What's the Difference Between WPS and DEIA?
Part of my "Frequently Asked Questions" Series
In the eight years I’ve been working on Women, Peace & Security (WPS), one of the most common questions my colleagues and I get asked is: How is WPS different from diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts? The short answer: DEIA efforts are fundamental for effective WPS implementation, but WPS is much, much broader than those efforts alone.
Before I get to the long answer, if you’ve stumbled across this post as a WPS newbie, please take a short detour to my previous post, “What is Women, Peace & Security?” for a quick primer before continuing.
What is DEIA?
I want to start by providing some operational definitions to level understanding. Decades of academic research, organizational and public policies, and other work on DEIA will provide slight variations on the definition of these terms. Since I support the U.S. Government in my work, for the purposes of this post, the following definitions are pulled almost verbatim from the U.S. Executive Order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce, which I think adequately covers down on the basics.
Diversity: the practice of including the many communities, identities, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, abilities, cultures, and beliefs of [all] people
Equity: the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals
Inclusion: the recognition, appreciation, and use of the talents and skills of [persons] of all backgrounds
Accessibility: the design, construction, development, and maintenance of facilities, information and communication technology, programs, and services so that all people, including people with disabilities, can fully and independently use them
DEIA efforts are therefore typically about building organizational, institutional, and/or community capacity to meaningfully engage everyone.
WPS: More than DEIA alone
At its core, WPS addresses women’s continued underrepresentation in peace and security sectors. Therefore, those entities that work within these sectors (such as governments, foreign and public policy institutions, defense and law enforcement agencies, academia, think tanks, civil society organizations, etc.) can and should apply DEIA principles to promote women’s meaningful participation internally in support of WPS.
However, increasing women’s participation is still only one component of a much broader WPS framework. You’ll recall that WPS also calls for peace and security practitioners to adopt gender perspectives, among other things. When I deliver Gender Advisor and Gender Focal Point training alongside my colleagues, we emphasize how gender is a key characteristic of the operational environment and help students consider gender as it relates to military operations, activities, and investments. This is what we call “operationalizing gender” and is an example of gender mainstreaming.
DEIA practitioners, even those within the defense sector, should not be expected to also be trained operational Gender Advisors—this is a learned and applied capability relevant for operators. Further, focusing solely on increasing women’s participation does not guarantee gender perspectives will be mainstreamed. And this is true for any institution interested in developing gender-informed work to support WPS. Women’s perspectives are not synonymous with gender perspectives, as gender is not synonymous with women. So a focus on promoting women’s participation through DEIA efforts alone will be insufficient to fully achieve the objectives outlined in the international WPS framework. Organizations interested in fully implementing WPS should therefore be careful not to conflate WPS with DEIA.
DEIA: More than WPS alone
It’s equally important to highlight that DEIA goes far beyond supporting WPS objectives. DEIA efforts are at the heart of creating environments that recognize and capitalize on the wide range of backgrounds, experiences, skillsets, and perspectives of all persons and are certainly not limited to women.
Substantive DEIA programming also recognizes that demographic data and numerical metrics alone don’t tell the whole story. There’s been a great deal of discussion more recently around the concept of belonging as central to DEIA. Everyone should be able to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day and feel like valued and respected members of the team. Successful implementation of WPS should therefore leverage DEIA efforts that can help assess meaningful participation and engagement.
Better together: How WPS and DEIA can and should inform one another
DEIA efforts are critical to build institutional capacity to support women’s meaningful participation as part of broader WPS efforts. Further, the tools utilized to apply gender perspectives to peace and security sectors can also be applied to DEIA efforts. This is where I see the greatest opportunities to leverage both DEIA and WPS principles together.
Above all, gender analysis should inform DEIA efforts and vice versa. This is because our organizations and institutions operate within a broader external cultural context while simultaneously creating and reproducing unique internal cultures. And we can (and should!) turn a gender lens onto these environments.
So what is a gender analysis? It’s really just a structured examination of gender within a given system (whether that’s a population center like a community, city, or nation, or a more discrete entity like an organization or workplace). It often includes examining cultural norms, values, and beliefs; the gender-differentiated impacts of laws, policies, and regulations; and formal and informal power structures.
Importantly, a gender analysis is not just about looking at the roles or experiences of women. It’s about exploring the expectations of men and women, as well as the relationships and dynamics between them. When applied holistically, a gender analysis will also examine how gender affects those who do not identify along a strict sexual binary and will consider how intersecting identities (such as race, class, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.) factor in.
When it comes to conducting a gender analysis on population centers, publicly available data, including data collected by civil society organizations, are often used to support these assessments. But relevant data are often not as easily accessible for more discrete entities, like single companies or organizations. This is where DEIA efforts become critical, because they often involve conducting surveys, assessments, and other methods of qualitative and quantitative data collection to better understand and address issues facing certain groups.
Data collected from DEIA efforts can be used to develop a deliberate and comprehensive gender analysis associated with the internal organizational environment. But this must also be examined alongside a gender analysis of the external environment. This is the only way to identify root causes of gender-related inequity and develop realistic solutions from within an organization.
Need a good example? Dr. Dave Smith and Dr. W. Brad Johnson, co-authors of Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women and Good Guys: How Men Can be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace, do a phenomenal job applying a gender lens in their work when it comes to understanding and overcoming barriers that affect workplace relationships between men and women. (I make no profits by recommending these books but encourage you to check them out.)
Key Takeaways
WPS and DEIA are complementary but distinct efforts. Not all WPS implementation involves DEIA, and not all DEIA efforts are related to WPS. But the same application of gender perspectives that help WPS practitioners better understand and address security issues and core drivers of global instability can also be applied by DEIA practitioners to better understand and address complex organizational issues and core drivers of institutional inequity. Further, DEIA efforts can and should inform WPS implementation. This is because conceptions around gender affect everyone and at every level.
Particularly as WPS continues to gain more visibility, and as more organizations are training Gender Advisors and Gender Focal Points to build the capacity to do this work, I see the need for greater collaboration between (not consolidation of) trained WPS and DEIA practitioners. Our communities can benefit so much from a mutually informed approach.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense.