In this 27th episode of the IGC podcast, Hannah Reinl meets Dr. Robert Floyd, Executive Secretary of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization and International Gender Champion.
They discuss how leaders and organisations can effectively and intentionally promote gender parity by cultivating female talent and dismantling roadblocks to women's career development through targeted actions.
TRANSCRIPT
Hannah Reinl
Hello, and welcome to the April episode of our International Gender Champions podcast. My name is Hannah Reinl from the IGC Secretariat in Geneva. Today, we are virtually traveling to Vienna, where I'm meeting International Gender Champion and Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban-Treaty Organization, Dr. Robert Floyd. And so just before hitting the recording button, Dr. Floyd told me that he is a big fan of interactive dialogue in these kinds of interview setting. So with that in mind, Dr. Floyd, usually I introduce the guests on our podcast with a little bio myself, but I was wondering if maybe you would like to introduce yourself to the audience.
Dr. Robert Floyd
Hannah, it's a pleasure to be speaking with you and to our International Gender Champions. I've been the Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban-Treaty Organization since August of 2021. Less than two years. Prior to that I was a senior government official in Australia working on non-proliferation and disarmament matters. And the first half of my career, I was a research scientist. I'm a biological scientist by training, but then moved into government and security where science meets security and meets policy and politics. And so the second half of my career has been much more in that political and diplomatic space.
Hannah Reinl
It's great to have you with us today. The topic we chose for today's episode is “Removing Roadblocks and Cultivating Female Talent”. Now, your career has pretty much been rooted in STEM, which for the audience is short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And traditionally, if we look at STEM professions, that's a domain where the presence of women remains still very limited, whether we look at the academic or the professional level. And I took a look at your personal commitments as a gender champion, before reaching out to you. And I'm quoting directly here, you're saying that you want to “cultivate early career individuals, especially women and people from developing countries, and ensure that they have access to meaningful job experience”. So, I'm curious to hear from you what you think are the main barriers women face when pursuing STEM related careers, and also how we can achieve higher employment of women in these areas.
Dr. Robert Floyd
One of the things I really enjoy about being the Executive Secretary of the CTBTO is the opportunity to actually promote and profile and prioritize some of these gender issues. It's a great opportunity that we can try and make progress in this organization and for women of the world. To me, it has been very important in the STEM area, to not just accept that we will get a biased set of applicants for jobs where it is dominantly male and a smaller number of females, but to actually then work further back down the pipeline. And to try and see how do we prepare more women or inspire more women to think about the CTBTO as a place of employment, and to see science, technology, engineering, mathematics, expressed in an area such as establishing a comprehensive ban against nuclear testing for the good of all humanity. We have some wonderful women on our staff here. And we are aiming to have a higher percentage of women on our staff, every one of them will be recruited on their competence. We will not be recruiting for anything less than competence. But we are actively working earlier in the pipeline to see more well qualified competitive women applying for jobs and then being selected and appointed and enriching our workforce. It's not good enough for me to just say, oh, well, only 28% applied. And that bit.
Hannah Reinl
That's great to hear. And I'm particularly happy that you're mentioning the piece on your recruiting based on competence. I've worked a lot on gender parity before in different organizational settings. And I feel the main argument against gender parity initiatives is to say, oh, but then we're just promoting because of somebody's gender and not based on their merit or their competence. And that's just lazy thinking, in my opinion, because it's true that organizations have to do the work back in their systems and their structures and their policies to make sure that from the beginning, we actually have an equal talent pool that we reach out to. So it's really not enough not to go to the kind of more systematic issues here and to just look at who's eventually in the candidate pool that's coming to your organization in the first place.
Dr. Robert Floyd
It's not just lazy thinking, I think it's actually detrimental to our organizations. We need to engage, all of the talent of humanity, and that that is of, of all genders. This is not good for my organization, or the states that are part of this organization, if we're not actually engaging with the best of people.
But one of the things I'd love to tell you about though, Hannah, is our mentoring program. Because we recognize that many people can have base level qualifications, they can have the education qualifications, but does that make them a competitive candidate? And the answer is, not necessarily, because there are other experiences and other professional and personal developments that can make a person a more competitive candidate. And this is why we have invested in our mentorship program, where we have chosen a number of young females from the developing world, from less represented regions of the world, and our staff base here in CTBTO, to be mentees, to be mentored by staff within our organization, which then allows them to get a broader range of experiences, skills, exposure, and personal and professional development, which actually then positions them to be more competitive as candidates.
So even if we've only got 20 something, 30 something percent female applicants, if those applicants are top shelf, then they come through in their competency-based selection, and they get appointed. So that is our goal. And we have had a wonderful response here in the first year of our program, which was last year, we chose 12 mentees, there were quite a number of people that applied, I think last year, it was 91 applications. This year, after we opened the applications in three weeks, we had 136 applications. This is good and bad at the same time is that we can only take a limited number in our mentor program. But the demand is great.
But one of the good news stories is that within the context of International Gender Champions, we actually then developed last year the opportunity for some of our mentees to get involved in our training programs and some of our workshops and capacity building activities. And that was then sponsored by various of the Permanent Missions here. And in fact, one of the ambassadors, the Ambassador from Mexico, ended up setting as one of his International Gender Champion goals, the support of young women from his country to be involved in some of our onsite inspection training programs. And so we then have different International Gender Champions coming together with their separate goals to build a greater outcome. We've now had some of our mentees being trained as surrogate inspectors through our onsite inspection program, as a result of the mentorship activity. And then building on top of the mentorship activity, to give them opportunity for this broader training. Surely, that makes them more competitive, too.
Hannah Reinl
That's great to hear that you're integrating the different approaches, and also that you're setting an example for other champions, for other institutions. And I think we've seen the ripple effects even here in Geneva with more and more people committing to mentoring younger women particularly, and really, maybe just giving this extra space for personal and professional development that is relevant and also somebody who's an advocate for you and a sponsor in a way and who will open doors that might not exist otherwise.
Dr. Robert Floyd
Let me tell you one other aspect of it, that didn't surprise me necessarily, but I was very pleased to hear. Research shows that men, for whatever reason, seem to be happier to be self-promoting than women. And so they will see themselves as competitive and well qualified for some position more so than women will. And it's only to do with their own self-perception. And one of the things that we had from one of our mentees last year was her summary at the end of her mentorship program is that she now saw herself in a different way, as more competent, more qualified and more capable than she had seen herself before. Now, when I hear that, I am so glad, because I wonder whether some of this disparity in the number of women that apply is actually about self-belief. And that's not about competence.
Hannah Reinl
I was just going to say she was probably competent, qualified, capable before and that's just about unlocking this confidence in young women particularly. I'm aware that you also have another initiative for Daughter’s Day, I believe you call it at the CTBTO. Would you like to tell me more about that?
Dr. Robert Floyd
Daughter’s Day is one of our initiatives and it's with the Vienna based organizations all up, it's not just with the CTBTO, where we invite the daughters of staff and some other people that are connected with the organization, aged 11 to 16, that have an interest in technology, innovation, etc, to come along and to be involved in hands-on activities. It's a practical engagement, we actually get them kitted out for inspection activities and use some of the equipment, you know, that would be used for detection and the like; they love using these things. It's a practical hands-on experience. But we do this with the International Atomic Energy Agency, with UNIDO, with the various UN organizations here in Vienna. And it is just wonderful to see girls, again, stimulating their imagination, and their image of what they could do with their careers and into the future. And if someday some of them ended up being recruited into this organization, I would be delighted. But it's something that we can do locally. It gives them a great experience and a better mental picture as to what a job working in science, technology engineering, maths could be like. And it isn't just about the boys.
Hannah Reinl
I really love that, because it's such a serious commitment to really building the talent pipeline from very early on. I think it matters, which role models we kind of set from the very beginning and which opportunities we show us something accessible to young girls from a very early age on.
Dr. Robert Floyd
We also have another activity that you probably are aware of. We run a youth group, the CTBTO youth group, CYG, we call it, actually consists of about 1200 young people from about 120 countries. Now, this is not limited to women, this is youth, but it ties in about early career and creating that pipeline and creating an engagement and understanding of the important issues of establishing a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing. But I find it so encouraging to see these young people, men and women, that are focusing and are passionate about a world free of nuclear testing, and ultimately a world free of nuclear weapons. And some of those then come on to staff. But it's about you mentioned the pipeline, which made me think about the CYG, the youth group is early part of that pipeline.
And so we invest in providing them with some training, some opportunity and encourage them in advocacy and articulating these important issues to their governments and other fora, in government and outside of government.
And we also have another group we call YPN, the Young Professionals Network, these are more the scientific people. And recognizing that it's great for them to get together and to network and to share experiences, insights, ideas, and even develop collaborative activities. So the Young Professionals Network, young scientists, early career scientists, then able to speak together about how they're applying their science to the cause of a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing and the verification system that we established. So for us, the pipeline is really important. And we need to see young people being involved in the organization as well, because that is diversity that we must tap into quite in addition to gender.
Hannah Reinl
And that's, you mentioned that before that there's this urgency almost for international organizations to tap into diverse talent and I think there's two pieces to it right. There’s the business case, very straightforward, that having a more diverse workplace is very likely to increase productivity, to enhance the quality of your work. The other part is really also just this responsibility that I believe international organizations have, because we are considered the international standard setting institutions. And so it's almost like a moral normative imperative to champion these issues and be very outspoken about it. And that starts of course, with the executive leadership, at the very top.
Dr. Robert Floyd
Yeah, and I'm glad to see that organizations like International Gender Champions, is encouraging leaders, executives of organizations to take a leading role. There is no more powerful influence in an organization than the Chief Executive. And, you know, I love seeing the passion and the commitment of my fellow International Gender Champions, as they're committed to this cause to do with gender balance, parity and full engagement. But, as always seems to happen whenever we meet as International Gender Champions, it ends up being about diversity and inclusion more broadly than just on gender. Which is also good and helpful. I love seeing that that is the heartbeat of so many of the International Gender Champions. This is not just a program. But this is something which really matters.
Hannah Reinl
I know that CTBTO has set ambitious gender parity targets, and from what I understand you're well on track towards achieving them or have achieved them already. But I also know that you're going beyond this statistical, numeric piece. And you're really striving to create a workplace that is truly inclusive, and enabling for everybody who works at CTBTO. So I was hoping you could share a little bit more about the other initiatives that you have in place.
Dr. Robert Floyd
Right, there's so many things I could tell you about. On the issue of targets, I don't have a published target of achieving parity and professional and higher levels within this organization by a certain date. But I do have a process. And my process is really simple. It is that when the cream of the crop in any selection process come to my desk for consideration and final selection, the first thing I do of those that are all considered to be appointable to a position, is that I look at gender. And I simply ask the question for those that are female, why not? And we've managed to see in a space of a very short period of time, the proportion of women in our professional and higher levels rise from 31%, to now being just over 40%. And that's in about a two-year period. We've still got work to do. But we're working on that and going higher.
But let me give you an example of other things that go beyond. A very recent one. One of our flagship events is our science and technology conference. We hold it every two years, it's coming up in June this year. And we invited for speaking roles and panelist roles, an equal number of women and men. And yet we found that more women were declining the invitation to participate. Now this is sponsored and paid for. So that is not an economic issue that is impeding them, but more women were declining than men. And so, with the organizers, we're now looking into that and reaching back to those women to find out why are you needing to decline? And is there anything we can do that would help make it more feasible or attractive or possible for them to participate? And you know what, Hannah, we find that often, it's actually other family or domestic responsibilities. That the women are saying, I can't come away for a week and do this or I have childcare needs. And so we're now going back to those people and saying, Well, can you come for one day or two? We'd love to have you here. And if that works for the rest of balance of life, well, great, so be it. Even yesterday, we were looking at, well, could we provide childcare, you know, to assist people to come to a meeting. So I illustrate this more as a way of thinking: don't accept the numbers and the trends. And we're not going to accept that less women will accept our offers for them to come and speak or be panelists at our conference. We want to push back on that. Find out why. And is there anything we can do to address the why so that we could have more women participate. So my encouragement to other International Gender Champions or others in different organizations is, let's not accept some of these trends, some of these imbalances, but let's go deeper, and see what we can do to make this a more inclusive, supportive, diverse workplace. It's a lot of fun.
Hannah Reinl
Thank you so much, Robert, for sharing your views, your opinions, and especially this very inspiring piece at the end for other champions, so here is to going deeper, to really tackling the root causes. And I hope, this works as a piece of encouragement for the champions on the network. Thank you so much for joining us.