Building a Global Community of Women in Water — Kathryn Pharr
About Kathryn Pharr
Kathryn Pharr is the leader of a global community of women who focus on issues related to water. Kathryn believes that water is a source for female empowerment. She founded the Community of Women in Water as a global network which now counts more than 1000 members. Their focus is empowering women who work professionally in water or WASH (i.e., water, sanitation and hygiene) challenges. The Community of Women in Water want women to be leaders in the water or WASH sectors on the local to global levels.
How Women Are Reshaping the Future of Water and Sanitation
Kathryn went to college to major in chemistry and international relations. An internship studying the Manhattan Project led her to the conclusion that the different disciplines involved in the Project had different takes because they were reviewing different information. Their decisions were made based on the information they possessed. It was not a global perspective. “I was really interested after that in becoming a bridge of one discipline to another and figuring out a way to help channel that information together. I saw that as being science policy and wanted to kind of bring science to policymakers.”
Kathryn attended water conferences where she found that most speakers at the conferences were male. In fact Kathryn says that the water sector is comprised of 80% male. This leads to a limitation of perspectives. Kathryn and other women delegates asked themselves if they should do something about this. The answer was The Community of Women in Water, a volunteer organization with more than a 1000 members of women who professionally work in the fields of water, sanitation and hygiene. Their networking is empowering women to take on leadership roles. Kathryn hopes someday to make The Community a non-profit so it can someday be a sustainable source of support and resources for women in the sector.
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00:00:01 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindtheater.com, I'm speaking with Kathryn Pharr, who is based in the United Kingdom. Kathyrn is the leader of a global community of women who professionally focus on issues related to water. Kathryn has come to believe that water is the source for female empowerment. Kathryn founded the Community of Women in Water, a network with a membership of more than 1000 water experts based around the world, the community supports women who are working to create solutions to water challenges.
00:00:39 Pam Ferris-Olson The Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the oceans. Through their stories Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the oceans and her creatures.
00:00:59 Pam Ferris-Olson I'm speaking with Kathyrn Pharr. She’s accomplished in science, international relations and community building. Kathryn founded the platform to bring women from different locations together to exchange ideas on topics related to water. The Community of Women in Water focuses on empowering women who work professionally in what is known as WASH.WASH sectors are water, sanitation and hygiene. The Community of Women in Water empowers women to be leaders at all levels, from local to global.
00:01:35 Welcome, Kathryn. Thank you for joining me. I'm grateful to Tracy Metz for suggesting you as a guest for this podcast. I believe you and Tracy met at the Stockholm Water Week. Tracy was also a guest on this podcast. She too is passionate about water related issues and among her many accomplishments, Tracy is a podcast maker. Her podcast Water Talks investigates the range of global water related issues. On this podcast, you and I will talk about your interest in issues related to water, women and the Community of Women who are focused on water issues.
00:02:16 Let's begin, Kathryn by having you tell us something about you. What were some of the things you liked to do growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia?
00:02:25 Kathryn Pharr I guess a lot of the things I still really enjoy. I love hiking and reading and cooking and love cooking recipes from all over the world, but particularly some of the ones I grew up with in the American South. One of the other things about growing up there though, is that when I left for college people asked me what I missed. I should have known then, because my answer to everyone was I miss my family, I miss the mountains, I miss our water because we had really amazingly good well water. I probably should have figured out then that I was destined to work in water.
00:03:09 Pam Ferris-Olson Very interesting. So how did you come to the conclusion that water leads to women's empowerment?
00:03:16 Kathryn Pharr So I was doing a lot of work that involved international travel on science policy and International Development when I was working in DC. And when I came to these places, it just sort of kept coming back to me that without access to water and sanitation services, women couldn't take the first step to being empowered without access in their homes to water. They were spending their time or some of their time collecting water for their families, for washing and cleaning, and that was not all that was needed for empowerment, but they needed that as a foundational step.
00:03:56 Pam Ferris-Olson So I believe when you went to college, your training was in chemistry and international relations. How useful were that background, that foundation in building a community of women, women that were focused on water issues.
00:04:12 Kathryn Pharr The reason I chose it was because of the job that I got after my summer internship after my freshman year of university. I was summarizing different types of media related to the Manhattan Project. And so I was looking at books and films and articles and academic readings in all these different disciplines: science, history, English literature. Because the Manhattan Project was when the atomic bombs were created and then dropped in the Pacific Theater in World War II. And everyone it affected, all the different disciplines, all the different disciplines have a different take on it. And as I was reading sort of the military history versus the government academic reports, it came to me that each of the different groups related to the project had access to different information and that they could only make decisions with the information that they had.
00:05:11 And that without access to some of that information, they're making very different decisions than perhaps they would have otherwise. And so I was really interested after that in becoming a bridge of one discipline to another and figuring out a way to help channel that information together. I saw that as being science policy and wanted to kind of bring science to policymakers. An example of how that plays out in water is Flint, MI, a decade ago.
00:05:43 When the local council decided to change the water source to the Flint River, they didn't have anybody on the Council that had a science background. So they just thought: “We're changing the water supply.” They didn't realize that this new water supply had a different pH and that pH would interact differently with the existing lead pipes and cause the lead to leak into the water, affecting and impacting the water quality for residents of Flint, MI. And so that's a really good example of not having access to scientific understanding negatively impacting the decision that policymakers make. Without that information, the decision they made seemed perfectly reasonable. It had a lot of unintended consequences because they didn't have the scientific understanding of what that decision really impacted.
00:06:38 Pamela Ferris-Olson So what have been your greatest challenges in getting your bridge, your community of women off the ground?
00:06:48 Kathryn Pharr I think they're probably the same challenges that every project faces, right? So it's resources. It's time, money, people. And so we've been in network for five years now, volunteers. I've been working and so that's just hard to find that time to do everything that you want to do. When you've got a team of volunteers, you can't plan sort of for that sustainability that you ultimately want. So I think those have probably been some of the big challenges.
00:07:32 Pamela Ferris-Olson So if people, human capital, is the most valuable resource you have in the Community of Women in Water, how do you bring them together to do the work?
00:07:38 Kathryn Pharr The community is and is really built to connect women who work on different disciplines, so they are not women who are working on the same project. It's really built to connect women who maybe aren't geographically located. Maybe they don't work in the same discipline. Maybe they don't think of themselves as initially connected on work. A good example of this is we held an event around women, water, and agriculture several years back. And in the midst of this really interesting discussion one of the women had started talking about the importance of gender disaggregated data. This is when you're collecting data and you subdivide it out based on different gender groups. This is normally men and women, but some of the research does have additional gender groups as well. And another woman who was attending worked on transboundary issues and she said: “Oh my goodness, I never thought desegregated gender data had anything to do with my work.” And after this conversation I realized that I need to be looking into this and this needs to be part of the project that I'm working on.
00:08:50 And so that's a really good example of how the women coming together, and it's often virtual within the community, can really share ideas and insights. And this is really the nexus of the community and part of its reason of being because a lot of women are not able to travel to in person events, conferences or other networking events compared to their male colleagues in the water sector.
00:09:16 Kathryn Pharr And that may be because of caregiving responsibilities. It may be a financial constraint. It may be because they are a more junior member of the team and the company or organization that they're with won't fund them because they're limiting the number of people who are going to the conference because they're trying to be either conscious of their carbon footprint or just conscious of needs-only travel. All of which are good things but when those groups get cut down too much, the women are often the ones who are not travelling. And so I wanted there to be a way for these women to engage and build networks and share ideas and communicate with other women that might normally not cross paths with them.
00:10:01 It got started out of conference back in 2016. I had this idea and so I was talking to a colleague of mine. She worked in a different country and we were chatting at this conference, that most of the speakers had been male. And to be fair, the water sector is 80% male. So it's probably not a surprise that most of the conference speakers are male as well, but there was a lack of variety in the speakers at this conference. And we were saying, well someone, you know, we should really do something. Someone should do something, and I didn't have any bandwidth at the time. And I thought, well, someone else will do something.
And about two years later, I had switched from a full-time job to doing a range of part-time work because I had changed from living in the United States to living in the United Kingdom. And I kind of thought: “Well you know this is the time. And “No one else has done this, so I'm going to do it.” And I reached out to the women that I knew who worked in the sector and said: “You know, I'm thinking that we kind of need a community and a place to come together. What do you think? What would you need? What would work for you? What are you looking for?” And then after COVID, we went from a model that I had originally envisioned where I had thought: “Well, these women live in different cities and they'll want to get together with the other women in those cities. And so we'll have kind of this model of different meetups happening in different cities all over the world.” There are some entrepreneurial groups that meet like this. Coffee for Founders, as an example. And we'll all just sort of follow the same format and that'll be how we're a global community. And I just found that our get togethers at conferences had really good turnout. But regardless of which city I seemed to try to organize around, I couldn't get those similar numbers or really a strong group of women to come together after work in the city. And so I said: “OK that doesn't seem to be working. And about the time COVID, and we had to go virtual. And it ended up being an amazing thing for the community because all of these women who didn't have the bandwidth to travel 45 minutes across town to go to this meetup, be at this meetup and then get home. Were able to say: “Hey, I can do a one-hour online event. Yeah, I can make that work.”
00:12:25 Pam Ferris-Olson Did you ever think that the community would grow to more than 1000 members from across the globe?
00:12:31 Kathryn Pharr No, I'm really thrilled and often quite surprised at how big it's gotten, but I guess that just means that there was a need and there's still is.
00:12:41 Pam Ferris-Olson So, reflecting back on the first five years of the Community of Women in Water, what do you think you'd like to have done differently?
00:12:49 Kathryn Pharr Well, I was really excited when the virtual pivot worked and that was very much an accident. So I would have loved to have thought of that before it became necessary, I guess. But I was really pleased that, that which I had thought this is, this isn't going to be good. Who's going to show up? And suddenly was…A big supporter of the community and a colleague in the water world is Lisa DeBevis [spelling?] and she was reaching out to me going: “Oh, I'm really excited about the community, how can I support. And she actually told me about this concept of virtual facilitation.
And I learned how to be more engaging than just kind of a standard talk and Q&A. And so that I felt was something that I did really right. I was taking advantage of an opportunity when it came along and really using it to help with how to help women connect better, virtually because back in 2020 that was a big question mark for I think a lot of us. It was all really new.
00:13:55 Pam Ferris-Olson So Kathryn, tell us about your goals for the next 5 years.
00:13:57 Kathryn Pharr I’d love to see the depth of connection among the women grow. And one of the ways that I hope to be able to do all of that is to move from being a network to an entity. So a nonprofit in the next couple of years and then be able to fundraise and hopefully get staff that can be paid for the amazing work that they do; instead of having to be volunteers. And then really create a more sustainable platform that women know that they can rely on.
00:14:26 Pam Ferris-Olson Finally Kathryn, how would you advise listeners who want to be actively involved in leveraging their passion, their skills, and their own communities. What would you advise them on the best way to begin and then keep on going?
00:14:41 Kathryn Pharr I think it's really believing in yourself. And then being flexible. So in the last five years, I've had two children. And that means that some of the things that I had planned to do, have not happened on the time scale that I had hoped. And I've also had to sort of change some things, but it's created really great opportunities for others. And then some things like I mentioned, the virtual facilitation suggestion to take that course that someone on told me about, taking advantage of that and maybe I didn't feel like I had the time. But I made the time. So I think just sort of giving yourself a lot of personal like support and a lot of encouragement and a lot of belief in yourself and knowing that the timeline is probably not going to be the timeline you thought it was.
00:15:33 And that's OK. I am so awed and inspired by all the women I've met on all of our virtual and in person events, the ones that just reach out to me with messages. I mean, these women come from all over the world. They have such a range of backgrounds. They have such a range of insights and I feel like I'm learning from them all of the time. And I'm really grateful to how many have verbally supported and highlighted and invited others to join the community and those that, especially those, that have volunteered. And to my husband because of course he does. He does a lot to make this possible and it's very encouraging. I’d say he is probably the biggest fan of the community that there is.
00:16:21 Pam Ferris-Olson So Kathryn, I want to thank you so much for joining me on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. I truly appreciate hearing about your journey and your effort to empower women to be leaders in water. I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Kathryn Pharr, the founder of the Community of Women in Water, a global community of women. By connecting with each other, they are better able to tackle water challenges. You can learn more about the Community of Women in Water by going to c.w.i.w.org.
00:16:59 Pam Ferris-Olson Kathryn Pharr is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. This series can be viewed on Wo(men) Mind the Water, Museum on Main Street and YouTube. An audio only version of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com, on iTunes and Spotify.
00:17:19 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
