By Rachel Jacobson, Alliance for Feminist Movements, Co – Director

One of the great joys of working for the Alliance for Feminist Movements, is that I’m required to lift up and celebrate feminist movement successes. My (many) open tabs are full of posts and reports documenting our successes, so that I can share them widely.  

Recently, I eagerly read a recent blog post by the Center for Global Development on the rise of women political leaders. The CGD post rightly noted that norm changes about women and leadership “have changed drastically and rapidly in the past decades worldwide” and that these shifts have created a conducive environment for women political leaders to emerge. 

Hooray – I thought. Surely the next lines will recognize the role feminist movements have played in driving this norm change. But that recognition never came. Instead, the post continued to acknowledge that norms change, but seemingly all on their own, with only a passing reference to early activism in Latin America.

My next open tab provided a sharp contrast to this erasure. It was a new report from ALiGN on gender-based violence in West Africa. The report foregrounds the connection between feminist activism and the disruption of the gender norms that enable gender-based violence. In this report, norms don’t magically shift on their own – strong, diverse feminist movements anchor the transformation. (But they need more and more flexible resources to maintain their progress and move forward as the report rightly points out.)    

Reading these two pieces back-to-back I couldn’t help but lament how the widespread and embodied nature of our impact contributes to its invisibilization. If you look at the quantitative data alone you can clearly see the direct connection between norm change and the acceptance of women political leaders. But you entirely miss the how. Without that connection to movements you miss the daily efforts, the conversations and campaigns big and small, that do the hard work of transformation.  

We hear from our members across all our constituency groups that communicating our impact effectively in language that decision-makers can readily understand continues to be one of our major problems and that this challenge is likely to grow. For this reason, we dedicated one of our newly launched Learning and Solutions Hubs entirely to the issue of impact. 

In September the Impact Hub meets for the first time, and we are so excited to be able to share its learnings and findings with you all in the coming months! In the meantime, let’s keep celebrating our successes and making the invisible visible.