Skimming off the top (part 3)

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this current series of posts I presented some data and insights on the first two-thirds of the survey questions.  This final part brings the ‘skimming’ to a close and my next posts will drill deeper into the factors of gender and race/ethnicity and also into the changes in levels of idealism reported by aid and development workers.

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Q51 and Q52 asked about the relationship between the “field” and “home office” with Q53 allowing for narrative responses to the questions.  Q51 asked in general about the degree to which the field and home office are in sync regarding important matters like priorities and processes, and Q52 made it more specific asking about this relationship in the organization with with they were working.

The numbers were striking similar in both with the mode (by far, about 62%) being the response “The field and home office are sometimes in sync regarding important matters like priorities and processes.”

Below are some illustrative comments, some of which providing good indication as to why 38% said that they were “rarely in sync”.  I find it interesting that the word count on this open ended question was one of the highest in the entire survey; many people had lots to say about this topic.

•  “F@$&@ng HQ” we have all heard that in the field. I think a big problem is depersonalization. HQ becomes a machine not a person and vice versa. People would be a lot nicer if they there was a clear face behind the email. Technology had helped communication move forward in incredible ways but it has also created a perverse form of bullying and consequence-less communication. (I might have invented that word sorry). As a whole it isn’t as bad as it is made out to be. They are running multi million dollar organizations after all. But as a field worker I wish the media and events team came and experienced the field before they started b&@&hing :)”  (26+yo male expat aid worker)
• “In a dream world the home office would have a clue what is happening in the field and the field team would manage expectations successfully. However, good orgs would trust that their field staff is working and they would also send their home office staff to collaborate and get a clue about life and expectations outside the western world/the cushy home base in a major African city. People who are not in the field (or who haven’t been in the field for more than 2+ years) should not dictate processes to people doing the work day in and day out in the field.” (31+yo female expat aid worker)
• “There is often a large disconnect between the two and while field offices are more intent on doing, HQ’s can often be more intent on process – usually implementing systems which are time heavy and not that useful for the field. Field offices can see HQ management/advisors as pestering, and HQ’s can see field staff as renegades. However, having one good liaison officer between the two can make all the difference, ensuring better relationships and better outcomes for both.” (35+yo female working in HQ)

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Corruption.  Big topic there, and also one where respondents had much to say.  Q53 asked  “To what degree do you have to deal with corruption within the organization with which you are affiliated?” and Q54 “To what degree do you have to deal with corruption within the region you work?” and the modal response to both was “I have to deal with corruption within my [organization/region] occasionally.”  Yes, that is vague, but in a previous post I drilled into the data and presented some narrative responses.

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Q55 asked  “How would you characterize the overall inter-agency coordination and cooperation among the humanitarian aid agencies with which you are familiar?” and though the most common answer was “Inter-agency coordination and cooperation are moderately high; occasion problems.” (44%) the next highest (at 42%) was “Inter-agency coordination and cooperation are low; frequent problems.”  In retrospect this is clearly one of the questions that should have allowed for a narrative response. The stress caused by low inter-agency coordination and cooperation is likely at the root of both loss of idealism and general levels of burn out among aid and development workers.  This question merits additional research to be sure.

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Although most  (39%) respondents answered “Increasing levels of corporate influence are having negligible impact on the effectiveness of humanitarian aid efforts” for Q56 the remaining 61% was nearly evenly divided among those who selected “overall positive impact”  (29%) and those that chose “overall negative impact” (32%). No matter the perception is on this particular question I think that the trend is clear and irreversible:  there will be increasing levels of corporate influence in the aid and development industry into the future.

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I will be making an entire post on the reaction to Q56 related to MONGO’s (“What is your general view of so-called MONGOs (My Own NGO) or other smaller humanitarian aid work entities?”), but just to give you a preview here are a couple comments, the first two of which are very, ah, critical and the third maybe a bit more representative.

• “I think that if every overly bright, well-dressed 20something would just get together and co-run the skinny jeans appreciation society in their respective countries, the rest of us could put all that money and press to actual use.” (26+yo female working in HQ)
• “Mongos are started by young, green, idealistic expats. Often funded by daddy and his friends, MONGOs are a faster, easier way to humanitarian glory than throwing yourself into the large and comptetitive sea of humanitarian recruitment.” (35yo+ female expat aid worker)
• “I think MONGOs like small businesses begin when the larger NGOs or companies don’t listen to a good idea. Of course there is that bit of hubris in being able to say back home I have my own NGO. I think a more realistic term would be “my own short term project” like most start ups unless they are bought out (or funded) by a larger organization they won’t last long. I think any large INGO would be wise to create a space for ideas and innovation in programming to be heard from all members of staff not only the grants and program development people. This would help the INGO to grow and develop better programs while keeping their staff from quitting to start their MONGOs.” (26+yo male expat aid worker)

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Q59 and Q60 ended the survey by asking about the overall direction of humanitarian aid work offering three response choices then a space for further comment.  The modal response  at 66% was “Humanitarian aid work is having and will continue to have a moderate positive impact on the lives of more and more people.”  Not overly positive, that.  And so we end with some aid worker voices on our future, some of which are flip and humorous, some sober. But all are thoughtful, methinks.

• “Humanitarian work is going the way of the dinosaur or jersey’s free of logos … soon enough, it will all be green-washing by some corporation to make themselves or others feel good about how the help people. The end-of-history is starting to subsume humanitarian work; eg., capitalism is dollar-for-dollar far larger than any aid agency, even in the poorest areas.” (36+yo male HQ worker)
• “I really hope it will have more impact on the lives of more and more people. But nowadays it is more and more linked with political and economic agendas of the “powerful” countires so it is loosing its credibility. The use of the army also to bring humanitarian relief is it complicating and confusing people about what humanitarian work is.”  (46+yo female expat aid worker)
• “We are like the frontier doctors– right now we are “bloodletting” and have no clue how to help people, although we may accidentally have a positive effect. But, our efforts will enable future generations to learn from our mistakes– at least we are doing something!” (31+yo female expat aid worker)

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So, that’s a bit of skimming done.  On to deeper drilling.  Email me if you have questions or comments.

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Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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Skimming off the top (part 2)

In my last post I began ‘skimming off the top’ of the data, highlighting what are the common/modal responses to most questions.  As promised here’s part 2 covering more of the questions.

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Questions 33-38 all focused on a what I believe is a constant -though evolving- issue for most aid workers, namely how to communicate what they do to those most important to them:  their significant others, children, family and friends. We all have a basic need to be understood by those around us, and the closer that person is to us, the more important that need.  All aid and development workers tend to compartmentalize to a greater or lesser extent just to get by, but the coping mechanism of separating the ‘job me’ and the ‘relationship me’ is inherently disingenuous and potentially a red flag in any relationship.  Being in a primary group with someone means that by definition you share your emotional lives, and that clearly would include what happens to you at work.

Q33 asked about the difficulty in explaining to non-aid worker non-significant other adult family members the nature of the work being done in aid and development.  By a small margin, the modal response was “I have some difficulty explaining my job, but it can be done” (38%) with a close second  (37%) saying “I have some difficulty explaining my job, and can only articulate a general sense of what I do.”

These responses illustrate some complexities and differing perspectives:

• “Family at home don’t have a reference frame for what it means to live in the places I do. They lose interest very quickly when I try to discuss my job, so I keep it general and very light.” (31+yo male expat aid worker)
• “Tried and failed to come up with the elevator pitch, failed to come up with the 5 minute pitch even. Have boiled it down to just “economics” [which] means very little and no one asks follow up questions.”  (30yo female expat aid worker)
• “My adult family members question the difference between development work and the invasion of Afghanistan, feeling both are western imperialism – one just happens to be at gun point.” (31+yo male HQ worker)

This last response raises a host of issues related to the complexities of not just explaining one’s job but also the risk of having to defend it as well.  This is an issue well worth further examination and explication.

Q35 asked, “Which statement below best describes your ability to explain to your significant other the nature of your job?” and by far the most common response was “I have some difficulty explaining my job, but it can be done.”  The results of this question were confounded by the fact that many aid workers reported not having a significant other and/or their significant other also works in the same or very similar field.

Here are a couple illustrative narrative responses, the second one containing a gem of insight about aid workers in general:

• “The significant other also has a high-stress job and is quite smart – so I make comparisons. Plus, he’s actually interested so it helps.” (31+yo female HQ worker)
• “My husband is not an aid worker but is a human rights advocate and has worked in the sector for some years before he became an academic. He still doesn’t understand nuts-and-bolts things about my job but he understands the big moving pieces and it helps tremendously to talk with him at a more philosophical level; in some ways easier than talking with other aid workers – we are an idiosynchratic bunch with lots of competing motivations.” (35+ yo female expat aid worker)

Q’s 37 & 38 focused on explaining the work the respondent dies to children in their lives (“non-adult family members) with a somewhat predictable -but none the less distressing- majority indicating that “I don’t even try to explain my job.”

This 35+ yo female expat aid worker, though certainly not representative of many in her same situation makes a wonderful point.

“My children (5 and 7) think my job is to work on a computer. During my last field posting, I took them to project sites from time to time which helped them connect the dots. But interestingly, through their eyes they did not see the poverty or the “despair” that NGOs like to market to their constituents – they played with other children, ran around together, they connected in a human way that we “aid workers” often fail to do.”

Though the work carries with it some liabilities, the overwhelming majority (80%!) respondents to Q39 said that if someone close to them (a child or mentee) wanted to become a humanitarian aid worker they would you encourage him/her to do so with some qualifications.  So, what I take from that is although it is tough work -emotionally, intellectually and physically- most aid and development workers would recommend this ‘line of work.”  Indeed.

For more information on the questions above (and others) I present some quantitative data and offer comment relevant to male-female differences in a previous post.

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The next four questions, Q40-43, each merit a detailed examination.  The two key  questions were “To what extent has your gender been a factor in your humanitarian aid work experience?” and “To what extent has your race/ethnicity/cultural identify been a factor in your humanitarian aid work experience?”  Please look for future posts on these in the near future. In a reversal to the sprint of “skimming off the top” here are all responses:

“To what extent has your gender been a factor in your humanitarian aid work experience?”

“To what extent has your race/ethnicity/cultural identify been a factor in your humanitarian aid work experience?”

You’ll have to return to the blog later for some of the narrative responses.  They are full of insight and contain good doses of humor.

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Why do aid workers become ex-aid workers (Q44)?  By a small margin, the modal answer was “Burn out: cumulative stress of the job, personal crisis related to on-the-job experiences, etc. become too much to continue.”

Here’s one of many articulate responses:

I don’t think that burn out is the right term but it is hard to both stay authentic to the mission /stay proximal to the problem and also have influence on the big picture (which happens often away from the problem) and also have a safe environment to create and maintain some kind of stable family/community be that a spouse/children or some other kind of modern family. (36+yo female  HQ worker)

When asked what they thought their reason would be for leaving this kind of work  (Q46), the modal response was “Leave the aid sector entirely to pursue a career in another field.” Again, here is just one of many, many thoughtful and articulate responses, this one from a 30+yo female expat aid worker:

“Probably a combination of factors – disillusionment, search for something more stable where I could have a network of friends/family/community, tiredness of endless new beginnings, all of which will probably require pursuing career in another field.”

Questions 47-49 continue the line of questioning about aid workers leaving the industry and will be treated in depth in a later post.

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So, lots to consider above.  In the next post I’ll complete the “skimming” with Part 3.  In the meantime, let me know if you have questions or comments.  I can be reached here.

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Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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Skimming off the top (or, alternately, modal muddle, Part 1)

What so far has come from our survey that may be of interest to those who recruit and employ development and aid workers around the world?

The above is a relevant question, and I will need to get into drill more into the data to arrive at a truly useful answer to that question.  In the meantime here is a sense of what the most common/modal answers were to many of the questions.

So, ‘skimming off’ the modal numbers to this point, our typical respondent is a masters-level educated 30+ year old white female expat aid worker working in the field for a non-faith based “big box” organization from the US or UK that is in a relationship (though no children) and has done work related travel more than 20 times outside of her home country and been deployed at least once for more than 2 years doing development work.

She became an an worker because she was “following my dream to provide aid to less fortunate” but found that response too limited and in the provided space wrote something like “Above responses are fairly stereotypical and surely apply to some, but I imagine most of us fall in between several of those and other reasons. I always wanted to work in war zones, as a doctor then when I was a very young child, and help the people living in those contexts. Discipline has changed, motivations are more nuanced, but as some always wanted to be lawyers or teachers, I wanted to do humanitarian work.” (36yo female expat aid worker)

Her view is overwhelmingly that being a humanitarian aid worker carries a higher risk of burnout than other professions and has used an array of coping mechanisms to deal with stress/burnout/loss of idealism but her “go to” is physical release (e.g., yoga, running, etc.), though she used the provided space to mention that talking to friends and using social media help (“social release”). (Q26)

Here’s a detailed response from a 30+yo female expat: “Coping with loss of idealism – my main coping mechanism is sharing with other people, obviously with those mostly in the sector/expats who understand and who have similar problem/doubts. It’s a constant path to find answers. Coping with stress is again mainly through social interaction, talking to close people (if they are there) who understand. The crucial part is that they have to have a similar experience, otherwise it’s not possible that they understand and help. Stress coping is complemented by a bit of exercise. Burnout coping is most difficult – too much work to take sufficient holidays. Often leads to “shutting off” as many interactions with the host country as possible. Not a good way, but haven’t found better. Besides time off, of course.” (Q27)

Her level of idealism is lower now than when she first became a humanitarian aid worker and wrote comments like

• “I’m still pretty idealistic about human beings and their potential for beauty, generosity, and progress. I no longer believe aid work has anything to do with bringing these things about.” (36yo male working at HQ)
• “Programs many times are written to fit the Donor and the implementing Agency and they tend to forget why, for whom the program is meant. Millions are spent yearly due to bad program proposals and unrealistic objectives. Many time it is better just to divide the cost of implementing the program that using the money to “try to implement” something that is not implementable.” (31+yo female expat)
• “I keep going back and forth. I believe like I still have strong ideals, but the frustration and the reality on the ground makes me waver sometimes.” (31+yo female expat)

She likes what she does as an aid worker to a great extent (Q28), but it is complicated as seen in this comment from a 25+yo female expat: “People ask whether I ‘enjoy’ or ‘like’ what I do. I always find that a very hard question to answer. Enjoy? No, not really. It can drive me crazy at times, but it’s what makes me feel most alive. There’s a depth of experience not often found in a ‘normal’ job in the UK. The things I don’t like would be similar in any role, e.g. dealing with difficult colleagues.”  (Q29)

And then there’s this sober response  “The nature of the work (talking of expat aid workers) attracts mainly younger, less experienced people, who are willing and able to live/work under different/foreign/rougher/dangerous conditions – but too often they don’t have the necessary knowledge/experience/qualifications to carry out a competent job. Ideally, it should be the older, expert people who should be working here, to build capacity and bring actual knowledge – but those, understandably, are less willing to live under conditions of this industry (discomfort, danger, food etc). Good intentions are not enough. In the end, we just become mercenaries to good job and life, but are hardly able to “make the difference” we wanted at the beginning.” (25+yo female aid worker)

Q32 asked  “Which statement below best describes how satisfied you are that what you do makes a difference for good?” and the most frequent response (nearly half at 49%) was “I feel that on the whole what I do makes a small difference for good.”

So, that’s Part 1.  As you can see, the modal responses to our survey offer no big surprises but they do give us a little clearer sense of the diversity, complexity and passion of aid worker voices.  Part 2 to come soon….

As usual, email any questions or comments.

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Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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             –30something female expat aid worker respondent w/ 10+ years experience

           –mid 30’s male expat aid worker with 5+ years experience

 “Something an old man told me in West Africa struck me. We were at a big conference on sanitation, and the guy stood up and said ’20 years ago I was at a similar conference where we discussed exactly the same issues, with exact same solutions. Now 20 years later we are still discussing the same things.'”

–mid 30’s female  HQ worker

More on building castles in the sand and on The Idealist:  Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

A couple weeks ago I posted about our survey results regarding the idealism of aid workers.  Having just finished Nina Munk’s book The Idealist:  Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (2013) I have a few thoughts I’d like to expand on that I began presenting in the ‘castles in the sand’ post.

I’ll start by saying that Sachs got it right, finally.  “It is what it is,” he says in last pages of the book in response to Munk’s hard questions about difficulties encountered related to the Millennium Villages Project.  The realization that he finally comes to -or reawakens to- is that everything is connected to everything else environmentally, politically and perhaps most importantly, economically both locally and globally.  He says exactly that to Munk at the end off the book, “For a long time, I wanted to simplify the problems by putting aside the rich world’s issues and so forth and focusing on extreme poverty.  But it’s all interconnected.”  I am reminded of the statement from the anthropologist Miles Richardson that, “…the problem of the poor is not the problem, the problem is the rich.”

His team’s 147 page  Millennium Villages Handbook used in the select villages in Africa reported on by Munk and elsewhere was, in a very real sense, the guide to put into place the prescription he expounds in his The End of Poverty (2005), his vision -some say promise- to eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2025.

The Millennium Villages Project did the world a great, sobering favor in that it gave perhaps our (i.e.,more specifically, the Western, ‘scientific’) world’s best shot at trying to solve the problem of the poor and came up, predictably, short.  Not because we didn’t try hard enough, but because the assumption is failed.

Certainly if we were listening to history we should have learned this lesson many times over.  In his Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails Christopher Coyne outlines in good detail the failed Kajaki dam project in the Helmand Valley Province in Afghanastan, calling it a “planners problem.”  His alternative, a rehash of William Easterly’s arguing points in The White Man’s Burden:  Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), is the so-called  ‘constrained approach’, not much more than a repackaging of Easterly’s ‘seekers’ idea. Both argue this general ‘bottom-up’ approach will have a better chance of success making lasting change.  

Coyne argues perhaps the obvious, i.e., that knowledge of the local culture is imperative for development work.  He posits, correctly I believe, that “…[we need to appreciate] endogenous rules because existing rules place a constraint on efforts to design and implement what are perceived to be potentially superior formal rules” and further that “…attempting to impose formal rules that are at odds with underlying informal rules is akin too banging a square peg into a round hole–it can be done, but only with significant force and collateral damage.”  Agreed.  But we’re still in the weeds here talking about how to engineer sand castles.

Both Easterly and Coyne find support from Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (2009) by Dambisa Moyo and of course Easterly continues to beat the same drum in his recent offering The Tyranny of Experts:  Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014).  I am reviewing my notes on this book now and will have more to say in a later post.

Easterly, for his part, argues very articulately for the position that by encouraging the rich and simultaneous exploration by many creative people -poor people-  for useful and effective solutions to human problems we will all be the better for it.  For my money, the Easterly/Coyne/Moyo (et al) arguments sound way too close to the neoliberal rhetoric washing around for the last several decades arguing that the poor just need to be given their rights and respect and they will solve the problem themselves or, rather, the forces of the market will make this happen and the efforts of the rich and newly rich(er) will ‘trickle down’ like so much sweet rain.

The Invisible Hand, in my view, tends to slap the poor and pat the back of the rich.  Just sayin’.

We are not in charge of how the future will unfold, nor can we ever be.

Is there something/someone else at the driver’s seat?  No, I will not go all InshAllah on you here:  the future is not in Allah’s hands nor any other God or gods hands, however much we would like to believe that.  If there were a loving God she would not allow the absolute horror that visits upon billions every day, especially the bottom 2 billion that are the focus of much aid and development work.  That’s my opinion.

It is what it is:  an unfolding of what may be best described as a set of  incomprehensibly numerous and complex algorithms perhaps the two most important of which are biological evolution and capitalism.  The future will become what it becomes not because of what we -or those like Sachs, Gates, Easterly, Soros and others- want it to become but rather in spite of what we what we would like it to become.

To be clear, these fine folks, Easterly, Sachs and the rest are all basing their actions and arguments on one very flawed and hubristic anthropocentric assumption, namely that we are in control of how the global culture unfolds.

There are those who will point to the many human interventions over the centuries that appear to affirm the human capacity to control our civilization.  My counter to these examples is that, yes, you can -and as I said in the last post, we must-  build castles in the sand, and some of these castles will be magnificent indeed.  But nonetheless these are more testaments to human will than true ‘directing the unfolding of human history’ moments.

In the final pages of Munk’s book she talks about the challenging social and economic changes occurring all over Africa that raise a very important question about the efficacy of the MDV’s project, namely would much of the change that happened in the target villages occur even despite the massive intervention?  The answer, quite likely, is yes. That is, change in spite, not because.

I find good support for my position in Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined in which he details the very counterintuitive argument that humanity is getting less violent over the centuries.

I disagree with what one respondent said when reflecting on the future of humanitarian aid “Human beings, we are not good.”  Humanity is getting more humane in some ways as social institutions slowly evolve to tamp down our more violent tendencies and see ourselves more and more as one humanity.  Sociologist GH Mead encouraged up to look forward to a time when we would have all humanity as our reference group, our ‘generalized other’ not just those in our immediate clan.

Can we impact this or that specific life with our actions?  Of course. In fact that is what aid and development workers do every day of every year all over the world. Is that impact scalable, the kind that can ‘end poverty’?  That indeed is the question I am attempting to address.  I would say ‘yes’ in the short term we can create that appearance, but on a global scale not so much.

The problem of the poor will always be with us, I am afraid.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Email your thoughts and comment to me.

Post Script thoughts 

“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. … It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.”

Jensen lectures poor Howard Beale further…

“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.”

I am not entirely sure Arthur Jensen/Peter Finch got it wrong back in 1976 in Network when describing the nature of global capitalism.

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Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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Just a bit more on male-female responses

Why so many females?
Interestingly 70% of all respondents thus far have clicked female ( total n = 813).  I have no data (does anyone?) on the total number of aid workers that read English and certainly no clear idea who might have been aware of this survey. But even if only a representative percentage of females responded (i.e., if the English reading humanitarian aid worker world is 70% female), this is perhaps noteworthy.

I conducted two international surveys (very much like this one) of self-described non-believers -atheists- in 2008 and 2012 and generated over 8,000 responses for each.  Having done the research I am fairly confident in supporting the statement that atheists are more or less equally represented in the population, though in both international surveys the respondents were disproportionately male -68%.  When I referenced the literature on Internet based surveys and response rates, the general consensus (stereotype?) was that males were just ‘more likely to be on the Internet  (read: tech savvy) and willing to respond.’  Regarding the 70% female representation in our data (that may or may not the actual proportion in the ‘real world’ of aid workers), I offer no conclusions other than I find it positive that female aid workers are so willing to respond.  I hope the same is the case as we roll out Spanish, Arabic and French versions soon, hopefully generating a larger sample of local aid workers (now a paltry 5% of our total sample).

Open ended response percentages
I was curious if there was a difference in the response rate of males and females to the open-ended questions.  The survey includes 18 questions allowing for respondents to expand on specific questions.  Females were ever so slightly overrepresented in these comments with just over 71%.  Looking at all of the responses, females were just a bit more overrepresented  responding to Q34 at 74%, Q36 at 74%, Q38 at 75%, Q41 at 74%, and Q52 at 75%.

Q’s 34, 36, and 38 were in the section of questions asking respondents how difficult it is to explain their aid work activities to various people:

• Q34 “Please elaborate on the response you gave to the question above regarding explaining your job to adult family members.”
• Q36 “Please elaborate on the response you gave to the question above regarding explaining your job to your significant other.”
• Q38 “Please elaborate on the response you gave to the question above regarding explaining your job to non-adult family members.”

Q41 asked, “Please use the space below to elaborate how your gender has or has not been a factor in your humanitarian aid work experience.”  Q52 was “Please use the space below to expand on your answers to the two previous questions regarding your views on the relationship between the “home office” and the “field.”

None of these numbers are so different from the male response rate to merit any conclusions, to be sure.

The final question of the survey asked, “Please use the space below to share your feelings about any of the above questions.” and the female response rate was ‘only’ 62%, i.e., females are under represented in feeling like that wanted at add one last word.

Explaining your job
As you can see below, there was a small but consistent difference between males and females on the questions asking about explaining aid worker life to adult and non-adult family members and to significant others.

Q33. “Which statement below best describes your ability to explain to non-aid worker non-significant other adult family members the nature of your job?”

Q35 Which statement below best describes your ability to explain to non-aid worker significant other the nature of your job?

Q37:  “Which statement below best describes your ability to explain to non-adult family members the nature of your job?”

These results overall indicate that many aid workers have a hard time articulating to those in their lives what they do for a living, with explaining to significant others being the easiest, adult family members a bit harder, and non-adults the hardest.

One wonders about all of the aid workers who do not have significant others and the fact that they can only articulate a general sense of what they do.  I would hazard the fact that many aid workers are very adept at compartmentalizing their lives is certainly supported by our data.

Does sex matter?
One of the more interesting questions -and set of results- on the survey was Q40 “To what extent has your gender been a factor in your humanitarian aid work experience?”  Perhaps not surprisingly, these results included the biggest differences between males and females in the entire survey.  Take a look below:

Though the numbers are fairly close, in the response “not at all”, over 20% of the males responded “has been a very positive factor” but just over 8% of the females indictated the same.  The contrast is even more extreme for the “been a moderately negative factor” with nearly 40% of the choosing this response compared to only about 6% of the males.  In a later post I will unpack the open ended responses to this question -268 females have responded-, but for now one can tentatively conclude that, yes, the perceived gender of an aid worker does matter a great deal.

Feedback and comment
So, all for now.  Please let mew know what you think or if you have any questions.  Email me with your thoughts.

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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Male-female variation: select results from the survey

Note:  This is a followup to my last post.  Arabic and French translations of the survey are still being vetted and, once fully launched, we hope will allow a clearer picture of the views of local aid workers.  Until those data are available, what we have is a snapshot of what mostly expat aid workers think and feel about their lives.

As a sociologist I have been trained to always think in terms of major demographic factors such as race/ethnicity, class/SES, age and, of course, sex/gender.  We are all perceive ourselves and are perceived by others viv-a-vis relative to our location along these continuums.

Below I offer a deeper look into the male-famale variation throughout our survey.  In sum, there are differences but none that I feel will be any huge surprise to anyone familiar with the field of humanitarian aid and, well, the fact that we live in a world where we are perceived and reacted to based on which gender people associate with us.

Relationships and family
Males are a bit overrepresented on the ‘been an aid worker for 10+ years’ (female = 18%, male = 31%, Q4) and this appears to be reflected in Q12 where the respondents were asked to self-report their relationship status, being forced into choosing one of three options, namely single and dating, single and not dating and in a relationship.

As you can see, females are far more likely to self-describe as ‘not dating’ than are males and male aid workers are far more likely to report themselves as being in a relationship. In Q13 we asked about marital status and the results were similar with nearly half of the males reporting being married (45%) and just over a fourth (26%) of the females indicating they were married.

If nothing else I think these data indicate that living the life of an aid worker is different based on whether you have ovaries or a penis, certainly to the extent that having an intimate other to share deep thoughts, emotions and, well, intimacy with is an important (critical?) part a healthy, whole human experience.  This snapshot of data begs further probing, methinks, and who knows what the same person would have responded if they took the survey a month earlier or later. Lives change fast sometimes, and snapshots are not very helpful fleshing out the more complex and nuanced details of lives.

That said, snapshots can be telling.

A very important and related question was the one asking whether or not the respondent had children.  Although 9% of both males and females reported having one child, more than three times as many males than females reported having more the one child (23% and 7%, respectively).  Do children make life more complete?  As a parent myself and based on my experience, I’ll hazard a ‘yes’ to that rhetorical question.  Does having a spouse and children make doing aid work more complicated?  Big ‘yup’ on that one, to be sure.

As a quick note, educational background of females and males seems uncannily similar.

Becoming and remaining an aid worker
In response to the Q22, “Which statement below *best* describes your primary reason for becoming an aid worker?” male and female answers were similar, but a slightly higher percentage of males (17% v. 9%) checked the box that stated, “I needed an adventure in my life and being an aid worker sounded like a good idea.”  Females were slightly more likely (36% v. 29%) to check the box that stated, “None of the above even comes close to articulating my reason for becoming an aid worker.”

Yes, its complicated.

Q23 invites, “Please elaborate on the response you gave to the question above on why you became an aid worker.”  In another post I will comment on the male-female differences in these comments but for now I’ll point out that 596 people that took the time to go deeper.  Similarly, in response to “What are your primary reasons for remaining an aid worker? Are your reasons for staying in this field different from the ones that brought you to it in the first place?” of the 614 respondents made time for a narrative response.

On burnout
Do males and females experience burnout in slightly different ways?  One might guess as much. Below you can see that the numbers are minimally different in response to our question asking about burnout of aid workers as compared to other professions.  It is note worthy that a significant majority of all aid workers perceived the work that they do as carrying a higher risk of burnout than other professions.  Do tell.

As to how aid workers report dealing with the burnout that comes with their job, the male-female responses were very close, but we found more than a 3 to 1 difference in those taking the time to offer “other” comment, females being much more likely.

A look at the data below indicates the vast majority (though slightly higher for females) report more than minimal burnout. A look at the “self medication” response indicates that more than 23% of aid workers use this coping mechanism with a slightly higher percentage of females represented.

Idealism
As to how being an aid worker has effected their level of idealism, the results are very close when comparing males and females, though it is interesting that nearly double the number of males reported their idealism actually increasing now that they have become an aid worker.  Overall I think that a fair interpretation of the data below is that females seem to report a more negative impact on their level of idealism, though, in response to the prompt “In general, how much do you like what you do as a humanitarian aid worker?” the male-female responses were identical at just over 56% in indicating that “I like what I do as a humanitarian air worker to a great extent.”

The notion that females are slightly less idealistic than males is supported by the responses to Q32, “Which statement below best describes how satisfied you are that what you do makes a difference for good?”

Conclusions?
The results and comment above touch on only select questions from the survey (more to come soon!), but they do speak to somewhat different experiences and perceptions for male and female aid workers.  As I read through a wide array of blogs, books and tweets from various aid workers I find very consistent support for what we have found in our data thus far.

No surprise there; we live in a world that treats males and females differently.
As always, if you have comments, questions or feedback send me an email.  More to come soon.

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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An overview of the survey results to this point

As of Sunday, 11 may 2014, we have reached 800 survey respondents.  According to the Cluster Map data on this blog site there have been 1628 visits from 104 countries -the most frequent of which from the UK- and 551 total visits from 34 US states.

It appears that the Cluster Map data indeed reflects that many of those completing the survey are actively serving aid workers deployed around the world.  As you can see to the left, the most recent visitors include me -I am currently in Costa Rica- but also souls from quite an array of locations.

As the weeks have passed I have been quite amazed that the map above has red dots from so many locations, and I can’t help but wonder to myself these questions and more:

• Who are these people and what are their lives like this moment?
• Who have they left behind to do this work and for how long?
• What trials are they facing navigating day-to-day life in the field?
• How are they coping with issues like corruption, staff dramas, field-home office communication gaps, etc.?
• Are they in danger either physically or emotionally?
• How are their lives as expats woven into those in the local community?
• How are they able to compartmentalize their lives to make sense of who they are, where they are, and where they will go?

To the extent possible our goal remains with this blog to report -and perhaps comment on- these aid worker voices with fidelity, integrity, and with the hope that we share the goal of understanding ourselves just a little better.

Here are the raw results.

801 respondents started the survey with a completion rate of 72%.

Note:  All open-ended responses have been blocked. You will have to navigate using the drop-down button to see all pages.

• Click here for all quantitative data.
• Click here for the same data comparing male and female.
• Click here for the same data comparing type of aid worker.
• Click here for same data comparing work situation.

Click back here in the next several days as I begin to present and comment on both the quantitative and qualitative data.

Email me with any bits that you would particularly like to see more in depth and/or have comment concerning.

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Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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