Jewish Community Zeroes
If you’re not bored with it by now, if against all odds, you’re still following developments in the Jewish Community Heroes campaign from the Jewish Federations of North America, you may have noticed that none of the finalists are women.
Former Limmud NY Executive Director Ruthie Warshenbrot (full disclosure: when she was at Limmud NY, she was my boss for a year and a half) definitely noticed. She and Shannon Sarna from the Bronfman Foundation have an article at eJewish Philanthropy today about it:
More than half of the 2010 Slingshot organizations are headed by women.
More than half of the 2009 Avi Chai Fellows (“the Jewish genius grant”) award winners are women. More than half of the current Joshua Venture Fellows are women.
And over 70% of Jewish professionals are women.
The number of women finalists in the Jewish Federations of North America’s recent Jewish Community Heroes campaign: Zero.
The Jewish Heroes project fails to accurately reflect the landscape of the Jewish community’s best and brightest. When the vast majority of professionals working to enrich the Jewish community are women, how should it come to pass that not a single women is counted among our top five heroes?
[…]
What’s the problem? The contest calls specifically for Jewish HEROES, not HEROINES.
I don’t feel like doing the math, but does anyone know the total distribution of votes between male and female candidates? Is it possible that there were more women in the pool, but they split the vote so none of them ended up in the top 5?
The top five weren’t determined by vote. The top five were chosen by a panel of judges, drawing from the pool of 20 semi-finalists.
This is totally my #ish.
I don’t think you can draw any conclusions about the results of a popular vote like this, other than who is the most successful at spamming their Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
There’s about a 13% chance that choosing 5 out of the 20 semifinalists purely at random would exclude all 6 women. Not being qualified to judge them on their merits, I’m less inclined to lay blame at that part of the process, and more inclined to point fingers at the spammy, annoying, near-worthless semifinal popularity contest. My Facebook feed has only recently recovered, but it still has PTSD.
(I posted this to the comments of the original article, where it’s still awaiting moderation several hours later.)
I recently had the privilege of assembling a panel for a workshop at the JFNA General Assembly (happening next week in New Orleans). I was specifically asked to recruit panelists with an eye to gender balance, and two of the four panel members on Synagogue-Federation relations are women, one a Federation CEO and one a distinguished lay leader. So give the JFNA brownie points for being conscious of the importance of egalitarianism.
Since the compilation of the list of twenty was by popular vote, we can’t draw conclusions about the imbalance of the list — and I suspect the judges who selected the five from the twenty were not instructed about gender balance. But of course, our shehechanu moment won’t come when women head the list, but when nobody bothers to analyze gender balance.
More than half of the 2010 Slingshot organizations are headed by women. More than half of the 2009 Avi Chai Fellows (“the Jewish genius grant”) award winners are women. More than half of the current Joshua Venture Fellows are women. And over 70% of Jewish professionals are women.
Yes- I am concerned when there are no Jewish heroines to be found on a list, but I am hesitant to call this competition an outlier. women often face glass ceilings in Jewish professional leadership. Lets not pretend that there is one Heroes competition that is the problem.
Larry, the problem is that nobody DID analyze the gender balance… until after the fact.
Desh, the article acknowledges that it’s not the fault of the process, but that there is a more general problem with the whole community that we couldn’t get one woman in the top five when 70% of Jewish professionals are women.
MS, I don’t think that’s the point. The article doesn’t go into glass ceilings. It’s only talking about awards. And of course, we can look at the few women in the Forward 50 this week for another example, but for people like Ruthie, who are Jewish professionals, the JFNA (read: Jewish professional mothership) is a big deal.
they’re blaming women for not getting the social networking piece of it going. I thought women were the Jewish social network. Something stinks like last week’s dead fish.
It’s a bit insulting to conclude from all this that, in this day and age, women still have be treated like underprivileged minorities who need a push, regardless of effort and merit.
Heck, if 70% of all Jewish professionals are women, and “more than half” of Jewish awards and achievements are earned by women, I say it’s time to refocus our efforts. Women seem to be doing just fine. We need to start allocating attention and resources on boys and men, who clearly are underperforming compared to their female counterparts.