I World
Searching For Equality
New book blasts Jewish gender inequity; seeks change.
Sue Fishkoff
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
I
San Francisco
is been 45 years since the U.S. Congress
passed the Equal Pay Act, making it
illegal to pay men more than women for
the same job.
Ifs been 44 years since Title VI of the
Civil Rights Act barred employment dis-
crimination on the basis of race or sex,
and the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission was set up to enforce it.
No one pretends, however, that gen-
der inequity has disappeared from the
American workplace. And it is just as perva-
sive in the Jewish workplace — even more
so, critics charge, than in fields such as law,
medicine and academia, areas that have
poured resources into closing the gender
gap in a way that Jewish organizations have
not.
Morlie Levin, the national executive
director of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist
Organization of America, spent 25 years
as a national security analyst at the Rand
Corp. before going into Jewish communal
work a decade ago. She is the wife of former
Detroiter Norman Levin.
"The Jewish community is a much more
gender-stratified community than any I
know, much more than the U.S. military;'
she says.
A new book, Leveling the Playing Field:
Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational
Life, aims to change that.
Published by a group that has long sought
to advance the cause of gender equity in
Jewish life, Leveling the Playing Field pro-
vides a how-to guide to gender equity for
Jewish professionals and the organizations
where they work.
It's not that women are absent from
Jewish life. They fill the pews of liberal
synagogues and make up most of the staff
at Jewish organizations. More than half the
new non-Orthodox rabbis and most of the
cantors are women.
Jewish summer camps and youth groups
are overwhelmingly female. In fact, the
liberal movements, particularly the Reform,
are struggling to bring their boys and men
back into religious life.
But the top echelons of Jewish communal
life — the executives of major Jewish orga-
nizations and the leaders of the large federa-
tions — are still male.
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April 10 • 2008
"I've done studies of rabbis, of federa-
tions, of JCC professionals; and wherever we
look, men occupy more prestigious and bet-
ter-compensated positions': says sociologist
Steven M. Cohen, whose studies are cited in
the new book.
"What's bad and wrong for America is
bad and wrong for American Jewry': says
Cohen of Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion.
Leveling the Playing Field, produced by
the group Advancing Women Professionals
and the Jewish Community, along with
Cambridge Leadership Associates, lays out
the theoretical basis for creating gender
equity in Jewish organizations, showing that
it is not only right, its good business.
For example, the book cites a 2004 study
of more than 350 Fortune 500 companies
which found that those with the greatest
percentage of women on top management
teams performed better financially than
companies with the fewest women leaders.
The book then provides concrete steps
that women — and men — can take to
move their own Jewish organizations onto
a more gender-equal footing, from building
alliances to setting up in-house mentoring
programs for promising young employees.
In addition, Advancing Women
Professionals will provide mentoring sup-
port and a conversation kit to help people
trying to effect such organizational changes.
Cindy Chazan, the director of alumni and
community development for the Wexner
Foundation and a former executive director
of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford,
Conn., has spoken about gender inequity at
Jewish conferences since the late 1970s.
Chazan says this is the first book to lay
out specific steps for changing the Jewish
world's culture, and the first to link the issue
so clearly to organizational effectiveness.
"Everyone wants to run a more effective
organization': she says. "Everything up to
now has failed" to close the gender gap.
"This book can help. It holds up a mirror
to Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders,
so they can assess gender inequity in their
organizations and improve it."
If women are so prevalent in every other
aspect of American Jewish life, what is keep-
ing them out of the top positions?
Sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman of
Brandeis University says it's partly about
money, that men don't want to give up the
lucrative positions. But it's also about pres-
tige.
"Men with power have been very cautious
about allowing women to penetrate the
highest level of Jewish communal leader-
ship because they're afraid the same thing
will happen as elsewhere in Jewish life," says
Fishman, who just completed a study on
gender imbalance in Jewish life.
"Once the field becomes feminized, it will
be very difficult to re-engage mee
Shifra Bronznick, one of three authors
of Leveling the Playing Field, says the will
to change is more prevalent now, but the
change has to come from below — the men
and women coming up within these orga-
nizations.
"People are ready to be part of a change
initiative': she says."This book is aimed at
giving them the tools."
Bronznick, who wrote the book with Didi
Goldenhar and Marty Linsley, is the found-
ing president of the 8-year-old advocacy
group Advancing Women Professionals and
the Jewish Community.
She has spent years working on gender
inequity issues, devoting much of the early
2000s trying to convince Jewish CEOs and
communal leaders to take the problem seri-
ously.
Chazan says that such efforts have a bet-
ter chance of succeeding today because
more Jewish resources are being directed at
the problem and researchers such as Cohen,
Bronznick and Fishman are producing stud-
ies that support the need for change.
"There are statistics connected to the sen-
timent; Chazan says. "People are suddenly
sitting up and listening."
Many of the steps outlined in the new
book have been piloted by key Jewish orga-
nizations, working together with Advancing
Women Professionals. The group collaborat-
ed on a United Jewish Communities gender
equity project involving 14 federations and
worked with regional directors of the United
Synagogue for Conservative Judaism to cre-
ate rabbinic search criteria aimed at hiring
more women rabbis.
In May 2004, the Cleveland Jewish
Community Federation assembled 80 local
Jewish leaders to discuss the need to bring
more women onto all agency boards.
With backing from the top federation
leadership — men and women — the
group launched a program working for gen-
der equity throughout the federation and
its affiliates that pays particular attention to
strategic and decision-making positions. A
mentoring program has drawn 140 young
women, targeted as the community's future
Jewish leadership.
"We've come a long way': says Erika
Rudin-Luria, the director of planning at the
Cleveland federation.
This kind of systemic, merit-based, col-
laborative approach is what "Leveling the
Playing Field" advocates.
"We want to give people strategies and
tools to advocate for systemic change with-
out being marginalized, without people
saying, 'You're not committed to our Jewish
mission, you're only interested in yourself,"
Bronznick says.
"The ways Jewish organizations need to
change to advance women are the ways they
need to change to advance their work." Ei