Think Tanks & Diversity: A Pipeline Problem

Dayna Chatman is a doctoral candidate at USC Annenberg who works within DSAIL, the University’s think tank. She’s spent the better part of her academic career studying and writing about race and gender in contemporary culture. Her experiences as a black woman sparked her interest in exploring how other black women negotiate their relationships with modern feminism vis-a-vis the media.

Currently she’s leading a team of researchers studying “Black Twitter’s” influence on public discourse. When the University announced her team’s work, however, Chatman was virtually written out of early press that inaccurately described the study as an assessment of Black Twitter’s commercial viability to advertisers.

“Black Twitter is about a lot more than entertainment,” she Chatman wrote in subsequent a blog post. “I hoped to develop a methodology that could be used by myself or by other like-minded researchers to understand the full scope of Black Twitter and its capacity to benefit Black public life and articulate our perspectives on the society we live in.”

The backlash was swift, and—unsurprisingly—came from within Black Twitter itself. On September 5th DSAIL apologized for snubbing Chatman, but a simple question remained: Why would DSAIL blatantly mischaracterize Chatman’s study without consulting her? How could a think tank manage to mangle one of its researcher’s work so badly? Specific answers are difficult to pin down, but DSAIL’s handling of the Black Twitter project reflected a much broader problem that many American think tanks seem to have with race and diversity.

Understanding the problem begins with understanding the think tank’s origin.

The American think tank was born around the same time that America was coming of age. In 1910 Andrew Carnegie founded the U.S.’s first think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Its primary goal was to advocate for the elimination of war and its members would come to play a key role in advising President Woodrow Wilson during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Today, America’s think tanks produce policy-influencing research on a broad range of topics like America’s internet infrastructure and the impact of fast food workers’ wages on fast-food prices. Think tanks also spend a considerable amount of time, money and energy analyzing socio-cultural phenomenon — everything from attitudes about the changing American family to medical marijuana laws’ effects on teen use. No two are exactly alike, but there is one characteristic that most U.S. think tanks have in common: a pervasive lack of diversity.

Statistics about the racial breakdown of American think tanks are few and far between, primarily because a large number of think tanks function as private organizations. But according to the German Marshall Fund, a non-partisan think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., 42 out of 50 top U.S. think tanks are headed by men. And by simply perusing the “meet the scholars” pages of the top 10 think tanks in America, you can see just how prevalent one demographic is: older white male. (I reached out to the 10 largest U.S. think tanks to request race and gender breakdown of its scholars. Most did not respond; the Wilson Center directed me to its directory page.)

While some receive public funding, many are financed by private investors and corporations. Put simply, think tanks aren’t required to be transparent about who they hire and why, and as a result most of them suffer from a lack of female and minority voices.

The source of the problem is complex, stemming from a lack of diversity recruitment initiatives in higher education as well as a number of more subtle, nuanced roadblocks deterring minorities and women from pursuing think tank careers.

Tom Medvetz, a professor of sociology at UC San Diego, says that universities and think tanks often inadvertently discourage those from diverse backgrounds.

“Elite institutions don’t necessarily erect any kind of formal barrier between themselves and non-elites,” he said. “But what they do is have their own very specific culture that’s difficult to learn and become fluent in.”

It’s not that women and minorities lack credentials, Medvetz explained. Rather, the largest obstacle this group faces is not having what Medvetz calls a “policy expert repertoire” — a collection of academic, political and social experiences that are bound together by comfort, privilege and a certain degree of entitlement.

“It’s almost inevitable that the people who have no hesitation about situating themselves at the nexus of the academic, political, media and business worlds — and acting simultaneously like an academic scholar, a pundit, a politico, a (policy-)entrepreneur, etc. — are going to have privileged backgrounds,” He said. “Which usually means they’re white men.”

Former president and CEO of the Congressional Black Caucus Dr. Elsie L Scott emphasized the importance of building up that same kind of cultural influence and familiarity in her speech at the inaugural meeting of the Think Tank Diversity Consortium’s Diversity in Political Science speaker series. Scott, who now directs Howard University’s Ronald W. Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center, says that an increase in early academic mentorship is vital to steer more women and people of color towards think tanks.

Scott attributes much of her professional success to her relationship with her mentor Dr. Jewel Prestage, the first black woman to earn her Ph.D in political science.

“She saw that there was a need for black researchers and intellectuals that white organizations wouldn’t necessarily be focusing on,” Scott said. “She convinced us that there was a role for us in political science.”

Prestage worked to help minority students at the University of Iowa find resources to continue their academic endeavors and earn higher degrees, work that Scott explained she sought to continue with the Congressional Black Caucus’s fellowship program. In making it financially possible for young minorities and women to become ensconced in the world of Capitol Hill, the Caucus gave them the chance to develop that intangible x-factor that ultimately makes young professionals attractive to corporations, non-profit groups, and think tanks.

The Power That Think Tanks Hold

Think tanks don’t just analyze data in a vacuum, they build upon it to endorse subjective ideologies and set agendas that, in some cases, have long lasting, wide reaching impacts on society.

Consider Charles Murray, an author and academic whose research had a profound influence on the way conservatives speak about the American welfare state.

In 1984, while working as a fellow for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank based in New York City, Murray authored “Losing Ground,” an analysis of the impacts that the American public assistance programs had on its recipients. What began as a monograph for the conservative Heritage Foundation blossomed into a sprawling treatise arguing that welfare, by design, systematically harmed the poor. The Manhattan Institute, another conservative think tank, eventually commissioned Murray to expand his initial thesis into a full blown book. In Murray the Manhattan Institute saw an opportunity to make a name for itself as a thought leader in the world of conservative economics.

An internal memorandum sent by the Institute’s president William Hammett solidified the think tank’s support of Murray ideology: “Any discretionary funds at our disposal for the next few months will go toward financing Murray’s outreach activities.”

In exchange for a political brand name the Manhattan Institute gave the public a right-wing canon justifying the abolition of American welfare. By 1993, Losing Ground had drawn the attention of the New York Times, and ambivalent recognition from President Bill Clinton during an interview with NBC news. In 1996, facing re-election, and following three consecutive proposals for massive welfare reform from the Republican-led Congress, Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, known as welfare reform, into law.

The welfare reform law was the culmination of decades’ worth of political debate about the efficacy of federal cash assistance programs, but Losing Ground is credited as having played a crucial role in strengthening the Right’s arguments.

Propelled by the inertia of his fame as the product of a think tank, Murray went on to co-write “The Bell Curve,” a controversial book rooted in Eugenics positing that race played a central role in determining human intelligence.

Next Steps and Seeking Solutions

Depending on who you ask the factors contributing to the think tank diversity problem vary in scale and complexity but solutions, Karthick Ramakrishnan asserts, are possible. As a professor of political science at UC Riverside and and a fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Ramakrishnan has seen countless minority and female students whom, while talented, never saw think tanks are viable job opportunities.

“Many [students] have no idea what think tanks are; they have never been to one, and this lack of awareness and exposure means that their career imaginations are limited,” he said in an interview. “The game is already lost if think tanks are only recruiting people out of public policy programs or those with economics PhDs,”

Real change, Ramakrishnan continued, will only come when the think tanks and academic institutions work together make it clear that many intellectual roads can lead to powerful careers in policy, regardless of a person’s specific background.

“We cannot simply expect that there will be a natural sorting order— If our strongest students are primarily interested in answering questions with real-world relevance, and are less concerned about theory and methods, we should be encouraging them to follow the career path that is most suited for them. Think tanks need to diversify.”