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Former Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard said global progress on gender equality was “really icy and slow”, warning that it was lagging behind among young people.
Gillard cited a recent survey by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which found that 51% of respondents believed men were doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% believed men were now being discriminated against.
Which is “stunning and unexpected,” she told the Hay Festivalare differences by age, with 60% of men aged 16-27 believing that ‘equality for women has gone too far’, more than any other age group.
Gen Z are also more than twice as likely as Boomers to agree with the statement that “a man who stays home with his kids is less of a man.”
“We have to deal with it and we have to ask ourselves feminist quite a difficult and profound question about whether, in our rhetoric and campaigns for gender equality, we have been as careful as we should be to explain that in fact gender equality will be better for everyone,” she said.
“This isn’t about women getting unfair advantages, it’s about creating a world where no one is surrounded by gender stereotypes, and that’s better for men and women.”
More needs to be done to dispel the notion of a zero-sum game in which women take men’s jobs, noting that women’s quotas in Australian politics have proven successful and that these initiatives are often “sensitive in transition, but the ultimate point is one that people embrace,” she said.
As chair of the Global Women’s Leadership Institute at King’s College London, she said she would like to feel there is no need for the organization anymore, but “the research base is weak” and there is a desperate need “to see the issues clearly”. “I’m very passionate that we’re accelerating the pace of change, and good research is critical to that,” she said.
Noting that World Economic Forum appreciates that gender equality around the world is still 130 years from now, she said that in 1998 a person would have a better chance of being CEO of a FTSE company if they were called Dave or David than if they were a woman. This has improved marginally since then, although Daves and Davids combined with Steves, Stevens and Stevens still outnumber women in top corporate jobs.
Unconscious biases need to be challenged, as research shows that people tend to think that “confident, charismatic men” make the best leaders, when in fact they tend to perform worse than more cooperative and cautious women and men , she said.
Research by Kings College London shows that the gender divide in political views is the widest it has ever been, with young men more likely to lean on gender and inclusion issues, while women are more progressive.
“This spells trouble for the future of politics,” she said. “We really need to understand what’s going on around the formation of attitudes in young men.”
While she said the drivers remain unknown, she suggested it may be related to early exposure to violent pornography and “toxic influences online selling a version of masculinity that your masculinity is best expressed by subjugating women.”
Although she wanted to “get on with it” starting her job as Australia’s first female prime minister, she couldn’t ignore the growing characterization of her construction on social media as a “hateful, ambitious woman with claws who didn’t understand what empathy was , what was the concern, what kind of woman chooses not to have children’, and was prompted to address misogyny directly in Parliament.
Although research shows traditional media is treating gender in politics better than it used to, she said “the nasty side of social media has gotten a lot worse,” with the abuse mainly directed at women and people of color in particular.
“Why are we allowing this to happen?” she asked, saying she “cannot believe” that better regulation of social media is not yet possible.
Although she said she was “no shrinking violet when it comes to parliamentary debate”, she warned that “we’ve swung the pendulum so far in democracies … to hyper-partisanship, fueled by the weakness of social media, it’s all binary, you’re for or you’re against “.
She advocated “conscious means and measures to introduce political and democratic systems that move us away from this,” such as greater citizen involvement in decision-making and other forms of direct democracy.
She proposed that parliaments be reconfigured to randomly allocate seats to members so that they are not in rivalries but are encouraged to bond with each other.
She also recommended the Australian model of compulsory voting, as well as the preferential voting system, which means that if you vote for a minor party as your first choice and it is eliminated, your second vote still counts.
Asked if women leaders would improve progress on climate change mitigation, she said the fact that people now, for the first time, believe their children’s lives will be worse makes this a challenge.
“It’s very difficult to get people to embark on journeys for big change and show the social solidarity needed to do so if they no longer have faith that we can build a better future together.”
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