Thread by @MForstater

Thread: going around saying something is toxic tends to make it more toxic, rather than less so.

Orgs & politics should be working to bring difficult issues back to a more normal level of disagreement.

The complete failure of orgs to do their job on this continues to shock

https://twitter.com/LucyHunterB/status/1393279944336322560

I am also an advocate of people sitting around talking for solving problems (what else is there?)

Orgs exist to do this - it's what justifies their overhead cost.

This is the office of CGD Europe where I used to work. You can see the Palace of Westminster from the windows

When I started talking about this it was with the naive hope that CGD might use its sunlit meeting room to host a discussion amongst development professionals about sex and gender in their orgs & policy advocacy.

It was the kind of thing we did

The reason why it's worth paying the overhead for orgs, careers, and credentials rather than an atomised gig economy workforce w transactional relationships is that it makes it safe for people to think and have conversations.

The slow burn escalating reaction to me, the way it has been ferociously defended by CGD & studiously ignored by the rest of the devp'ment sector is not a sign of the awfulness of what I said (despite the myths) but of th brokenness of incentives of the markets driving these orgs

People with career jobs in nice offices know they are not substantively more skilled than the 100s of hopefuls with insecure, gig economy incomes who could equally well do their job.

They got lucky and they value security. Because the alternative is scary.

And so the whole edifice of funding & orgs turns in on itself.

Unable to do the job of hosting the meetings & holding the space for debate, because their whole focus has become funding the overhead.

The funding streams incentivise isomorphic mimicry: orgs that look the part

Last week a "journalist" at Times Radio asked me "it's all very well having beliefs, but why couldn't you just keep them to yourself?"

My answer: because it matters.

Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose.

But somehow we have to rebuild these organisations' cultures or build new ones.

Because having organisations & professionals "faking it" destroys the value they are being paid to create

cgdev.org/blog/one-size-…

@RuthLevine5 @governwell @rambletastic @Integrilicious @alanhudson1 @nancybirdsall @bill_easterly

CGD at its best was not a place of people who are good with numbers but of people who are good at thinking about bureaucracies and incentives and people.

Making whole societies lie about the obvious reality of the two sexes is horribly corrupting of organisations.

But what allows this absurdity to take hold is not unique to this "toxic" topic but is about the vulnerability of bureaucracies.

#sexmatters