Team ResponsibleFeminism—with a small but strident f—is having a cultural moment. From Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to Beyonce, it is becoming part of the mainstream. And this week, it marched onto center stage in Manhattan, at two of the nation’s biggest annual social good gatherings of world leaders, CEOs, cause-wired Millennials, celebrities, and philanthropists: Bill Clinton’s invitation-only, 10th annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), and the Social Good Summit, the open-door, Gen Y celebration of grassroots activism sponsored by Mashable, the United Nations Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
CGI’s stepped-up focus on women’s empowerment this year was not simply a reflection of Hillary Clinton’s highly-buzzed consideration of another run for the White House. [The comedian, Seth Meyers, speaking at a pre-CGI awards dinner early in the week, told CGI delegates, “I am so excited to be here with the President—and Bill.”]
Feminism for social good programming also loomed large outside the Clintons’ orbit. Social Good Summit organizers boasted repeatedly that the conference this year had scheduled as many Main Stage female speakers as men. SGS organizers also took the unusual step of devoting nearly half of its programming this year to gender equity and female empowerment issues.
Across both forums, the push for data-driven activism was strong, and the case for broader, more vigorous and results-oriented feminism was made all the more credible by speakers’ frequent references to statistics—some supplied by the UN and some pulled from a year-old Big Data project called No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, led by Hillary Clinton. “Data will help us transform talk into action as never before, and give these issues (of women’s empowerment) more credibility going forward,” Clinton told a room full of mostly female CEOs, nonprofit executives, NGO leaders and social change activists during a limited-access “women’s strategy session” held at CGI early in the week. Similarly, at the Social Good Summit, UN Foundation CEO Kathy Calvin urged Millennial men and women to help start a “gender data revolution.” Calvin told Summit attendees that “stronger data will lead to strong opportunities for girls and women everywhere.”
[One of the Gen Y activists on the roster was former Apple senior executive Jeff Martin, the Cofounder and CEO of Tribal Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based company that uses big data to predict consumer behavior and interaction. Martin urged gender activists to step up their use of mobile media, to enable more real-time collaboration and coordination of efforts locally and globally. “Often, when you go into village in Africa, or a small town in the United States, health care initiatives often don’t connect with education initiatives and female empowerment initiatives,” Martin said. “One thing I love about mobile analytics is that it’s not only a way to cut out the middlemen and get faster data and more successful results by charities, but it’s also a way to thread the needle between health care, education, and causes for women and girls.”]
But becoming more data-fluent and data-driven is only part of what is needed, Clinton added. At the women’s strategy session, she said, “We also need to put these issues on the political agenda. Sometimes, people in the NGO world and the corporate world are reluctant to engage in politics—and believe me, I know why politics is not for the faint-of-heart. But if you don’t move into the political arena with these ideas, it is unlikely you will ever get to scale. I am passionate about the cause for women and have been, my whole life. And I know how important it is to make moral arguments and demands, but it’s also important to have a mix of strategies that can get results for women and girls.”
Across town, Asha Curran, director of the Center for Innovation and Social Impact at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, the site of the Social Good Summit, issued a similar call to action. “I feel this year has been a big one for conversations about women—a profound, huge, emotionally confessional conversation and sometimes a conversation that has been very contentious,” Curran said. “These very personal conversations are happening now across a huge, huge span and across online networks, and we haven’t seen this kind of conversation happening in quite this way before. …It is time to convert that talk into new strategies and real results.”