Jillian Foster has founded multiple women-focused organizations, including the consultancy Global Insight, the think tank and feminist collective Continuum, and the Women in Conflict project. She’s a PhD student in political science at Yale.

Stephanie Newman: You’ve started multiple companies and are currently on the PhD track. How do you describe what you do?

Jillian Foster: I tend to be someone who has a lot of things going on at once. It’s always how I’ve done personal and professional life. It’s what I naturally gravitate towards. Timelines have to be adjusted, but every projects relates. Essentially, I do consulting and academic research on gender, peace, and security, which sits within political science. It’s the study of political violence and gender. I add a lot of quant to it also, doing work with NGOs in conflict zones.

I’m also interested in the chronology of your career. What led you from Global Insight to Continuum to Yale and Women in Conflict?

Global Insight has always come first in terms of urgency, because it’s the way I make money. I’ve done consulting my whole career: research, data, and evaluation for NGOs. I started first as a solo consultant, and then I organized into an actual firm in 2011. At about that same time, I started hosting little brunches with friends in my home, and that informal gathering grew into theHive, which is Continuum’s mother event. Continuum grew out of that, and was officially started in 2014. The Women in Conflict project is related to my consulting work, but also to my academic research.

What’s a sample project you’ve worked on for an NGO in a conflict zone?

All of my work orients around my function as a researcher. Sometimes a project involves program evaluation, or one-off questions that NGOs want answered, like: How does a particular program interact with child marriage in a certain region? Is it improving the situation or not? Or maybe an NGO wants to do a scoping study into a particular topic around gender-based violence. We’ll build out what is essentially a research design, and then I do desk research and go in-country to collect data. The fieldwork phase lasts for 2-6 weeks. After I leave, my team and I analyze the data, and write a report or create infographics -- whatever is right for the project.

Global Insight seems to place a lot of emphasis on data-driven analysis and gender-sensitive methodologies. How do you leverage data as part of your research, and have you always done this?

I’ve always been into math. I have an undergrad degree in economics. I’ve always been really interested in quantitative analysis, and data science fits into that. What I find most interesting is mixed methods, where you have to know both quantitative and qualitative methods. It requires a great degree of creativity: you piece together the story of what’s happening, using different data sources and styles of analysis. So the quantitative piece might be results from a survey, where qualitative would be long answers to interview questions. Did your interview subjects mention the same word a lot? Are their responses scared, happy, indicative of the same sentiment?