 So who are we? We are what we repeatedly see. So my question to you today is the following. What is a culture made of? A culture is made of a repetition of an image or of a concept that becomes a belief. That belief becomes the DNA of a culture. So what type of images have we created about women since we are a majority, but we are treated as a minority globally, and we represent 50% of the population. So let's go and see what type of images. So it's the perfect woman objectification. And so today, I would like to bring you in a journey where we go from the different type of storytelling. And my question to you is, if we change the storytelling, can we change the culture and therefore the role of women in society? And if so, how can we do this? And can men and women do this together? Well, I would like to bring you in this journey of the storytelling, starting from the fairy tales, then the advertising world, the movies, and finally the social media. So let's start with Cinderella, the most translated fairy tales in the world. So who is Cinderella? Cinderella is a young, beautiful woman. She has no friends beside a couple of birds and a family of mice. She cleans all day long while she sings. It's very important because we do clean and sing at the same times. We are happy. And her half-sisters are evil because she's prettier. And there are her competitors. The prince is going to choose only one. So Cinderella, she is basically a victim of her own circumstance. What solution does she have? Well, let's try to think. Maybe marry a prince, number one. Number two, marry a prince. Guess what is the number three? Marry a prince. So let's find out if Cinderella is going to marry the prince. Well, as we can foresee, she goes to the ball with nice crystal shoes. Because who wouldn't go to a ball with nice crystal shoes? She lose one. The prince will rescue her. And finally, he will marry her. And Cinderella is rescue. So what is the prince's paradigm we are creating when we are reading these fairy tales to our children? First of all, that we women can speak to my samberts. And second, we clean and we laugh, we smile, and we sing. Third, that without a man, we can go nowhere. Fourth, that we compete with each other. So I think that time has arrived to say goodbye to Cinderella, to Sleeping Beauty, or to Snow White, or any of these princes. And when I was little, I couldn't find any example for me or to follow or any point of reference. But I had a very special point of reference. My grandmother, Adriana, she was a strong woman. She was independent. She traveled the world. And she thought me that dreams, guess what, are genderless. So dreams have no gender. And then if I believe in something, I can achieve it. I just have to work hard and believe in myself, regardless of my gender. So I was very, very lucky because even if Adriana is not here with us any longer, she left me with this treasure. And then I decided to go to the United States and say, oh, let's change the world altogether. So let's go back to the journey of storytelling, advertising. So when we sell a car, we don't sell a car, but we sell an experience. So next to a fancy car, there is always a beautiful woman. So what is the storytelling here? That the man that owns that car has good chance to conquer the beautiful woman. Right? So the objectification of women in advertising is honestly everywhere. And it's tough to be a woman nowadays because guess what? We have to have silky hair, perfect body. We need to have white teeth, wider than the snow here. We need to be perfect. And guess what? We cannot age. No, we can't because we are like tuna fish. We have an expiration date. And the expiration date is younger and younger. Now, it's apparently for media, it's around 28 years old. So basically, we smile at these when we become aware. But a lot of young girls, they feel insecure. They feel that they are not perfect, that nobody is going to desire them. And a lot of women, they feel very insecure after 28, 30, 32, 35. So I think that we have to change this paradigm because this paradigm makes no sense because we are focusing only on beauty in women. Beauty is one element, but it's not 100%. It's just a small piece. So it's like when we look at the moon and we look at the finger, no, let's look at the moon and then there is the finger. And it's the same concept. But this concept of beauty has changed in time because before, during the Renaissance time, until the French Revolution, this was the standard of beauty. So a little bit different, right? So an easier goal for us women, honestly. I would rather go to that direction. But so basically, this is a Ruben painting. So women were extremely pale because it meant that they were rich, they didn't have to work in the field under the sun. And they were a little bit voluptuous because that meant that they had money and they could eat. Now, we went from that paradigm to this paradigm. So I would like to pause for a second and think that I believe that men also would like to have women represented as a subject more than as an object. I believe that men are fathers, our husband, our business partner, and they would like next to them empowered women more than an object that has an expiration date. So as we do it together, we decided to create a new campaign where we focus on women as a subject, as an example. And the campaign is be the subject, not the object. And we were lucky enough to have Nobel Prize be a three spin for Econ campaign 2018 for the piece. So here I would like to show you a teaser. Very often as a woman in this field, you get discounted as naive, idealistic. I've worked on this issue for a decade. I run the organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize for it. Yet in a taxi driver, when they ask me what I do, it's like, that's never going to help. It's extremely frustrated sometimes that there's this sort of discounting of your experience and your knowledge, which I don't think that men face. You want these powerful women to be heard and seen for who they are and what they really represent. We do it together. Hashtag be the subject, not the object. Thank you. So now I would like to bring you to the magical word of cinema. Let's see what is the storytelling there. And in this case, I would like to analyze who are the people behind and in front. So let's start. Who are the protagonists? In 2017, the protagonists of the 100 most seen movies were 24% women and 76% men. And of these 24% women, most of them, their role was related to their men. So they were either wife, daughters, or, sorry, wife, mothers, or lovers. So we didn't really see roles for women, were after their dreams, their career goals, but they were really related to the men. So they were desperate wife trying to conquer their men back. Then let's see what are the numbers behind. We have the 2017, because we just are in 2019, so we don't have the exact numbers yet. But directors are only 7.3% female, which is really nothing. And then we have screenwriters, 10%. And then we have editors, 14%. So we must hire more women behind the screen and in front of the screen. Because the strength of our society relies in its diversity. We cannot have only one point of view. We have to have multiple points of view. And as we do it together at this moment, we are producing a documentary directed by Katja Lund called Reflection, where we analyze the images in the United States of men and women that have shaped the American culture. And this is what we found out. We found out that the role of women is really related to beauty, youth, sweet, always sweet. And the role of men instead is a, men too has a paradigm. The man needs to be extremely successful, strong, always have an answer, in the state has a gun. So these are two boxes. They're both boxes. We have a pink box and a blue box. But what's the difference between the two boxes? The male paradigm is an independent paradigm that pushes the man to be successful, achieve his dreams. Okay, still a box, but it's a little bit bigger. The female box is very small because it only focuses on beauty and youth and depends upon the choice of men. So when the man chooses the woman, then that's when the life of the woman will change. So we do it together. We believe that no boxes are needed because we're human being and no matter what, right? So, but our box is so small that now we're concentrating on ours. So, and now I would like to bring you to the journey of social media because now it's the most powerful tool. Why? Because we have 76 billion people in planet Earth and 3.2 are active social media users. So how can, why social media is so important? They've done a study in the state, which is amazing because the way we see our body is really related to social media, around 20% men and women and then TV, so we are influenced. So we feel fat according to what we see on TV or old what we see on social media. Guess what is the percentage of mirrors? Look at this, 1.50% and 1.55%. So basically the illusion, it's more important than reality. So I believe that right now it's in the last two years a lot of important things have happened for gender equality. This has been the years where we had our first female superhero, Wonder Woman and we did pretty good, over 400 million in box office. This was the year where in the last election in United States we had over 120 women elected. This is the year where in the last two years where in Saudi women can drive. So I believe that talent is genderless and I dream of a society where men and women together are different but they're equal. And I believe that all of us today we can change the storytelling and the paradigm, first of all by not reading princess stories to our children. Choosing movies by women about women and third, we have the power as author through social media, why? Because we are creator of our content by posting a picture. We are distributor by sharing a post. We are critic by liking a post. So the power of the storytelling is in each individual. So let's pay attention to what we post, what we share and let's make sure that it's not anymore about gender but it's about individual. And let's make sure that we create a society where people are investing in people. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Kiara. This is wonderful. Fascinating to me, I think what resonated was when you said, what is this impact on girls? Yeah, I think that just really resonated because it has a huge impact and we know some of the research around women's girls' body images and eating and what confidence levels and things like that. So very fascinating and now we're gonna have a different kind of storytelling. For Rina Effendi, who is a award winning photographer. She's originally from Azerbaijan but now lives in Turkey and has gone around the world to look at not the women that we see in these kinds of things but the women who have lives that are invisible to us and whose lives are real. What they experience in life is real, unlike the artificialness that we saw with Kiara's work. So I'd like to introduce and ask Rina to come to the stage. Hello, I'm often asked about being a woman photographer, what's it like for me and how does my gender affect my work? And now it may sound peculiar but my answer to that is that in my work, I am a photographer first and a woman second. I'll give you an example. I was eight months pregnant with my daughter when I went up to a mountain village, a remote village of Hinalik in Azerbaijan and was very beautiful there and people were very hospitable but still quite traditional in their values. And after photographing for a while there, I realized that nobody in the village noticed my pregnancy. No one put their hand on my belly and asked me how far along I was. No one asked, is it a girl or a boy or offered me a chair to sit down and rest? And I was surprised at first, but then it dawned on me. I carry the camera, a professional tool. So in the minds of these people, I was a photographer and not a woman. It was as though I could not be both. In my work around the world, I travel to a lot of remote places and I often see societies that are quite traditional and patriarchal. And the one curious thing that I discovered is that the attitudes and customs which prevail towards women in these places don't necessarily apply to me. And it's not only because I'm a foreigner, it's also because they perceive me as someone with a power, the power to tell the story, their story. And this power changes the dynamics of gender and it creates a neutral space where I can photograph men of authority, be it militia men, prominent leaders or village patriarchs. And these men, these powerful men, they pose for my pictures, they bend their rules and they do, respectfully do what I ask. Like in this case. Yeah. Photography has empowered me and it has also enabled me to meet extraordinary people and especially women. Now, as you've seen Kyara's work now and like many of you, I've grown up with this image of a female icon, a very beautiful woman, but in a very specific way, a woman, a fragile woman that needs to be saved. In popular culture rarely did I see women who actually managed to save themselves, but the reality has always been different. And in my work, I came across women that overcame unspeakable traumas but their spirit remained strong. So today when I'm being asked who is your role model, I think of these women. They're not known to the world, they're what we call ordinary women, but their resilience and spirit is something absolutely remarkable. Now, we've all been following the Me Too movement and this worldwide campaign that galvanized so many brave people, both women and men, to step forward with their testimonies of sexual harassment and abuse. But in the mainstream media, we're mostly focused on stories of public figures and celebrities and we don't hear enough voices of regular people. So today I'd like to share with you some stories of very brave women that came forward in spite of this culture of stigma and shame around the subject. Now, over the years, I've spent some time in a place very far from home in North Dakota, Spirit Lake. It's a Native American reservation. And in this tightly-need community of about 2,000 people, I came across a shocking statistic. For every 62 residents in Spirit Lake, there's at least one registered sex offender. Just in comparison, the sex offender ratio in Manhattan is 81,000 to one. There is 62 to one, okay? Let that set in. And most of these crimes happen in the victim's own homes. Now, you would think it's the safest place, imaginable, right? Your own family. But once these incidents take place, the trust is broken and victims often find themselves with having no alternative, no place to go. And many of these crimes are not investigated because the family members urge the victims not to report the criminals because of stigma and shame once again. In Spirit Lake, I met Jada. She was repeatedly assaulted by several of her family members. She told me she was a child victim of sex abuse since she was nine years old, okay? And she said, sometimes you have no choice, but to go back to your family, you still get hurt by them, but you end up going back. Sashin was raped by a family member when she was 11 years old. And her grandmother said, shh, don't tell anyone. As a result, the man was not punished. He's still walking free. He's her neighbor now. And she says, when she does her dishes, she can see him through the kitchen window. So she ducks her head low to block him out of view. But Sashin today is a woman, no longer a child. She's a mother now, herself. And she doesn't wanna keep her head low anymore. She wants to break the wall of silence over this taboo subject. She insisted on instituting the sexual harassment policy at the public library where she worked to prevent these crimes from happening again and protect her own children. Now, gender-based violence is widespread in our world. And Spirit Lake was one example of a peaceful community where it has reached epidemic proportions. But in the zones of conflict, it's especially common. Here are some stories from Congo DRC. Women here have been systematically targeted and rape has become the weapon of war. But again, individuals of incredible spirit and strength rise above this landscape of despair. In Congo, I met a local nun, Sister Angelique, a beautiful woman. She sheltered orphans, born out of rape, by women that were once abducted by the Lord Resistance Army rebels. She also worked with victims of sexual violence and war trauma. She obtained plots of land for them and she taught them how to cultivate the land. She gave them cooking classes for women like Ruth, whose family members were killed by the Allure. In Congo, I met a woman who survived a devastating act of violence. The Allure killed her husband in front of her. And then they said, would you rather die or be tortured? She said she would prefer to die, but they tortured her instead. Now, this is gonna sound really horrible, but they cut her lips off with a machete knife, okay? It fell on my lap like a donut. She recalled. And then they sent her back to her village mutilated to instill fear in all the others. When I was photographing Joan, I felt nervous just like all of you right now. I felt intrusive with my camera. What am I doing? And she stood there calmly and she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and she said, when you're done with these pictures, can you please give one to me? I've never been photographed before. Then I thought, wow, what a strong woman. I look at her face and all I can see is her trauma, but she sees her face in the mirror every day. And to her, it's just a face, her face, okay? In my work in general, I'm constantly amazed at the ability of people to overcome and recover from some of the most gruesome circumstances. When I went to Chernobyl, Ukraine in the winter of 2010, I observed life resurging in a place once devastated by the world's most powerful nuclear disaster. What I saw there was that wild nature has reclaimed spaces once inhabited by humans. Just like this birch tree is pushing through the floorboard of a school gymnasium in Pripyat, a city once inhabited by 40,000 people now completely deserted. They call it the exclusion zone. It's a vast area around the damaged nuclear reactor where access is prohibited due to high levels of radioactive contamination, other than some thrill seekers who penetrate the zone illegally and hide in its forests and buildings, and a few tourists who come in with special guides carrying radiation measuring devices. No one else is allowed into the zone, except some women who were past their birth giving age. They were allowed to go back and resettle in the zone of this disaster. And today, there are elderly women. They live alone because they've outlived their husbands. All the men have died. They live alone and their children moved away. When I met Hannah, she was 78 years old and this incredible woman, she was native to Chernobyl. So she survived the great famine of Ukraine which was imposed by Soviet era blockade when her neighbors resorted to cannibalism and almost butchered her for food. She survived that. On top of that, she survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, this woman, this babushka as we call it in Russian. And then two months after the disaster, she chose to go back and resettle in this area. I watched Hannah run around her yard and do things with almost manic energy in a ghost village that had only three remaining inhabitants. So I asked her, Hannah, are you not afraid of radiation? She said, radiation? No, starvation. I'm afraid of that. Nadezhda, another woman I met there, she lived near the barbed wire of the exclusion zone and she snuck into the forbidden forest almost every day to fetch berries for her winter preserves. And she told me, when I see the police, I hide in the bushes, no one can stop me. The food these women harvested and ate in the zone was most likely contaminated, right? But they didn't seem to care or be affected by it. Many of the women I met there were liquidators. They were put in charge of cleaning out the radioactive contamination. So some of them develop thyroid cancers. And I asked them again and again, was the pool of your homeland so strong that you decided to go back and resettle in this place in spite of these dangers? And one of them said, the bird flies close to its nest. Those who have left all died of sadness. Now I live in Istanbul and unlike the women of Chernobyl, the three friends I met here don't have the same strong sense of belonging to their homeland. All three of them came from the countryside in eastern Anatolia because they felt they were outcasts back home. They settled in Istanbul. Biologically, they were born as men, but by gender, they chose to be women. And it was through them that I learned about the liquidity of gender identity and the dangers these women face every day just to preserve their right to define themselves. Secil wanted to keep connections with her family back home, but each time she traveled back to her hometown she had to disguise herself as a man. She put a strap around her chest to flatten her breasts. She put on men's clothes and dyed her hair black. She said the only good thing about a Turkish trans is that many Turkish names are gender neutral so she didn't have to change her name. Secil could be a boy or a girl. Yankee cut all ties with her family because they expected a traditional life out of her, having wife and children. She said marriage to her represented an encroachment on her personal freedom. Helene, however, had completely different views. She dreamt of starting a family. She said, I want my husband to be a passionate and jealous man. I want him to call me every hour and ask me where I am. But in spite of their dreams and aspirations, many of these transgender migrants I met in Istanbul ended up in a sex industry, working clubs and brothels of the city because it's the only community that's accepting them and the only job that's readily available for them. Transgender activist Sheval told me that there's still no anti-discrimination laws in place to allow for equal and fair employment opportunities for members of the LGBTQI in Turkey. She herself started as a sex worker but then got off the streets. But many of her friends are still working on the streets. For them, just walking in Istanbul is an act of courage in itself as they face regular violence from both clients and police. Yankee once told me that there are some places where a lot of LGBTQ members gather where she is accepted, people like her are accepted. But she said, I don't go there. For her, going there is basically accepting defeat, okay? Instead, she goes to traditional places where she stands out, where people stare at her and call her names. Let them stare, she says. I'm different but I know I'm beautiful. Thanks to women like Yankee and others, I've come a long way in my perception of what a female icon should be. The social media has enabled us to start a debate on such taboo subjects as sexual harassment and assault. And more and more of these female voices are heard louder and clearer now and for me as a woman, it's an exciting thing to watch. This paradigm that you're talking about, shifting from the damsel in distress to a powerful individual who is not ashamed or afraid to speak out. So today I'd like to celebrate these new female icons with you and I hope more of them will be stepping into the spotlight. Thank you. Thank you, Renna, for that extraordinarily impactful set of photographs. I think that will not be erased from our memory ever. So if I could invite both of you to come up now, we're going to have a bit of a dialogue and then turn to some of the questions. And to remind you, if you have a question, please feel free to put it onto the tablet, as it were. So we have paradigms, we have boxes. We have everything. Yeah, we have all of this. What would you like this audience sitting here and the audience listening in? What do you want them to do with this information? Both your information, the statistics you showed us, these incredible females who have the courage to live their lives in the way they do. What's your call to action? Well the call to action, I believe, is that we have to become aware that an image is much more than just an image. And that image could become, that repetition could become part of the cultural DNA. So we are responsible which images we choose and which images we, because with social media, as I said before, we are creator and distributor as well of images. And it's important what type of storytelling. For example, something as simple as, oh, she's such a cute little princess. We all do that. I catch myself all the time. You know, because honestly the paradigm is so strong and doesn't allow us to come out of it, to come out of this box where women are much more. And I believe that we, this conversation and this call of action must be done together, men and women. Let me just follow up with that question. All of these images and the magazines and the little princess things that you can buy in the store and all of the things get marketed after a film and all of that. And what's the incentive for companies who are making a lot of money on these images? What's their incentive to change? I don't think the incentive from them is when the buyer change. So really the power is in our hands. I give you an example. Right now, most of the company that are female-oriented like luxury's company, luxury's brand, or are starting to focus on women empowerment. Why? Because even if us women don't have the money necessarily, we have the power of acquisition. So we choose what to buy in the family, you know? So, and we start awakening ourself thanks to all these movements that are happening. And so we choose what to buy and therefore the brand is following the new movement. How? They're starting to put attention. I'm not naming the brands, but there are many of them internationally and globally brands. They're putting their attention on female empowerment. So there is a shift. So I don't know. I believe that the brand will change because we are changing. So they have to follow us because at the end of the day, we have the power of the acquisition, not the brand. We have to remember that, that we have the power. And I suspect it's to not go to the movies that don't pass the Bechdel test. Some of you don't know the Bechdel test, which is how many times in a film did two named women speak to each other? This was Gina Davis, right? Yes, two named women speak to each other about something other than a man. Yes. That's the index. Sweden actually does post the index in their films, like America Post or Call to Action. I mean, I'll give you an example. Not recently, not long ago, I was watching one of the first Indiana Jones movies with my daughter. I don't remember the name of it, but it took place in India where they were eating the soup with eyes floating in the soup. And there was a lady at Damsel in distress in the main role. I believe she's the wife of the director or was. And she kept falling off the elephant and getting in trouble and Indiana Jones was saving her. So I'm sitting and watching this movie on Netflix with my daughter. And I couldn't shut up. I was like, this is wrong. Okay, listen, she's nine years old, my daughter. She was trying to enjoy the film. And I said, this is all wrong. Women are not like that. They don't need to be saved. Okay, this is in India. I've been there for two months. I've never seen a soup with eyes floating in a monk array. Please, like this. So it was like this director's commentary from hell, okay? And then I realized that I've watched this film before and I enjoyed it back in the days. I did not notice any of that. I was just watching it and loving the adventure, okay? So I think this paradigms that we're talking about is shifting tremendously. I think we are, we've really, all of us have come a long way in our perceptions. And yeah, I mean, we can't watch it again without being angry, okay? So I think that's, things are happening. And what do you want people to take away from these extraordinary images that you created? I want to, for people not to take pity, I want for people to admire these women because they don't deserve pity. I mean, maybe they deserve compassion, but most of them deserve admiration for what they've done because the way I see them is that they're survivors, okay, they're not victims. You know, we have this word victim that's kind of ingrained in our psyche, but they're not victims, they're survivors of crimes, they're survivors of rape. These women have turned their lives around, they're walking, okay? After all these trauma that they've gone through, they're still getting up and, you know, being themselves and living a life. So I don't want any pity. I just want admiration. We had, how can we go through this entire session without somebody bringing up frozen? No. The film, right. Which, for me, when I look at frozen, number one, I look at those really tiny wastes. It's always that tiny wastes. The tiny wastes? It's always, that's a must. And I did read an article in New York Times that said 57% of the lines said and frozen are by men. Male voices. Oh, really? Yeah, so, and it's an enormously popular, right, for many girls. What do we do? What's a counteract to that? Again, we have the power of the remote control. We have, the counteract is either we are creator or either we are the audience. The audience is more important in the distribution than the creator, meaning that. Of course, the creator is the creator. But the audience really has the power of which movie is going to be distributed more? Because after the first weekend, if the movie doesn't do well, the distribution. So we do have a lot of power if in, like you mentioned Netflix, how many time a movie get watched. So for us, I think then, again, we go back to number one, be aware of it. So because until now, as you said, and myself too, at a certain point, I even maybe wanted to be a pretty woman, you know what I mean? So I believe that number one is the awareness. Number two is not a war between men and women. Quite the opposite. We're here together. So it's putting the light on the value of women, which is not only the exterior part and the age factor, which is really killing me because every day we're losing a little bit. So that's extremely important. So when you are aware, then you make the choice. And then you also share with your children, with your peers, with your husband, wife, whatever, you share why you made that choice and why you are not going to look at, in this case, Indiana Jones and see, I want to be her in the elephant that drop all the time and just finally rescue me. Or I don't want to be a pretty woman. There is a commercial that I really love. I'm not going to say who is this commercial by, but it says be the CEO that your family wanted to marry. They wanted you to marry. So let's not be the girls that drop from the elephant. Let's be Indiana Jones, you know? That's the kind of... I would also think that you would want to encourage both of you. The use of social media. Absolutely, big time. We're in a funny sort of way for naming and shaming, as it were, for some of these. What do you think about it? Well, the one thing is like, let's not be ashamed anymore. I think it's now finished. No more shame, you know? Something that happened to me in Cairo was very close to a sexual assault, okay? And as soon as I came home, I fought it off and I had my face bleeding. And as soon as I came home, I did a selfie of my face bleeding. And for a year, I was ashamed to post it, to tell people. But then there was a rally in Cairo organized by people who were trying to rally against the subject of sexual harassment. So I posted this picture of myself, my face, on Facebook where people post their vacation pictures because they want everyone to be envious of how great your life is. I post my bleeding face, okay? It got shared, it went viral, viral. It helped the rally, it helped the cause, and it also inspired other people to not be ashamed. And I got letters from women telling me their stories and it emboldened some people. So I think that this time of shame needs to stop. There should not be stigma around the subject. We need to open a dialogue. It's a hard dialogue. These are hard truths, but we need to speak about it, okay? And let's shift from the victim to the empowerment because if we focus too much in the victimized culture, let's remember we will stay victims. So let's put the energy, let's make sure that all the victims are recognized and then let's make sure to empower each one of us. Unfortunately our time is coming to an end, but both of you do an extraordinary work. You're opening people's minds, both men and women's minds about putting these photos up like that in that sort of critical way, I should say critical mass way, really helps us understand what's happening. Wonderful phrase and I guess appropriate to use in dollars. Women are like snowflakes, one alone may melt, but together we can stop traffic. But they're stopping traffic. Thank them, wonderful artists and thank you all for coming.