstorming sort of other kinds of polling and public opinion research we can do. If what you hear today inspires you to go out and figure out how we're wrong or incomplete, that's great because there are many PhD dissertations to be written on this work and so I hope some of you will go out and do it. So having said that, I've been in this field a while. I thought I was, you know, I have my share of sort of nasty sexism war stories. I thought I was pretty cynical about what we were going to find. And as Elizabeth foreshadowed for you and as the PowerPoint indicates, really we don't have a scale that goes low enough to indicate the lack of awareness about the ideas inherent in the idea that looking at how men and women experience policy changes differently has impact on how those policies play out. This had a couple of impacts which are really important for all of our work and frankly for the daily lives of women and men in the field, which is that because this topic was so incredibly unfamiliar to people, and again I think Rebecca has wonderful war stories about this, people default to what they know and what they know is gender representation or what we like to refer to as add women and stir. So, you know, we didn't want to talk about child care at the Defense Department actually. You know, other people have done great work on that. We didn't, you know, our colleagues at the Better Life Lab here do great work on child care. We didn't want to talk about that. We didn't want sort of everybody's story about discrimination in the field, but that's where, because this idea that it actually makes a difference in policymaking is so absent from our national security discourse. That's where the conversations inherently went, triggering all of people's back attitudes about gender in the workplace, whatever that might happen to be, and then making it much more difficult for you as the interlocutor to drag the conversation back to no, actually I'm talking about how you demobilize both male and female gorillas. I really don't care. I really don't care how many women there are in the cabinet. So, I think that was a finding that was completely unexpected to me. I want to point out this finding that nobody had any idea what gender mainstreaming was or what all of this was. You know, similarly, nobody knew what women peace and security was a field or that the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 dealt with women. And as you'll hear in more detail, this sort of lack of awareness cuts across, as Elizabeth said, cuts across ideology, it cuts across age, it cuts across gender. And just to highlight that, actually since we've been planning this meeting, I had a meeting on the Hill with the National Security Staffer of a very well-known, very progressive member of Congress. This individual is in his early 40s and he said, oh, what are you working on? And I described this and I got the most utterly blank look. Utterly, like none of the words I said registered at all. And this is one of the go-to progressive offices. So, the good news for us, if it's good news, is that even in these kind of very polarized and partisanly painful times, we have plenty of work to do even if we don't have access to the White House. So, you know, if that's what passes for good news these days. I'll take that for good news. That's fine. So, a few more findings. And this is actually a particularly interesting one because it's one that I work on a lot of projects related to diversity and inclusion generally and particularly in tech. And so, when you look at research on diversity and inclusion and particularly when you look at how people will account for their attitudes, you do find that a lot of people will say, oh, I'm gender-blind or I'm race-blind. You know, I don't take those things into account. And that that for those people has come to mean that, oh, I don't discriminate. So, it's a kind of, it's a claim to some kind of virtue. They think that they're saying, I'm blind at these things. So, in this case, you know, policymakers think, A, that it is possible to be gender-blind, which it's not and can talk about that, but all of the unconscious bias research that's out there points to the fact that even if you think maybe you're not biased, you're like, you know, a superhero who doesn't have any biases, you are, in fact. And so they think, you know, A, that this is actually true for them, but also this related idea that creating gender-blind policies is virtuous because gender sensitivity, they think, amounts to some kind of discrimination. So, in fact, you know, this is not what we're talking about, but this was one of those moments where we were feeling like we were talking, speaking in two different languages, because what we're talking about is gender sensitivity related to thinking about how a policy might impact men and women differently because, again, of men and women's often different access to opportunities and resources in a particular society. What they were talking about is a policy we thought that would encode some kind of discrimination, which is related but a different issue. So it was interesting to hear that kind of understanding of gender as something, well, no, I don't want to pay attention to gender. That's something I've been told I'm not supposed to think about. I'm gender-blind. So the other aspect of this that was kind of interesting to us, and Heather was speaking to this as well, was the kind of generational change piece. And to me, these are kind of related, actually, because when you talk about the problem as it exists now, this kind of impulse to say, well, I'm gender-blind, or this isn't really my problem, because this is something that is primarily the older generations are perpetuating this. You know, what does that say about the policymakers that we spoke to, kind of the ability to self-reflect on how you could be part of this problem? And so to me, those are both kind of ways of sidestepping responsibility when everybody actually needs to be thinking about how might I be contributing to this or how might my biases be contributing to what's going on. Joe, one of the interesting parts of this to us was that we had a much easier time talking to people about gender representation versus encoding gender into policymaking. And as Heather was talking about before, and I think as Rebecca might get into a bit as well, that is where the conversation kind of tended to go when we brought up gender. So people really wanted to talk about the fact that they thought, yes, there should be more women around the decision-making table as if that was the same thing. So really these issues we found are frequently conflated, but they are certainly not the same. And so kind of what does it mean that there's still this kind of misunderstanding between encoding gender and policy versus having women around the table and the related assumption that if you just have women around the table, add women and stir, that gender is automatically going to be part of the conversation, which is certainly not the case. Plenty of examples illustrate that, but talk about kind of essentialism in that case, just assuming that you have somebody from an underrepresented group and it's their job to make sure that that gets in the conversation. So also problematic. Great. So this gets back to some of the data that we pulled from the Chicago Council. And interestingly, I think one place that there was a divide that surprised me was that comparing the general public results we got from the Chicago Council survey with the elite results that we got through the LBJ school, actually the general publics were mildly more supportive of inclusion or thinking about gender in policymaking than elites were. Now, it may also be the case, and this is a finding that even, I mean, as someone who works in a think tank, the LBJ school's think tank sample was 80% male. And, you know, I'm very proud to say that we don't work at a think tank that's 80% male. But the extent to which sort of how elite policymaker and how security elite policymaker is coded in the U.S. really seems to be actually certainly holding the elite conversation back from, frankly, where the government conversation was at least at upper levels in the Obama administration. We may now be seeing a reversion to mean. But what you see, again, overall on these numbers is that there's just, and you could really tell with the public survey that it's not like the average people that were surveyed had read Valerie Hudson's work or had read business school diversity theory, but just heard this and thought, oh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea as opposed to the elites, which know, as Elizabeth said, which know that they are, that being genderblind, raceblind is a good thing. So that was, and then here we come to, I think, one of the findings that may be a little more challenging for people who have been very embedded in the women, peace, and security community. Over the last eight years, we saw, or longer than eight years, we saw both the use of the special advisor for gender model or the women's office model at the State Department and then at USAID, a rather different model where there was an effort to insert gender concerns into offices and I think globally, and Chantal can speak to this, there's been quite a bit of experience with both models, but the U.S. national security establishment is really pretty unambivalent in having a huge problem with the gender advisor model and that this may, from our research, it certainly looks counterproductive. I know that the champions of this model have other views for what it achieves that may be worth even the sort of downsides that we saw, but that, again, is another place where I think our research calls out for more research or thinking about when do you want to use, when do you want to use which model? Okay, well, that disappeared. All right, well, I bet you've all been wondering when we would get to the part where we blame the media and the time has come, so don't fear. Oh, no. It's okay. No, so truth be told, there are some really significant gaps in the way that mainstream media covers gender and security topics. So for three months in the fall of 2016, we cataloged search results for terms like Iraq and women, Afghanistan, women in peace, et cetera, et cetera, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, to try to really look at what were the patterns on reporting on gender and conflict in specifically in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and South Sudan. So we essentially found that when women are mentioned, they are overwhelmingly portrayed as victims, and they're also coupled with children. So you see women and children frequently, but not women talked about on their own. In South Sudan, they're pretty much exclusively discussed in terms of sexual violence as victims, and they rarely have a voice in speaking out about the atrocities that they've endured, so people are speaking on behalf of them. Only 5% of the articles in our sampling of The Washington Post featured women as activists, union leaders, protesters, politicians, or women's advocacy groups. And so this is kind of stark on its own and definitely an issue that we would hope people who are part of mainstream media publications would take up, and that's why part of the toolkit we produced was for people in the media who want to write about these subjects with more nuance and more understanding about some of the resources and data and research that's out there. But a separate and kind of related issue is one that our friends at Foreign Policy, Interrupted, have set out to solve, but is in some ways connected. The fact that disproportionately few women are actually writing about and reacting to national security and foreign policy issues in the news. So this is not to say that a perspective on gender is missing because so few women are analyzing this issue, so it's not to insinuate that like having more women around the policy making table, they're going to automatically bring up gender. But rather that like policy making, a lot of these stories would be richer and convey potentially fresh angles of inquiry and analysis that they were to integrate different perspectives. So just to give you a sense of what those numbers look like right now, according to Media Matters for America, less than one in four national security and foreign affairs experts featured on Sunday and weekday shows in 2015 were women. So still a long way to go on that road as well. So what do we recommend doing about this? I'm going to show two slides and talk a little bit about effectiveness as a possible solution and put that in context. But first, I need to ask you to rewind your brains back to June 2016. And the data on the next two slides was gathered at the Center for New American Security Annual Conference in June 2016, which had two extraordinary things about it. I mentioned that, oh, Elizabeth, I'm trying to remember, I stood in the back of the room and counted the number of women. And it was a huge, huge ballroom, and I could still count the number of women in the room. Thank you for having me now. So on the one hand, this was just a tremendously pale and male crowd. Very much what you stereotyped the national security community as being or what it is if you turn on the Sunday shows. But there were two other extraordinary things about this moment. One, of course, is who was leading in the polls in the presidential campaign. And number two is that for those who don't know, the head of Center for New American Security was widely expected to be picked by the front runner for president to be the first female secretary of defense. So what you need to think about when you're looking at this data is that everybody in the room was answering these questions in the expectation that we were entering into a world where women played roles in American national security that we haven't seen them play up to now. So having said, I mean, frankly, I was surprised by how positive these numbers were. Yeah, shucks. We just, if you tell us women, gender is more effective, yeah, all we want is the data. Yeah, you tell us it makes policy more effective. We would definitely consider gender. Absolutely no question. So, you know, let us try to be generous and positive about what people were communicating with this data. Sure, sure, sure, sorry about that. So slide number one, when I consider inclusivity in relation to national security, it is because 56% it increases effectiveness. 4% international law demands it. 18% it's the right thing to do, just in case you wondered how well that one works. 10% it's a priority for the leadership of my organization. Those people are the honest ones. 12% I don't consider it, which again, that 12% number is way out of whack with all of our other data. And so anybody who had put himself in a room with Michelle Flournoy that morning was not in the, I don't, but there's a point about that that I'll come back to. So then graph number two, what kinds of inputs would make your workplace focus more on inclusivity? 30% data showing it includes the workplace environment, improves the workplace environment. 42% data showing effects on hard policy outcomes. Oh hey, what do you know, we have that. 21% mandates from leadership, again those are the honest ones. 4% formal legal mandates, I'm guessing most of the people in the room had no idea what that was. And 3% none of the above, so like that's your dead enders, right? So sort of the point, so I want to draw two points from that. One is people say, people say we pride ourselves in the national security community on being data driven, being result driven, being impartial, and so if you can show us that this helps effectiveness, if you can show us that this saves American lives in the field, if you can show us it saves money then sure, we'll do it. And so there is a strong argument for taking people at their word, and since we found that there was this hole where people didn't actually know the data and we found that particularly female respondents, and this is something Rebecca can talk more about, were really excited at the idea that there was data out there to support this, but they didn't have it. So we can make an approach that focuses on that and that is sort of where we came up with these five data points, all of which are drawn from good, hard social science. Many of which are drawn from good, hard social science in fields like business schools, so you don't have to be quoting gender scholars because God forbid you should quote something that a woman had to say on this topic. So the five data points. Number one, women's physical security is one of the best predictors of conflict. Peace processes in which women participate are more durable than those in which women do not. If you know these already, you can chant along with me. It'll feel good. Gender and gender roles play a key part in either moderating or exacerbating extremism. Multiple studies show a direct relationship between women's decision-making power on issues of peace and conflict and the likelihood of societal violence. And private sector experience from corporate boards to management teams to business school theory parallels these observations on the values of diverse teams and gendered perspectives. And these five points plus the supporting data are all available in the toolkit online. But the last point I want to make here is I mentioned that I was a little skeptical about the results of those graphs I showed you. But we should pay attention. So what got all those suits and uniforms to give those responses? Really just the fact that you had a powerful woman in the room. You had a powerful woman convening the event was enough to focus the mind in that way. So I think the final lesson that we took away from this, which was really not a lesson that I had thought we would learn or frankly not a lesson that I wanted to learn, was just how much the power of example does matter. And that that is unfortunately in the American context. Again, this may be different in other places, not something we can get away from. And I had the experience of working, of listening to the head of the Canadian general staff be interviewed about how his country's government and security forces had come to adopt a perspective that takes gender into account and policymaking. And he said all the great stereotypes you've ever heard about Canada and Canadians. And then he looked at the audience and he said, but you know, we got told. And so just there is no question, and I think the research sort of subtly points to this, that direct orders and signaling do play a really important role in making progress on this issue. And now you'll get to hear some of that. Yeah, so we've been talking quite a bit about the interviews that Rebecca did as part of this research. And so we wanted to, we pulled from some of the direct quotes from the research, and we're going to do a little mock interview now to just give you a sense of what Rebecca was hearing. And then she's going to talk a little bit. I'll introduce her and she'll talk a little bit more about what it was like. Ready Heather? All right. Where does gender fall in the list of factors when devising and implementing a new policy? Well, Rebecca, I would hope less so as time goes on. I think male and female roles are quickly evolving. And it really depends on the issue. It was a good deal of the issues are gender neutral. But some are more gender specific like equal pay, abortion, minority rights. So it really depends on the issue. And what comes to mind when you hear the phrase women, peace and security? I think someone's trying to make a gender specific point that I don't view as particularly complementary to women. So then in another interview, same question. Where does gender fall in that list of factors? State has an office on global women's rights and initiatives. They are not very well respected in the State Department or interagency. It's not specific to them. It's more so that it's such a niche office focused on more contained issues that they start to sound like broken records. Hands up, if you've ever been told you sound like a broken record. Knows when they raise their hand what they're going to say. They're not usually invited to meetings. So they have to fight for access on their own. And when they are invited, it's more of a check the box PR move. Not because anyone wants to hear what they have to say. A positive note. I want to invite Rebecca Heller, who is the managing director of Politico's new audience insights and data department. As a recovering journalist, she's dedicated to helping solve the media industry's complex quandaries through human centered frameworks to ensure journalism continues to be supported, sustainable and scalable. Which is great news for people who are in the media. Rebecca's vast experience in the media industry with stints and digital broadcast and print. Both newspaper and magazine at both the national and local level spans more than 12 years. So Rebecca was such a hugely important resource to us as we conducted this research. But she had all sorts of really interesting insights from being on the ground. So would love for you to share some of those. Absolutely. One of the things that I always love about working with New America is that oftentimes people want to conduct research purely to validate their hypothesis or what it is that they believe. And it's always a treat to work with this team because it is so open to uncovering new findings and new discoveries despite how perhaps not pleasant they always are. So a few things. One of the quick things that struck me when you're sharing the polling data and the survey data, it's one of the reasons that my work is more on the qualitative research side and that was what I did for this particular project. And we did one-on-one interviews with the participants in their home or office somewhere where they were comfortable and they felt at ease and it was all off the record in that New America did not receive the names of the people that we spoke with. So it was a much safer environment with which to be open. So when you look at the polling data, I immediately think back to 2016 and things that we saw in polls and the perhaps not predictive nature. People often take polls so in a way that they, as a representation of the people that they want to be rather than the people that they are and the beliefs that they hold and the interviews to say the least were fascinating. I think at one point I was emailing with Elizabeth and saying and now that you've heard some of those responses that I was receiving that I felt at times that I deserved an Oscar for keeping a straight face and not pushing back or really questioning why and because it is intended there's no judgment in these interviews it is to genuinely understand where folks are coming from. And one of the things that I was most struck by were the, certainly going into it, the, as these two have pointed out already the people immediately jump to the representation and the who's at the table. And one of the things that I was a little bit nervous about going into this with particularly the more high ranking policymakers was that I was going to be told what they believed I wanted to hear or the PC talking points that they had been told and I was really, really surprised by which perhaps those don't exist to the degree that I once thought they did because that did not happen. There was a lot of really genuine, genuine honesty for better or for worse. And another thing that really stood out to me was the once people would get going, they, and I will also caveat all of this with no one I spoke with when they said things that may have been particularly off-putting to me as a female or that went against something that I personally believe in, no one ever said anything with malice. They were coming from a really genuinely good place and often from a really protective place when you really dug into it. But something that was fascinating to me was the degree to which people would contradict themselves over the course of this one hour conversation. And that is why you sort of ask the same questions but in different ways to keep people going on the subject and to make them feel more comfortable. And a couple of examples that still stand out in my mind. One female, one male. One actually a quote that was in the study. One male said, I really don't think about gender when considering policy and never with implementation of policy. The only time I think of gender grouped together with diversity is when we're going into a meeting. It's important to demonstrate that balance. Going in with all guys isn't cool anymore. And in the same conversation said, when Hillary wins, I hope she doesn't have an all-female cabinet. And it certainly wasn't picked up by this gentleman that he was sort of completely contradicting himself. But then it was also, I saw that on the female side as well, one younger woman had worked as a special advisor to the National Security Advisor. And National Security Advisor. She very strongly felt that there was no gender issue. And there was almost a tension there and she didn't want to, some of the last talking points there around, she didn't want to be that token female at the table and be treated as the person that was looked to speak on behalf of the women of the world at that one table. And so she very strongly would speak about not never feeling uncomfortable and never feeling like she was treated any differently. And then she at the same time shared an anecdote that still is with me. She had walked into a, and said this happened on multiple occasions, that she'd walked into a meeting with her boss and people would automatically assume that she was assistant or personal assistant or secretary and would ask for, to make coffees of something or would ask for another cup of coffee. And the fact that she was not naturally connecting that to there being an issue, I think is very telling. I could go on and on, but I will save time and I'm sure there are questions when we get to the end and the discussion. Yeah, we'll, we're gonna, I'm gonna introduce Shantel who's gonna speak for a bit and then we will open it up to some questions and then we will then ask you all questions. So there will just be so much question time. We won't know what to do with it. So we're gonna hear some remarks from an advocate, practitioner and pioneer of many of the ideas and principles that we've been talking about. Dr. Shantel Deyonga Odrat. Okay, kind of, yes, all right. Is president of the Women in International Security since February 2013 and she's also a member of the U.S. Society Working Group on Women, Peace and Security. So our partners in this event. She was the founding and executive director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute North America, previously held positions as associate vice president and director of the United States Institute of Peace, Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program, adjunct associate professor at Georgetown, senior fellow at Johns Hopkins, many, many other positions. We'll let her just get on with her remarks. So basically I have one foot in the security community, the very traditional security community and one foot in the women, peace and security community. Your report, your research has, you know, provoked lots of thoughts, but I thought I'd limit my remarks to five sets of remarks. And first of all, I want to congratulate you. Doing this research, I think it's very important to get some data. And as we often know, you know, what is measured is valued and vice versa. And I really like to encourage you to repeat this research on an annual or bi-annual basis. Second, I'm not surprised by the results because the US security community in particular I think is a fairly homogeneous community where international security challenges are really seen as still very much in sort of state-centric terms. Third, silos. Whenever we talk about these issues, I'm thinking silos.  The security community is a fairly small community. Unfortunately, the women, peace and security community and the security community don't see eye-to-eye actually hardly ever meet. And that is because the security community is mostly composed of men, is very much anchored in the policy establishment, while the women, peace and security community is mostly comprised of women and anchored in civil society. And so they come from very different power positions as well. The other thing I would say is that for the security community, as we have seen, gender is really a marginal issue, and most of the time we're not thinking about gender at all and the gender dimensions of international security challenges. But on the flip side, the women, peace and security community is also not really engaging in a lot of the traditional security issues and has generally been very wary of the military aspect of security and also very wary, and I would say even mistrustful, in particular the military. Fourth remark is that the women, peace and security community has not always been its own best champion. I think this community is too often focused on stories, on action at the community level, and not sufficiently engaged in the problems at the state level or looking at the structural barriers to achieving gender equality. I also think that within this women, peace and security community we have silos too. The people who are doing SIDA, that is the convention, help me out here, the convention against women, then there is the women, peace and security community. There is the development community. I recall that the Sustainable Development Goals and particular Goal 5 stands for gender equality. These communities don't always communicate with each other and so what I'm trying to say is we are also organized a little bit in silos and one of the things that I noticed, this was in the survey as well, there's often times in the media we talk about women and children and in the WPS community we do this as well and I really would like to start a campaign against the women and children frame because I think it really infantilizes women in a manner that is not helpful. So what would be my overall assessment? I think we have made some progress in this arena but the progress is very fragile and we see that today here in Washington and progress is easily overturned. Now on the glass, sort of half full. I think if you look globally, we've made some progress. WPS and gender is now part of the international lexicon. 64 states have national action plans to implement 1325 military organizations, regional organizations and military organizations like NATO have policies that introduce gender perspectives in their activities and operations and even the G7 and the G20 find it necessary to organize W7 and W20 in their activities. So I think that's part of the glass that's half full in terms of our policy frameworks. We're actually pretty good. I think where the glasses half empty is in terms of implementation of policies that really further gender equality and we know that in many countries human rights defenders and women rights defenders are really under attack. So why has implementation been so difficult and I would argue maybe there are four main reasons why that is so. First of all I think most societies are based on a patriarchal model whereby man hold primary power and where men predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, control and access to resources. Rebecca, I think you mentioned that some of the people you interviewed they had no malign intent. They were actually a little protective at times and I think most societies espouse these gender values whereby men protect and women care. But when we talk about gender what we really talking about is power and power relationships and for many people these emancipatory efforts, these efforts towards greater gender equality are seen often times as zero sum games whereby the empowerment of women is at the expense of men and that is of course not very helpful. Second I think we need to remember that gender is not just at a personal level but our institutions are also gendered and are reproducing these gender inequalities and institutions are very hard to change as we well know. Third is a lack of education and research. There is too little analysis of the gender analysis of the gender dimensions of international security challenges and I think the universities here in the US are really doing a very poor job in this regard and the security studies program are doing a very poor job. And I think in your report it also shows that a lot of the US policy experts said well we actually don't have the tools and knowledge to really introduce a gender perspective in our policies. And then last is a lack of leadership. I think change will only come if there is committed leadership. The power of example is important but it really has to be from above there have to be instructions. And in that regard you talked about the gender advisor model as maybe not so useful. I actually think in particular when we look sort of internationally that the gender advisor model has been very effective because in most of these institutions you need one particular champion that continues to remind people well have you thought about these gender dimensions and if you don't have one dedicated person or dedicated persons then it just won't happen. Wonderful. Shantel thank you so much. We are going to move to some Q&A and then just as a warning you are all as mentioned going to have to participate and ask each other questions and ask us questions. My colleague Susanna will be circulating with a mic so one thing I just want to mention while you are thinking about your questions and getting Susanna's attention there was a point in our developing of the various survey instruments where some new America staff and actually I think unfortunately the person who was the ringleader behind this just left the room so she's not going to hear me say it but came to us and said well you know I mean this is really a problem this thing that you're doing you're just reinforcing the gender binary and of course there are way more than two genders and you know I'm in my late 40s and I've been in this field a while and I took a deep breath and I said I totally get that and please give me a few years to finish explaining to the security establishment that we need to think about gender as a thing that there's more than one of and then we can move on so you know that to me and that's I mean one of the real benefits to Shantel's point of breaking down your silos and doing your work in an interdisciplinary context where you know when you go to the fridge to get a Diet Coke you bump into the person who's thinking about gender as a polymorphous entity and reminds you how your construct is sort of lagging so far behind where other parts of our national discourse are so that's you know the silos that we're sitting in here are just really fascinating and somebody needs to ask the first question Hi this is one Courtney Weinbaum I'm with Rand I'm sitting here thinking how do you measure impact you know if you're going to prove to people that this matters in the financial industry there's been a movement the past few years to measure returns on firms that have women serving on the board versus women that don't serve on the board women as CEOs and C-suite versus women who aren't and that's very measurable what's the equivalent in foreign policy and national security how do we prove that this matters if we were going to create a research project to measure impact what would that look like well I mean we should ask you that question but first of all I think I mean Valerie Hudson's work at Texas A&M is a really good place to start looking at the sort of statistical relationships between incidents of violence against women in society and incidents of either intra or inter societal conflict and I mentioned her but there is in fact a broad there's a number of scholars that have done that work the UN has tried the US Institute of Peace has tried Chantal you should talk about this also there is the beginnings of the literature on the connections between women's participation in peace agreements and the durability of peace agreements so actually the sort of the way we did the five points in our toolkit has footnotes to what we think is the best scholarship that's currently available it does not match what you're talking about it does not match the level of resources that have been put into to data driven research so sort of a great sort of the question I would ask back to you is what's the what's the study that would be convincing in the Rand context and then someone who's either in the room or watching this presentation should go out and design that study and fund it but Chantal what else are we missing on the data side so I think the data is starting to be developed it is far from from a fully developed field but the data question is always a little bit it's an excuse for not doing anything and that's where I have a little bit of a problem that when we're talking about women peace and security that we have to change the narrative and we have to put this into an effectiveness argument because you know ultimately we're hitting a brick wall ultimately this is about gender equality that you have the same rights as your brother your nephew or your husband or that every human being has the same rights and that it is useful for a society to actually use all people in its society so I am always very careful by pushing too hard for just the effectiveness argument Diane Mars with Deloitte Consulting and with the Truman National Security Project thank you very much for having this event my first question is I like what you said about we're too story focused perhaps but that said based on your collective experiences can you cite a success story like where this is done better one or two places that's not a designated women's office and then my second question a very quick question fascinated by the term feminism and whether that came up in any of your interviews or research or if in the national security, homeland security using that word is like throwing a bomb and actually towards the aims that we might hope to achieve so you get successes and you get feminism so yeah so I would say one of the best examples of a place where this has really been done pretty well was at USAID so you had a combination of factors at work there you had leadership that was really committed to this issue and this place was actually pushing the effectiveness frame so Donald Steinberg who was there at the time was really a leader in talking to people and making the case by saying this will make the programs and strategies and processes that you have in place more effective like this is why this is in part why we're doing this of course that wasn't the only thing that they said but that was a big part at USAID was they took a look at all of the different whether it was a process by which somebody would apply for funding to do a program or whether it was an evaluation or an impact evaluation how were they going to make sure that gender was a consideration kind of down the line and how were they going to make sure that it was a consideration whether or not somebody was in power who had those same priorities so I think one of the things that we saw with the transition from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to John Kerry was that even though both of them really prioritized gender Clinton certainly it was an issue that was a bit closer to her heart and so what I heard from people inside state and serving under both of them was that there were certain ways in which gender had kind of been knocked down a few pegs and so that I think didn't happen in quite the same way at USAID because there was this real kind of encoding of gender as a consideration across different policies, programs and processes but again it was I think a lot had to do with the fact that there was both kind of a push from the top and I think also the development community has been socialized with this message for a lot longer than the security community so you have people who maybe unlike in the security community had courses in school that dealt with how gender was an important factor and had been kind of more conversant in the intersections there but that's definitely one case for the feminism question it was really not it really didn't come up often and if it did it was an unspoken to some of the earlier points I think there was almost more of a an over-correction on wanting that place in the conversation from the females that I spoke with and the not wanting to be any different from anyone else who was part of that conversation and I say over-correction in the sense that not taking action or consciously speaking up when they probably could they rather they just really did not want to be treated or looked at or any differently than anyone else in the conversation Just for the success stories I would refer you also to the book of Tanya Puffinholz who has looked at different peace negotiations Hi, my name is Aske Brechenmacher I work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and thank you so much for having this event my question relates to how do you reach a certain audience or the audience that you want to reach because I did my graduate studies at the Fletcher School which now has an excellent gender studies program it's very new but it's really good it also has a very traditional security studies program and what my experience there was when you have events or workshops around security gender and security issues even if they were framed as hard security issues you would still tend to attract first of all mostly women and then mostly the human security people not so much the hard security folks and it was very difficult to achieve that integration and the one time we did was when we had an event specifically around masculinities and war so it was about men so I was just curious about your ideas or insights you would have what people you want to reach I think that is a very important question to be asking one of the ways that I think you can and you know this this is almost a trope in and of itself now but by engaging whether it's men or whether it's people from any population engaging people in your kind of planning process in the conversation if it's an event or if it's an article that you're writing and you want to make sure that people from a particular community are engaging with it you know one tactic that we've used here is how do we engage in the conversation first with members of that community which often is not just a ploy to get more people to look at it but also meaningfully contributes to our understanding of the issue itself and also our understanding as to why the way that we had kind of written something or framed something may not appeal to that particular audience so it's I think there's this learning on from both sides but I would say that's something that I know several of my colleagues have done is you know how do I partner on this with somebody and how we kind of learn from each other and then kind of target the groups that we're looking to engage but even then it can be really tough so I agree I think in this case sometimes you know with these topics you're going to get kind of polarization no matter what but what we've found is that if you can take if you're writing for a general audience for instance or if you're kind of framing an event for a general population in this case our event was kind of more for practitioners interested in the subject but you know try to take all the jargon out of it so don't assume that people know what you mean when you say gender mainstreaming most people have no idea what that means as our research backs up and as just casual conversations that I have with friends people just very smart people you know it doesn't mean that somebody's not intelligent it's just that's a really jargony term so how do you kind of police your own language and make sure that you're speaking in a way that doesn't alienate different groups I think and that can just be as simple as sending it to a friend who's not steeped in this literature who's very smart but doesn't really know what what gender mainstreaming is or you know any of the kind of subjects that we've talked about today to get them to kind of say you want to take this word out take that word out and find a simpler way to say it good afternoon thank you so much I had two questions one which she answered as she asked would you guys answer and I really appreciate it and my second question is for you Shantel you mentioned that and you kind of touched on this as well and I felt this way when I was an undergrad in grad school how would you suggest that security studies would be improved in our universities to include gender in a more comprehensive way thank you yeah so I think it really requires leadership so the dean of the Fletcher school has to take leadership and say to his faculty you know you have to introduce this and if they need some extra training you know provide that extra training what's really important that this gets in the curriculum of first year students at the undergrad level you know when you're starting at the PhD or MA level you're almost too late and what I see is that there's enormous interest from young students in gender issues in examining these gender dimensions and younger people actually do I think there is a little bit of a generational difference here they they understand that this is not just a women's issue this is really an issue about power relationships within society and I think making clear that yeah gender is not just a women's issue so you can do away with it is very important and in that sense it's a little bit of a pity that the women peace and security agenda the nomenclatura of the women peace and security agenda itself has women in there where it actually should have or what it is really about is about gender equality in society but it's I think leadership the other thing I would say is create platforms where you can get different communities together have foundations fund these kinds of interdisciplinary types of efforts things they're not doing currently yeah I mean while Susanna you're walking to take the next question just I think several people have mentioned this the question of how masculinity contributes to conflict or doesn't or sort of toxic masculinity versus healthy masculinity is another really interesting research area the US Institute of Peace did this really interesting event recently which I think you can find online called the man box and I think there's there's growing research from other societies as well so that that's you know both from a research avenue and a communications avenue although I think there's significant downsides to deciding that this is all about masculinity as well but Gail Maddox oh I guess Wilson Center and I had a couple of comments to to make I mean first of all on the subject areas international aid and development and all has focused very much and I think we're really should be thankful for that but we need to move into the other areas and one that's more recently been striking is the arms control area I mean there are a number of women in the arms control area and I think that that is probably could be a model that would strike a chord for a lot of people and for a lot of men in the in some of the progress that I think women have made that have participated in that in that particular area but it needs to move on and I would suggest also that as this combat inclusion begins to begins to take effect that women really need to all of us that maybe are not so involved in the military need to support and that effort and try to make sure that these women that are interested in going into the military and not everybody is but I think we all should be looking at that and making sure that it has a smooth and which I don't think is going to happen but should have a real smooth input and I think that we need not to leave those military women out there without some assistance and I think that we can learn a lot from it it's having a very rocky start and I think it's very difficult to even see where it's going given the administration but we have had some voices that are at least say that they're going to fulfill the legislative requirements that they're going to be coming up so that's my one comment on a broader thing and then I think that what Chantal said in terms of education that leadership is really important at these graduate schools and even undergraduate and I think her point about starting it at the undergraduate level is extremely also vital to for men to be pulled in but I am a little bit against just doing it we have a gender course we have a women's studies and so you have to go there and you have to sign up for that I think where the leadership is really important to come in is that it's integrated into other courses that international relations includes it and Tickner of course has sort of led the way but there are lots of younger scholars now and I really think that it shouldn't be isolated from the general study of security and stability and it should be broader and everybody here can help to contribute that and even in terms of curriculum development I think it's vital to bring that in at the very lowest levels and across disciplines Rebecca do you want to say something about because the combat issue did come up frequently in the interviews and I think your sense of where the security establishment is on combat is really interesting. Yeah I mean there were a number of fascinating findings I mean on the I spoke to one man who had combat experience as well as influencing policy and he he felt that it needed to be more than simply said that yes a woman can do the exact same things as a man it needed there needed to be all limitations to that were moved and that's where I heard on even from females was the I mean if you even think about the phrase women peace and security the peace is one woman made the connection that it does women a disservice to put women in peace in the same phrase because it automatically assumes that women are better peacemakers and that is the one role that they should and can be playing and when in reality there's no reason why they cannot be in combat and on the front lines and that was sort of where people with the exception of the male participant who had served people really struggled with that conversation when it got to the point of at the front line and the person who when your convoy is entering a dangerous situation would be very willing to say female colleague please you go in first even if that is the job of the female and I think that that is I think that's very telling in that there's a sort of a power struggle internally that people have on where that line is drawn. Did you want to say anything about curriculum development? Well I was just going to say stay tuned because that's what's on our agenda next is working with multiple collaborators on developing a tool for undergraduate, graduate level learning in this area and how to mainstream it and integrate it better than it is today so that's a very important issue to us and one that we're going to be working on. Great so we're going to take one or two questions we will take two more questions we'll finish up and then frankly we're going to give you all discussion questions for the reception that is waiting for us. We have like ready made ice breakers we were going to take some time but you guys have so many great questions. So if we've got a question here and then maybe one more and then we'll all give our final thoughts. Thank you so much thank you for this event so I was the communications coordinator with the grassroots woman SG campaign to elect the first woman secretary general was our aim we worked with wise thank you again something that I experienced is I would be fielding requests for our perspective as the drama unfolded right in this sort of chapter in the institutional gender wars and we had access to all seven of the women candidates and each week when I would receive all kinds of media requests I would always try to connect those making the requests from big publications all over the world with the women themselves and very few would take me up on that offer and so it became a problem where they just wanted our sort of take on the play by play each week and our core committee was articulate in this regard no problem but why not go to the women themselves when we were offering them a bridge so maybe it's a little more of a media question for Miss Holler but how can we do better how can we encourage our media institutions to do better when many times it's just a matter of picking up the phone to get one more woman's perspective or another woman on your panel et cetera thank you so much how do you want to take the first pass at this because we've had conversations about from the media perspective yeah you know it's really it's tough I mean I before I worked at New America worked at the Atlantic and its slate and so have some experience in media although it's been a while since I've been like officially a journalist at a mainstream media publication but I would say that for a lot of journalists the media environment that we're in right now has made it I think harder than ever for people to to take the time to think about the fact that you know well how inclusive is my reporting right now am I really getting a diverse set of voices in my story if you're up against several deadlines a day and you're expected to produce you know X amount of and I'm not making excuses at all I'm just kind of explaining what I know to be the reality for a lot of journalists and then there's the other problem of course which comes when you do include lots of voices but then they get cut out by an editor at the last minute not to blame everything on editors I've been an editor that always happens but it is very convenient so I think I guess I guess two things one is to the extent that you can create easy ways for journalists to access more sources I mean often that's kind of befuddling to me because I think what what I've heard more often is that people are like oh I really want to quote a woman or I really want to quote like a female who's working in this industry or I want to quote more people of color or whatever it is but I just don't know I have access to them I don't know where they are it's like well they're out there you know and there are lots of organizations that have tried to make it much easier for journalists to find them there are all sorts of databases and that I can like recall if I yeah if I take a look in my email because I get like all their emails so that's kind of one way but the what you're talking about is is a bit trickier because it's kind of that frame of mind of like this isn't necessary like I don't need this person's voice in my story or like something like that is what I'm kind of getting and you know I think I think the way to change that is sometimes through more you know sometimes through kind of education as to why is it a problem if you don't have those voices so the extent to which people like us can be doing more research and writing about how narratives are actually flawed when different perspectives aren't included I'm actually writing right now about how history curriculum and just curriculum in general when it leaves out women's stories and voices how you actually just lose parts of histories that make it an inaccurate representation of what happened so I think that if we can make that case more that like here's how again I mean going back to the effectiveness argument but I think for journalists this is going to be an effective one to make that if you write the story and you don't include these voices you will write a story that is less truthful or less accurate so you know how do we kind of how do we use that and make that case I think is how I would think about that I think that the type of of sourcing I think that the journalists are inherently curious people and that is something that is not often taken advantage of in my opinion to the degree that it should be and there's an assumption that the media should know this or the media should be aware of this or the media should be devoting X number of resources to this topic and I don't think that that is an assumption and so if through the lens of national security and gender typically those would be two separate beats right and the the it's getting that on the education front it's also educating journalists and the media to know that there is a story there and helping connect those dots in a particularly in unexpected ways goes a really long way because it is I think that I think this is an area where journalists would latch on to and sink their teeth into if it were it to reiterate a little bit of Elizabeth's point it is at the end of the day it's competing against a lot of other the news of the day and right now that means something very different than it meant even this time last year and I think that any guidance that can be provided from this community or even reaching out to put these ideas in front of media would be really helpful so there is sad news and there is good news here and the sad news is that we are over our time the good news is that when US Civil Society Action Network reached out to us about this event one of the things we were really excited about was the chance to put together the people who are on new America's list and usually come to our events and the people who are on the Civil Society Action Network list and come to your events and I see just by looking at the faces I know in the audience and the kinds of questions we've had that we do have just an amazing set of interlinkages across issues across silos that we have nuclear people here and cyber people here and UN people here and people who have been working in the academy so we are going to wrap up we really in a way that is much more sincere than you often hear at this kind of event we want you to stay in touch with us because we are continuing to work in this field but you all are the folks who are doing the work in this field so where you heard research that you want done where you think we got things wrong where you think your community or your issue like that last example either is a great proof point or is a great place for research please grab one of us and let us know or send us a follow up and just because we always like to layer stuff on extra thick we have a couple of ice breaker questions for you in the cocktail hour we usually don't do this our plan really was to save enough time so that we could all discuss here but I will give you some of these ice breakers which are super fun and sometimes I bring up this stuff at the cocktail parties that I go to and I'm not like that popular person to talk to but we'll see so the first subject is benevolent sexism really exciting so no but truly I think this is a fascinating subject and it's one that we were talking about a bit today but we were genuinely curious one of the things that we heard frequently in our interviews were men who said that they were really true advocates of gender equality but they simply couldn't imagine putting a woman in harm's way on the battlefield or they felt a push to protect women as Rebecca was talking about so this is what is called benevolent sexism and it's a fairly common response to questions about gender and gender mainstreaming so our question to you and again we would love it if you told us and came up to us there should be refreshments outside have you ever experienced this type of sexism in your work and how have you dealt with it so that's kind of number one number two what's a challenge that you didn't hear or see addressed in the toolkit and presentation so what did we miss and number three can you envision upcoming events or meetings or places where some of the lessons that you you know learned today could possibly be used so with that thank you all so much for being here we really really we're so happy to talk to you today so thanks


All right, so welcome to another edition of the vlog. Me plus you is us. My name is Kwame. I'm Elaine. And we're happy to be back on your screens. Today, as you can see from the caption, we're talking about how it took a village to help us make our stay in the Netherlands better. Yes.  He's always around. Make an armor eye. Yeah. Our boss is always around. And yeah, it takes a village or how the Netherlands has treated us in our stay here. And that's what we want to just recap. I think it's more like a gratitude vlog or. Yeah, and I also think it really takes a village as kind of a plea to ask for help whenever you need it. Kwame's made quite a few videos with a set to not on mental health. And we think even as a new parent, it's OK to ask for help. And it really takes a village. So that's why we thought this would be a great way to share what has been happening with us. Here from the beginning, we're taking from scratch. Even before we traveled in arranging a lot of things, we had a lot of help. Yeah, so you want to. Yeah, so I think the first thing we did was asking ourselves where we would want to be when we're in Netherlands. If we're going to be in Ghana or Netherlands. And for me, it was more an emotional decision to be in the Netherlands, be close to my family, my sisters, my brother, and my friends here as well. And then, of course, you need to get to the practical side of things. And we got a lot of help there. I've asked many friends if they knew somebody was going on holiday for a long time or if people would be maybe out of their house and they would want to rent it to us. Anywhere close to my hometown would have been great. And we just started with texting and calling. And in the end, my parents really came true because of their network, we found not one but two places to stay, or actually three. Because in the beginning, we stayed with them for 10 days. It was a good way to land from the craziness of moving houses in Ghana. Yeah, just literally 10 days before traveling back here or traveling here. So it was a good way to just land and be at home while the other places which had been arranged with their help were getting ready. Sorry, for us to move there. So it was good. Yeah, and in the end, we ended up for five weeks in one house of a friend of my parents who went to Australia, which was a really nice house. And it was close to a small lake. I think you've seen that in the video on the New Year's Dive, yes. So it was fun and it was in my own old hometown but it was still in another neighborhood. So it was close to home but not too familiar. And then in the end, we ended up in another house of people who also had a daughter abroad and they went to visit her and the old neighbor of my parents who has moved to this village asked in the WhatsApp group of the village if anybody was going away for a long time. And then if they had a space here. Yeah, and these people normally didn't want to rent out their house but because it went through somebody they know they were willing to meet us and then we took it from there. And it was a great stay so far. We still have a small week to go, but... Yeah, and this is where we are at the moment. So yeah, so even from scratch, yeah, people have been on board with helping us because if we would have done it the other way by ourselves, if I should put it that way, then we would have been paying extremely huge amounts for rent and it probably wouldn't even be close enough to where we wanted to be especially considering the fact that coming here was to be close to Elaine's family for ease of access to them as well as ease of access to the health care system where she wanted to or we wanted to have the baby. Yeah, and even outside of more, this was more like a place to stay, so it was quite a logistical puzzle, but even with a lot of the things we needed, like it's now winter in Netherlands, so it's quite cold. But of course in Ghana we won't need the winter clothes for the baby. So what I did of all the things we needed for the baby, I made a list of the things we already have and the things we were still pending. And then I first asked my other mama friends, he's doing a number two on the vlog. I don't know if people can hear it. So I asked my other mama friends, like, OK, I'm still looking for this and this and this. Could you do you still have those? Or, yeah, maybe you can advise on where to get them and bless you. And they really came through. I hope Korma has some b-roll to show on all the clothes that we got. But it was it was really nice. We had a whole wardrobe for him, winter clothes and everything.  Just the basics. And even his his bed downstairs, which is actually made in Ghana. We got it from Toborra from friends who first lived in Ghana and brought their their baskets here. I mean, it's really nice to have him laying something from Ghana while we are here in the Netherlands. Yeah, so that was really nice as well. We even got a stroller, which is a huge thing for me. It's a huge thing for me. And I also got a pumping machine, and which has been very essential in kind of the feeding journey. So, yeah, our friends or our mom friends really came through. And it was also nice because then you could have a conversation about what do you really need and what do you don't you need? Because the whole baby business also is a lot of marketing and like has a commercial purpose. So it's good to also discuss like, OK, this I really didn't need, but this might be nice to get. So it was outside of the stuff we could borrow and get. And it was also a lot of advice. And yeah, just sharing experiences. So that was really good. Yeah. So that was for the pre prepping before the baby came. And after the baby came or before the baby came or during the labor time as well, we also had a lot of help, especially when Elaine's sister flew in. And during the time when the labor was happening, she was with us the whole time because the labor took longer than we had expected. Yeah. And we were not at any moment feeling like, yeah, we're alone in this or we're doing it alone. Yeah. And I think also logistical wise, one, my parents borrowed their car to us. Yeah, they have two cars and then they let us have one for the entire time would be here, that we didn't have to even think about transportation or lack a way of moving around if we had to. Yeah. And then especially we're doing groceries now. It's just nice that you don't have to worry about how to get there and not buy too many things. You can just, you know, get everything you need and put it in the car and drive back. And the location we are now is also a bit more remote in Dutch terms. It's not a little more remote. Dutch friends have visited and even them think that, oh, wow, OK. Yeah. So I think she's being modest is remote. Yeah. So you need a car to move around. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult. So that one was also very essential. It's almost impossible. And then for us in the first week, I was still very much recovering and we were already dealing with a lack of sleep from the labor because it took longer than we expected. And of course, there was a little one we had to take care of who also didn't sleep a lot. Three hours max in one go. So we had lots of help. My siblings came through. They made sure groceries were actually delivered, which was such a good moment because we just moved to the second house and we didn't really have a lot of prep time because the labor was going on. Yeah. So I was really worried about what we're going to eat this week because there's nothing in the house. But then they made sure that we had groceries, which was really great. And they also made sure that they came to cook. My mom also came to take care of us and the baby. Bringing food over, apart from cooking, they also bring food over sometimes, which is you have enough to eat in the night and maybe early in the morning, so you don't have to do anything. Yeah, and also just people checking on us, like, how are you doing? Are you okay? Do you need anything? Can we do anything? Which was really nice. And in the Netherlands, that's quite a unique system. So when you get home from the hospital or you just got your baby at home because a lot of babies are born at home in the Netherlands, which is quite unique. When you have like a nurse at home, we go at Kamsorg and they stay with you for a week when... Well, they don't stay in. They don't stay in your house. No, no, but they come to your house every day to help you with the newborn, help you with your household. They learn, they teach you, sorry, they teach you everything. You need to know about your newborn, how to bathe them, how to take care of them, how to do the diaper, how to recognize which cry is what. Yeah. And yeah, all these things. It's really... We had a really very, very knowledgeable lady and she was very caring as well for the baby and also for us because at some point we were really sleep deprived. So then she was like, you guys really need... We still haven't recovered though, but now it's better.  So it was like little reminders of things on how to take care of yourself in such a dynamic time. I think that was really great. And when she left, we were both a bit like, hmm, that's sad. Yeah. But it's a great system that actually exists in the Netherlands. And yeah, I think, what else? Yeah, that's about it. And even now that things are getting better in terms of how we're managing or handling our boss, still every now and then people pass by, people, no, Elaine's siblings mostly, would pass by, would cook for us and then spend an evening with us. And besides that, I mean, the general culture of having a baby and having a village or a group of, or a network of friends around you is that people would like to visit and share gifts as well. So which is something that has been happening. That's true. In between the visits that, no, it's not visits, in between the family time being here, them cooking for us, them taking care of us every now and then in the beginning it was more, but now it gets like less and less, but every now and then they just offer to come and cook. Yeah. But even the amount of cards we got, it's really crazy. And at some point we, every morning we had packages waiting for us, like cards with some small gift or some... So many books. Yes, books, but... And the toys. Yeah, and like a relaxing package for us. And it was like, people were really showing up and it also makes you feel like, okay, we're not like, we're still juggling things, but people are thinking of us. So it also makes you feel like more, like cared for and supported. Yeah. It was really nice. Yeah. So for us, the import of making this video is more to also compare culturally. I think it's a cultural difference. But in Ghana, when we say it takes a village, it's a different kind of way of doing things in Ghana with your family and everything sometimes or not sometimes.  And your friends would come over every now and then to help out. But it's mostly your mother and your closest family who take up a lot of the things. But we have experienced it in a different way where in Netherlands, a lot of the things that we needed to arrange that we couldn't be physically available had been done. And people were just pulling strings from their networks and just getting things done for us. And when the baby came, they also came here to just be with us, help us. And yeah, it's been an incredible three months from the last stages of the pregnancy to having the baby till now. So that's basically what we wanted to share. And if any of them are watching this video right now, I just want to say that we're really, really grateful. Yeah, really thank you for making. It's also more memorable when you do it together. I mean, we could have arranged stuff on our own, but in the end, like it's nice to do it together. Like it come way, way, way further together. And yeah, it's also nice. I find it also a nice feeling that the baby comes into like a community of people. And because we are also just parents, like we're just trying, but it's good that the baby has other people to learn things from as well. And that people are there for him. Yeah, so we're very grateful for the community and the village so far. And we hope to tighten the village even more. More everywhere we go, we hope to just have a closer next to people that are in our corner. Yes, so thanks for everybody. Who was in our corner doing this crazy roller coaster? Thank you to everybody. Yes, we're really, really grateful. And if you want to catch up on other videos, especially with our culture shock and other cultural conversations, you can check them up on the screen at the moment. We'll catch you in the next one. My name is Kwame and... I mean, I'm Elaine. And this is me plus you is us. Get you next time. Bye.


Thanks. Hello, my name is Andrea Floresco and I will talk about Rust VMM, and how can that help you into building your own custom VMM. So, this is my first time at FOSDM. Well, actually, my second time giving a presentation and I heard that the first thing that you have to do is introduce yourself in case you are wondering. This is a failed attempt at reproducing my GitHub profile page. I'm super excited about the open source. This is my current focus at Amazon where I'm a software development engineer. I'm a maintainer at Firecracker and also a contributor at Rust VMM. But before getting into details about what either of these things are, let me start with a simple analogy. So, let's say that we want to build a motorcycle. The first step is to gather the requirements and getting a pretty clear idea of what we want to build. Next, we will just break it into tasks and thinking about the components that we need for our motorcycle. But then we soon realize that this is actually going to take a lot of time. So, can we use something that already exists? And the answer is yes, because I wouldn't have asked the question otherwise. So, we can use a car. Everybody's using the car. We know that the car is great. People have used it in other projects as well. So, it must be perfect for our use case. Now, the car is too complex. So, we just start removing the components that we do not need. And we soon face a serious problem. So, the motorcycle will fell down. So, we have to add some weight to balance it. Which means that we patch it a bit. We are at the end of our project and we compare what we wanted to build with what we actually built. And we are not really satisfied with the result. So, even though the car was super great, our motorcycle is not ideal. Now, we naturally ask ourselves, is there a better way to build this? And of course there is. Now, we can build it from scratch. But that takes a lot of time. So, moving to the technical side of the talk, this is similar to what CrossVM did about two years ago. Instead of using an existing VMM, they decided to build their own VMM as a lightweight VMM written in Rust. CrossVM runs on top of KVM and it is used for providing application isolation in Chromium OS. Moving a bit in time, about more than one year ago, we decided to build Firecracker. We also wanted a lightweight VMM that can boot very fast and that has a low memory footprint. And that is because we want to build Firecracker for short-lived and multi-tenant workloads. Now, Firecracker was also supposed to run on top of KVM. And we started our design process and we analyzed the options that we have. We decided to go with Rust because it's a system language. It's a language that offers memory safety, concurrency safety, and also it has performance that is similar to modern C++. Now, after some digging, we discovered CrossVM and we decided to start our work from there. Now, even if Firecracker was developed, was started as a fork of CrossVM, the project's almost instantly diverse. And that is because they have really different customer use cases. So CrossVM, as I said, is providing Linux, it's providing isolation for Linux application in Chromium OS, which means that you could potentially run, for example, Photoshop in your Chromebook. And for running Photoshop, it would actually make a whole lot of difference in having features like GPU and PCI. Now, Firecracker is used for some other things. So it is powering AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda. And it is running in a cloud environment at scale, which means that we added features that could make us operate it easily, like metrics. But we also have rate limiting for block devices and for network devices. And we also have a feature by which the guest can query information about the microVM that is running in, which is MMDS. Now, they're different. We talked about it. But still, there are some common virtualization components. So because they are both built on top of KVM, they have the KVM API wrappers. They have block device and network device. So they have a similar implementation of the specification. And because they are both lightweight microVMs, well, VMMs, they have a minimal kernel loader. And there are some other components as well. So basically, if we are going back to the analogy with which I started the presentation, we are now having two motorcycles. But if somebody wants to build a third motorcycle, there is no good way to do that. So basically, they would have to either fork one of the projects or start from scratch. And actually, this is where RazVMM comes into place. And one of the reasons why it exists. RazVMM is an open source project. It started about two months ago. It's very fresh.  If you're wondering why would you actually want that, well, the first obvious reason is that it would be actually very easy for a firecracker and KVM to share common virtualization code. But since we are here, and I can ask you why would you actually care about that, because maybe you wouldn't, unless you were working for one of the projects. And now the answer is you should care about it because RazVMM is going to do much more. So with RazVMM, you can create your custom VMMs. And that is because it is taught with modularity and testing in mind. So for example, let's say that you want to build a VMM that is for Kubernetes. That means that this VMM is going to be fully compatible with the runtime interface. And also it will have features like memory hotplug and CPU hotplug and host file system sharing, which is something that, for example, in Firecracker, we don't have a really good use case to add it. So far there are some people that are involved. We aren't many people. This is a call for you to get involved as well. People have contributed code. People have participated in discussions. We have a feedback process by which we are adding components into RazVMM so people have also provided reviews. If you want to help, it is as simple as becoming a RazVMM member on GitHub. You just have to open a new issue in the community repository. Then if you want to participate in the discussions, there is an email list. And if you have an idea about the component, that could be a good fit for RazVMM. You can write it and then open a review request and people will look at it. Now, you might think that the talk is over, but it's not. And there are two reasons for that. So one is I just added the slides two days ago. And the other reason is that we are going to talk about what's next. So what is in the future? There are some discussions ongoing about adding the host user, user space implementation for the host in RazVMM. Then there are also some discussions around porting QMU components which I actually find very interesting. But the future is not set in stone, and it is an ideal time for you to come and decide with us. The talk is still not over. And we are going to go over an example of a VMM that you can build with components of RazVMM. And this slide is actually here because with the current stage of RazVMM, you can't really build anything because we don't have enough crates there or components. So we are going to build a minimal VMM. It's not exactly minimal. It is more to prove a point of the structure of RazVMM. So our VMM is going to run on top of KVM. So we will need some KVM wrappers. Then we will need a kernel loader, a block device for our root file system and the user interface. The first thing that we are going to do is write the VMM user interface. This is basically the place where an external client, let's call it, is going to configure the VMM that wants to run. Now, next we are going to look at the future RazVMM components. So before getting into details about what these things are, let's talk a bit about structure. Each box on the right side of the screen, it's a crate or a package. In Raz packages are called crates. So that was my first slide sharing crates, virtualization crates. Now, each crate can have zero, one, or many modules. And this is, for example, the vertio devices, which has a block device, a net, a viscoc and a serial, each structure in a module. Now, there is an interesting feature about that Rust. There is an interesting thing that Rust helps us with now. Instead of, for example, you want to use just the block device. And instead of importing all the code, you can import only the block device by using features, which basically means that it's actually just conditional compiling. Now, let's get them one by one. So KVM bindings is actually auto-generated code with binding. It is a Rust for in function interface to the KVM headers. But these are not very useful by themselves because it basically just defines and structures. Now, on top of that, we can build a KVM wrapper, which actually has implementation wrappers over IOCTLs, KVM IOCTLs, which can help us in doing stuff like opening def KVM, creating a VM, also creating VCPUs, and so on. Next, we have vertio bindings, which are similar to KVM only that they are auto-generating from vertio headers. And we have the implementation for the vertio specification in the vertio devices that I talked about earlier. Next, we have a kernel loader. The kernel loader is minimal. It just loads the kernel image in the guest memory. A rate limiter that can be applied on the vertio devices to limit operation per seconds and the bandwidth, and also the V-host user. Now, we said that our VMM is going to be minimal, so we are just going to select some of these. And because these components are actually independent in some way, we can just dump them into our VMM and everything works. We will have to also add a VMM glue that is basically responsible for interacting with the VMMs and also making the connection to the VMM user interface so people can actually start VMS with our minimal VMM. Now, there is only one thing to do. We have to profit. And that was all. This is really the end of the talk. The first link you have is the RazVMM organization on GitHub. Next, if you click the link on this slide, the second link, it will take you to the subscribe page for the RazVMM email list. And the last one is my email address, so if you have any questions that you do not want to ask now, you can send me an email and I will be more than happy to help you. Thank you. So the question was if on the first, do you mean this one? Yes. So the question was whether these crates are already available on crates.io. So the thing is that the only thing that we actually have in RazVMM now is the crate KVM bindings. This is already available on crates.io as well, and we are using it in Firecrackers, so it's working. All the others, we have to add them. So the follow-up question was if we reserve the names, no, we didn't. You should. And the answer was we should. Yeah, so the question was if we plan to add arm support. So I started with KVM bindings. It has support for arms, so the bindings are generated for arm as well. And the plan is actually for the craze that I'm adding there to have support for both x86 and arm, and I'm actually working with one of my colleagues to do this for the KVM wrappers. What? Sorry. Okay, so I don't have... The question is if we are going to add support for other architectures as well. I can't do that by myself obviously because I'm 26 and don't actually know all those architectures by name. Yes. Yeah, this is different. Well, because you can conditionally compile everything, that means that you can add support for many platforms and it should be okay for most people because if they don't want your code, they will just not pull it in. Yeah. It is a common foundation. Oh, so the question was if this is a common foundation and if we are working with KVM. So I just want to make something clear. This is not Firecracker, so this is not a product owned by a company and it's not a product of its own. It's really just the place to share common virtualization components between many VMMs so we can build them in the same way. Yeah. The question is if we can create non-rust VMM on top of it and I don't really know how to answer that question. Probably for languages that allow you to call a code that is not rust, maybe. I really don't know how to answer that, sorry. So the question was if we are going to replace QMU components with components from Rust VMM and there is actually some discussion about it on the Rust VMM email list, you should join it as well so you can participate in the discussion so I think that's the plan. Yeah, that's it.