 Well, welcome everybody to, not the Low Institute, the Low Institute at Telstra. Telstra has very generously provided this beautiful, actually spectacular venue, so I hope you enjoyed walking in and seeing this amazing livery that we've created for this event. My name is Alex Oliver, I'm the Director of Research at the Low Institute, and I have four women on stage with me, each leading experts in their particular fields, both in Australia and internationally. I will keep these introductory comments brief. These four experts have very compelling stories to tell from their research and experience, to illustrate and explain what is a very big, unwieldy and quite challenging topic as we all discovered as we prepared for it during the week. In the first issue in 2019 of the Atlantic magazine, the journalist Peter Bynart wrote a seemingly provocative piece titled, The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women. In the Washington Post in 2016, Professor Piva Norris, an academic at John F Kennedy at Harvard and at University of Sydney, wrote a piece headlined, It's Not Just Trump, Authoritarian Populism is Rising Across the West. Both of those pieces catalogued the rise of authoritarian leadership in Brazil, Philippines, Hungary, Italy, Poland and even in the US. A diverse set of countries with a broad range of social, economic and political conditions, some in recession, some with booming economies, some facing big immigration flows, some not. In other places, Professor Norris catalogued the electoral gains made by populist authoritarian party leaders in Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Latin America and the UK, not your usual suspects. Contemporary authoritarianism, gee that's a long word, bear with me, is not particularly new. This may come as no surprise in this room. To paraphrase Professor Norris, these authoritarian populists have been with us for decades in economically bad times and good in liberal and conservative governments and regardless of religion equality or inequality. And then there are the long-standing authoritarian states such as Russia and China. Just last week, a group of prominent international female leaders including Helen Clark, Irina Bokova, Christina Figueras, Mary Robinson wrote an open letter warning of the perils of the rise of macho-type strong men to the peace and security of societies across the globe. In the next hour we're going to delve into why this is happening and what specific impacts this trend is having on women. As Barnhart theorised in January, the common thread across all of those leaderships that I listed is that they all want to subordinate women, that they link and entrench their new political order with a more subordinate and traditional role for women. Now, to our panel. Dr Nicole Curato here in the middle is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, the Philippines editor of New Mandala and just this year she has authored and co-authored two books on deliberative democracy. She's been awarded a prestigious ARC award for her work on democratic innovations in post-disaster situations. Lydia Khalil, to Nicole's left, is my colleague and research fellow at the Low Institute. She's an expert in security policy, Middle East politics and intelligence, worked as an advisor for the US Department of Defense in Iraq and with the Boston and New York police departments on counter-terrorism and violent extremism. She's held fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and Macquarie University. Elaine Pearson on my left is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch, previously Deputy at Human Rights Watch's Asia Division in New York where she's just come back from yesterday. She's worked for the UN and various NGOs in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She's an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Trafficking Women. Dr Bekashi, and last but not least, at the end, there's Program Director of Gender Studies at Macquarie University. She's an honorary associate at the US Study Center. She's lectured in US history. Her research spans US and feminist history, popular culture and cultural politics including race, gender, religion and sexuality. And she's currently working on a new book as well, On the Rise of the Superwoman. This is a great title. How Sex Remade Gender in America's Long 70s and we're going to get to that later. So I can say that this is a uniquely qualified panel to debate this issue. Elaine, let's get going. Can I start with you? With a career in human rights spanning the globe, I was wondering if you could perhaps describe for us what appears to be this escalating trend towards authoritarianism across the world, materialising in sometimes surprising places and with disturbing impacts on women. So... Yeah, shed some light from Human Rights Watchers' perspective. Thanks, Alex. And I think it is particularly timely to be having this discussion right now. As you mentioned last week, there was this letter from 30 female leaders around the world really condemning the erosion of women's human rights right now. And, you know, when I think back over my career, when I first started working, I worked for a small women's rights organisation in Thailand and I was in New York... I think it was the year 2000 or five years after the Beijing Platform for Action, which was really, I guess, the pinnacle of the women's rights movement. It was like a new commitment to gender equality of women all around the world, of governments. And now when I look at what's happening around the world, I think it is extremely concerning because we have seen, you know, the rise of these populist leaders that are going all out to attack women's rights defenders. I think with populism, you know, what we see in many countries is the rights of the majority are being protected or supposedly protected by scapegoating or demonising certain minorities. And in different parts of the world, we see this playing out in different ways. It might be migrants, it might be Muslims, it might be LGBTI people, but in many countries, actually, the minority, which obviously we're not a minority because we're half the population, but it's actually women. And I think Poland is a particularly interesting example where this has been playing out. In both Eastern Europe and Latin America, we've seen the rise of these leaders who talk about combating gender ideology because gender is now a dirty word in certain countries. And, you know, they've moved away from using terms like gender mainstreaming. It's now about family mainstreaming. So what does this mean and what exactly is the threat? Well, this is really, I guess, governments that are dominated by religious conservative leaders. They're particularly concerned about the promotion of policies about improving gender equality, about addressing sexual and gender discrimination. And so, you know, as part of, I guess, their politics and, you know, maintaining their political support from their base, they've really started, particularly, I guess, with galvanizing support around sexual and reproductive health rights. So we've seen a lot of a push against laws that allow abortions. And we're seeing this play out in places like Poland, but also, of course, in the United States. And so, while, you know, of course, Trump gets a lot of heat because of all the casual misogynistic and sexist comments that he makes nearly every day about his political opponents, you know, it's also extremely concerning that in the U.S. we've seen the return and expansion of the global gag rule. And this is basically a rule which restricts U.S. funding to any groups that advocate or provide information. They don't even have to advocate. They just might provide information about safe legal abortions anywhere in the world. So this has massive implications for women's health all around the world. And I think the fact that the U.S. government is doing this, we're now seeing in the U.N., I was just in New York last week, we're seeing in all sorts of resolutions where the term sexual and reproductive health is mentioned, there are efforts by the U.S. government and by a lot of these other governments to simply delete that language entirely. And, you know, so we've really moved backwards when I think about, you know, where we were in 1995, I guess, with the Beijing platform for action. And then I guess, I mean, there's also countries, I feel like if we're talking about, you know, women in the ear of the strongman, we should also talk about Saudi Arabia, we should talk about China. I don't think we can have a discussion on women's rights without mentioning Saudi, which is probably one of the world's worst countries where it is to be a woman. And, you know, there we have a leader who, you know, supposedly is a reformer, has granted women the right to drive cars last year, has opened up entertainment venues, has allowed women to attend sporting matches. So this benevolent leader, not so benevolent as we have discovered, has, you know, granted, I guess, women's rights. But at the same time, he's embarked on a massive crackdown on human rights defenders, including women's rights defenders who remain in prison, while at the same time he hasn't done anything to get rid of the entrenched male guardianship system in Saudi Arabia. Nana Coll, I'm going to come to you because you mentioned casual misogynistic comments, and you spend a lot of time in the Philippines and have been a close observer of his presidency since 2016. One of the most polite things he has said about women is that he believes in the competence and capability of them, just not in all aspects of life. No doubt you've got a catalogue of the polite things that he said about women. What is life like for women in the Philippines today? The Philippines is actually a fascinating case because it looks excellent on paper when it comes to gender equality, but grotesque in practice. In 2018, the Global Gender Gap Report ranked the Philippines eighth in the world when it comes to closing the gender gap. So basically it's in the same league as Sweden, Norway, Iceland, you know, the Scandinavian paradise. It ranks much better compared to Australia, the United States, Japan when it comes to gender equality. So it looks good on paper, but it's grotesque in practice. So for example, if we look at the data on economic participation, it's very common to see women in positions of leadership. But that really is underpinned by the idea that women can aspire to be ambitious and successful in their professional careers because there's a steady supply of underpaid, overworked women who are able to take on the caring duties that traditionally stop women for pursuing their professional ambitions in the same way that the Philippines is actually doing really well compared to its neighbors in terms of women's participation in parliament. But if we actually look at the background of women in parliament, they belong to political clans, they get their political brands either from their fathers or their husbands. So I think if we locate President Rodrigo Duterte in this context, I would say that President Duterte is also just a manifestation of how the Philippines looks good on paper but grotesque in practice. So of course there's a lot of attention given to the rhetoric, the very sexist rhetoric that President Duterte directs at women. If you'd allow me to provide some quotes, for example, he recently told the military that they should shoot female rebels into vagina because if women don't have vaginas, they're useless. How does this speak to how the Philippines looks like on paper? Actually, the President's spokespersons and some of his allies, or spin doctors if you'd like to call it that, would say that this President is actually quite progressive when it comes to women's policies. So just recently, President Duterte signed a law that extends maternity leave. Recently, he also committed to funding reproductive health programs that not a lot of politicians in the past would commit to because they're afraid of the Roman Catholic Church. Where President Duterte was mayor in Davao City for 20 years, Davao City actually had the most progressive gender policy. So just to give you an example, the Women Development Code of Davao prohibits taunting a person with constant talk about sex and sexual innowendos, displaying offensive or lewd pictures in the workplace, repeatedly asking for dates despite verbal rejection. That's prohibited in Davao City. If he was mayor, then he was somehow violating of those rules? Exactly. But what's the punchline here? Why am I describing this in this context? What I'm saying is if you look at things in the Philippines on paper, it looks good in practice, it's grotesque. And when we focus on President Duterte's sexist language, then we realize what is still permissible in this patriarchal society. I've been on the front lines witnessing President Duterte deliver these speeches. And it's very confronting when the people around me laugh at a rape joke. It's very confronting when I hear his speech in front of a mass grave, reducing the vice president of the Philippines who is a woman to a piece of meat. It's very confronting, but it's also a reminder that a lot of things still need to be done. Lydia, in a way, one of the most obvious places to look is in your area of expertise in the Middle East. And Elaine mentioned the case of bin Salman and the driving ban. And there's sort of contradictory evidence coming out of the Middle East. Can you perhaps take us through some of those contradictions across that region? Sure. Well, you're absolutely right that we've seen this stubborn resilience of authoritarianism in the Middle East. And sadly, frustratingly even after, with the promise of the uprisings in 2011, we've not only seen a return to authoritarianism of the Middle East, but in a much more virulent form. So you have examples of countries like Egypt which went from authoritarianism of Mubarak to the totalitarianism of President Sisi right now. You see countries that started peaceful protests during the Arab uprisings in 2011 descend into civil violence and civil conflict like Libya and Syria. And then you have countries as Elaine had alluded to like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries who have this veneer of progress but stealthily they're still maintaining very, very tight controls over their societies under this clever veneer of openness and reform but it's far from the case. But authoritarianism in the Middle East is interesting in that in a lot of the past authoritarian regimes we actually saw some gains for women. So again, under Mubarak and Egypt we saw some gains for women in terms of access to education, public health. There was a big program promoted by President Mubarak and his wife Suzanne against female genital mutilation for example. You had some level of representation for women in Egypt. Same thing with Iraq under Saddam Hussein women were very involved in professional lives they had some sort of representation in the bath regime and there were some gains. But the problem was that they were very top-down reforms from these authoritarian governments and they either didn't stick with some of the conservative elements of the population or if people bought into them and they benefited from them and they agreed from them you still have this restriction on personal liberties and civil liberties that didn't make those top-down reforms enough because it restricted every individual in their civil and political life. And then if you go back again to take a look at Egypt during these protests we saw that women and women's physical bodies became a battleground during these protests between some of the authoritarian regime elements and the protesters. So for example during the protests in Tahrir Square in Egypt women were sexually harassed by the security forces some of these women were exposed to virginity tests so they were arrested and detained by police forces in Egypt where they supposedly for their own safety wanted to check to see if they were protected during the protests and stuff but it was basically a means of controlling and repressing women's bodies and you have a situation where sexual harassment is still very very rampant in Egypt I saw some statistic where it was said I think 99% of women or something had complained about sexual harassment and I thought well it's absolutely 100% where's that other 1% and Cici in the beginning he came out as a promising leader you know saying that he'll go back and reflect the will of the people from the the revolutions but since he's a masked power he's just become much more brutal than Mubarak ever was there's more political opponents jailed under him than there was under Mubarak he was an early supporter of women's rights and spoke out against sexual harassment he even made this big show of visiting one of the women in the hospital who suffered from a sexual assault he did that well at the same time proceeding to arrest women activists who are trying to get garner attention for sexual harassment and assault so you see this kind of cat and mouse game in the Middle East with women's issues and women's rights and these authoritarian regimes so it's not just in Egypt and Saudi Arabia again as Elaine mentioned in other countries as well and obviously the conflicts that are happening in there have been extremely detrimental for women and children and other vulnerable populations including just threatening the rights and the safety of everyone in those societies and we're going to get on to where there's a slight switch in that dynamic women not so much as victims but women as in fact aggressors but we'll get to that but I've wanted to turn to the United States now Rebecca and you're a particular area of interest at the moment looking at the women in the 70s I was a kid in the 70s I remember that famous slogan for Virginia Slims you've come a long way baby which became something of an emblem for women's lib and in fact I think I can remember it was just short handed to women's lib that was a pretty exciting time with feminist warriors like Gloria Steinem Betty Frieden Janane Greer forming the vanguard of that movement the right to birth control for unmarried parents pregnancy, anti-discrimination laws passed women allowed to be on juries in most states Roe vs Wade and the liberalisation of abortions Sandra Day O'Connor as the first supreme court judge so all of those wins but with the confirmation last year of Brett Kavanaugh as the ninth judge of the supreme court there are fears that those sort of advances for women might start to be eroded so are you fearful so I think there's always a complex dance going on I mean we were talking earlier about whether this is just a totally grim state of affairs that we're in or whether there's some hope there and I think the 1970s is really useful to look at I think even in in terms of the fact we're having this conversation tonight gender is a major defining theme of our time and it was in the 1970s as well so you can look to now The Guardian has a weekly this week in patriarchy newsletter The New York Times are hired a special gender editor and those same kinds of things were happening in the 1970s so it's a really useful time to look to to see some of the advances that were made during that time but what was rolled back and one of the things that's so interesting about using the Virginia Slim's slogan there is that advertising played a really significant role in the 1970s in terms of looking at the different constituents the possible different markets so on the one hand there are women who are wanting to go to work there are feminists who are arguing for women's rights outside of the home and arguing for women's rights in various kinds of ways and at the same time well because of Susan Feludi's work Backlash we tend to think of a backlash happening a decade later it's actually happening simultaneously in the 1970s led by conservative evangelical women saying no we don't want to have this going on here so that's happening at the same time advertisers who are trying to appeal to feminists as well as feminists during that time come up with this composite image of a superwoman so a woman who does everything outside the home and it's all tied up in a commercial for perfume at the time which and the taken from a 1960 song that we wrote the lyric you can bring home the bacon fried up in the pan but at the end of the day never let him forget he's a man right if you're wearing this particular perfume so appealing to all different women at the same time the reason I think that's important to say is I think we live with the consequences of that superwoman image from advertising today so women's lives get remade during the 1970s in a way that men don't quite women are going to work plus doing all the domestic labor as well on mass to your question about what's happening with the supreme court am I worried yes absolutely just the same as there are these incursions into human rights elsewhere in the world the same things happening in the US the good news is because of the difference between federal rights and state rights even if there's a federal rolling back say of a woman's right to an abortion in the United States there will still be states where it's legally available but because there's no federal mandate there there's no federal protection there anymore it's going to create states where abortion may not be available in any longer which means you get the rise increase of abortion tourism a phrase that's used in Australia for instance for people going from say from Tasmania to Melbourne to have access to abortions so and that affects different kinds of women so one of the interesting things hearing from the different people here today is acknowledging different women and who gets hurt when abortion access isn't readily available poor women disproportionately women of colour and that has all kinds of flow and effects too for women's access to work women's economic status so there are some real concerns with the reproductive stacking of the US Supreme Court and what that means for women's reproductive rights in the future I just want to give you a couple of statistics with a record number of women voted to the congress in last year's elections 121 up from 107 and yet 47% of white women voted for Donald Trump post pussygate and 45% voted for Hillary Clinton so there seems to be this backlash within the backlash going on in the United States there are white women's groups in the United States today 20 years, 30 years, 40 years after the last feminist wave who are asserting themselves in strange ways all it would seem strange to the feminists of the 70s what is that dynamic there well I think that does the same has happened in the 1970s it's a dynamic that believes in a traditional gender order and that's what we're seeing threatened around the world now so the strong man requires a particular kind of woman the sociologist Ray Wincong would talk about emphasized femininity in order for there to be this very powerful masculinity there has to be a kind of femininity that exists to shore up that masculinity that's there so often conservative the kinds of women who would vote for Donald Trump are often Christian, conservative and believe in a God ordained traditional gender order with the man as the head of the family, man as the head of the church God the father, God the son God the Holy Spirit, all male so attitudes about where women sit in a gender order are really informed a lot by Christianity and this goes to explain why these women might still continue to vote for Donald Trump so what Donald Trump's been very successful at doing is playing to this base of people and separating his behaviour so they're able to go oh yes we don't really like your behaviour but you're still looking after our interests in trying to maintain the gender order through doing some very obvious signalling and one thing I really want to say here is that often a lot of these people talk about the problem of identity politics they always blame identity politics is something that feminists do identity politics is something that's out there Donald Trump is the master of identity politics he's always wielding identity in particular kinds of ways I think and so for instance ban on transgender people serving in the military it's not just women it's all these ways of signalling I'm not going to upset a traditional gender order and in fact what we're going to do is restore the natural the so-called natural order of things with white men at the head of the family so to speak Lydia the natural order of things seems to be a bit upturned in the role of females in the jihad movement and this is something you've been working on for about half a year now at least the idea of why is it that women have been motivated to jihad and how is this strange role reversal where they have become the aggressors in jihad yeah this idea of women's participation in jihad is a really interesting one we had a round table on it this afternoon at the Lowy Institute and what we've seen since the rise of the Islamic State that despite it being an organization that has been terribly misogynistic and has committed all these atrocities very well known against women they have become ironically very progressive when it comes to female participation in jihad so if you take a look at the jihadist ideology there was very prescribed roles for women in the past they were not able to commit violent attacks they weren't allowed to be militarily active in the jihadist conflict their roles were in support roles as wives and mothers and as educators of the children in the ideology of jihad perhaps do a little bit of fundraising on the side but it was essentially a supportive role with the Islamic State they've upturned that completely and they said in fact it's not only permissible for women to participate in violent acts in the name of jihad they're in fact obliged to do that just as the men are and so we've seen this like complete reversal in the ideology now there's questions as to why they did that people say well it's an act of desperation they're losing so they need to harness the power of women and as it makes its last stand which there's merit to that argument but actually if you take a look at the trajectory of the organization they recognized the power and the role of women very very early on and they harnessed it not only as emphasizing their roles as wives and mothers is very important to the future of the jihadist enterprise but they were very progressive from the beginning in terms of the combat roles that they gave women so for example they had these brigades the Al-Khansa brigades who they were this morality police that would roll around during the caliphate completely clad in the naqaf but carrying clash naqaf rifles basically carrying the morality police and being enforces of all the draconian codes that the Islamic state put in place and so that was contrasted that image that we have of these women as being coistered and at home and kind of compelled to just be in that role as wife and mother and a lot of women we've seen in the news report saying that you would pray that if you got caught doing something wrong that it would be a male Islamic state jihadist too would kind of catch you because they'd be a bit more lenient whereas the women were so much more brutal in the enforcement of those codes we've also seen them organized into different brigades where they could they had intelligence functions were involved in suicide operations were involved in combat and the Islamic state released a lot of propaganda more recently lauding those roles so this has a huge implications for the terrorism threat going forward and our counter-terrorism policies and how we deal with these women particularly the women who are seeking to return who are in Kurdish camps right now and in custody a lot of them are saying well I was just there with my husband and just raising the kids I wasn't doing anything and well that very well may be for some instances but we're actually seeing a lot of evidence that these women are extremely committed the Islamic state has a a plan put in place for them where they've allowed them to come out of the strongholds basically surrendered them and said you just wait and see we've got plans for you in the future so I think going forward these women will play a larger role in global terrorism and I think our security services need to be ready for it and our legislation needs to be ready for it as well in another sign of women were quite in a quite a different way pushing back against an authoritarian leadership the Rahaf Muhammad case was interesting with the young woman who sought asylum after having tried to come to Australia and caught up in Bangkok is that what you're seeing with young women in obviously completely different context from Jihad is that going to be a trend across the Middle East? Well it's hard to say I mean her case was really dramatic case and unfortunately I don't think a lot of women who wish they could get out of their confined situations are able to do exactly as she could have done but I think what her case represents and what a lot of women and I think men also in these societies are feeling is that it reflects I think the fragility of these authoritarian regimes that we look at them as strong men as oppressive but underneath that there's a certain fragility to it and if they don't maintain that iron grip control a lot of it could collapse into the dust I think that's what these cases reveal to us there's this really Yeah there's still this appeal particularly in the Middle East I think it's just this kind of orientalist western notion of how we look at the region that a strong man is the only one who's going to be able to deal with that mess that's the Middle East and that's how they position themselves that's how C.C. positions themselves that's how Muhammad bin Salman positions himself I'm the only one who can deal with this mess of the Middle East and these repressive policies are put in place because our populations can't handle democracy and can't handle self-determination and so I'm going to keep it in check for you so for western governments who are allies of these countries or have dealings with these countries it's a good temptation to be like yeah that's easy I can just deal with one guy I can deal with my diplomatic relations with these countries and they'll take care of it instead of having to do the messy work of dealing with the society so I think those are the two things that a case like hers reflects about authoritarianism particularly in the Middle East I'm going to bring Elaine in here because it was actually the Asia director who received one of the first approaches from Rehaf Muhammad He actually woke him up speaking of messy work so is this something that Human Rights Watch is looking at over the Middle East is this something that you expect to see more of young women fleeing using social media in very potent ways to escape I think these cases are happening all the time it's just that in Rehaf's case the world found out about it we had a very similar case in 2017 of a young woman in the Philippines again she was at risk of being returned to Saudi Arabia I think it shows the lengths that the Saudi government is prepared to go to in order to control women the fact that it sends its diplomatic staff airside in an airport to take the passports confiscate the passports and basically force these women onto planes in the earlier case of the other young woman she was escaping a forced marriage in Saudi she was actually sent back they actually bound her mouth with duct tape and dragged her onto the plane so we were very concerned with Rehaf's case that it could have the same ending which was why yeah it was great to sort of be able to mobilize the media and sort of help her I mean she was generating it all through her own twitter account but just I guess to see I guess the extent of public support but you know the reality is this male guardianship system that you know remains in Saudi Arabia it really does treat women as children you know women need permission every time they travel internationally from their guardian and we've learnt that there is now an app available on the Apple Google the Apple and Google stores where men can basically be notified if the women in their care basically treating them like their property are travelling internationally and they haven't sought permission and is it an irony or ironically that you know that a high profile escape like that actually makes it harder for the women that bind well I think yes and no like yes in some ways I think you know obviously men in Saudi Arabia are going to be keeping a lot closer tabs on women but then at the same time I think it's also given a lot of hope and that's what we've heard is that actually for a lot of Saudi women and girls you know they feel actually very inspired by what Rehaf was able to achieve but you know obviously for most women it's really not that easy and I think it's becoming even more practical especially as we learned from the Four Corners piece that you know actually governments like Australia are actually blocking the yeah the visits of young women who are travelling without their male guardians because they see them as a risk that they will claim asylum and I think that's you know really the big problem is that these governments who say that they're committed to gender equality in reality they need to be doing more to promote the rights of women in other countries. Now I don't think we can have a discussion about gender and authoritarian strong men without touching on me too Rebecca first you and Nicole I'm going to bring you in on this as well because Philippines has obviously had its own pussy gate you know what has it achieved me to has it been effective as a sort of a counter trend to the terrible things that people are saying about women and doing to women around the world. I think it's been an incredibly important movement for a number of reasons I think that part of it is prosecuting Trump by proxy so for a man to be elected president of the United States the most powerful person in the world arguably to be elected to be president after a comment like that after a series of comments in his various behaviour and I'm wearing my nasty woman t-shirt in acknowledging that comment that he made about Hillary Clinton I think for there to be seen to be some accounting if it's not him directly via other people is really important so I think a couple of things really important about me too one is visibility and attached consciousness raising this is one of the most important tools of 1970s feminism and continues to be really important consciousness raising and visibility for people to identify themselves to each other and realise it's not me it's actually happening to everyone and there's a shift in the way that people think about things and that relates to tolerance so I think we're seeing a reduced tolerance for certain kinds of behaviour companies are being forced to address or do we actually have a policy that deals with this do we have a particular separate policy do we need to introduce something do we need to have training within the company so in the workplace I think we're seeing some immediate effects certainly in Australia and in the United States and I don't think that the importance of that should be reduced at all so I think that there's some sense that people are saying well it's not so much of a movement maybe people are talking about it but then also another problem is that there's a backlash that comes with it too right so the conversation of people saying oh you know why don't these women all shut up men will be men boys will be boys and women should be women and just be silent and deal with it but I think that it's worth having that in the public sphere and for people to be revealed to each other in that context as well so I think it's been hugely important. Nicole what's happening over the other side of the world in response to you know really quite a similar situation with the leadership and the sort of approach to women is there any sort of me too backlash yes there is actually but in a very different form so I think if we just backtrack a bit we're talking about strong men it's precisely an issue because they're corrosive for liberal democracies these are men who want to concentrate power in the center and in the case of the Philippines I think what's very fascinating with women's movement is that resistance to the strong men happen at the top and happen at the grassroots so at the top the politicians that are really responding to President Duterte's bloody war and drugs which has left more than 20,000 people dead for example are women in positions of power so for example one neophyte Senator launched an investigations against Duterte's death squads where is she now she's in jail when it comes to the vice president she's now served as the main opposition figure in the Philippines has been sexualized by the president has been the subject of fake news and trolling online to discredit her political power the former Supreme Court justice was known to be critical with the president she's very much an advocate of human rights she was unceremoniously ousted for journalists Maria Ressa from Rappler has been the constant subject of trolling and she was recently arrested for trumped up charges so what I'm saying here is that women at the top are obviously taking the lead in pushing back against democratic backsliding but we can also see how state power at least in the context of the Philippines and I think in context like Brazil as well where you know Rodrigo Duterte now has company with President Bolsonaro right so I think it's this pushback that we're waiting for from women but I think the other interesting example in the Philippines is the grassroots resistance from below so there's a movement called Babayako which is roughly translated means I'm a woman so in a way similar to me too but I think what's fascinating about this movement is that they've organized the widows and the mothers who were killed in the drug war to basically create a movement to speak up and resist the encroachment on liberal democratic values. A lot of it is still a wait and see how will this end but I think as far as women organizing in the Philippines is concerned there is definitely some reason to hope. Now I'm going to bring in the audience in just one second because at the end of a low e-institute lecture we always have a question answer session but I just wanted to leave you with one thought and I was thinking about it last night are there any female strong women in the Philippines that have sought to do similar things to men in their systems and it brought up an interesting list and I'll just read them out very quickly so there's a top nine Elizabeth Bathroy the Blood Countess of Hungary Ravana Lovnar won the Mad Monarch of Madagascar Isabella won of Castile the Wicked Queen of Spain Wu Setian the Villainess Empress of China Agrippina the Younger the Empress of Poison Queen Mary of England Bloody Mary Elena Chasescu nickname Kodoi strictly CO2 but also meaning big tail and Emelda Marcos known for shoes those names are quite revealing sorry that was a little bit cheeky but are there any thoughts from those who are prepared to admit being a feminist about that list just very quick observations Margaret Thatcher's Missy The Iron Lady Another example Evita What was her nickname? Evita Alright look if I can we would like to take now about 20 minutes of questions from the audience now we've got some microphones on either side of the room so if you could indicate if you'd like to ask a question of course and because we don't have too much time if you could just keep it to a short question that would be great we have one down here in the third row this lady here and then I've got you there as one of the original the 70s feminist Eva Cox to raise some fairly basic points that have been disturbing me because I've been sort of obviously aware of the whole thing I think while we're actually identifying a lot of problems women are facing identifying how we got there and I think we do need to think more seriously about that and somebody just mentioned briefly the idea of the problem of trust of social democracies and I think we've got to actually look at the fact I'm glad somebody brought up Thatcher because I think we can blame Thatcher for a hell of a lot of what's happening now because that whole advent of neoliberalism the whole individualization the whole undermining of social well-being as part of the democratic process has certainly contributed to the rise of a distrust movement I mean I did the Boyer Lectures on this a whole idea of trust of social trust we have a very low level of social trust and that means that people turn back to all sorts of things whether it happens through racism or sexism or other things and I think we've got to get women back into the leadership position that we've never had we're still the second sex you know we get three days of the year if we're lucky two before IWD and maybe one after where they are prepared to talk about it I know that's a very pessimistic view but that's just my momentary thing there but I think we seriously have to look at how we put the social back on the agenda because social equity, fairness trust of government trust of democracy not stupid neoliberal crap which turns us all into sort of macho male individualized digits to put it elegantly but I mean that breaks us up in a way that undermines social cohesion undermines tolerance of difference undermines all of those things I think if we only look at feminism as the problem or the anti-feminism as the problem we miss out on the fact that what we have is some serious social issues and what we do need to raise feminism for it's about time we talk over and explain to blokes that we're social beings that we're not customers we're bloody citizens and we want to bring back a social contract because I think nations that start looking in those sorts of areas rather than growth in sort of economic terms that look at the unpaid contributions that look at what creates a society there's a lot of these particular manifestations that we're seeing which often come out of failed democracies need to be actually picked up so I think it's about time we talk over leadership so I'm happy to organize the next revolution for everybody else I'm sure there are a few subscribers in the room now I'm just going to take it straight to the next question thank you so that was a very very insightful discussion I'm Natasha and I'm currently working with a corporate advisory firm which basically deals between Australia and India on trade and investment previously I was working with the Indian parliament as a policy analyst and a little bit of my work is also focused on economic participation for women now my question to is to Dr. Nicole I heard Ms. Rebecca she pointed out about the Me Too campaign and how it is like a mass catharsis it is happening to each one of us every day all of us know about it but there's something which we have all noticed some sort of a fractured movement why is it that all women haven't come together why is it that on one side we see women themselves perpetuating masculinity at home, outside you know Terry after a famous psychologist has said working women don't have wives and most of us even the fact that I'm here today I had to negotiate a time with my husband so my focus has largely been on economic participation and because when we are talking about strong men the drivers and the barriers that exist about women's participation in the workplace what challenges we basically focusing on authoritarian regimes but democracies have not been better I'm an Indian and we have struggled with this aspect again and again we are talking about range of issues how to bring in women educational attainment for women is going up but it's not converting itself into women's number in the workforce why is that because men are not increasing their participation at home so how do we do that what sort of challenges means I would be very interested to know you know understanding of the democracies how does any different in the democracies why we have not really come very far on this thank you just one point on that I think what we have heard today is a litany of authoritarian populism or populist authoritarianism which is not just in non-democratic states but is also starting to erode some of women's gains for women across the west and democracies as well you've asked some very big very difficult questions you'd like us to solve the world in the evening but it seems really unfair to give it to you Nicole but did you want to have a go sure yes I'm about to solve the world's problems but that's the Natasha thanks for that question and I think the one direct answer to it is because we cannot just assume that women share a single interest in the Philippines polling firms say there's no such thing as a woman's vote where I work in the slum communities of Manila that have witnessed a spate of killings in President Duterte's drug war even these women have different ideas in terms of the relationship between the president and women some women actually say that the crack down on the narcotics trade is good because finally if you're coming home working from a call center coming home at three in the morning the crackheads in the street corner are no longer there thank you President Duterte the neighbor the neighbor will tell you no no no my son was shot dead there's no due process yes he's a crackhead but he shouldn't have been killed right so I guess what I'm saying here is we can think of many examples on how these populist strong men are actually able to turn their to pit women against each other authoritarianism has not just been about a war against women they've turned it to become a war among women and I think that is what's particularly dangerous because it's corrosive in this movement and I think just a tiny comment in relation to the revolution we're about to launch I think one of the important factors we also have to remember here is at least in Australia there's a backsliding when it comes to gender parity views on gender parity so my colleagues at the University of Canberra from the 5050 by 2030 foundation found in their survey that millennial Australian men are actually backsliding when it comes to their views on gender equality and they feel like women are disproportionately benefiting from gender equality rules in the workplace at the disadvantage of men and I think this is very much a social issue this is very much a labor issue and I think we can progress with women's movements and women's rights without making a case that this is everybody's issue that men are part of this too and again this is the problem when we are in the system where citizens are pitted against each other and that has to stop okay another question sorry I can't see very well from here there's one just here on the left yes one of the things that troubles me as an older Australian woman is what's going on in the whole in Australia in the whole arena of sport I'm always really troubled I mean it's almost daily now you see of the way sporting men's groups behave by themselves it leads to assaults on either their wives, partners girlfriends or groupies and also how a whole lot of young women seem to relate to these sporting heroes in particularly it's in the area of football and I was just it really does trouble me and it bemuses me but I when I was much younger I was never caught up in anything like that and I just don't understand what informs the psychology of the young women who get caught up in it and seem to accept the behaviour of these young sporting men who would like to have me out that well I mean I think there's so many different factors that go into that but part of it is just what you observe of the world around you right we still have way too many arguments about gender being driven by biology and you know my daughter only would wear pink dresses when she was two and therefore that's because she's a girl well it's the cultural messages that we're getting in different kinds of ways so if young women are seeing messages from the President of the United States saying you can just grab them they'll let you do that if you've got power if we're seeing for instance news reports when Scott Morrison becomes Prime Minister of Australia that describe his wife as being a nice stay at home mum and in a very positive way describe her as being very different something to look forward to than the previous Prime Minister's wife really getting these kinds of messages we have a country where oh no we can't have safe schools we can't have sex education programs we need education for people right from when they're young about gender and identity and sexuality that can help people make more informed decisions as teenagers and we don't we're constantly having battles over those issues alone so I think that in Australia there's kind of a vacuum in terms of discussing gender and then if people want to talk about it they're talking about it in relation to watching married at first sight on television which I don't think there's anything wrong with doing but if you're going to watch it let's actually have a public conversation about gender roles about all of the different things that are involved there conversations about what does it mean to be a man in Australia what kind of masculinity is lionized here why are sportsmen so revered in Australia in ways that they aren't to the same extent elsewhere I could go on and I'm going to stop myself because it's all it's all rolled in together a very interesting low-institute poll result a couple of years ago where we inserted for the first time into a list of Australians policy priorities, the things that concern them most and domestic violence actually came in at equal third which is a surprisingly high priority because usually those priorities are in some sort of order education, health, the economy and then some lower order issues like international policy issues like terrorism and war and nuclear threats so to have domestic violence up so high on the list suggests that it is a widely perceived problem and the sensationalization of it in the media and the way that media is responding in a sporting context in particular is obviously elevating it but that's not to say that there isn't that much broader pervasive popular concern about it next question I've got some up the back there there's a lady with a black dress third in from the third last row Hi, my name's I'm actually working on a not-for-profit to try to increase female participation in politics and I had a question that sort of related to perhaps the way that women organize in general but particularly lessons from the US where I think obviously movements like the suffragette movement and the civil rights movement had really sophisticated forms of organization where there was a political agenda and activists were prepared to have and knew they needed to have in depth and really meaningful relationships with the appropriate politicians to advance their goals and had clear plans for what they wanted to ask for and increasingly we see that there's a fragmentation of that sort of effort and increasingly there are one-off or sensationalist protests where there's not a clear organizational flow chart or clear plans for what women want to achieve or what they want to do next and that often cripples the efforts of those women and unfortunately has the effect of men delegitimizing those efforts claiming that women aren't serious about the problems that they have. Why do you think that that transition and fragmentation has happened and what do you think that we can do to fix it to avoid that cultural problem? Well maybe I can just give an example of that from what you have said it just brought to mind so many of the ways that some of the activists organized during the Arab Spring. They are organized in this very spontaneous way they did it a lot online there was no structure behind their organization and as a result it fizzled and it fragmented and when they got pushed back by more organized political forces say like the Muslim Brotherhood who took advantage on other Islamist groups who were more organized took advantage of what the opening that they provided and then it allowed the remnants of these authoritarian governments to kind of squash their goals because they precisely had that lack of organization that you describe. Part of it seems like we're living in an era where this internet driven technology and communication gives us an illusion of doing something without actually doing something so tweeting about it writing about it on social media is never going to be enough it's never going to be the same as real true organizational grassroots type of structure and so I think maybe it's this moment that we're in where we believe that this internet enabled communication and technology gives us this illusion of doing something when in fact it's very on the surface so it could be those kind of similar dynamics that are at play with galvanizing for women's rights for example with those movements it seems very similar to me from what you're describing about what happened in the Arab Spring. Just to add on to that it made me think a little bit about Saudi Arabia and how a lot of the women's rights activists their objective really was to address male guardianship system to address some of the broader human rights violations that they face but they picked driving because it was low hanging fruit and they felt like they would be able to achieve that and if they could make progress on that then maybe it would open up space to make more progress on other issues and I think actually it was a very clever strategy on their part but of course what happened was instead we saw a massive crackdown on women's rights. There's another one over the left here sorry I hope I'm not excluding people it's just a little bit bright. Just to pick up on this idea of making it seem like we're doing a lot but not much is actually happening I'd like to talk about the UN if you don't mind International Women's Day is coming up the UN ran a huge very well known campaign he for she you could argue that the United Nations talks a lot about advancement of women and the opportunity to select a female Secretary General of the United Nations and that opportunity was passed over do you think that the lack of representation of women in international diplomacy is a problem in this era of strong men and how do you think we can fix that? Excellent question. We're doing a bit of work on women and diplomacy at the Low Institute and there is a lack of representation and perhaps in particular one of the issues in some of the western democracies is political appointments and that when you look at the catalogue of political appointments over the last three or four decades they have been almost exclusively men and then that itself derives from the composition of our Parliament and as I think Julie Bishop pointed out in a speech yesterday or the day before Australia has come nowhere in its representation of women in Parliament and that it is actually behind last time I looked it was around about 111 in a list of female representation in Parliament across the globe and it has not moved at all in the last 20 or 30 years so at a time when female participation in a workplace has increased dramatically female participation in Parliament has not and then that then filters through to political appointments and there's quite a substantial proportion of them in diplomacy so sorry that was just to answer that aspect of the question so to do something about that then we need to focus on female participation in Parliament from in my view and that means looking hard at that dirty word targets and quotas let me take a question over here I haven't been struggling I know there were a couple of hands up earlier there's one to stand and then we have just one more question I think sorry thanks ladies for everything so far it's been really insightful taking it from a global level to local there's a whole lot of people in this room if there was one thing that each of us could do at a grass roots level that could shift to the dial what would that be Karl do you want to have a try actually this relates to the earlier question about the fragmentation of women's movements I'm not particularly bothered by these spontaneous women's movements women's organizations and the local community because I think there is this tendency for us to just disparage women's actions as subordinate to political action that are often associated to men so for example there are women who organize small at a big batch cooking so they have to rotate their division of labor at home among a community of women that's often disparage as it's not political it's just women being creative women being women but actually the politics of that kind of means no we're contesting how domestic labor is actually organized we're actually organizing amongst ourselves so I think what I'm saying here is on the local level there are creative alternative forms of political participation that are worth celebrating but we tend to overlook it because we think it's too feminine so maybe the way we look at organizing has to change and give recognition to these fragmented, micro-political but nevertheless highly impactful things that women do on the grassroots but that's not to say that we have to aim big infiltrate your parliament infiltrate your political parties I mean come on Philippines number 8 Australia number 1 when it comes to women in parliament don't start political dynasties but I think the high level forms of organizing has also to speak to the more micro-political forms of political organizing and don't disparage the power of micro-politics I absolutely, I totally endorse that because personally I never really thought about feminism or women's rights or any of that stuff until I got married and had children and I think that it really does start at the home in terms of your relationship with your male partners and family members and sons and daughters and how we raise them in the home what values we impart to them how you organize the division of labor with your partner, male or female it's all of that stuff on the very personal and family level I think that has the most immediate impact I never really had it in my consciousness but it was because my father was involved in domestic duties that I never thought twice about some of these things so there's yeah it is also on that macro-cultural level but it's really that domestic sphere, that very personal sphere that has the most immediate impact especially for future generations and can I just add in there too so the personal is political, absolutely but I think to scan ourselves for our own unconscious bias and the ways that we perpetuate a particular kind of gender dynamic if you think about it there's so many things, assumptions that we make about ourselves, things that we'll step into doing that really need to be reviewed, thought through done in a different way in order and even you know I don't believe in the idea of a sisterhood to the point of women aren't all united by a single goal or similar ideas but I do think we can think about something like a strategic sisterhood to make a decision to not tear strips off other women to make a decision for how we behave with our friends, other women we know with co-workers and so on in order to behave in a way to create better the world that we wish to see and maybe just one final thing, maybe to bring us back a little bit on topic I mean I do think there are women's rights activists all around the world who also need support and sometimes they can't get support in the countries where they are, in China we can't speak out on behalf of women's rights activists so they actually need support from feminists in other countries, western feminists to express solidarity with them to push our government maybe to speak up and be a stronger voice Thank you Now we have run over time but we did start a little bit late because there were people still coming in I just wanted to finish on this note Research by Women, Peace and Security expert Valerie Hudson in the United States in a very rigorous data collection exercise she encapsulated in a 2014 book Provocativity Sightled Sex and World Peace found that gender equality is the best predictor of a country's peacefulness and overall stability so there is evidence that an authoritarian rule which is predicated on reducing the role and or freedoms of women is neither good for women nor good for the world I hope we've been able to shed a little bit of light on this issue today, I'd like to thank our four panellists Elaine Pearson, Nicole Curato, Lydia Khalil and Rebecca Sheehan for bringing their expertise to these issues for writing and talking about them publicly and most of all tonight for talking about them with the Lowe Institute thank you all very much for coming along today to a different venue I'd like to also and we don't often do this acknowledge individual Lowe Institute staff, I'd like to thank our Director of Communications Erin Bassett who along with our research fellow Kelsey Munro originated and helped in designing this event and an inspired choice of topic I think and for all their background work in preparing for it to our lead designer Stephen Hutchings who gave us a brilliant graphic expression of the idea in our event invitation and all our communications, our events team who saw a very enthusiastic audience and decided that we needed to relocate from our usual venue at number 1 Bly Street and for a characteristically professional event and finally to Telstra one of Lowe Institute Corporate valued corporate members who so generously stepped into the breach and provided this wonderful evening venue for the evening, now we have home repairs and drinks outside so I hope you will join us for a quick drink before you head home, thank you very much