 It is now my great pleasure to introduce Francis Adamson to you, well known to all Australians in the room and those from our region I'm sure. Francis is the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and has led the department as secretary since 2016, August 2016, so she's just completed her second anniversary. Prior to her appointment as secretary, Ms Adamson was international advisor to the Prime Minister the Honourable Malcolm Turnbull from November 2015. From prior to that 2011 to 2015 she was Ambassador to the People's Republic of China and has also served in diplomatic posts to Hong Kong, Taipei and London amongst a range of other roles during her career. Ms Adamson serves also on a number of boards and professional bodies and we are very honoured from the National Security College perspective that one of these is the advisory board to the National Security College. She is also a special advisor to male champions of change and we will be having some of our male champions of change with us during the conference. Francis is here to speak to us on an extraordinary topic, one of great interest to all. I won't reveal anything further but ask Francis to come up and join us. Thank you very much. Thanks very much indeed, Jacinta and I hope you don't mind being dragged out of the sunshine back into this room but it's really lovely to see you all and it's a pleasure to be back for a second year participating in this conversation alongside a remarkable line-up of leaders over the two days of ANU's Women in National Security Conference. Now I think my speech title was up there earlier. I don't normally read it out but I will because Jacinta thinks you might like me to do that I think. I'm going to talk about the Game of Thrones Effect, the interrelationship between role models and reality for women in international security. So let me get on with all of that and we'll get back to it perhaps during questions. But I really want to begin by acknowledging the Nunnamal people, the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting and of course I want to pay my respects to their elders past and present and this afternoon I particularly want to recognise the contribution that Nunnamal women have made to our broader community. So let's just recognise that because there are some fantastic Nunnamal women around and I want to thank the National Security College and of course Rory Metcalf for hosting these events and encouraging I am certain future waves of female leaders in international security and foreign affairs. Security and defence is still undoubtedly a male dominated profession. I'm reminded of that every time I sit at the table in the National Security Committee of Cabinet and indeed at the Secretary's Committee on National Security. But for those of you today who are still students and I hope there are some, I'm pretty sure there are some, perhaps about to embark on your own careers in the field, my great hope is that you will see that change over the course of your professional lives. So now to the Game of Thrones Effect. As it happens and those of you who know me will know that this is a truthful observation, I am one of an increasingly small minority who have managed to resist total and complete obsession with the series. For me it was intriguing. A surprise when a pop culture obsession harboured by my 23 year old son and secretly, in fact unbeknownst to me, his younger sister started to appear in the kind of media publications that sit on my iPad rather than theirs. So articles cropping up in the Economist, in Forbes, in Time Magazine. He was enough to have tempted even me, not usually a big sampler of the sci-fi fantasy genre, to learn a little more. And though I remain at arm's length an observer of the Game of Thrones phenomenon rather than an avid viewer, what has intrigued me most is that the series has become a most unlikely picture of modern day feminism. Now when I was planning this speech and when I was talking about it at work and at home, said younger daughter and I'd rather not say how old she is, insisted on taking me through a her from memory potted history of every single, not just series, but episode of Game of Thrones. So while unlike many of you I haven't invested the hundreds, wouldn't quite be thousands, but hundreds of hours necessary, I do speak from some knowledge of the subject. Over the many controversies of its seven seasons, Game of Thrones draws a long bow to illustrate a nuanced transition. It starts with a highly sexist world where women can expect to be shamed, objectified, brutalised by individuals and institutions around them. They are all defined by their vulnerability. Fathers marrying off daughters, wives expected to bear sons, women openly uncomfortable with the restraints placed upon them through rigid, gender-based social expectation. By the end of it however, and we're not quite at the end as those of you who are anticipating the final series next year will know, by the end of it however, we arrive at a world where each of the many female leads, both good and bad, have chipped away at those barriers and against the odds proven that they are resilient, strong-willed individuals, rational and independent. They have agency and are decision makers in their own right. And perhaps most relevant for our conversation here today, they challenge their systems and ascend to take the most powerful international security roles in their world. In governance, we see the likes of Daenerys and Sansa. In diplomacy, Catalan. In warfare, Aya, Brienne, Yara. There are some, Marjorie, who take advantage of traditional social constructs and use manipulation to exploit those who underestimate their intelligence. There are others, Cersei, for example, disillusioned with the men around them, who transform to prize the power that they are deprived of above all else and to reject morality as a perceived means of survival. These characters are far from perfect. They are complex and multi-dimensional, but they have seized agency where that agency was once categorically denied to them. Gamer Thrones is a series watched by over 16 million people around the world. There is no data that I could find on this, but I'd hazard a guess that the bulk of those viewers are among the millennial generation. It leads me to think of these characters, the fact that they're so visible, each so distinct from the other, each so multifaceted in her history and motivations and priorities. Women like that did not appear in the TV shows I used to watch when I was growing up, when I was at university or when I was just beginning my career. But they are becoming increasingly visible and increasingly normalized in today's media, in Game of Thrones, in so many other fictions as well as in real life today. We do not all have dragons at our beck and call. I very occasionally wish I did, but neither are we all born into privileged nobility, as is the case of Game of Thrones. But we do happen to live at a time where women can be Jedi knights in Star Wars, where they step on screen as Doctor Who, huge excitement in my household, I have to say when that happened, where they are centre stage in the fight against terrorism in homeland. What is the influence of the visibility of these characters on girls and on young women, on how they see their own access to positions of strength, control and leadership? The term role model was coined just last century by the sociologist Robert K. Merton, to describe the fact that as human beings, we model what we see and admire in others. Several studies have since found that women benefit from role models of their own gender much more than men do, particularly when those role models are associated with study or work. Visible role models have always been important. There is little doubt in the research that they influence career aspirations as representations of the possible, that is that women can reach certain goals, and as representations of inspiration. That those goals are valuable. Yet in an age of the internet of social media platforms, of news saturation, the influence of common social narratives and of what is visible to us in mass media and in popular culture, is all the more important. By the same token though, they are perhaps also all the more malleable. In speaking to colleagues in preparing for this speech, I learned from the principal gender specialist in my own department, Amy Haddad, that she uses a TV series called The Hundred to teach her own children about gender roles in international security and in peacekeeping. Now, I don't know the series well, to be perfectly honest, The Hundred to me speaks of Pilates, but Amy tells me that it is set in the future in a world where there are strong female leaders making strong decisions on all sides of a multifaceted conflict. I hear that her son, now 14 years old, points out scenes where major decisions are made in the show's narrative without women present in the room. For him, those scenes jar. He identifies them straight away as a sign that the decision will turn out to be less than optimal. Normalizing women in leadership roles is just as important for boys as it is for girls, particularly in their formative years. The research is clear whether fictional characters or non-fictional real world leaders, the more women you see in these type of roles, then the more routine it is for women to take up these roles and eventually the less these roles are seen through the prism of gender. We live at a time when our youngest generation is growing up, having seen strong women increasingly embedded in the global international security framework. For an 18 year old, choosing to step into tertiary study at the National Security College, this may include some of you here today. Names like Madeleine Albright, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Goldamere and even Condoleezza Rice are practically ancient history. Jacinda Ardern, now the third female Prime Minister of New Zealand, is no longer all that remarkable for her gender. The media is more heavily focused on her progressive policy platforms, possibly her young age, and of course her baby, Neve, on a full charm offensive at the UN General Assembly last month. Angela Merkel, Theresa May, they're not commonly women leaders anymore either. They're just leaders. Here in Australia, Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister, endured her fair share, or perhaps it's better to say her unfair share, of gendered media commentary while in office. But in doing so, made it a little easier for whoever comes next. Now you will have all been here this morning, I expect. You won't have just happened as I did, to have Sky News on, as Julia Gillard made a speech up at Parliament House for the unveiling of her official portrait. I am sure this or elements of it will be captured on YouTube, even if it's not on whatever kind of media you may be tapping into tonight. It is really interesting to hear what she has to say about what the portrait doesn't capture, and what it does. And what she says she wanted was a portrait that would distinguish her, if you like, from all of the male portraits of male Prime Ministers which have gone before. And when you see the portrait, and I certainly hope to have a look at it in person, I encourage you all to do it too. Take your friends. It does exactly that. It's worth listening to, it's worth looking at, it's worth thinking about, including in the context of what we're talking about today. And then of course, Julie Bishop, who I know spoke to you this morning, our first female Foreign Minister and an excellent advocate for the Australian interest. Maurice Payne, our current and second female Foreign Minister, also our first female Defence Minister. For that 18 year old, this may not be all that remarkable at all. Perhaps there's no real memory of the last time we had a male Foreign Minister. You're all thinking, no, who was it? I'll leave you to remember. For that 18 year old, as we start to piece together enough visible role models in our media outlets that gender becomes less and less of a defining factor, of course will, as I've said, as I think we know, have a different future. There is, of course, still, though, a long way to go. Only when we have a critical mass of women coming through in these positions are we really going to be able to overcome the politics of gender. Around the world today, there are only 20 female heads of state or government amounting to a tiny 6% overall. Only 24% of members of parliaments around the world are women. The US trails at 19%. Afghanistan is above the average at 28%. Rwanda leads at 61%. In parliaments of Pacific Island countries, that number drops in some cases to close to 7%. Globally, women constitute only 4% of UN military peacekeepers. And here in Australia, there are 36% of staff across the Australian federal police and 16% in the Australian Defence Forces. The reality is that our impetus to bring more women into the fold of international security is so much more than just altruism. Amy's 14-year-old knows that. Diversity in a room of decision makers leads to a better decision. The question of intrinsic difference between women and men is a contentious one and a debate I'm going to leave to the scientists. However, what we know without any doubt is that we still socialise boys and girls differently from a very young age. Girls are still held up to silent markers. Let's talk, listen more, be inclusive, be more empathetic. Boys receive their own messages, be assertive, be strong, hide weakness. These are stereotypes of course, but they do still run deep in our society. It's hardly surprising therefore that men and women show different trays and bring different qualities to international security roles. One only need read the memoirs of Wendy Sherman, the first woman under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, serving the Obama Administration. The woman who among other achievements led negotiations for the P5 plus one Iran nuclear deal. She speaks of a lifetime navigating Washington politics, overcoming familiar double-edged swords such as tough, assertive, ambitious or even aggressive. Compliments for the men in the room, red flags for the women. She speaks of women around the table banding together, silently supporting each other, through personal commitments such as caring for children or aging parents, through interruptions and oversights from male counterparts, through insecurities and lags in their own self-confidence. She cites an internal study conducted by Hula Packard in 2017 that showed that men will apply for a job when they have 60% of the qualifications for the post and good on them for that. Women on the other hand will only apply when they can show they have all of them. How many of you can relate to that? I mean I certainly can. Yep, okay, not necessarily everyone but probably too many of us. I personally find it helpful when beyond anecdote, I can point to data as evidence of systemic issues that I can recognise all too well and this is one of those cases. Barriers do exist and they must be acknowledged. But I have been one of the fortunate ones, privileged with a strong education, a supportive family and strong female role models on my maternal side. For me those barriers were not insurmountable. My personal experience as the first female head of mission at our post in Beijing was that my gender was an enabling factor rather than a hindrance. I often stood out in a room and Chinese leaders would recognise me and come over and speak. As Vice Premier Wang Yang did in a crowded forum in a room in 2014 when I needed to advocate for the conclusion of the Australia-China free trade agreement. I was also often able to develop deeper and more productive professional relationships with female Chinese contacts at senior levels. I invariably found my Chinese interlocutors male and female, courteous, respectful and attentive. After all, China had posted its first and so far only female ambassador to Australia, Fu Ying, several years earlier. Of course we've since gone one better with our second female ambassador, Jan Adams, now in Beijing and she's actually shown with our female defence attaché in the great hall of the people at a recent event, National Day event. Foreign environments steeped in more prevalent gender bias can present challenges for our women diplomats posted abroad. However, there are many times when their presence is uniquely useful. If not for anything else then for their visibility as role models in their own right. Strong, capable women across the table from their local male counterparts. I'm going to introduce some of them to you shortly. I thought you'd probably know all the Game of Thrones characters so I haven't put them up there. Apart from anything else the copyright costs would have been prohibitive but I do want you to meet our heads of mission. Women are also essential to understanding and engaging with local women and developing a different appreciation of the needs and wants of the community as a whole. Where we can, we make an effort to ensure that Australia represents a gender balance in these situations. Visibility is important no matter where in the world we are. So in Beijing there's Jan Adams. In the Middle East and South West Asia, traditionally relationships where security issues have a significant profile. We have women in our posts in Abu Dhabi where we've got a female deputy head of mission Julie Shams, Baghdad headed by Ambassador Jo Lownes, Tayran with a female deputy head of mission Anna Oldmeadow and heading further east to Kabul where Nikki Gordon Smith is our ambassador and Islamabad where Margie Adamson serves as our high commissioner. Across security partners in the Indo-Pacific, in New Delhi where we have a female high commissioner Harinda Sidhu serving in that role for the very first time. In Washington where Katrina Cooper serves as Joe Hocky's deputy. In Honolulu where Jane Hardy is our Consul General pictured there with the new Indo-Pacific commander. In Tokyo where until recently we had a female deputy Claire Walsh. She was there until she was promoted to Deputy Secretary. I'm delighted to have her back but she was first in that role as well, pictured there with Shinzo Abe. And then I was delighted to see Caroline Miller also until recently a DFAT Deputy Secretary move across from DFAT to PM&C to take on the Deputy Secretary National Security role. Across multilateral posts where the international security architecture is debated and negotiated and eventually reformed. In New York where Gillian Bird serves as our permanent representative to the UN. In Geneva where Sally Mansfield is our permanent representative. And Vanessa Wood is the councillor for disarmament. And in Vienna where our Deputy Head of Mission, Alison Dury works a lot at the UN as well. And I know we've got a number of colleagues from the South Pacific with us and in the Pacific we have a number of excellent women including Angela Tierney, our High Commissioner in Nauru and Jenny Durin in Port Villa. Aside from the optics of our presentation, of our representation sorry, there is also strong evidence tying women to successful outcomes in peace building. Whether informal influence at the grassroots level or whether informal positions of institutional power. The contribution of women is critical to our international security goals. Impacts touching on a broad stretch of fields. Crisis management, international legal practice, intelligence analysis. One recent study examined 40 peace processes. Finding that where women were involved, parties were significantly more likely to reach agreement. And that those agreements were themselves more likely to be successfully implemented. Other well-sighted studies have shown a strong relationship between the status of women in a given society and the likelihood of that society experiencing war and conflict. Where women are more empowered in multiple spheres of life, countries are less likely to go to war or to have serious problems with crime and violence. It is a truly remarkable conclusion if you think about it. Gender equality seems to be a better indicator of peace than a society's wealth or the strength of its democracy. Why is this important? Because an understanding of gendered issues is key to examining how we can best leverage our diplomatic network and best allocate our development budget. Gender equality is a widely recognised part of Australia's foreign policy posture and part of our global contribution from the multilateral level right down to our grassroots development work. We have been a strong advocate for the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 to boost the role of women in peace building, security and foreign policy. 1325 recognises that the experiences and needs of women differ from those of men in conflict and post-conflict situations, particularly in relation to human rights violations such as sexual and gender-based violence. It underlines the essential role of women in conflict prevention, management and resolution. For Australia, this is a critical framework, not a tokenistic gesture, but a commitment to practical implementation voiced in our national action plan on women, peace and security. Currently a member of the Human Rights Council, we have used our membership to promote gender rights around the world. Across each and every one of our overseas posts are diplomats engage partner governments, advocating for the inclusion of gender equality objectives in national planning, in budget process and in legislative reform. Australia's development investments are likewise used to influence and advocate for broader gender equality gains. Under current government mandate, at least 80% of all aid investments must effectively address gender issues in their implementation. Fair to say that very few areas of my department's work do not have at least some consideration of gender equality. Issues of politics, trade, economics and security affect men and women in different ways and our engagement increasingly reflects this reality. We partner with the private sector to increase women's economic empowerment. We assist women to develop leadership skills and strengthen engagement in their own local political systems. We support local champions and service providers seeking to end violence against women. An impressive current example of actively integrating a gender equality approach is in the department's work negotiating a trade and gender chapter of the Pacific Alliance Free Trade Agreement. This chapter recognises the benefits of joint cooperation activities and the sharing of best practices aimed at improving the ability of women, including workers, entrepreneurs, business women and business owners, to fully access and benefit from the opportunities created by the Free Trade Agreement. In particular, Australia sought to accelerate tariff liberalisation on sectors that would have a disproportionately positive effect on women. The idea is that there could be positive gender outcomes through accelerated liberalisation of sectors that impact on women. In the Pacific Alliance context, the two predominant areas where women are represented are in agriculture and in textiles production. Many small holding farms in Latin America are operated by women. For instance, one of Columbia's main agricultural exports, cut flowers, are dominated by women, with 65% of the workforce being women. In Chile, it is a similar story on horticulture. The textiles production industry in Pacific Alliance state predominantly employs women. So faster the normal tariff liberalisation of these sectors helps better align the goals of trade liberalisation and empowering women. This sort of gender sensitive approach to trade negotiations recognises in a practical way that trade may affect women and men differently and that they may face different challenges in accessing trade finance. Domestically, we're also proactive. Recognising the barriers to change and acknowledging the advantages of removing them is only a starting point. Structural inequality requires structural efforts from top down and at every level in between to address imbalance and to increase the visibility of female role models for younger generations. In the two years since I was appointed secretary, I have prioritised our women in leadership strategy as a formal means to address and enduring gender imbalance in our foreign service. When the strategy was first launched under my predecessor Peter Varghese, most of the meeting rooms in our Canberra offices were named after men, the rest after native flowers. There were no rooms named after the many women whose dedication and persistence has moulded this foreign service into one that we can all be proud of. And I should say, I don't know whether Julie Bishop would have mentioned it this morning, she probably didn't, but Peter Varghese and other colleagues in the department decided before I became secretary that the treaties room in DFAT should be renamed after Australia's first female foreign minister once she had completed her duties in that role. So when we farewell Julie Bishop as our foreign minister, we at the same time announced that that room and it's been renamed and there'll be a gorgeous photo there reflecting her signing of the maritime boundaries treaty with Timor-Leste earlier this year, the Julie Bishop treaties room. So we are making progress and I'm pleased to say that our women in leadership strategy has gone a long way to inspiring real change, something that Peter was pivotal in leading in its initial phase. The strategy has supported the implementation of fundamental training to address unconscious bias at every level. It is pushed to see female role models become more visible and more celebrated in day-to-day work down to gender representation in the photos that hang in DFAT hallways. It's gone a long way to normalising flexible and remote work practices under the department's flagship if not why not approach. We celebrate personal stories under faces of flexibility campaign. We welcome staff on parental leave to join us with their babies and toddlers for policy play dates. We promote dialogue through a large gender equality network. We track our own progress through listen and learn conversations with DFAT staff, men and women, junior and senior. The results are already visible. More women are taking up responsibilities in the ranks of the senior executive and more women are being appointed as a heads of our posts overseas. In fact today I'm pleased to say that 40% of our posts overseas are led by women. That's up from 27% when the women in leadership strategy was first launched in DFAT in 2015 and 23% at first went backwards when I became secretary in 2016. And we're on track to meet our target of 40% women at SES band one level by the end of this year, although we will fall short on our band two target. We can see that change also emerging across the broader public service. 46% of Australian government board positions are now held by women. 43% of the senior executive across APS departments are now women. Nine of the 18 departmental secretaries are women. Under the male champions of change initiative to which I'm a special advisor and member of the founding group, we're working together with male colleagues to ensure that visibility is a key word in addressing unconscious bias. Under the motto you can't be what you can't see, we've been promoting a panel pledge across both the public and private sectors in Australia. It's estimated that 15% of panellists at professional forums in Australia are women, often it's less. Those who take the panel pledge commit to accepting invitations to participate at professional forums only where there are tangible efforts made to encourage agenda balance among the speakers. Many of you are familiar with that, I know. It's been a very successful initiative. Numbers of female speakers are up, event organisers are better engaged with the issue and it's becoming increasingly normal to hear a diversity of voices. Normalising the contribution of women to international security, that's the goal. Seeing those successes, I've decided to take a step further. I've committed to my own personal participant pledge which aims to ensure that women are represented not only as speakers but as participants. So I'm now letting it be known, I will only agree to speak in boardroom forums or forums such as this when the event organisers undertake to ensure that at least 30% of attendees are women. So you have massively overachieved today and can I thank you for that? Let me simply conclude by saying visible role models matter, whether in real life or on television. As the Game of Thrones phenomenon draws to a close next year, its most important legacy may well be its female leads. Imperfect, often imprudent, but nonetheless equal to men in their capacity to make difficult decisions and to take on roles of leadership in international security. Perhaps it's a sign of the new normal in the field for years to come. Thank you.