Policy hackathons: waste of time or fast track to innovation?

What happens when you put a hundred strangers working on gender equality together, over a whole weekend, and ask them to find solutions to some of the world’s most intractable problems?

That’s what I – and apparently the Swiss government - wanted to find out.

In Geneva, the city of international institutions, the question of progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is hot on the agenda. The UN has even set up a SDG acceleration lab – the first of its kind – which is now inspiring similar initiatives around the world.

Goal number 5, which focuses on gender equality and women's empowerment, is one of the hardest to meet. The World Economic Forum announced this year that things are now actually going backwards – the global gender gap is, for the first time, widening. If there ever was a time for innovative thinking, this is it.

Sponsored by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, a group of Swiss think tanks decided to try a new method of problem-solving – a three-day SDG Accelerator hackathon for gender equality set in Geneva’s very own “Impact Hub”, a large stone building in a trendy neighbourhood.

The idea was to ask large private- and public-sector organisations to propose tough gender equality challenges, and then find enough interesting and relevant people – mainly women, it turned out – willing to give up a weekend to solve them.

The challenges set for the teams of five ranged from the ordinary – Swisscom asked how to get women into leadership, Le Temps how to change media representations, and Hospice Général how to help mothers reintegrate into the workforce – to the slightly more creative. "How can we use humour as a tool in gender equality?" asked Gender and Mine Action. And, also a little out there, the challenge I had unwittingly set for Apolitical: how to close the gender gap in artificial intelligence and automation.

AI and automation and their implications for the future of work are hot and growing topics of conversation – and concern. Yet, the serious gendered implications of this new future of work have not had due scrutiny.

Twice as many women as men are likely to lose their jobs as automation replaces human labour. Women are more likely to work in easy-to-automate sectors like administration and textiles: 97% of cashiers are expected to lose their jobs in the coming years to automation, and 73% of cashiers are women.

These are not issues to be solved by an economics PhD student, a writer, an engineer, a woman from a fintech startup, and a gender project officer at a large international organisation in a mere 48 hours.

Technological innovation that destroys jobs also creates new ones, raising demand for skilled workers in technical, creative, and managerial fields. But men are concentrated in fields like tech and computer science - and are more likely to be managers or in higher-level positions, making it easier for them to take the new jobs.

And robots themselves can also be sexist: AI algorithms already exhibit racial and gender biases. Facial recognition can pose dangers for LGBTQ and other at-risk minority communities.

These are serious problems, and ones I pitched on the opening Friday evening in a speech to the conference. But, through two twelve-hour-long days of solutions brainstorming, I realised that they are not problems to be solved through a brief spurt of innovation or ingenuity.

Technological disruption, the structure of the labour market, and deep social inequalities like unpaid care work all require long-term, broad innovation and collaboration from governments, corporations and society. These are not issues to be solved by an economics PhD student, a writer, an engineer, a woman from a fintech startup, and a gender project officer at a large international organisation in a mere 48 hours.

Other groups had tasks more amenable to short bursts of creative thinking. The best idea – in response a challenge set around male perceptions – was a “gender footprint calculator”. Men can take the fun quiz - built on Harvard’s implicit bias test - on their phone or computer. A man predicts his result, then takes the quiz and challenges his perception of how well things are going. Questions range from “Have you promoted more men or women in the last year?” to “How many days a week do you pick your children up from school?”

An introduction to the new world of “impact hubs” and “innovation labs”, intense learning about AI and automation, and three days of food and wine - not to mention meeting so many interesting people willing to give up a precious weekend for the sake of gender equality - made the policy hackathon much less boring than it might sound.

If I were a public servant really intending to find innovative approaches to pressing challenges, this experience has taught me that throwing a slightly random group of strangers together over two pressured days of thinking may not be my route of choice.

But, if the aim is to build and strengthen a community of people working on a topic that is important to sponsors, present a city as an up-and-coming hub of innovation and progress, and spark some inspiration – and fun – then the concept should be here to stay.

(Picture credit: Think Tank Hub Geneva/Jerôme Favre)

Odette Chalaby
odette.chalaby@apolitical.co