 Welcome to the last session for the day. I'm sure you'll find it a really interesting and stimulating discussion. We had a great one just now, but I'm sure our panelists are up to it. The topic we're gonna be talking about next is the importance of women as practitioners in national security and foreign policy, particularly in a deployed or operational capacity or context. And we've got some fantastic panelists who I'll introduce in a moment to talk about this topic. My name is Sari Sutton, as Rory mentioned, and I'm a secondee to the college from the Department of Defense. In my own career in national security, I've been privileged to have been deployed overseas in a number of operational roles in Boganville and the Solomon Islands as a peace monitor and in East Timor and Iraq as a policy advisor. National security policy is often developed in safe locations, remote and removed from an actual crisis, just like Canberra. We're all used to that. Which is quite appropriate, but in this work is necessary and critical. But the deployment of human capabilities into challenging, complex or dangerous locations, wherever a physical presence or operational response to a crisis is required, is often necessary to resolve a situation or deliver real results. Many of our perceptions of conflict or crisis zones and the skills and the type of personal qualities or characteristics that are required to succeed in them are outdated. We have tended to think about the importance of physical strength, superior fighting skills and weaponry. As a result, men have often been considered to be more suited to this work, as Chris Maritas just mentioned, more suited to the hard stuff. And to delivering the kind of results that were deemed to be appropriate and thought to be required. There's no doubt that in many circumstances, physical strength and more traditional military skills are still matter, critically. But modern conflicts and human security challenges are often far more complex and multi-dimensional and demanding in terms of the skillsets required to accomplish a mission and bring about success. Much broader and more sophisticated skillsets are now required to achieve desired end states, whether they be in support of the national interest or internationally agreed outcomes. There are certain cultural contexts where deployed women can be mission critical because of their often privileged access to local women and key information. It is also well recognized that diverse teams tend to be better at solving problems and engaging in red teaming or exploring possible challenges or alternative futures, which is so important when we operate outside of our cultural comfort zones. But more generally, contemporary crises require the ability to work closely and effectively with a wide and diverse range of stakeholders, interpret and navigate often highly complex, nuanced cultural, political and religious factors in rural, remote or urban contexts, with complex competing agendas and players, whether they be combatants, community groups or foreign agencies and actors in the space, as well as often adapting to difficult physical conditions. Skills in negotiation, persuasion and diplomacy, analysis, the ability to make decisions on complex and sensitive issues under pressure, often independently and with limited resources and information, and the ability to make risk judgments that balance complex policy considerations and objectives can be critical to any kind of mission success. Women can and do excel in these fields. And as Minister Payne stated earlier this morning, their inclusion in operational contexts is indeed a real capability issue. So what are the challenges we face on the ground and in getting women there in the first place? And what can we do to open up opportunities? Our panelists today are highly experienced in their fields and we'll have the opportunity to explore this topic through three different and distinct lenses. I will introduce them in turn each before they present but we have with us today a highly experienced Australian diplomat, Ms Lindell Sacks, the Executive Director of the Australian Civil Military Centre, Dr Alan Ryan and our final panelist, Dr Habiba Sarabi, who will also provide some perspectives as a woman with some incredible experiences in her own country. It's wonderful to have you with us, Dr Sarabi. So I'll go to our first panelist for this afternoon, Lindell Sacks, she's a distinguished Australian diplomat whose career has taken her to many frontline conflict zones or countries emerging from conflict, including Lebanon, Rwanda, the Balkans and Iraq, where she served as Australia's Ambassador from 2011 to 2015. For her work in Lebanon, where she served as Australia's Ambassador from 2006 to 2009 and organised the evacuation of Australian citizens during the conflict, one of Australia's largest ever consular operations, she was awarded the Public Service Medal. Lindell has also worked for the UN in the non-government sector. She's currently Chief of Protocol at DFATS, a quite a different role. Lindell, it's wonderful to have you with us and I shall hand it over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sarabi. Yes, protocol is a very different job, broken hand. It's a different sort of war zone. First of all, I'm very pleased to be here to discuss what is a matter which is very dear to my heart. You've had very many eminent speakers who've discussed the policy frameworks, but I will speak more from a practitioner's point of view as someone who spent 25 years working in conflict zones as a UN official in the Balkan conflicts in the early 90s and then the genocide and the post-genocide in Rwanda and then Zaire in 1994. I've also worked in the NGO sector where I focused on women's reproductive health rights in refugee settings and then more recently, as was said, as ambassador during two major conflicts, the 2006 conflict in Lebanon and then the Iraq insurgency and rise of Daesh from 2011 to 2015. I was also part of the advanced team of Australian officials who set up operations in the Solomon's in 2004 as part of Ramsey as well. But my introduction to the marginalization of women in conflict was during the Yugoslav contract conflict in 1991, when I and several other female UN workers had to fight to get sanitary items for women included as a part of the basic emergency kit. Ladies, we all understand what this might mean and you can imagine what it's like in a conflict when you can't go down to the local pharmacy or supermarket and buy those all important items. It's very restricting. Fortunately, these battles over women's dignity are over and over the past quarter century, I've seen significant improvements in the activism and engagement by women in conflict prevention and in resolution. At the grassroots level, I'm seeing greater engagement by the women in the communities affected by the conflict but also by those working to help. In Lebanon and Iraq, I made a deliberate choice to prioritize support through our aid programs towards groups that's focused on support for women's groups. There's greater recognition by those working to help these communities, be they the aid community or the military, that if they want 100% community buy-in, then they must recognize the often behind the scenes influence and knowledge of the women in their communities they are trying to help and to find creative ways to engage them into finding solutions. This has in large part been achieved through greater participation by females working in the humanitarian and in the development sector but also in diplomacy as well. This is not just at the worker level which is always very important but also in the more senior roles, both in the UN, in diplomacy and in the not for profit sector. In Iraq, most recently, the very impressive work but done by a woman by the name of Lisa Grande is driving a much more holistic approach to the development needs of the country as well as the more urgent humanitarian ones. And the efforts by the United Nations to get more women into the UN special representative role is a very important step forward but much, much, much more needs to be done. Now, why is this the case? Having women in these roles is important for several reasons. We have access to 100% of the population. In Iraq, unlike my male colleagues, I was able to sit with local women and hear stories firsthand about the very challenging lives they live. I found that women are much more likely to focus on broader issues such as food security, access to services such as health and education and security itself, rather than simply seeking access to power for power's sake. The experience of women of security challenges is very different to that of men also. Women face a continuum of violence and insecurity that does not end with a cessation of military action. Hence, their priorities for peace are very different. They need legal protections against generalized violence as well as family violence and community violence. We also need to demonstrate the commitment to securing more women in senior positions and not just lecture these communities of the importance of it. In Iraq, as one of the few senior women, in fact, I was the first senior female ambassador, there's a first for you, and a very active one who was one of the few ambassadors that traveled extensively throughout Iraq, I was a novelty that garnered a lot of attention and the media were covering me and hence the local politicians were listening to what I was saying as well. But very importantly, and this has been a point that was raised earlier, I provided a very important role to women in the country's concerned that they can play a role in their country's return from conflict. And this was drawn out to me very clearly in Baghdad when I made a point of going out to the universities and speaking with the women. They were very eager to see a role model and to explore how they might contribute to their communities. The other thing about having a woman in senior positions is it gives them courage and at times protections from those forces that can seek to impose or usurp their participation. Again, in Iraq, I made a point of making contact with women's groups and funding them and supporting them and visiting them regularly. And they often told me that my presence there was very useful because it meant that they were protected from harassment and threats that the watchful eye of a Western woman on them gave them heart that they had this measure of protection as well. Now, the opportunities and challenges of working in these environments are enormous and the benefits of one of its done successfully are immeasurable in terms of improving the lives, not just of women and girls, but of the community as a whole. So let me talk about some of the opportunities. I find that males find it easier to interact with female colleagues. We're perceived as less threatening and I felt that they did not see me as a competitor. Therefore, they divulged much more information but they were also more willing to negotiate. They didn't realize that this little pocket rocket was a tough old bag. There is a sense also that women are much more trustworthy, we're less likely to engage in corruption but to put the interests of the wider community and their family first rather than the clan or the tribe or self-interest. The other point, of course, is that men are often more willing to talk to women and if I cast my mind back to my work with victims of sexual violence in Bosnia, for male victims of sexual violence or for male family members of women and girls who'd experienced sexual violence, they felt safer talking to a woman than they would with a man as well of their experiences. Now the other point that I would make is the process of engaging in negotiations for any of us who've involved in this requires patience, cooperation, listening carefully and mutual understanding. These are often traits that are attributed to women and I've observed over the years that male egos often take over in negotiations. Now we as women in this room experience that on an everyday basis and we've developed the stamina and the skills and the determination not to take no for an answer. But what are the challenges? It's not all sunshine and roses. Men who control the levers of power can be very resistant to change because it means a loss of power for them and access to resources in many cases. And this cannot occur not just within the countries where there is conflict but also within the organizations and the countries which are sent to help. And we need to find creative ways to minimize this. We need to focus on the contributions and the enhanced wealth for all rather than just a narrow group. But I will also add that the problems are not just with women and this was a point that was made earlier. There are entrenched attitudes amongst conservative societies but also amongst other women as well where they are not supportive of the work that women are doing. And I have to say this was the most disheartening moment of my career when I heard the Minister for Women's Affairs in Iraq say to a group of about 350 women and men on International Women's Day say that the reason that women were experiencing problems in Iraq was simply because they were not religious enough. Now of course there are many challenges in being taken seriously and getting a woman's voice heard. There is always the widespread issue of credibility of women and women's groups. There is often a sense that they are not strong viable organizations and therefore there is a much higher barrier for women to overcome if they are to get their voices heard. And I've had to deal with this within my own institutions as well be it within the United Nations, the charity world and of course as a senior diplomat. I've often had to credential myself and I've had to demonstrate and prove that I had to do the job rather than just being taken at face value that I can do the job. I got selected for the job by a bunch of, by a panel so I must have the skills. And I have to say, I have, I can recall the look of shock at one meeting when I turned up and the rather dismissive manner in which I was treated until I firmly made it clear that I was actually the ambassador and I had to remove gender from the discussion and then I was taken seriously. But of course there are issues that we face in general life that also what we're going to experience in the workforce as well and in these contexts. The harassment, when I was trying to negotiate for a boat to remain, a ship to remain in port when we were evacuating large numbers of Australians where the captain decided he was going to pull up the gang plank and leave. I ended up being groped by this guy being patronized and talked down to. Now of course that can sometimes be useful because sometimes in the mansplaining and I'm sure we've all had that women you do sometimes get a little bit too much information but you can sometimes pick out some really juicy nuggets about that. And then of course there's the issue of being trivialized and marginalized and the best one I had with that was when I was ambassador in Lebanon and some fellow who thought he was being unbelievably charming said to me, how could a beautiful woman like me be an ambassador? And I said, well, I can multi-skill. I can be both beautiful and I can be an ambassador. We've come a long way through the mainstreaming of gender in ending conflict and in the tradition to peaceful coexistence. However, there is an awfully long way to go. There is no easy way to secure the equal participation of women and the incorporation of women's perspectives in all levels of decision making in conflict and post-conflict. It will require patience and perseverance and in an increasingly complex world creative ways to ensure that women can participate fully and effectively in the continuum from mediating peace to the longer term resolution of conflict. Without this, the goals of quality, development and peace cannot be achieved and we will continue to face a world of conflict and instability. And let me finish with one final anecdote. Again, it was another International Women's Day function that I was at, again in Iraq. And I have to say, I'd been surrounded by a bunch of men and they were all making rather patronizing comments and maybe my tolerance levels were not so good that day. Perhaps I'd been bombed and shot at once too often, verbally and physically. And the very senior minister made a comment about women and their role in the kitchen, at which point I stood up and I said, well, look, your excellency, thank you very much. It's a great privilege to be here. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak. But it's clear that over the past 2000 years we've continued to have problems, particularly in the Middle East. The men have been in charge for these past 2000 years. So how about giving the women a go? We might be able to sort the problems out. 250 women stood on their feet, clapped and stamped and the 50 men looked like they'd sucked a lemon. Thank you. Our next panelist who will be known to many of you, I'm sure, Dr. Alan Ryan. Alan is in a vital role at the moment which helps shape Australia's capabilities to prevent, prepare for and respond to overseas conflicts and crises. He's the executive director of the Australian Civil Military Centre which was established by the government to improve our nation's effectiveness in inter-agency crisis response and mission delivery. He's made his mark in many national security spheres here in Australia. He's a former advisor to the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill. He's worked as a strategy and security consultant. He's worked in a number of key academic roles and he's widely published. Alan, it's wonderful to have you with us today. APPLAUSE The starting point of so many of these discussions in my experience tends to be what women can't do rather than what women actually do and what they have always done. In a short time today, I'd like to discuss three issues and confront them head on. The first of these is vulnerability. The second is representation. And the third is the promotion of radical transparency. I tend to be a lazy person, so I try and get the most out of most of these opportunities to talk to audiences such as this. So I've come up with a set of notes which I'll depart from, just as Francis Adamson did, but I do intend to blog them. But I've got to say that after the day that we've had, I've done quite a lot of work on them, so what I've prepared, what I'll say and what I'll blog are fundamentally three different things. So let's be honest. Vulnerability. Women are vulnerable, just as vulnerable as men. It is a part of the human condition. Ultimately, men and women die at exactly the same rate, though in the circumstances that we're talking about in complex situations in operations overseas, your statistical chance of getting hurt or killed will rise according to your gender. As the Oslo International Peace Research Institute suggests, men are more likely to die during conflict as a direct result of the violence, while women are more likely to die of indirect causes occasioned by the conflict. And as we move from the industrial age style of conflict, of force on force conflict to more diffuse models of violence, women are going to continue to suffer more. It will get worse, not better. But to come back to this issue of vulnerability, on the direct fire battlefield, where all vulnerable bombs and bullets do not discriminate, I commend to you the excellent publication that we put out of the Australian Civil Military Centre entitled Gender Crisis Gendered Responses, written by Sarah Stier. That work disposes of stereotypes far more succinctly than I can in the time available. She demonstrates the complexity of gender in the operational context and warns us against accepting simplistic narratives. Importantly, she points out that we ignore the gendered dimensions of operations at our peril. I've tweeted that particular link, so not only do you get me speaking about this, but there's actually a range of supporting materials or out there in the cyber sphere. We need to acknowledge that we're all vulnerable when we are confronted with violence, disease, and unsafe environments. Certainly when we look around this room, a larger number of women, a larger number of people from non-traditional occupations have been exposed to those circumstances in recent times. We need to confront the fact that planners and deployed personnel need to be much more aware of the significance of gender on operations. But neither issue is relevant to the importance of women as practitioners in national security, which is what we're talking about now. You only have to be human to be vulnerable, and both men and women are capable of understanding why gender is important in that deployed environment. So vulnerability is a fact, take it as said. Moving to representation, you may well ask what is the issue. Certainly there are operational tasks and roles that women will do better than men in some circumstances. A good example being when women need to communicate with women in a cultural context where gender matters. Women will often be able to access gendered spaces in an operational context with less disruption and negative effect than men. Lindell's point that in stabilization and reconstruction operations, women can be effective role models for other women. For example, women police and officials will be able to demonstrate equitable workplace arrangements. Their absence from an operational context sends exactly the opposite message. Women can carry a message more effectively. A critical success factor for the regional assistance mission in the Solomon Islands was engaging with women's groups to support the disarmament and demobilization effects of the operation. This is the good news, but the current significant level of underrepresentation of deployed and deployable women is not contingent on anything that is specifically gendered. And this is perhaps where I depart from some of the comments with respect that Chris Maraitis made. There still aren't anywhere near enough women in the civilian, military and police professions that contribute to offshore operations conducted by governments. I say governments because government numbers do not stand particularly well when compared with civil society and non-government organizations. Part of this lag factor for women and particularly for more senior women is that funnel effect which has been discussed. Women will certainly now have better early career opportunities than they did several decades ago, but there is actually a problem of time catching up with us. Much more to the point, in the world in which we operate, women are not as able to access the educational and training opportunities that currently continue to stream men into deployed or leadership positions. So in answer to the question of our quotas, I believe we need to formally institute quotas to assure that women have these opportunities. What I'd suggest though is that these are not quotas that will assure women appointment, but quotas to ensure that women are competitive for positions on offshore operations. Controversially, and I moved to my third point, I recommend radical transparency to ensure that we get the most qualified people for national security positions, both deployed and in Australia. And we've cut these two sessions into two parts and perhaps I think that's a bit artificial because careers are long and we would expect that people who arise to positions of leadership, both deployed and in policy positions in Australia will have rounded CVs which will have seen them deployed as Surrey and Lyndall have during their careers. But we tend to make a division between Canberra and out there in the field. I'm going to put my career out on a limb now by suggesting that there are too many people, men and women in Australia who've become practitioners in national security with inadequate education, training and professional experience. Guy talked about the armchair generals of which there are many in the national security sphere. A broad general education no longer suffices to prepare people for immediate employment in complex crises, let alone deployment into harm's way. We need people who have operational training and experience in the civilian, military and police spheres who have experienced leadership opportunities hopefully outside the bureaucracy and in complex field environments. The educational qualifications of our people must be relevant. And this is where institutions such as the National Security College still a relatively recent initiative have a significant role to play. In the United States, it has been virtually impossible to become a senior official in both the political and career streams of public service without excellent postgraduate professional credentials. This is not the case in Australia. In the United States, senior officials biographies are published on the internet. Here they are anonymous, failing to identify public officials credentials is a practice that promotes cronyism, implicit bias and lack of competence. Let's be honest, men have long benefited from the Peter Principle of being promoted past their point of competence. And now women are finding themselves in the same situation. And unfairly, it is making some women vulnerable to criticism that they did not gain their roles by merit. To be frank, many women are poorly qualified for the positions that they hold in our national security system. But the same thing has always been true for men, more so for men because our systems implicitly favor the incompetent male. Why are you looking at me like that? Women will become more competitive for national security roles including on operations when they are assured the same career opportunities and development opportunities as men. We require transparent basis of comparison to demonstrate that we're appointing demonstrably capable people, not just bureaucratic time services. Finally, I want to address the issue of physical suitability to undertake jobs because as I started off by saying, we often talk about what women can't do rather than what women can do. This issue of physical strength and endurance has become an issue of special pleading that relates to standards that were again implied in the conditions of industrial age workforce structuring based on those Taylorite notions of interchangeability of the component parts of the organization. As a military historian, I can attest to the fact that we have constructed our military forces over time in the era of mass conscription on the basis of the male aged 18 to 35 as the basic unit of battle. We have constructed our tactics, techniques and procedures to suit. But these standards make very little sense in digital age deployments that are all about deploying people in specialized tasks and small teams rather than in mass formations. So long as we see extremely fit young men as the basic deployable unit, we are blind to human resources that are available to us. And the conversation that I have usually goes along the lines of, well, if you can't change the track on a main battle tank or carry a general purpose machine gun all day, what use are you? Based on my own experience, that's a test that very, very few males can pass. So why are we applying this double standard? In determining suitability for deployment, gender comes a long way behind education, training, personal physical fitness, emotional and mental health, no drug or alcohol history and sheer professional competence. So to men and women who either reject women's ability to serve or question why gender should be considered in the first place, I suggest that they get over themselves. We are well past questioning women's right to serve. The discussion now is just about the way in which we can maximize their contribution. Thank you. Our final panelist for this afternoon, Dr Habiba Sarabi. Dr Sarabi, it's wonderful to have you back with us again. We're honored to have you with us. Dr Sarabi is on her second panel for today, so we're working her hard while she's here with us in Canberra. Dr Sarabi brings a wealth of unique and extraordinary, frankly, extraordinary experience as a woman and a politician in incredibly challenging conditions in Afghanistan. Dr Sarabi is the deputy chair to the High Peace Council and the senior advisor on women to the chief executive of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. She's also a hematologist. So Dr Sarabi, welcome. Thank you very much. I don't want, I have a written paper, but I don't want to talk on my written paper. I want to talk the experience that I have in my, on the ground in my country. First of all, let me to tribute the women activists that they have paved the road to us to come together to talk about women peace and security, which is very important and relevant in my situation and my country. As a practitioner, I want to talk on focus about the civil society role and this regard and this issue. And also my background before working with the government, my background is working with civil society during the time that Taliban had the control to whole Afghanistan. And after 1996, I fled from Afghanistan and went to Pakistan as an immigrant. So started to work as a women activist for women's rights. Civil society in Afghanistan playing a big role and played a big role. Even the time when Taliban was controlled Afghanistan and all women were at home and didn't allow to go out of the home to work. But it was the civil society that working on the education, healthcare and different other service or welfare work for Afghan people. Even we had this courage to go with work with the total cover of the body. And I myself, different time between Pakistan and Afghanistan, I was going and coming to help Afghan women especially, did the education program for women as an underground school. So civil society and different stage and different era have been worked very hardly in Afghanistan, especially with the recent election. And before 2014, which was the last presidential election happened to Afghanistan, the civil society group started some advocacy for the women's rights, human rights and the corruption, this type of issue. And they started the lobby to lobby between different groups, different ticket that they were candidate for presidential. And one of the topic that they had on their agenda was the political participation of women and also they lobbied for the resolution 13-25 and participation of women in the decision-making body. And it was on the top agenda that 24% of women on the decision-making body, I mean 24% of people who are on the decision-making body should be women. It was a target that the civil society put a place for all the ticket. As a result, we have 26% of the women in our parliament, which our women or women in Afghanistan on 2001, they didn't have a voice to have a voice to have a voice to how to lobby for their rights. So, but on the base of our constitution, now we have 25, 26% of MPs in our parliament. So also according to the lobby of the 13-25 that they have the civil society done with all the tickets. So after the election, also they started to have a strong voice for the government of Afghanistan that we are women participation in the high-rank position. So as a result, now we have four women minister at the cabinet, 10 deputy minister, different ministry level, five ambassador with the different embassy, and also one governor. I have the privilege to serve as a first female governor in my country from 2005 up to 2013. So the result or the outcome of my service during my time as a governor, the good governance, which is the transparency and accountability was on the top of my agenda. And also the girls enrollment in the school was one of the top priority for my agenda. So we have the target for the national action plan, 30% of women for the civil service, but up to 2020. But we couldn't catch up to that. And now we have 21% of women at the civil service. We have 6% of women at the ADF, Afghanistan Defense Force and in coincidence, it's the same Australia Defense Force and Afghan Defense Force, both of them is ADF. So the committee that I have been talked in the morning about that is also always doing advocacy for the bringing more women to the defense force. The attorney general, fortunately, we have one of the human rights activists as our attorney general. And he tried to focus mostly on the deputy for his deputy as a violence against women and appointed one woman as the first time as a deputy for himself. And also the attorney general changed the sex female persecution from the province level up to 18 female prosecutor at the province level and also started to have or establish 29 evil law which is violence against women unit for each province. The other outcome of working together with civil society and women in the government, we have the violence against women law, of course, due to some problem in our parliament because the majority of our MPs, they are the former warlords and mostly they are extremist group from extremist group. So that's why we couldn't pass that bill from our parliament, but according to the decree of our president, that law is applying with every judiciary system. Recently, the regulation for anti-harassment of women also passed through the cabinet meeting and this is implementing by a different agency. These were the achievement that we have after 2000, especially after 2014. And so it was the result of working civil society with women at the government level together. So that's why we were able to have some achievement but this achievement and they are very fragile as in the morning friends told about that that of course, if we cannot be very mobilized and we cannot work together, this achievement will be broken very soon, especially if there will be and at the policy level, the people or the policy maker will not be very gender sensitive and also they are not caring about women. Of course, these achievement will be very fragile. I share some of the recommendation that we can do work together to defense these or to protect these achievement. Making a strong network among women, it's very crucial for our society. So the result of that network will be to save or to protect the women's rights and women's organization and Afghanistan. And also with these women's groups, these network need strong support from international community and also from the government of Afghanistan. Education and awareness is very crucial. Education is especially the education level. The girls' education is very important and girls, some of our province, which is the security is not good, especially on the south border, some of the or the most of the girls' school, they are shut down and the women and girls cannot go to the school. That's why girls' education is very important. Supporting the civil society and also supporting the research journalism is very important. One of the biggest challenges in our country is the violence against women, domestic violence and the gun rape and violence in the rural area. So the media is playing a big role and they are doing some research and making the documentation and the documentation after that will be published through the media. And it's a kind of awareness for the people that they will stand up for their rights. That's why supporting this research journalism and the media and civil society is very, very important. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Dr. Sarabi, thank you so much for those words. It's quite extraordinary to listen to you and to reflect upon the real challenges that you're facing in your country. It puts some of our own challenges into some sort of perspective, doesn't it? But the work you're doing is really extraordinary and courageous and we commend you for it. You're really an incredible role model for girls and women but also for men, so thank you. Let's open the floor to questions. I'm sure those three panels have generated a lot of thoughts and ideas. Who'd like to kick off? Alan, I might start with you. You're accepting that women are in need of, or they're capable, have all the capabilities necessary to deploy. Do you accept also that there's some challenges for women actually when they get there in the field, in deployed situations? Of course. There are also challenges for men. There are challenges for people, however they're constructed in whatever environment they find themselves. Anyone who's been deployed here, and I'm thinking actually of operational deployments, certainly not the smooth, comfortable sort of overshoot these trips, but packing up everything into a bag and going off into a condition where there's been a disaster or there's been a war where there's ongoing insecurity would know that these are not pleasant circumstances. I count the mornings when I find myself in an operation environment, I'm still here, I'm not home, and yet I also count those experiences as being some of the greatest experiences of my professional life. And I think there's a duality of that in all of us, and those have been on operations that would probably appreciate that. The fact is though, we deploy people and we deploy men and women to do a range of functions and roles. And as a country of 23 odd million that isn't going to get terribly much larger but is going to continue to have a range of offshore deployments, we simply cannot afford to discount 50% of the deployable population. Particularly given that in the environment in which we now operate, the women that are coming through have education, training, skill sets, the sorts of things that we didn't even dream of 13 years ago when we were still constructing ourselves around a World War II or Cold War construct of what an operation looked like. Operations don't look like that anymore. They need people. Absolutely, absolutely. I look forward to seeing the results of the study that you're doing as well at the ACMC into deployed women and deployed men. Absolutely. That's that suggestion. Got it, yes. Question time. Thank you very much. I'd like to ask Dr. Sarabi. How do you establish women's networks and how are they kept alive and dynamic? Is it just communal or is it sort of national? The networking? How has it done it? And is there a need for physical protection? The non-governmental organization work started during the Taliban, when the Taliban had control all over Afghanistan at the moment also. One of the third, unfortunately, one of the third part of our country controlled by Taliban. But, I mean, 2000, 1996 was the time that Taliban occupied all of Afghanistan. And so it was, the government was unfunctional. So it was the civil society, they started to work and their base mostly were in Pakistan because it was the near border with us and the near place that the people could have access to that. And they started to work together and on a base of the need, they started to have some network, but the most very familiar and very popular network is the Afghan Women Network Organization, which is an umbrella for different other organizations. But specifically on the peace issue, so I want from address of the High Peace Council, I want to make the women network for peace only. These women should work mostly for peace or specifically for peace, especially from the grass root, the people who are in the provincial level on the grass root because conflict is coming from the grass root. It's from different issue, different reason can be. One of the biggest reason for the conflict is the lack of education and also the poverty because the poor people, mostly the children of the poor family are going to the madrasas, religious madrasa and after that getting the extreme education from there. The madrasas or the religious school, we call it madrasa, these madrasas mostly producing extremist group to come to Afghanistan to do some activity. Hi, thanks very much for your brilliant presentations. Just referring to Alan Ryan's comment on incompetence in the national security practitioners, I was just wondering what sort of experiences do I guess all the panellists think are currently lacking in national security? Thank you. Probably left myself open to that one. This is an opportunity for me to grab the handball that Sarri just threw to me and I didn't catch quite as well as I should have, but we're completing a study at the moment. It's a study of deployed women's experiences going back over the last two decades or so. And the reason we're doing that is that there isn't a database anywhere in the world. We have a lot of feelings about what we think is important. There's a certain amount of writing out there, but there isn't really any scholarly verifiable work about the particular skill sets and significance of having women deployed into operations. I put that on the table first, so I'm probably talking through my hat because I'm speaking ahead of having the experience. Perhaps my biggest concern is to come back to the situation we have here in Canberra, where over a very, very long time, the skill sets that have taken people through to senior leadership positions in the national security environment haven't necessarily reflected the operational reality that we're now facing. So we do have people who have got to the top by being good public servants, who have never deployed, who have no relevant educational skill sets. And if you were to go and, again, if you look at the United States, an entry-level requirement to work at senior levels in the State Department or in the Defense Department is going to be a master's degree or a PhD from somewhere like the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies or the Harvard Kennedy School. Those are entry-level requirements and we simply don't have that here. And I know a good many of my colleagues who proudly assert the fact that a degree in medieval French literature has stood them well all their career and they've reached senior ranks in the Department of Defense. Why should they start now? But the other thing I come back to is the importance of training. I've talked about education, but it's only recently that we've had the establishment of the National Security College. It's running into its eighth year. This institution is priceless and yet for most of my professional career there was nothing like it. And what's more, training and preparing people for offshore deployments was something that the military did but which was not carried through to civilian agencies and organizations. That's changed. And we're seeing organizations like REDAR which is a civilian organization but which provides training to government and we're seeing much more enhanced training programs. So we're getting there but I come back to the analogy of the funnel. It's a very sharp gradient to produce the senior leaders that we require and we require now. Actually I might invite Lyndall to comment on the challenges of the transition when you're going out deploying or being posted into difficult environments and then coming back to Canberra and how you find that. Do you think it's got easier over the years or is it something that's still a challenge? Speaking personally or more broadly in observations of colleagues. Look, I remember talking to my father who fought in World War II and he actually didn't talk to me about his own experiences in fighting in Papua New Guinea and some pretty awful experiences until I'd actually come out of Yugoslavia and Rwanda and Sri Lanka. He sat me down one day and he started to talk to me about his experience and I said to him, Dad, as a family we've often tried to quiz you about your time in the army and he said to me and I said so why are you talking to me about this now? He said you will understand what I have been through and it's one of these, I can see a couple of faces of female colleagues who've served in Afghanistan here and one served with me in Baghdad as well and unless you've actually worked in that environment you can't understand and I think it's an experience of anyone who's served overseas. You come back to Australia and maybe someone says, where have you been? You say, well I've been in Baghdad. Did I tell you about my mortgage? People often don't understand where you're coming from. They can't conceptualize what it's like to live and work in a war zone but yes there are some real sacrifices that you make. For me personally, I get a lot of rich reward and experience from this sort of work because I'm a true public servant. I feel I am here to serve the public. I feel like I have the experience to do it. Yes, there are major sacrifices that you make but it's all part of life's rich tapestry. There are a few drop stitches along the way but at the end of it you've got a really rich experience that you can then bring to other aspects of your life as well. Linda, all those questions for you. My name's Jennifer. I work at DFET. I have four lovely colleagues from the security branch here and it's been fascinating listening to you this afternoon about your experiences in those conflict zones and I think what you've spoken about are those experiences that have given you credibility in a space that's often quite complicated and often quite well dominated especially in our organization. I've made some interesting observations over the course of the day but one thing that's kind of DFET specific I've noticed that we have quite a few women in these conflict-developed posts in policy positions and leadership positions like yourself but in the security space. The four of us here we're all potential regional security advisors and well qualified to be regional security advisors but in fact we have 15 RSAs across the network and only three women in those positions and interestingly those positions are normally not ones which attract women because they're in those conflict zones like Baghdad and Kabul where women who perhaps have children or family commitments actually can't go there because it's quite difficult to do that two months in, one month out and that rotation it becomes quite difficult. I'm just wondering if you have a sense about how we women build credibility in that space if we're unable to actually gain those experiences as regional security officers which are normally positions held by men. First of all let me say in Baghdad I had a couple of women who had children who chose to come on postings they had very supportive partners and in fact one of them her partner had the previous time that one of them was going to be overseas was actually in Kabul so they both actually shared very difficult postings. In terms of working in that sort of context and in terms of getting your credibility it is quite challenging because there are a whole lot of assumptions about what you were saying Alan about what women can and can't do and certainly when I arrived in Baghdad I made it pretty clear that I can do anything. I may not be able to bench press 250 kilograms but I can bench press 250 kilograms of strong words against someone that's going to leave them quivering at the end. So you have to use your skills and capabilities in different ways and you have to know where you can use these these contextual use these skills as well. It's I felt the biggest challenge for me working in this sort of environment was about having to credential myself and prove myself every time. It took me about 18 months before people would know that's Lindel and she's pretty tough and it was when it was to do with keeping the embassy open and I fought to keep the embassy open and I had the weight of Canberra on me and I had the weight of ISIS on me as well. So to withstand those two pressures was quite significant and I think then people realized that yes you're a person who can do a job. My gender just didn't come into it at that point and I constantly rail about the fact that you're judging me as a woman first and my professionalism second and it should be my professionalism first and my gender second. My gender has nothing to do with it. Yes, I may not be able to bench press 250 kilograms but I don't need to do that in my job as Alan was saying before. So we need to reframe how we approach work and it's behoved upon all of us men and women. We women have to have more confidence we have to be out there saying I can do this rather than saying well I've only got 98.9% of the skills so I won't do the job whereas some locals say well I've got 60% of the skills so I can do it I'm sure. You know we have to have more confidence in our abilities. I have a Madeline Allbite bright comment that there should be a special place in hell for women who don't support other women I think is really really valuable. We need more women in senior positions so that you know the young women of DFAT that I can see can feel they can see role models like Francis, myself Ruth over there who've done these jobs and have been very successful in doing these jobs and so that men know as well that you know they're a women able to do it it's a community that is going to solve this issue it's not just a women's problem it's a community problem and both men and women need to be working on these sorts of issues but we as women need to be much better at promoting ourselves not using excuses not playing the role of victim oh I'm a woman you know I'm going to get criticized for doing this I've spent a lot of my life fighting to get where I am and you know I can remember the reason I was feeling a bit tired one day and I was talking to the deputy at the British Embassy really feisty kickboxing young woman and I said to her I don't think I've got the fight left in me and she was 36, 37 and she looked at me and she said please don't give up the fight you know you've trailblazed a lot but please help young women like me to continue to get ahead because I think about the generation before me you know the women who were out there on the front lines fighting on a range of issues women's rights issues that you and I now take for granted those women are there we can play an important role mentoring the young women and I'm very happy to mentor young women in the department now because I think I can give a lot to them help them have the confidence and the courage to do the jobs because there's not enough examples out there in order to give women the confidence and the courage that they can get out there and do these things there's been some tremendous discussion there and thanks for your questions and thanks to the wisdom and experience of our panelists Lyndall Sacks Alan Ryan and Dr. Sarabi thank you very much