Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy Launches First Impact Report

Today, Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy (GCNP) released its first Impact Report, measuring progress made during its first year in advancing gender equity in the nuclear policy field.

GCNP was launched in November 2018 by NTI Vice President for Materials Risk Management Laura Holgate and Ploughshares Fund’s Michelle Dover. In just over a year, the project has grown to include more than 50 organizations whose heads have become Gender Champions by making voluntary “SMART” commitments to advance gender equity in their own organizations.

“The existential challenge of nuclear policy in all its dimensions—deterrence, nonproliferation, security, energy, disarmament, and so on—requires our best minds and our most committed participants,” write Holgate and Dover in the report’s introduction.

On an encouraging note, the Impact Report found that 95% of commitments made by Gender Champions were at least partially completed, including those ranging from holding sensitivity trainings to enforcing appropriate codes of conduct.

74% of Gender Champions successfully upheld the commitment to avoid speaking on single-gender panels.

“If we consider GCNP’s first year an experiment, the results captured in this report are proof positive that our hypothesis was correct. Voluntary commitments give Gender Champions a specific objective that they’re accountable for, and the results they’ve reported back have been nothing short of impressive,” said Jack Brosnan, NTI Program Officer.

While the Impact Report found mostly positive results, GCNP recognizes that much work remains to make gender equality a working reality in this challenging field, and effective change in an organization’s culture and behavior takes time. At the same time, the data collected for the report indicates that the GCNP impact model works and that supporting Gender Champions in making voluntary commitments is a workable model for creating durable change.

Read the report here.