 Hello, everyone. We're going to get started now. We at USIP are really thrilled to have this virtual audience here today to listen and engage with this panel on women and youth participation in nonviolent action. My name is Matthew Siebel. I'm a researcher with USIP's nonviolent action program, and I'll be moderating today's discussion. I'll say more about the panel's origins here in a minute, but to start, I'd like to first introduce our four panelists. Dr. Jennifer Earl is a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and a prolific expert in the social movements field, particularly regarding issues of movement repression. How many published works her 2011 book digitally enabled social change explores nonviolent activism in the internet age and she's also written extensively on youth activism and political engagement. Marwa Loati, who is not here at the moment, but hopefully will be joining us soon is an international development professional and a Tunisian civil society activist. She has worked with the National Democratic Institute, the US Institute of Peace, Democracy, Reporting International and the Council of Europe, among many others as a senior project officer. Marwa is also a peacebuilding trainer in the African Coaching Network where she works with social movements across the continent and is formerly the president of a youth civic organization in Tunisia. Isabella Peacon is a Venezuelan activist and political scientist based in Caracas. She participated in the 2017 and 2019 nonviolent campaigns for democracy in Venezuela, and is the co founder of Labo Ciudadano, an organization and activist collective that promotes nonviolent action. She also recently earned a master's degree in political communication at LSE through a championing scholarship. Lastly, Dr. Emily Henkin Ritter is an associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. Her research examines the relationship between government repression and mobilized to dissent activities and her newer work focuses on the role of non-government actors in the repressive process. Her book Contentious Compliance was published in 2019 with Oxford University Press. Thank you all for making time to share your expertise and wisdom with us. We're very grateful for the opportunity to bring together this group of activists, academics and policy practitioners in one space. Okay, so moving forward, the panel will go as follows. I'll actually kick us off by introducing the project that motivated this panel and describing some research that my team at USIP has recently conducted exploring women and youth participation in nonviolent action. After that, panelists will get the opportunity to respond to those findings, and then we will shift to a moderated discussion, including audience Q&A in the later stages. If you'd like to ask a question, you can type it into the window on the main event page online, which I will do my best to moderate here. I have it up on my other window, and I will attempt to slide your questions in real time during the Q&A. Okay, so without further ado, this panel is the culmination of a two-year research collaboration with USAID that explored the dynamics of contemporary nonviolent action campaigns. Our research focused specifically on women and youth as two groups that often play vital roles in nonviolent campaigns, but have not received as much attention as we think they deserve in social movement scholarship. Over the past two years, we've conducted a number of case studies. We've collected cross-national data on women and youth participation in nonviolent action campaigns. That was in collaboration with Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks over at Harvard. And we've run some survey experiments to test whether women and youth respond to protest events differently, or whether women and youth framing of protest movements matters for how observers perceive campaigns. And if you're curious to really dig into that research, you can find more detailed information about our findings online in several recent or forthcoming report publications and website posts. They're either up on the website now, or they will soon to be up. I think we're going to have another short piece up next week, and you can always reach out to me if you'd like to see more of that. For now, I'll just summarize the top-line results, which should serve as a launching point for today's conversation. So the biggest empirical finding from our work is that women and youth participation, both of them are associated with movement success. So according to the cross-national data we've collected, movements with extensive women and youth participation on the front lines of protest movements are more likely to succeed than movements with less prominent women and youth participation. Youth participation specifically is also associated with improvements in democratic outcomes in the years following campaigns. And we think that these findings reinforce the importance of women and youth participation and also justify policy efforts to better support these groups and their political engagement. Now, there are a lot of reasons why women and youth participation could be associated with movement success, and we try to dig into those mechanisms as well. Data from our survey experiments shows that movements involving women are perceived to be more likely to succeed and more deserving of popular support, so those movements might just be more popular. Movements featuring extensive women's participation are also associated with less violence, and we think that this is largely due to what is known as the moral shield effect, which is that it's harder for governments to violently repress women without triggering social backlash or massive popular backlash, and so perhaps governments are more risk-averse in this sense. In addition, younger activists are thought to be especially creative and also more willing to work across ideological or cultural lines, which can help them to build broad and diverse movement coalitions, which past research on nonviolent action tells us is really important to movement success, bringing in as big a constituency as possible to the movement. So all that said, at the same time, women and youth participation is not associated with specific improvements to material quality of life for those groups. For instance, in our cross-national data collection, we don't find any evidence that youth participation improves youth unemployment in the years after campaigns, and that's pretty striking because one of the major motivators for youth participation in politics that the literature identifies is youth bulges and exploding youth unemployment. So that's not getting better in the years after campaigns. We also know that both women and youth are often excluded from positions of political influence and leverage both during movements and the political transition periods that follow them. Women have to contend with patriarchal societies and gender norms that leave them subordinate to men and kind of boxed out of politics, while younger people are told that they lack the experience or wisdom of older generations and that they should defer to their elders or they're not taken seriously as political actors. So in short, our research suggests that while women and youth are important for movement success, it's not really clear that their participation is benefiting them as much as it could or as it should in the long run. Okay, so now I'm going to turn to our panelists to get their initial reaction to these findings. How do you feel about this summary? Did these findings resonate with your own work and personal experiences? And in your opinions, what makes women and youth participation important to nonviolent action? And anyone can jump at that. So I'm really excited about these findings. I think they're really fascinating. I also think that they are reflecting the fact that the broader the coalitions are that are involved in a movement, the more likely they are to be successful. So individual groups, if we look only at LGBTQ persons who are protesting for LGBTQ changes and making demands for their rights, and they're working alone, they're largely not successful, right? And that's what's being found in the work that you've done with, with Marx and Rivers. But when youth and women and men are working together towards a movement, towards a change, then they're more likely to be successful. So I think that the findings that are largely driving this is that when women are involved in a protest with others in a broader movement, that's a signal that the movement has really broad and diverse support and coalitional support. And those are the kinds of things that are more likely to be successful. So for instance, the US Civil Rights Movement really took a turn in the United States when members of the dominant group, white persons joined black organizations for their fight for rights. And when black organizations were working on their own, they were less successful. And in Iran, the protest movement started with demands for women's rights, but quickly turned into a critique of the repressive regime at large. And so it has become a movement with men and women and labor unions and lots of different swaths of communities across Iran working together for change. So when women, when women though demand women's rights and they do so alone, they're really successful. And when youth are demanding rights for youth alone, they're really successful. So I think it's, it makes a lot of sense that we're finding that when women are involved in larger movements and broad movements, they're more likely to be successful, but we're not seeing necessarily changes in the material benefits and policies for these marginalized groups, because they're not as successful when they're making demands on their own. Pissabella, do you want to go next or show? Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to point out that I think women, I mean, my perception is that when I started studying civil resistance and it started doing it because I became an activist. I, I felt that that civil resistance studies were like excessively focused on products on outcomes rather than process and like how movements are are built. And women are very, I mean, I don't want to essentialize because I think that's a problem like essentializing that women are good for peace. Women are focused on, for example, carrying duties, etc. But, but many women are very good at curating spaces that sustain movements. And this makes movements more resilient. Like the way I became an activist was because my father was in prison and it was that was this was in 2017. After like the four months of protest in Venezuela and I was very, very depressed. And I went to a meeting sort of like a very small assembly that was near my house with some people that I knew some people that I knew were going to be there. And say mad, someone that I had done activism with sort of like took me on her arm and told me like asked me like, how are you and like, are you kind of ready to, to come back to us. And I was like, actually, maybe I am, you know, and she exercised that role of. How are you and the other her partner, a guy was they, you know, kind of basically organizing stuff and like doing the, you know, doing more. I guess more operative work, but what say Mark did actually is was, you know, what actually added me into their numbers. And this meant that I was now participating again. So, so I think one of the reasons why, why women are like essential for this for social movements is because the curation of spaces and the, the, like, the sustaining processes of deliberation and are. They're, they're like essential for that. And, and it's a work. It's actually work that is not recognized. And that not only woman should do. I mean, the problem is one of the problems is that we think, oh, well, women are doing that. That's great. So the guys should basically do the spokesmanship and, and we should write the minutes and they should run the meetings. And it's like, no, actually what we are doing, they should be doing too. And we should be doing the spokesmanship and running the meetings too. It's not like there should not be like this very clear gender rules. It's just that we should be doing both things to sustain movements. That's just how I wanted to like open up. Yeah. Well, Matthew, let me thank you for both the work that you and your colleagues have done and also for hosting this event today. I've already enjoyed hearing from Isabella and Emily. I think that the research that you've done with your colleagues has really been important because young people are in practice. They're innovating social movements. They're, they're innovating. So they're through and through social movements. But people often don't notice them. And scholars don't often notice them. And when they do, as you mentioned, they often notice them to say that this isn't for you. You have to do it our way, or you don't know enough. Instead of to notice the incredible amount of innovation, the incredible amount of resilience, and the incredible impact that their participation has. So I really appreciate that you and your colleagues are helping to highlight the importance both historically and contemporarily of young people and women to nonviolent conflict to social movements, because I think for too long. Many people have have ignored the role, particularly of young people in movements. And when they noticed it complained about it, as opposed to celebrated it. And as academics really approached it the way older people approach looking at many older people's actions, like through our mindset. So we have concepts like biographical availability to explain the specialness of young people, which is that that young people have this incredible amount of free time. Maybe not the young people I know, but they have this incredible amount of free time and that's what's special about them. And I think more and more scholarship and and the work that you and your colleagues are doing is, I think, helping to push this forward, more and more scholarship is recognizing that that's not really probably capturing the full or most important impacts of young people's participation in movements. Instead, we really need to think about what it means to have distinct interests from older movement members. What's it mean to be a young Iranian woman versus an older Iranian woman? What's it mean to be a young black woman versus an older black man in Black Lives Matter? What's the unique interest that young people have? And then how do those interests, the innovation, the participation of young people, how does that help transform movements in more fundamental ways than they're biographically available or something? And so I think that the work you're doing is really pushing that forward. I was saddened, although not surprised, I guess, to read that your research is showing that the payoffs of that participation are disproportionately lower for young people in terms of the rewards that they as a group receive for that. Not surprised in the sense that young people have been formally politically excluded. And when they're not formally politically excluded, are often faced, you know, this heated criticism from friend and foe. And so it's not surprising that their important contributions don't just get denigrated on the front end, they also get diminished on the back end. I hope that your findings, though, point to a way that international actors and national social movements can focus on rectifying that, both then highlighting young people on the front end and also helping to reward that participation on the back end. Wonderful. Okay, this is, there's a lot to chew on here. I don't quite know which direction to go on but here's the question I now want to ask after these helpful introductory remarks. So I wanted to jump on something that Emily said about, like, my question is about the relationship between women's issues and kind of broader protest participation. So which of these comes first. So, one of the findings that comes out of our research is that women are often welcomed into social movements for regime change or democracy big system level change but then women face hostility when they attempt to build on that mobilization and advocate specifically for their, their, their own interests. But at the same time, it seems like sometimes protests that are initially about women's issues like the Iranian example is really good, which protests that started around expressly women's issues that then snowballed into this kind of bigger social movement. So what's going on there, how should we think about the relationship between gender specific protests and like how that fits in this with this broader kind of civil society space. I feel like, so I wish I had a direct answer for you. I wish I could say, this is what comes first and this is why this is how it works. And I honestly don't know that. But what I will say is that I think it's related to the fact that there are multiple actors who were involved in repressive policies. Right. So the government that makes policies that decides to use violence in the quick by using the military or the police and decides what the framework or the structure of repression is going to be. And then there's this site, right. And in particular, there are dominant actors in society that carry out the repressive policies in the structure that the government creates. And so when that societal actor, right, so if we're talking about women, often when we're talking about the dominant group in society, we're talking about men or male identified persons. And so when men see a place that they can benefit or hear demands that they can broaden to their benefit, then they will do so. So they'll do what happened in Iran. It's not necessarily, we can't conclude from the fact that there's this broad coalition and support that all of these people support women's rights. But they could take women's rights and turn it into a focus on the repressiveness of the regime and enlarge. And because the dominant group was so repressed as well under is so repressed as well under the Iranian government, they're willing to do that. If they weren't also repressed, right, if they were benefiting from the structures that that the women were protesting then they'd be less likely to join them. Right. And so I think that those are the kinds of so we need to think not just about the government versus women, we need to think about government and the dominant group and women and how they relate to one another. And in particular, how they relate to the demands that are being made. Eiza, are you looking to add to that you're on mute at just one. No, no, no, I'm just like. Just absorbing wall. I have it. I will direct it at you anyways because I'm curious. You know you you had gotten it. Another question I have that's related about kind of unique gender roles and protest movements. You know, you're describing I think what what I suspect is a relatively common struggle for women activists. And I'm just curious how how you like, how you see the way forward to navigate those issues, especially as they relate to then which which which objectives or priorities these movements are focusing on. Yeah, I mean, the, the more time I spend in like activism and politics. The more I feel it like the more the. I mean, the, the higher in the echelon of decision making, I go the more I feel it. I mean, if you are in a, I mean, I'm going to like explain the difference between what I was doing in 2017 and what I'm doing now. In 2017, I had a tactical role. I was basically doing. I was doing like painting stuff and like doing tactical things and that place is a place of horizontal and horizontality and camaraderie and it's beautiful when you go into the strategy into okay what are we going to prioritize today. What should we communicate. What are which organizations should we ally with like right now I'm trying to to connect civil society organizations and political parties to join forces on like water issues or subway system or like that like our theory of change has to do with with causes with like. Joe like building unity, but around certain causes, rather than like top down, we need to have a grand strategy, like. From from the beginning, because obviously the manual says that you need unity. This opinion and planning, but it doesn't really work. And like in practice, unity is not built like top down like that. So the instances of strategy are very much male dominated. It's, and the older I get because I go higher in the echelon that the more you feel it. And the only way you can actually sort of build the strength to. Yeah, please. Sorry, I didn't mean to. No, but I like what you're saying about choosing, you know, how do organizations choose the topic or the issue that they're going to focus on. And I think there's back to Matthew's point, I think that there's a really interesting thing to to study here about how organizations choose that issue, and to see whether it lasts after their success. Right. So, if you choose an issue that you can build a coalition around. Does that mean that the coalition will states together after they've had some success and they can then use that unity to make demands for their individual partners that are in that coalition. And this is something that I think is really interesting, like, choosing those issues influences what's going to happen in the next stage and and it's really hard to to know what that that influence is going to be. Yeah, yeah. For sure. Sometimes there's a temptation of we were successful and okay we go on to the next thing and it's like. Well made, not necessarily, but what I was saying is that you need to partner and to have affinity groups with other women that are sort of in the same position or in in lower positions in the hierarchy to like support each other. So you are like, you know, this meeting, I'm just not going to write the minutes, you know, I'm just someone else is going to do it. And, or I'm not, I'm not going to send the list of to do things someone else is going to do it like and. Like, you need, you need support from other women to sort of survive and thrive in the in the process, especially if you're in a strategic role, because it happens a lot that woman are basically doing social media right in minutes, doing this care, the care and and curating spaces duty. And it doesn't mean we don't have to do it, but we have to kind of teach men how to do it and tell them, you know, you can, you can probably do it too. But I think the only way is spaces where women support each other. Okay, I'm going to follow up on this again and hopefully bring some more you focused themes in as well so. Another kind of major change that has happened over the past 1015 years with the advent of digital media the internet really cheap cell communication, lots of contemporary movements now are really decentralized. Previously movements had very clear rigid hierarchies are not all of them but this was more common and now it seems like potentially especially younger activists are shifting towards more horizontal networks with consensus based practices. How does that impact kind of these gender roles that you're talking about in social movements do you think that the kind of these practices are changing those if there's less clear hierarchies or is that not the case. Yeah, I think I think it's changing. I mean, I think that this affection, it has to do a little bit with the disaffection in general with political parties. So, I mean, I would, I would make a difference, or try to to study, like, are young people in political parties as non hierarchical as young people in like social movement and civil society organizations because sometimes the, I mean, the medium kind of affects the, the behavior. So I've seen young people in political parties that are very much hierarchical and older people that are very much into, like, they don't basically they question any kind of leadership that there is, which is also very bad. Sometimes we go into the other extreme that is like any leadership any kind of leadership is suspicious. But I would say that also, maybe young people are more into are more into this tactical roles and precisely because of that like in tactical roles there's going to be more horizontal. Like if the, if the task is to do a creative protest, then, you know, in a creative process, you need sort of horizontality, but in the strategic process, you need a few decision makers. So, I'm a little bit skeptical of like young people are essentially like non hierarchical, or I don't know if that's exactly a case, but that's just me, I mean, yeah. So if I could jump in, I mean, I would agree that I wouldn't want to essentialize the characteristics of either young people as a group, because that's, that's a difficult grouping there lots of different intersectional identities amongst young people that make important differences and I wouldn't want to essentialize those either, or women, but I think it may be a different way to come at this is to think about the position within a political context that is leading people to be outside of organizations, because the technology doesn't cause people to go outside of organizations. It allows them to. Those are two fundamentally different things. People might have had an appetite to work outside of organizations long before there were digital and social media, but they didn't have the means to easily do so to cheaply do so to quickly do so. And so the technology itself doesn't lead to the appetite. It leads to an ability to realize that appetite. And so then I think that the more fundamental question becomes, why would it be that young people or women want to work outside of those existing organizations. And the research that exists within social movement studies on young people certainly says that it's because those organizations haven't been very welcoming to young people. I mean, politics in general, really treats young people by telling them this isn't for you this isn't for you. And then when young people reach voting age says, why aren't you voting? Why aren't you doing things? Why didn't you just act like your political involvement was a light switch that went from you should know better than turning that on to it's on. So we have this context where we give just tons of cultural and formal structural messages about how outside young people are. And then even our social movement organizations often repeat those same kinds of messages really treating young people as though they're only going to be effective when they're working under the tutelage or mentorship or instruction of older activists and often treating young people as labor as opposed to ideas people or strategic thinkers. So here's this preset thing that we've decided you should do. Now, what your contribution to this movement is to go and do the things that we've decided on. Who wants that. No one ever was like that's the most attractive offer ever to just think about taking my labor, but none of my ideas or what I think is important. And so I think what we see is certainly changes in digital and social media matter, because they're allowing these appetites to be expressed. But the appetites aren't being created by digital and social media. They're coming from the relative marginalization of young people's interests ideas deeper want for participation than acting as labor and movements and also reflecting their deeper exclusion from political environments. And so I think it's really the coupling of those two things that helps understand us to understand why young people would choose more horizontal and sort of routing around organizational pathways. Although I would agree with Isabella that that's not a totalizing fact there are plenty of young people who are involved in more hierarchical movements as well. I would say that's the is apart from like being sort of marginalized sometimes is the instrumentalization of of young people. I mean, and it kind of triggered me a little bit when when like young people in the on the front lines because we live that I mean, in Venezuela in like in 2014 2017. Wow. So many young people on the front lines, but not really as spokespeople. They're basically on a labor like putting their flesh and their blood there and willingly, like, you know, thinking that they were actually gonna that we were actually gonna achieve democracy I was, I was 27. And I had, I mean, enough. I inhaled enough tear gas for for a lifetime and willingly like I really thought that that was gonna, you know, maybe change things. And with these phrases like you're the future of the country, you're the one that needs to be here, etc. And that causes, I mean, in the same way that you're absolutely engaged at one point, then you get allergy from like any kind of political engagement, because of the instrumentalization of your presence and and now you see the lack of young people like most of the diaspora are young people 80% of the diaspora are between 18 and 50 years old. And most of them, it from 2017 most of them were between 20 and 35. Now it's gotten a little bit older, but you see like in, I can go to an activist meeting and be the younger person, the youngest person and I'm 33. It's insane and that's, um, that makes for lack of creativity for, you know, kind of not wanting to to make any really any real disruption, etc. And what young people can do is because we can achieve some kind of disruption, we can sort of impose some rules of the game on how we're going to make decisions to build a protest or build a strategy, etc. It's like, we can create the disruption we are the creative ones. We have the discourse in a way so, you know, you can you're going to participate, but we're going to put the rules here, and we have sort of started to do that at home with certain causes. Okay, so I'm going to jump in here and because we're kind of circling indirectly around something that I want to ask directly about. So we often talk about generational gaps or generational differences or kind of divides between, hopefully without essentializing them younger groups versus older groups. But we don't talk as much about specific strategies for how younger and older generations of activists can build bridges and work together. And obviously, these comments are all related to this about how you feel marginalized and are not respected by older generations of activists. So I'm just curious. Do you have kind of examples in mind of cases in which this has worked well or what are the conditions that civil society organizations need to develop to try and better include younger people? This is for me. If you'd like, sure. I mean, for example, we organized a march on November 25th. It was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. And we wanted to be like a woman's march that basically included young women and older women from popular areas of Caracas. Because violence against women, obviously, everyone lives it, but in more vulnerable areas, it's more acute. And last year we, I mean, and there are many, I am a feminist, obviously, but sometimes violence against women is sort of academicized. And we wanted women in the barrios to like feel that this was their issue too. So we kind of had to explain in a way to older women that are like, you know, the traditional feminist activists here at home that we needed to have a strategy to expand the participation so that women in the barrios that don't necessarily call themselves feminists would participate in this protest too. And that we were going to, and actually share my screen. Here it is. That's my email, but yeah. So we created this protest where we created butterflies. And through like, basically self mediation, like they would serve as pancartas as they would make, they would decorate their like, you don't touch children, you know, they would basically put whatever they want. And this is the organizing team. It's very like, you know, all of us in our 30s. This is very, you know, this is this person is like 60. See, like 40, like people from different ages, people from different political parties from like the left, the right, etc. And basically, it was because the core group had a very, very intent and clear strategy, clear symbol that was the butterflies. And because it represents freedom and transformation. And, and that's how sort of we created for us ideological participation where women from different classes would participate in the March. But we took some convincing of the like the older, more traditional activists, you know. So if I could jump in and add to this, I have a, my general answer is that we need to really think about allyship as a model for moving forward. But I'll back into that by saying some things that often ruffle people's feathers a little bit when they first hear because they're not used to being pitched this way. But I really think that we need to think about youth as an axis of inequality. And intersectional youth identities as intersectional identities that are often associated with minor organization. And so, in the same way that we have worked across movements to try to make them more inclusive spaces and we're certainly hearing from Isabelle and Emily about the way that this is still very much a work in progress for women. We need to also think about trying to make spaces more inclusive for young people. And so I have like an easy rule to suggest to people in their organizing, which is if you wouldn't say or do something to another group of minoritized people, you shouldn't say or do those things with respect to young people. And so, if you are, you know, for instance, hopefully unwilling to assume that women as a group have completely consistent interests that there's no differences amongst women of color from white women, women from different socio-economic classes, women of different nationalities, if you're unwilling to accept that there aren't these, you know, if you're like in the moment now and like that was a tragedy for movements in the past to really think about things that way. We need to carry that vision of inclusivity into our relationships with young people. And so, if you wouldn't assume that women or another minoritized group can't be effective unless you tutor them, right? That's not a great look. Then you shouldn't make that assumption about young people either. If you assume that people are only good for their labor, not for their strategy, and you wouldn't do that, you would know better than to do that about another group, you shouldn't do it about young people either. And so, I think really the way to fix this is to really understand that this is a dimension of inequality. And that means that some of the same solutions that we've tried to have to other inequalities and movements and in politics can work here too when we recognize this as an instance of inequality. And so, when we start to really say, wait, if we think about it that way, that means that young people may have different interests than us. They may have different life experiences. They may have different positions and resources. They may have different networks. That opens up a way of really understanding how that difference can empower and improve movements as opposed to be ignored by them. And I think that model of allyship is the way forward. And we could talk about specific organizations that do that really well. But at the base, what those organizations that are doing things really well are doing is treating young people as people who come to movements with as much value and position and interest as everyone else coming to that movement. And that once you get out of that hierarchical, unequal mindset, you can start to get to a more genuine place of collaboration. That was great. Okay, way too much to follow up with. I'm just going to take a second to remind viewers that the Q&A is open on the event page where you registered. So if you have questions, we're starting to collect them. I will start looking at them shortly, but I'm going to use my prerogatives and ask one more question, which is, one thing that our research didn't really explore as well as we would have liked is this issue of intersectionality, which has been brought up a couple different times between gender and age identities. So we know that youth and gender matter separately as we've discussed, but these identities kind of interact in important ways. And we, you know, we think that younger men and women versus older men and women face different opportunities and constraints. I guess I'd like to hear from all of the panelists. I'd just like to hear more really. Can you speak about this, how this intersectionality plays out in social movements? You know, are there the kind of differences that have emerged across time? Are there differences in digital space between younger and older men and women? Really, however you want to take it. I mean, I'm going to be happy for somebody else to go first if they'd like to, but I have some thoughts on it as well. Isabella, I'm going to do either of you want to go first. Okay. So I think, you know, if we start moving from my last answer to thinking about this as an instance of inequality or a kind of inequality, then you would immediately expect the kinds of double disadvantage that we see for other intersectional identities. And that is what the research tends to suggest that, for instance, young women face even greater burdens than young men in being seen as a genetic, as able to provide more than their labor, as able to provide more skilled labor. And so I think you see those kinds of double disadvantage. And so it's not surprising to me going back to one of your earlier questions, Matthew, that we see young women stepping forward and leading outside of traditional organizations. Like, let's think about, you know, Greta Thunberg not as a sort of, I mean, she is a unique person. I don't mean to say anything like that. But instead of like having this like great leaders mentality about it, let's think about why is that person who's stepping outside a young woman? And my answer would be because the routes inside are relatively more for stalled for young women than young men. And so I think, you know, my immediate answer is that there's this kind of double disadvantage and that's really important to address and for us to be aware of, not to sort of just treat all young people or all women as if they're all one age. And I think that there are differences across societies about how much of a double disadvantage that is, right? So if women become childbearing much earlier in some societies than others, or if they go to college in some areas and others, right, those differences influence whether young women are going to have more power than older women. Or have the same amount of power, right? So there are some societies where I think that there's not as much of a double disadvantage as Jen describes and there are other places where it's absolutely a double disadvantage. So I think that, yeah, that it's worth considering cultural context. And in those kinds of context where there is a double disadvantage, it'll, it takes even more effort to bring in people who young women into the organizing and activism space. I see that Marwa has been able to join the call, which is great. I would like to kind of ask Issa and Marwa a follow up question along these lines, which is, are these kind of, we've been talking a lot about gendered roles in activism or simple society organizations. And we've also talked a lot about how those are often imposed by older generations. Do you think that they're the younger generations are different or do they exhibit the same types of kind of structured gender roles? Like we talked earlier about how men are seen to be in like the big vision strategy positions and women are more like facilitators or curators of spaces. Is that true for younger men and women as well? Hi everyone, sorry I joined late, I got confused with the time really sorry. So for, for, I think that things are changing, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, in terms of values because now we're seeing that the globalization has changed a lot of things in the mindsets of young people and the values that they embody. So we see like more openness towards gender equality and for women to embrace leadership positions and among young people. So even as an activist in civil society, I can say that most organizations are women dominated rather than male dominated, which is great. And the activism in Tunisia and in the Middle East, North Africa is also has been shaped by women's presence in the field and they have contributed a lot in the fight for women's rights, especially and also for minorities rights. And that's I think a great way to make gender equality, not just a slogan, but at least in activism, we see it broadly and we see it pervasively that the fight is on and also that young people in general are calling for gender equality. And women are taking more of leadership roles. For instance, in Tunisia, we've seen that in the constitutional development, there has been a huge role and one of the prize winners of the Nobel Prize winners was Mrs. Widad Bushamewi. She was like the lady and she was leading the reform process and she's also a great activist. When we see about the laws that have been shaped against the violence against women, a lot of the leading roles were like women NGOs that were fighting for women's rights and also human rights more broadly. And also in peace processes and mediation, many of the facilitations that happen and happen in dialogue, whether at regional or national levels, they include both men and women, but we can see like things are changing. At least I would say like Tunisia has a lot of the changing perspective in the Middle East and North Africa and has been set as an example. We also see that there's still a lot to be changed in terms of making women's roles, not only in civil society but more importantly in politics. We see that there's still this huge gap. I hope that covers the points. Yeah, I think that in Venezuelans and Latin America is the same like the civil society and sort of grassroots social movement sector is dominated by women. And when it comes to like the speakership, like probably the running of meetings too, but like the speakership, the decision making, the actual coming into politics, it becomes, I mean, there's a glass ceiling that makes it so that we need to be very deliberate in, okay, we need to have these programs that sort of help women transition from this civil society social movement roles, grassroots roles into political leadership. And that requires training in giving speeches and speaking in public, media training, it requires like how to lead campaigns, how to like management. And yeah, I think it has like, I think globalization, as Marwa said, and there's a value change that makes women more like, okay, I could be in that role. But the confidence and the training that it requires for people to actually feel in, like be comfortable in that. I think it's very different. Like I many politicians, friends of mine have taken what five or six courses on giving speeches. And I mean, women are usually not given that investment. So that has to be done sort of very much deliberately and it has to be done from from from the start from when you are a social leader, so that you are putting positions that make you think you know I could, I could be up there in a more representative position. So I'm going to turn to some of the audience questions now. Erica Lee asks about what what should we do in contexts where access to either education or other resources are restricted. So where should women pull support from if, for example, women led affinity groups are kind of met with violent repression or are kind of excluded from from political power or resources how should women engage with that process. I think I'm the one that that mentioned women led affinity groups so I'm, I'm going to try to answer the question I think, first, I think it's. I mean, yeah, exactly. That's a good idea. I think affinity groups are very much like a private thing. So I've never heard of like an affinity group has been like targeted specifically. I think that were access. Sorry, one second to read the question. Yeah, I'm going to read the question. Well, I think that's, I think one of the last questions or one of the last talking points of this panel, it was going to be like how can the international community help external support. I think, I think external support can actually should have should help women affinity groups sort of deal with emergencies lead deal with with with moments where when a woman needs needs help because of repression, etc. I think that's a really important area of support for the international community. I 100% agree with that and I think this can also be a place where courts and law can be really useful. So one of the cases that I look at in the paper that I've been writing on this topic is, is in Turkey and in this case women, I mean, we're looking at the feminist side in Turkey, and there are nonprofit organizations around Turkey who can help women bring legal claims about against their oppressors or against the state for engaging in femicide or supporting or allowing femicide and in this particular case, this organization worked with international NGOs to bring a case to the European Court of Human Rights. So, not only I think, is it really important for international organizations non governmental organizations and governments to support women in these kinds of spaces where they have less local or domestic resources available to them, but we can also use things beyond traditional protest actions and instead use things like legal claims to be able to to pressure governments for change. I'm actually going to follow up on this to get back to a question I'd wanted to ask Emily about an hour ago, and the conversation kind of wound its own way around it, but this is now related so so this initial question was about, you know, society and many countries in the world women's access to to political power and influence is restricted I think that's not that's not like a particularly unique context. And that fact kind of it clashes with some of the stuff that our research shows in interesting ways so lots of activists that we have spoken with talk about this moral shield effect by which, including women in protest movements, kind of reduces the violence overall either for the moral shield effect reason because women in protest movements are less willing to repress them, or perhaps because women are, for some reason, more predisposed to non violence and are better able to maintain nonviolent discipline in movements that that's a really common thread that comes out of our work. And at the same time you've kind of pointed out a couple of times here that, you know, domestic resources for for women might be really constrained that societies find ways to repress women so those those seem like their intention to me like how can, how can regimes get away not not be able to repress women and social movements but find ways to systematically repress them kind of elsewhere. And I know you've done some work on this so I would love to hear more about that from you. There to answer this question. I think there are two things to think about one is how social ideas of women are norms about women create this tension and then there's also the process of repression that leads to this tension so one in the first place. There are often in lots of different places and in fact probably in most places, there's this norm that women are vulnerable there to be protected by what my men. There's something that they, they are this group of people and individuals who need protection and should never be attacked they should be supported they should be, you know, they, we don't kill women because they're gentle and soft. Right. And, and I think that that norm can be really cross cutting one in that it creates this moral shield as you described right like that that police can't get away with shooting a bunch of women in an open field or in an open space. But at the same time, it undercuts the belief that women should have power or have rights. Right. So if, if society sees women under this norm of gentility or vulnerability, it can do serve them in this way of the moral shield but also undermine, whether they are perceived as being deserving of these kinds of rights and protections that they're asking for. I think there's also an element of there's a difference between the government responding to protests with violence and governments actually changing policies and practices. Right. So, governments might not shoot into the crowds. If there are women there, because they know there will be societal backlash, but they can easily get away with passing a policy. Five months later, when people aren't paying attention anymore, that is a repressive policy, or they might not shoot into the crowds and let the protest happen, but then not actually change anything. And that's especially likely if the dominant groups in society will support the government in that. Right. So they may not want them to shoot women, but they're perfectly happy not voting them into power. Right. And so when they are, so I think bearing in mind the distinction between that response and overall processes of oppression and repression is important for understanding that distinction that you found. Got it. Okay. So, shams in the audience chat asks a question about kind of along the same lines of how to deal with repression, but the question is specifically about education so and in Afghanistan so younger generations of women in Afghanistan are restricted potentially even from basic educational opportunities and I'm wondering if kind of this education problem is specific and requires specific responses so what how should we think about lack of educational opportunities for women as a barrier to social movement participation and and you know it does that I assume that extends beyond Afghanistan as a context. I don't have an answer to that situation but I mean, I have an example of how we are dealing with that in at home. I have a friend Daniela who actually was one of the organizers of the, the March on the 25th of November. She has groups of women teachers. I mean, unlike the education system is especially up in the barrios is is pretty much non existent so but they're women teachers that used to teach maybe 10 or 20 years ago into in public schools, and they have like in their homes they their home serve as a small schools. So they create like a sort of comparative of women teachers that teach each other how to teach and that also teach other women. And because they go through a training to like hone their teaching abilities and their, you know, and to cope with the, with the world with the fact that they actually have now the burden of teaching to and not only like cooking and doing the carrying off of their own homes. They, they go through this training and they create affinity groups. So it's like, and they become sort of activists. Also, I mean, in the area where they want. So, I think to the extent that you provide education and to two women in these spaces, they don't have to be institutional spaces because we don't, we know that the institutions are sort of like a zero the non factor, but to the extent that you can provide some is some some extra institutional education and and also abilities to to teach to others. You can create affinity groups of people that that eventually become activists to because they are not also they're not only carrying any more about the individual and like private needs, but they start carrying out the community to and they start having the some some skills to to be effective in the community. So I don't think this is a, oh, sorry. Please go ahead. I saw you on news. Please. Okay, you go ahead fast. Okay, so I was just gonna actually emphasize what Isabella said, like, in context where there is a lot of violence and threats of police arrest. I think that homes, and also historically like through colonialism, and also when women didn't have as much rights as they do today in the world, homes were an important place where education and activism and preparations for tactics and for strategies were in place in informal settings at homes and home education is very important, especially in places like Afghanistan now with the restrictions even on young young girls like going to school. So homes schooling has become very crucial to ensure that the young girls continue to receive education and not to become a literate and also women and homes in general, even when we talk about people who are looked up looked up from the police. Homes are a refuge for places to places to where where people can can hide and historically this is where people in general have been either hiding educating preparing for their activism and to fight police forces or to fight colonial forces and to avoid any any violent clashes. In general, what is very important here is that, especially with the technological developments that we utilize the platforms that are safe and secure for the communication. And if there is internet, of course, because now we live in the also in a world where internet is not in place or not doesn't exist everywhere in the same way, but whether there there is internet or not, I think humanity as a whole has been able to implement defined develop tactics where it can and secrecy continue to do the activism and does not stop just because there is a violent police forces or violent regime that oppresses people. The women women played historically a huge role and they will continue to lead the stroll whether it whether it be at homes or at institutional level and we I don't think that the world really understands or fathoms the the importance that women played over time to make regime regime changes. Through home activism as well. Just to sort of extend off that I think, instead of taking this question from my perspective as you know what to do. I could ask what has been done in the past. And I think we could look at research by folks like Katie Pierce on former Soviet block nations. What, how did people resist in in Soviet times Hank Johnston's work is also on that topic with a lot of good work that is about how people have managed in highly securitized spaces that that have that have made potentially extended family and friendship networks parts of the surveillance apparatus, how people resist and we just heard a great application of that work to to now. And we might also think about the ways that cultural groups and other kinds of affinity groups that are more allowable become politicized become spaces that are protected so for instance, you know language, language learning groups or language retention groups have historically become politicized and been places where people can hold on to resistance, but pivoting this and just one other direction. I think this really points to the importance of thinking about the multiple layers of control that young people that women that other minoritized groups face. And because exactly the question that you posed that Emily spoke to before about this juxtaposition of women being safer from immediate repression and yet being really repressed by states. Jessica Brathwaite and I have come out recently with a model for thinking about how you combine what's going on at the overall population and government level with what's happening to minoritized groups in a country with what's happening in political institutional space with the control apparatus that's being focused on social movements and our argument there is that literatures have treated these as things that are separable, but in practice, they are entirely inseparable for for getting a bigger picture understanding. And in part, the reason that they're inseparable is exactly the base of this question because the answer is that if one area is stifled, you move to another area. And from a government's perspective, or a repressor's perspective, when you can't do in one area, you do in another. And that's the the sort of basis of the conversation that that you and Emily Matthew had earlier. I'm just I'm just frantically taking notes down here with everything everybody said, it's already 1117 so I think I'm going to cut us here. Thank you all again very very much for spending time with us this has been really informative and I have a lot to chew over as I kind of write up our final reports on the subject. To the audience thank you all very much for attending, and we hope to see you again soon in an event like this. Thank you all very much. Thank you.