Emily Nielsen Jones is the co-founder and president of the Imago Dei Fund, which has just launched, in conjunction with Gordon College, a “landscape” study measuring the gender gap within evangelical ministries and organizations.
What motivated you and your organization to begin exploring this issue of gender equity?
Most ideas have many antecedents that bring something into being. The most basic impulse behind this study is simply that we are in a special moment of time, one where gender equality has the global limelight, not so much in an ideological, political sort of way but more, from a practical, human and real institutional sort of way. How do we move beyond merely good intentions to achieving the ideal of gender balance? This I do believe is the work of our generation, in large part because everywhere we look, it seems, studies are making the case that gender balancing our institutions is “not only the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do.”