Recently I have been talking to various people interested in starting diversity initiatives. A common theme seems to be the lack of interest or support from the greater community. When we started Graduate Women at MIT in 2009, we also thought this was the case. We quickly discovered, however, that with the proper encouragement, the community was able to become quite supportive of issues related to diversity and equality.
When I started my Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, there was no campus-wide women's group to speak of. Only eighteen women attended the Women's Welcome Lunch for first-year Ph.D. students. During my first year, they laid off the campus women's officer and there was talk of further reducing women's resources. Whenever I tried to discuss topics such as feminism or implicit bias, no one cared. When I would bring up the idea of starting a campus-wide women's group, people told me they didn’t see the need for one.
The following year, I started Graduate Women at MIT (GWAMIT) with two other Ph.D. students. In our first couple of years, we organized fill-the-room talks and panels about topics such as implicit bias and feminism. We had women talking openly about topics we hadn’t heard discussed before: for instance, “nontraditional” life paths (childlessness; singlehood; single parenthood) and the unexpected perils of collaborating with men. We increased the attendance of the Women’s Welcome Lunch from eighteen to two hundred, and then to over three hundred. By early 2013, we had over 1500 mailing list members and over 80 active members running our mentoring program and two annual conferences. Even my male friends, the same ones who liked to deface GWAMIT posters in the Stata Center elevators, started attending events of their own free will and talking about what they learned for weeks afterward.
Evidence suggests that the sudden change of heart by both the student body and institution had something to do with GWAMIT. Before GWAMIT, people who I had talked to viewed women’s groups as unnecessary: why waste time on irrelevant issues when we have a meritocracy? After GWAMIT, it became clear to many people that a women’s group was important for bringing up issues to women and the greater community. We developed a reputation not just for providing useful workshops for women, but also for provoking useful discussions for the greater community.
There were two important parts of changing perceptions on campus: branding and doing. We knew that the only way to get people to realize that a women’s group was necessary was to provide programming they deemed useful that was not otherwise available. People could only decide it was useful if we got them to the events in the first place. Getting people to events involved fighting against stigmas associated with women’s groups (“angry;” “fluffy”). Once people were there, we needed to deliver on the promise of useful content. This involved making people feel like they learned something without feeling too bad about themselves. We were careful to avoid sending negative messages (for instance, about how women need to change or how people are doing wrong things to women) while providing positive messages about how people can change their behaviors to help everyone become happier and more successful.
The first step in branding GWAMIT involved identifying the interests of our target audience. Since we had decided that was important to us to start discussions across the MIT community, we thought hard about what everyone was interested in. This involved identifying the core values of our audience: for instance, achieving personal excellence and maintaining a meritocracy. We attracted women by promising to help their professional development: we hid our more provocative messages about gender difference in workshops on generically useful topics, for instance communication, online branding, and professional attire. We attracted men and women by promising to help MIT become a more effective meritocracy. I knew we were doing something right when, after attending an event on implicit bias, a man from my department said that anyone interested in starting a company needed to know these things.
The next step was deciding how to position our group as being useful towards the goals of our target audience. Our audience wanted to learn how to be more effective and how to make MIT better. We needed to make a strong argument for why we were going to successfully help them with this, and without being dismissive of the existing women’s resources. Rather than emphasizing the more radical parts of our agenda, we made our mission to help MIT’s graduate women with “personal and professional development.” We existed to address the “leaky pipeline,” the phenomenon of women declining in numbers at each career stage, suggesting there was some injustice along the way. We were an “umbrella organization” that brought together the “decentralized resources” MIT offers and filled the gap for resources that didn’t exist. Once we framed it this way, it became difficult to disagree that someone needed to fill this gap.
We kept our niche and audience in mind when designing events and their associated advertising. From early surveys, we learned that people don’t like wasting their time or being told the world is against them. Thus we stayed away from open-ended discussions and conversations and always had talks and panels with a specific focus or goal: for instance, communication or personal branding. In advertising the event, we made it as clear as possible what people would get out of the event and highlighted the credentials of the speaker to inspire confidence that they could deliver on our promise. We tailored the descriptions to our target audience. For instance, we wanted to get people who didn't identify as feminists thinking about feminism, so we titled our panel "I'm Not a Feminist, But..." with conversations bubbles with phrases like "I wish there were more women in my department." This way, our ads resonated with those who were reluctant to call themselves feminists but who were interested in having a conversation about gender and other equality.
Finally, it was important to give our target audience the experience they want at the event. The women and men attending our events want to feel like they learned something and an event that was worth their time. For the former, we chose speakers carefully and communicating to them the goals of the group and interests of our audience. For the latter, it was important to communicate to people what they would get out of an event: for instance, better communication skills or knowledge about how to address implicit bias in their work environments. The best thing for our branding was to have well-advertised events that looked like they were well-organized and that they would have broad appeal. A final important thing about advertising was that we e-mailed and postered liked crazy so that we didn't just reach people who were already looking for events like this. In fact, most of the attendees of our first kick-off conference heard about the event from posters they had seen in bathrooms.
Of course, we had many learning experiences along the way. Our first talk started half and hour late because we did not realize we needed to test the A/V beforehand. During our first conference, we learned from event surveys and informal feedback that our creatively designed events were confusing, and especially confusingly advertised. (It turns out “improvisational leadership mixer” doesn’t mean much to most people.) In trying to prevent burnout the first year we recruited fresh Executive Board members, we had a bloated board where nobody had enough responsibility to feel motivated or do anything innovative. We learned to consistently collect feedback through surveys and discussions, to change our behavior based on what we heard, and to understand that we could not make everyone happy. The result is that we have a more streamlined procedure for designing, advertising, and executing our events, as well as organizing our mentoring initiative and community-building activities.
Today, people are shocked that Graduate Women at MIT did not exist prior to 2009. People talk openly about feminism and take it as a given that MIT should have a women’s group. I am most pleased to see that people now see it as obvious that our group should have happened the way they did.
Those of you reluctant to start a women’s group—or any other kind of group—because of the resistance you perceive: go for it. Stay open-minded, focused, and determined, and you might be surprised at the results.
