You might’ve heard the stereotype that feminists are just angry women who need to find a man who can satisfy them sexually. It is an old trope that has been with us since at least the 1970s.

Unfortunately, just when we think we may have moved on from toxic myths like these, rhetoric reminds us they are still very much around.

United States Sen. Ted Cruz tried to revive this cliché in recent comments at a conservative conference. He suggested that liberal women are sexually unsatisfied because liberal men are too wimpy: “If you were a liberal woman, and you had to sleep with those weenies, you’d be pissed too.” He implied that they will only achieve sexual satisfaction by submitting to domineering men.

I have conducted research on the topic of feminist identity and sexual behaviour, and I’ve got news for Cruz and anyone else worried about women’s sexual satisfaction. There is no sex drought for feminist women; they have sex just as often as non-feminists. In fact, feminist women report their sex is more cuddly, loving and pleasurable — some might say better — than those who are not feminists.

Thanks for your concern, Sen. Cruz, but we’re doing just fine.

Feminists report having better sex

In 2022, I surveyed a representative sample of 2,303 adults across Canada and I analyzed the responses of the 1,126 women who took part. Respondents were asked about their sexual activities, both alone and with a partner.

I found that women who identified as feminist and non-feminist both reported high levels of sexual satisfaction. However, women who claimed a feminist identity were more likely to report their most recent sexual encounter included kissing and cuddling than non-feminist women.

Among women, 57 per cent of non-feminists said their most recent sexual encounter included kissing and cuddling, compared to 68 per cent of feminists. This data suggests that feminists are not sad and lonely, but they are engaging in loving, enjoyable sex to a greater extent than non-feminists.

The clitoris is where it’s at

One difference between feminist and non-feminist women that stood out the most in my research relates to the pleasure centre of the female body: the clitoris. Feminists were more likely to report receiving clitoral stimulation in the form of oral sex from their partner: 38 per cent of feminist women, compared to 30 per cent of non-feminist women, said they received oral sex in their last encounter.

Clitoral stimulation is the path to sexual pleasure and orgasms for women, feminist or not. However, sometimes sex — especially in heterosexual couples — pays more attention to male pleasure, focusing primarily on stimulation of the penis through vaginal penetration. Clitoral stimulation, such as with mouths, hands or sex toys, gets less attention. Sometimes we give short shrift to clitoral stimulation, relegating it to foreplay, or somehow outside of what counts as “regular sex.”

Shouldn’t women have as much access to sexual pleasure as men? There is abundant evidence, in the case of heterosexual couples, that there is a gender gap in orgasms, with women having fewer orgasms than men. A feminist sensibility might consider it obvious that women should have as much sexual pleasure as men, and their sexual behaviours reflect that ideal.

Why might feminists have better sex?

Many women see feminism as a source of self-actualization and empowerment, and the link between feminist identity and better sex might be quite simple: Feminists know what they want in bed and are more likely to feel empowered to ask for it.

Feminists are more likely to be in social circles with other feminist friends, and they might be more comfortable talking about sex and pleasure, giving them a chance to discover what they want from sexual encounters. Indeed, my survey also found that feminist women also pleasure themselves more frequently than non-feminists.

Perhaps they are more likely to have sexual partners who are also feminist. We know that feminist men who have sex with women are more likely to give oral sex to their partners, tending to the clitoral stimulation of their sexual partners to a greater extent than non-feminist men do.

Heterosexual feminist women might be more likely to have feminist men partners than non-feminists do, so they might have greater access to more generous lovers. Women who have sex with women are also more likely to receive oral sex than women with men partners.

Whether it is through personal empowerment, better communication or sexual partners who are willing to give them what they need, feminists are having sex that is kissy, cuddly and stimulating.

So, contrary to Cruz’s pronouncements on the subject, feminists have sex just as often as non-feminists, and the sex they have is often loving and pleasurable. It’s time to let go of hateful stereotypes. Let’s lean into the idea that satisfying sex should be available to everyone.

Tina Fetner, Professor, Sociology, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Research from Ipsos, King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership surveyed more than 3,600 men and women from different generations on their views on masculinity and women’s equality.

Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London Professor Bobby Duffy said the research shows a gender divide among Generation Z, those born between 1997-2012, on feminist issues and concepts.

“This is a new and unusual generational pattern,” Professor Duffy said. “Normally, it tends to be the case that younger generations are consistently more comfortable with emerging social norms, as they grew up with these as a natural part of their lives.”

However, the research found one in four males in the UK aged 16-29 believe it is harder to be a man than a woman.

Around 16 per cent of Gen Z men feel feminism has done more harm than good, compared to 13 per cent of males in the Baby Boomer generation, aged over 60.

Social media influencer Andrew Tate is viewed favourably by one fifth of the Gen Z men surveyed in the research, and more than a third (37 per cent) of Gen Z men consider the phrase “toxic masculinity” unhelpful.

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Although they remain in the minority view, it is a larger proportion of Gen Z men that hold those views compared to Gen Z women, where the vast majority believe it is harder to be a woman than a man in the UK.

Professor Duffy said this points a gendered “fractious division” within Gen Z and explained that both points of view should be listened to carefully.

“That includes much more work on understanding the challenges facing young men today, or we risk that void being filled by celebrities and influencers, and this nascent divide being exacerbated,” Professor Duffy said.

Professor Rosie Campbell, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, said the research shows a polarisation placing “women to the left of men”, as it’s women who find “toxic masculinity” a helpful term, yet are more pessimistic about future progress on gender equality.

“We’re just at the beginning of understanding what’s driving this but the fact that this group is the first to derive most of their information from social media is likely to be at least part of the explanation,” Professor Rosie Campbell.

Head of Political Research at Ipsos UK Gideon Skinner said it’s important to remember that only a minority of Gen Z males hold negative views of feminism and positive views of Andrew Tate.

“Both young (and more middle-aged) women are most likely to feel that despite the advances of feminism, women’s lives will still remain harder than men’s over the next few decades, and that gender equality has further to go,” Skinner said. 

“But younger men, on the other hand, are more worried that life will be harder for them, and are more uncertain over male gender roles.

“As we have seen in the rest of our research about culture wars, it is important not to exaggerate the divides – it is still only a minority of young men who think equal opportunities have gone too far.”

However, Skinner still urged for action to ensure the “gender split among younger generations” doesn’t grow any bigger than it already is.

“The lessons are that polarisation can increase if we don’t take steps to understand these divisions and do more to improve the prospects for young people’s lives,” Skinner said.

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Despite criticism of his behaviour, Rubiales has refused to resign, defending himself in a lengthy and at times bizarre speech.

Throughout, Rubiales resorted to strategies that are commonly used by those resistant to gender equality. It was straight out of the anti-feminist playbook. Sociologists Michael Flood, Molly Dragiewicz and Bob Pease set out a series of discursive mechanisms used to diminish feminism in a paper published in 2020. These were all on show when Rubiales took to the floor – from the most subtle to the most aggressive.

1. Denial

The first tactic is denial. This includes rejecting the idea that any problem even exists and denying the legitimacy of any case for change.

Denial is a very common element of resistance to gender equality. In Rubiales’s case, he said: “It was spontaneous, mutual and consensual. I have a great relationship with all the players and we had some very affectionate moments at this training camp.”

However, two days earlier, a statement issued on behalf of Jennifer Hermoso by her union didn’t seem to go in the same direction. It stated that the union was working to ensure that “acts such as those we have seen never go unpunished, that they are sanctioned and that appropriate measures are taken to protect women footballers from actions that we believe are unacceptable.”

2. Disavowal

In this context, disavowal amounts to refusing to recognise responsibility for addressing a problem or instigating change to address it.

Rubiales’s speech was made at a special meeting of the federation, called in order for him to explain himself. But he did not engage with the questions around his behaviour towards Hermoso. He apologised for grabbing his crotch during the celebration, but not for the unwanted kiss.

In relation to the kiss, Rubiales only insisted: “They are not trying to do justice. That is false.”

3. Inaction

Inaction is a refusal to implement change, and here too, Rubiales played it by the book. While rumours about his resignation were floating around since the previous evening, he made clear that it wouldn’t happen. He didn’t apologise for the kiss or even thought that it could have been a mistake. In fact, he did exactly the opposite. His big announcement – that he not only declared but yelled five times – was the fact that he refused to resign.

4. Appropriation

Appropriation can involve simulating change while covertly undermining it. This was in evidence during Rubiales because he did at one point apologise “unreservedly”.

However, he did not apologise for the main problem. The apology was only for “an event that occurred in the box” in a moment of “euphoria” when he grabbed “that part of his body”. He was referring to the moment when he grabbed his crotch in a moment of celebration. By apologising for this action, Rubiales was able to assume the position of someone seeking to atone without atoning for the more serious act.

5. Cooptation

When people use progressive language to maintain unequal structures and practices, it is called cooptation.

Rubiales began his speech by appealing to “all female and male assembly members”. He used the word “feminism” and its derivatives eight times in his speech. He said “equality” four times and “justice” six times.

But later on, he spoke about using the masculine plural in Spanish, which “includes both women and men”, urging those present not to be “self-conscious” about using the word campeones to talk about the winning team, rather than the feminine plural campeonas.

Other frequently used words were hunt, assassination, pressure and suffering – but always in reference to himself and those who support him.

“Claims of male victimisation and reverse discrimination are also common elements in resistance,” according to Flood, Dragiewicz and Pease. “Many men feel under threat from feminism and draw attention to what they see as forms of male disadvantage,” say Flood, Dragiewicz and Pease.

Anti-feminists try to reverse the problem by claiming reverse discrimination. Rubiales appeals to this several times. He is the victim. “A social murder is being carried out. They are trying to kill me,” he says.

“We have suffered a lot. We have been through a lot. We have swallowed a lot. But we have been together. You and me and your team, who I’m grateful are here,” Rubiales said to the team’s coach.

Rubiales even assumed the right to define what feminism is and what it is not. Demanding responsibility for what happened, in his view, is “false feminism”, which is “the great scourge of this country”.

“Equality is not differentiating between what a man says and what a woman says. You have to differentiate between truth and lies. And I am telling the truth,” said Rubiales. He also claimed the power to determine what constitutes aggression. “What will a woman [who] has been forced and sexually assaulted think?” he asked.

6. Repression

Rubiales’s surprise refusal to resign is an example of repression, in that he was reversing the process of change. By the time he got up to speak, it was widely accepted that the appropriate thing to do would be to resign. Yet he pushed back against the tide.

7. Violence

The use of violence, harassment and abuse against subordinate groups is key to pushing back against the forces of change. For Rubiales, aggression against someone he considers subordinate is nothing more than a paternalic kiss – a gesture without desire. Yet he also indulged in a lengthy, graphic explanation of Hermoso’s supposed actions in erotic terms – claiming she grabbed him “by the hips, by the legs”, “lifted” him off the ground, “pulled him closer to his body”, etc.

#Seacabó

The applause Rubiales received at the end of his speech corroborates what Flood, Dragiewicz and Pease say, and what many researchers have seen time and again in scientific studies – anti-feminism is not anecdotal but widespread. It is a real social scourge.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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None of this has happened overnight. The long road to gender equity in Football has relied on generations of women defying stereotypes, gendered norms and the criticism of men.

Women like Teresa Vugrenic, my grandmother. 

Teresa played football in the early 1930’s for Cakovec, a town on the border of the former Yugoslavia and Hungary. Every weekend, she took to the field in long white boxer shorts and starchy polo necks, tamed her stylish honey locks beneath a thick headband, and transformed into a masterful scorer on the wing. 

I have a rare and wonderful photo of her on the pitch with her teammates. It’s taken, sometime before WW2. She’s barely twenty years old. 

It’s a pre-match team shot of some importance. You can see a full crowd in the stadium behind her shoulders. 

When this photo was taken, the FIFA women’s competition was still another 65 years away. Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had not yet been written, Germaine Greer had not been born, Ruth Handler hadn’t created Barbie and Kotex had only just started manufacturing sanitary napkins. 

To say Teresa was a trailblazer is an understatement.

While most of the team is laughing, true to my gene pool, she’s the serious looking one, with Greta Garbo brows, looking directly to camera. 

It’s like she’s eyeballing me across generations.

She looks fierce.

Tight lips. Stern eyes. Arched brow. 

I kind of recognise this look.  

I saw it on Sam Kerr’s face as she readied herself to sub into the match on Monday night. Camera following her every move, there was focus and the fierceness in her eyes, as she stripped to her bra before stadium and nation, to swap into a team jersey for the first time in the competition.  Sam Kerr is not just an Australian hero because she is one of the greatest players of all time but because she was part of the ground-breaking collective bargaining agreement that saw the Matildas earn a revenue-sharing deal with their male counterparts. 

I’ve seen the same look on Megan Rapinoe’s face, too as she took to the pitch to play her final match for the Stars and Stripes. I had the privilege to see her play last Sunday. At 38 years, she spent most of the match on the benches, but was subbed on at the 70th minute to loud AAMI Park applause, her signature lilac-blue hair tossled by the night wind.  Rapinoe lays claim to two “Olimpicos” – a goal scored directly from a corner kick. But it is her actions as a human rights champion taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter campaign and a champion of LGBTIQ+ rights in the face of hateful Trumpism that I admire the most. 

Tight lips. Stern eyes. Arched brow. 

This is the look of a woman in pursuit of excellence. A woman so focussed on the job at hand, there’s no time for the trivialities of media or making nice. 

I can tell a lot about this photo of my grandmother. 

That she liked to #getshitdone; that she was fit and fast; that she could marshall “bitch-face” when she needed it. 

For the first time, it occurs to me, that I may have inherited my competitiveness and will to win from her.

Teresa died when I was nine years old. Too young for me to ask questions about feminism and football. Or what it was like to birth a stillborn child. Or how hard it was to migrate to a new country. Or start her own Salon.

I have vivid memories of her love for me, the eldest of her eight grandchildren. She is a sepia vision of faux-fur, Slivovitz-infused, Eastern European loveliness. 

I only learned later in life that she was a badass. The kind of woman even World Leaders didn’t mess with. 

Its legend in my family that Teresa wrote directly to Yugoslav President Tito himself, demanding the release of her husband, my Deda, from prison during the War, taking off on a one-woman freedom ride to Zagreb to secure his release. She won. 

I’m told, Frank Kovac fell in love with Teresa Vugrenic while she was playing Football. Who can blame him? 

There is a raw power, grace and sex appeal when women put their bodies on the line for a goal; when they stand up – alone and together – for what they believe in. 

There is reverence for this power. But also fear. There is a reason why women are conditioned not to strive; not to collectively mobilise and punished for playing to win.

Nearly a century has passed since Teresa played Football and while much has changed for women, there are also too many things that remain the same. 

Too many of life’s cultural prizes, economic benefits and social solutions are owned by, made for and designed by men. 

Most of the time, I feel every single frustrating year of the two centuries the World Economic Forum believes it will take to close the global gender gap. 

Most of the time, I feel like Barbie in Ken-land; struggling with the never-ending entitlement of patriarchy. 

But then there are moments of change. Like the one we are having right now.

When women’s athleticism, guts and mastery is powerful enough to dominate a 24/7 news-cycle.

When the highest grossing film of the year is a #MeToo made-over Barbie movie, mainstreaming the “F” word. 

When it feels like women can achieve anything whether its creating sharp, intelligent comedy, performing personal-is-political drama, wearing fairy-floss fashion or sweating and panting their way through being a post-game hot-mess. 

These are the days when life is a Spotify playlist made especially for me of Tori, Joan, Sinead, Tracy, Bey Bey and Tay Tay. 

I’m not fool enough to think it will last more than a moment. Soon, it will be back to boys-business as usual. History tells me there is always backlash and punishment after our rise. 

By the 1940’s Women’s Association Football was banned in Yugoslavia – as it would be in the UK, Belgium, Spain, Norway and Nigeria – as moral panic and the battle for pitch time, sponsorship and attention after WW2 became too much for the male code to tolerate. 

My grandmother would not play again. 

Tight lips. Stern Eyes. Arched Brow. 

Furious and fierce. #tillitsdonetsdone 

#GoMatildas!

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The long-awaited Barbie film (2023) directed by Greta Gerwig, co-written by Gerwig (and partner Noah Baumbach), and produced by Margot Robbie (who also plays the titular character) promised to provide a feminist makeover of the famed Mattel doll that for generations ignited controversy over its unrealistic body image.

Those of us who have grown up with Barbie no doubt felt marginalised by the doll’s body type that carries the message that beauty is about being blond, tall and thin. In light of this, the endless interviews with director Gerwig and star Robbie promoted this film as a feminist intervention into the doll’s original message that a woman’s worth was based purely upon her sexual appeal.

For millions of cinema goers across the world, including the grandmothers, mothers and daughters who flocked to Bathurst’s Metro complex (and who good-humouredly decked themselves in pink frocks, tiaras, and impressive glitter), the question of whether Barbie could be reclaimed as a feminist icon was on everyone’s minds.

Did Barbie transform the Mattel original into an empowering representation of womanhood? Are their advances made for feminism? The quick answer is: ‘no’.

The film’s dramatisation of all kinds of Barbies —Nobel Prize-winning Barbie, President Barbie, pregnant Barbie, and even ‘Weird’ Barbie — ostensibly pushes the idea that women can do anything, but in fact what this array of dolls proves is the marketing power of a massive corporation that has made billions out of duplicate Barbies and thanks to this film, it is still making profits.

Barbie does not make the important correlation between multiple versions of Barbie and rampant capitalism that has for centuries subjugated women.

This same capitalism gave birth to the 1959 doll when Ruth Handler acquired the rights to a West German toy called ‘Bild Lilli’. The film does not deal with Barbie’s German origins, but it is concerned with origins as the character of Handler appears in the film as Barbie’s mother creator, and she imparts some dubious wisdom: ‘Mothers stand still so their daughters can see how far they’ve come’.

So, mothers need to stagnate themselves in order to support their daughters? How is this message empowering or liberating for women? Handler’s words articulate a logic of sacrifice that structures the narrative of Barbie as well as its gender representations.  

For instance, Barbie’s identity is based upon her difference to Ken, and Ken is defined through his difference to Barbie. This logic of loss, sacrifice and plenitude inform the political landscape of ‘Barbie-land’ that begins as a matriarchy, only to be turned into a patriarchy (once Ken is exposed to the ‘Real World’), and then is returned to its matriarchal origins.

Of course, the matriarchies and patriarchies in this film are not democracies as each operates on the basis that there is one ruling group and one oppressed group. This is not sexual liberation but sexual autocracy.

The film also confuses gender equity with a battle of the sexes dynamic that pits each gender against the other and it also assumes that there are only two sexes thus negating fluid gender and sexual identities.

The many Ken dolls in the film are also portrayed as vacuous and beautiful and in need of being propped up by their Barbies — this echoes a sexist dynamic in classical Hollywood films in which the importance of a female character is tethered to a male lead: she is significant only if he gives her significance.

Again, this reversal of power relationships does not create a new paradigm, it just reinforces familiar and debilitating gender constructions.

There are some progressive feminist moments in the film, but they are likely lost on most audiences as the material comes across as throwaway lines: ‘I’m a man with no power, does that make me a woman?’ and ‘everyone hates women, men hate women, women hate women.’ These piercing observations are diffused by other jokes that dim their insight and wisdom. Jokes that make the film appear shallow and its dealings with equity, diversity and the acceptance of all body types tokenistic.

The two dolls that did not conform to a rigid feminine or masculine binary — ‘Weird Barbie’ and ‘Allan’ — could have shaken up the strict female versus male dynamic as well as the matriarchy versus patriarchy opposition, but these ‘alternative’ dolls were secondary and relegated to serving comic value.

Ideally these alternative dolls could have inaugurated important conversations concerning the complex nature of sexuality and gender, but they do not. Gerwig and Robbie’s film sustains a heterosexist and patriarchal model of constructing sexuality and gender that locks Barbie and Ken, and by extension women and men within a limited dynamic that ultimately undercuts identity and agency.

Contrary to Jennifer Stokes’ ‘Life if Plastic, it’s fantastic’ Barbie is no more in control than those pink Birkenstocks will transform the future into a feminist one. And Ken’s only a few brain cells short of starting his own radical INCEL group (insightfully discussed in Lucy Nicolas’s piece ‘Ken’s Rights’).

So, what have we learned from this film? That Ken is ‘Ken-enough and a 10’, and that Barbie aspires to be ‘ordinary’ and ‘gets a vag’ — yes at the end of the movie, Barbie goes to a gynaecologist to correct her absence of sexual organs. Once more, female identity is reduced to being a biological phenomenon. How this is liberating or empowering for real women, young and old, is a mystery.

Regardless of the claims for hyper-femininity and a feminist bimbo classic, Barbie reminds us, at best, that the real danger is patriarchy. Yet, the real disappointment is there’s not a feminist solution in sight.

Suzie Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University. Donna Bridges is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology a Charles Sturt University and Elizabeth Wulff is a Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University.

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At last – after the hype and advance mass-merchandising – the Barbie movie is here. Part spoof, part action fantasy, part Barbie doll virtual museum, it’s a full-blown product placement experience – but ironic as much as iconic.

The movie sets off feeling like a post-pandemic party. It’s an opportunity to be frivolous after a time of adversity, and to reclaim the pink of life – especially, perhaps, for fun-starved Gen Z. Given Barbie first appeared in 1959 as a baby boomer’s plastic mini-mannequin, dress-up fashion doll, that’s real inter-generational reach.

But to early critics, the doll evoked the mass production of white, American tween culture. To feminists seeking women’s liberation, Barbie symbolised a culture that objectified women, treating them quite literally as living dolls.

All this is captured in the first part of the film, where “Stereotypical Barbie” and “Just Beach Ken” are brilliantly brought to life by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. The film playfully toys with the long history of Barbie debates, subtly feeding into the backstory.

Just as impressively, no expense has been spared on set and accessory design. Watching the actors breathe, think, move and play like dolls is hilarious and spooky.

Of course, real people playing dolls might suggest those feminist fears have been realised. Except for the fact that Barbie Land in this film is an empowering matriarchy, full of dreams coming true, and where the dolls are leading perfect lives of substance.

Unlike real-world America, there is a woman president. Equity, diversity and the acceptance of all body types are on display. All of which support Barbie manufacturer Mattel’s claim to create the dolls as “role models” for women’s advancement in a changing world.

And then the aspirational matriarchy starts to malfunction. Stereotypical Barbie develops bad breath, flat feet, cellulite and a fear of death. A leak in the portal to the Real World means dark and crazy drawings by that Barbie’s owner are having a voodoo effect. She must travel there to sort things out.

‘I am Kennough’

The movie turns dark, with tag-along Ken discovering patriarchy in the Real World and taking it back to Barbie Land. With Ken largely invisible in the film’s merchandising and girls-night-out launches, we’ve been set up for the surprising plot twist.

Gosling proceeds to own the screen and make this the Ken Movie. He rejects being “just Ken” and instead acts, dances, prowls and flexes to steal the show. (He calms down later, accepting that Barbie does not want to be his girlfriend.)

An appendage no more, it is Ken, not Barbie, who whines about blonde fragility and every night being a girls’ night, and who now sings of seeking to push women around and take them for granted.

This is where the movie is at its most profound. Ken, not Barbie, is the victim of sexism. As Barbie has flourished, Ken has been left behind. Kens are the objectified, excluded second sex.

There are echoes here of the American feminist Susan Faludi’s writings. In the early 1990s, she saw feminism as being defined in a sign hoisted by a little girl at the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality march: I AM NOT A BARBIE DOLL.

By the end of that decade she described the betrayal of the American man, and a crisis of masculinity. Emasculated men, she wrote, were left behind in the wake of women’s progress. But as the inhabitants of Barbie Land discover in the film, matriarchy can be just as damaging as patriarchy. Better to mix pink and blue to make purple instead of them competing.

Rejects save the day

Writer-director Greta Gerwig and her collaborator (and husband) Noah Baumbach feed the dichotomy of being “for” or “against” Barbie. But they ultimately render that debate history.

Enter Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) and Alan (Michael Cera), outcasts and rejects of Barbie Land, who want “nobody in the shadows”. These are the real heroes who save the day, deprogramming the brainwashed Barbies. It is one more layer of irony in a film about a doll once accused of brainwashing girls.

Indeed, when Barbie cries at one point about being ugly, providing irony within irony, narrator Helen Mirren steps in to suggest that Margot Robbie was probably not the right actress to cast to make that point.

By the end of the film, Barbie has become real and ordinary. Replete with genitalia, she liberates herself from her plastic-fantastic dream world – without Ken – to live in the unruly real world. In a full circle, the doll becomes human.

So, must women’s empowerment come at men’s expense? The historian of patriarchy Gerda Lerner once addressed this very question. She said the idea was an outmoded construct that

no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.

As in the finale of Gerwig’s film, Lerner’s feminist vision was for everybody to stand in the sunshine. In a world emerging from COVID and grappling with the general grimness of war and climate change, Gerwig’s Barbie is both an exuberant opiate and a comment on the state of global feminism.

Perhaps most ironically, however, it may signal market saturation for Barbie. Surely this must be her peak moment, a massive last hurrah, after which the doll and all she has represented for over 60 years recede into history. Then again, Hollywood loves a sequel.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Speaking on Women’s Agenda‘s weekly podcast The Crux, Pascoe said fans can expect the first half of the show to feature funny stories from her teenage ambitions, including the times she tried to get on TV, meet famous people and, believe it or not, be insulted by a spice girl.

But there’s also a deeper, more personal level of truth-telling that comes out later on in the show, with Pascoe sharing her journey with infertility to finally “becoming a mum” and the ways in which that’s changed her life.

While many have labelled her brand of comedy “feminist”, Pascoe revealed she’s struggled with the label in the past since it seemed like it was only being given to her because she was a woman speaking on topics of personal experience.

She gave an example saying, “if a man is in a supermarket, he’s doing stand-up comedy, and if I’m in the supermarket telling jokes about a supermarket, that’s feminist– just because I’m a woman doing comedy about a supermarket.”

Pascoe says she used to wonder why her comedy was labelled feminist and laughs that even a comment about “having a bra on”, can be deemed a form of activism.

“Oddly, a woman talking on stage unapologetically was seen as activism even though it didn’t feel like it,” said Pascoe.

Since then, she’s come to embrace the label and values “the importance of women hearing from women and a whole diverse set of opinions and experiences”.

And while being a feminist may be considered part of it, Pascoe’s brand of comedy has always been about transparency.

“Audiences know when they’re being lied to,” she says.

“We’re a very social species, so we pick up on each other’s voices and body language. And audiences will not laugh if they think that you’re lying to them or pretending to be something that you’re not.”

It’s this unabashed honesty that what makes her so incredibly relatable to audiences.

“You can’t really change the kind of comic that you are,” says Pascoe.

“[Comedy style] chooses you, so mine has always been essentially telling secrets– mine and other people’s.”

In addition to spilling secrets and making audiences laugh, Pascoe says her career also allows for good flexibility as a new mother.

“I was able to go back to work for the first time five weeks after my son was born because I can work pretty much as and when I want to,” she says. “Now being on tour, I work at night, so I still get to spend the day with my son and he’s in bed when I’m working.”

To other women looking to pursue comedy, she has a simple message: “give it a go”.

“If you do a couple of gigs and you don’t enjoy it, you never have to do it again. But you might just get a real obsession with it, which is what happened to me.”

Pascoe’s new show will ride off the success of her last live tour, which received critical acclaim and sold out at the Edinburgh Fringe before it started. Australian audiences can get tickets for showings in April and May, on sale now.

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On August 26 1970, 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in a Women’s Strike. Organised by feminist activist Betty Friedan, the march highlighted the fact women still performed the vast majority of domestic work.

The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “unpaid domestic servitude at home”.

Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.

Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?

Dramatising women’s suburban alienation

Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives offered a bleak answer: women themselves would be replaced. Levin powerfully dramatised women’s suburban alienation and men’s resistance to feminist change.

The Stepford Wives begins with Joanna Eberhart, a wife, mother and photographer, who moves with her family from Manhattan to the suburban town of Stepford. She is interested in tennis, photography and women’s liberation. Joanna and her husband Walter have a happy, respectful marriage. Yet Walter joins the mysterious Stepford Men’s Association, where the men of the town spend their evenings.

Joanna finds it hard to make friends in their new home: all the women of Stepford are too busy cooking and cleaning. In the 1975 film adaptation (directed by Bryan Forbes, with a screenplay by William Goldman), Joanna and her only friend, fellow newcomer Bobbie, begin a consciousness-raising group – designed to raise women’s feminist awareness – which is derailed by an intense discussion of the merits of Easy-On Spray Starch.

The women of Stepford transform into glassy-eyed housewives within months of arriving. Watching one of them admiring her washing, “like an actress in a commercial”, Joanna thinks

That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

Joanna and Bobbie realise, with mounting horror, that the Stepford women have literally been replaced by robots, in a scheme masterminded by their husbands – and they too, will be similarly transformed. Bobbie is first. She tells Joanna

I realised I was being awfully sloppy and self-indulgent. […] I’ve decided to do my job conscientiously, the way Dave does his.

The women’s personalities have been erased, but their families don’t seem to mind – Bobbie’s son is delighted because his mother now makes hot breakfasts, while the husbands are thrilled because their “new” wives love sex and housework.

Fearful that she “won’t be me next summer”, Joanne realises Walter has also changed. He tells her the women of Stepford have changed only

because they realised they’d been lazy and negligent […] It wouldn’t hurt you to look in a mirror once in a while.

Joanna agrees to see a psychiatrist, who prescribes her a sedative. But soon after, her voice vanishes from the novel, as she too has been transformed. At the story’s close, Joanna is gliding slowly through a supermarket, telling an acquaintance that she no longer does photography because “housework’s enough for me”.

An extraordinary feminist horror novel

The Stepford Wives is an extraordinary feminist horror novel. Its vision of a group of men who engineer housework-loving robots to replace their restless wives offered not only a satire of male fears of women’s liberation, but a savage view of heterosexual marriage. In this telling, a man would rather kill his wife and replace her with a robot than commit to equality and recognise her as a whole person.

Sarah Marshall, co-host of the podcast You’re Wrong About, argued the novel dramatised a real problem of the 1960s and 1970s: suburban living did transform women into robots. Tranquillisers like valium were massively over-prescribed for women who were suffering from “suburban neurosis”, both in Australia and the US.

The extraordinary 1977 Australian documentary All In The Same Boat suggested suburban women had to take drugs to cope because their husbands refused to shoulder their share of the burdens of home and family. In short, what was happening to the women of Stepford was happening to women everywhere. They were losing their identities in a sea of endless domestic labour.

Joanna’s bafflement at her neighbours’ absorption in domestic chores echoed the feelings of many women of the era. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique resonated with so many white women in the 1960s because it articulated their dissatisfaction with the postwar gender order. Friedan declared:

we can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.’

Like many who joined women’s liberation, Joanna also wanted something more. The novel made it clear that “more” would be difficult for many women.

From post-feminism to Get Out: cultural influence

It is telling that in post-feminist 2004, the Joanna in the Frank Oz film remake of The Stepford Wives is not a woman seeking liberation, but a TV network president who creates crass reality TV programs. Women’s liberation had been transformed into corporate feminism, and the engineer of the scheme was not the Stepford Men’s Association, but an exhausted career woman who wants to return to a “simpler” life. The remake took a feminist premise and made an anti-feminist film.

Despite the dismal failure of the 2004 film, The Stepford Wives left a significant cultural footprint. The term itself entered the vernacular. Filmmaker Jordan Peele cited The Stepford Wives as a key influence on his horror film Get Out, also set in white suburbia. And Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, centred on a lifelike female robot who turns on her creator, was a biting critique of tech bro misogyny.

In a post-Roe v Wade world, where many men still seek to control women’s bodies and curtail their imaginations, Levin’s novel remains as chilling as ever.

Michelle Arrow is Professor of History at Macquarie University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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On November 11, 2021, Sam Mostyn, an independent company director, long-time women’s advocate and current president of advocacy group Chief Executive Women, arrived at the National Press Club to deliver what would subsequently be hailed as a landmark address.

Mostyn promised to deliver insights from “a relentless two years during which women had been trying to deal with the upheaval to their world caused by COVID”. She promised to extrapolate from those insights some key lessons regarding “what Australia could — and should — look like as we emerged from one of the most disruptive and challenging periods in our history”.

Given the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on women, and given Australia’s relatively recent feminist reawakening that culminated in the March4Justice rallies across the country, it came as no surprise that Mostyn was offered such a prominent platform at the National Press Club to canvass these issues and chart a course forward.

Many listeners were probably expecting a speech that focused on the more traditional Chief Executive Women territory of women in leadership and on boards, issues that have topped the corporate feminist agenda for more than a decade. But Mostyn had a radical surprise in store: she would have a laser-like focus on care, the so-called “care economy” and “care infrastructure”, in particular the low pay and poor conditions that are the hallmark of the care industries dominated by women, including aged care, early years education and care and disability support services.

Mostyn framed her remarks in terms of Australia’s characterisation as a lucky country. “In Australia, we like to tell ourselves that we are the Lucky Country … and yet among our vast natural resources, possibly the most underrated, undervalued has been the unpaid (and low-paid) work of women,” she said. “We are ‘lucky’ to have benefited from that for so long.”

We virtually never hear how care and economic performance and success go hand in hand, Mostyn added. “They are inextricably linked, and they are the foundation of our future prosperity.”

The gauntlet was thrown. The whole purpose of Mostyn’s speech, she said, was “to put care at the centre of the economy”. Watching at home, I was blown away.

Mostyn’s speech represented a turning point for Australian feminism; a transition from the lean-in, “career feminism” that had dominated mainstream Australian feminist discourse for nearly a decade to a “care feminism” that grappled with the critical role that care, and care infrastructure, plays in our economy — it is the work that makes it possible for other women to work.

It is also, according to countless economists, a larger and larger portion of the economy with each passing year, with most jobs growth over the next five years expected in services industries (the majority in healthcare services), where 90% of women already work, according to the Grattan Institute. What’s more, there are expected to be far fewer jobs in the more traditional male-dominated industries of agriculture, manufacturing, construction and mining. The economy has been changing before our very eyes, though it seems some people hadn’t noticed.

In plain sight

Mostyn’s point was that this was the future of the economy, and there was a lot to be gained — from both a social and economic perspective — by facilitating a long-overdue shift in how we think about care. Comparing a $1 million public investment in education, health and construction, the Australia Institute estimated the employment boost in male-dominated construction is minimal (1.2 jobs) compared with the female-dominated health sector (10.2 jobs). That’s a ratio of 10 jobs in education and care to one in more traditional “infrastructure” for the same amount of stimulus investment. Yet the Coalition government — at the height of the pandemic — continued to direct all the cash stimulus towards traditional hard-hat/hi-vis industries, with women missing out. It would seem the Coalition government had no shortage of hard heads donning hard hats.

Mostyn was also keen to explore the appalling way we as a society don’t value the critical caring work women do simply because women do it. We are missing out in terms of reaping the social dividend of increased community wellbeing, and the human capital formation and productivity dividend, boosting long-term productivity by freeing up more people, usually women, with caring responsibilities to work. She clearly understood that the women who do the unpaid and low-paid caring work might have zero interest in “leaning in” to the corporate leadership roles typical of members of her organisation. And thank bloody Christ they didn’t subscribe to that singular definition of workplace “success” for women. Because without our care workers, we would live in a society that doesn’t provide even the minimum standards of care to our disabled and aged loved ones or the best start in life for our children.

It was high time women in executive roles showed they had the backs of the largely female care workforce. A bit of good old-fashioned feminist solidarity — to my mind — was long overdue.

And now where?

In a 2021 essay for The New York Times, Anne Marie Slaughter, chief executive of the New America Foundation, made a similar, scathing observation about the care economy and care infrastructure, in particular the extent to which they had not been on the agenda of women in executive roles. Entitled “Rosie could be a riveter because of a care economy”, Slaughter’s NYT piece scolded the more recent generation of corporate feminists for not paying enough attention to care.

“The value and visibility of care goes far beyond the definition of infrastructure. It is the central question of 21st-century feminism, and one far too long ignored or downplayed not only by men, but also by many prominent women, particularly wealthy white women who have been able to leverage the privilege of race and class,” Slaughter wrote. “Care feminism has long taken a back seat to career feminism. Advocating for child or elder care may be less glamorous and newsworthy than breaking glass ceilings to become the first woman in a role traditionally reserved for a man, but both are necessary if we are ever to achieve true gender equality.”

Mostyn’s speech represented the brave new vanguard of care feminism in Australia, and a very welcome break from the dominant career feminism. The vital issues of the value of care and the value of women’s paid and unpaid care work were, at last, moving from the fringes of the debate to the centre. And the fact that this unequivocal message was coming from the president of Chief Executive Women, an organisation traditionally associated with career feminism, was symbolic of how mainstream care feminism was fast becoming — and the potential impact it could have.

But there were, as there always are, trailblazers who laid the groundwork for this moment, both here in Australia and around the world.

Those who passed this way before

Decades before Mostyn spoke, feminists began making inroads in policy and economics circles towards the recognition of the value of women’s unpaid and paid care work. This work was initially described as “reproductive labour”, i.e. the childcare, elder care, cooking, cleaning, shopping and domestic logistics (now more popularly known as the “mental load”). Basically, all the work that women do unpaid in their own home or for little pay in other people’s homes of care settings.

The Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici first advanced the argument when she founded the Wages for Housework movement in 1972. Influenced by another Italian feminist, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and the American activist Selma James, who argued that by working without pay in the home women were producing the labour force that capitalism exploited for profit, Federici founded the American chapter of Wages for Housework and wrote her own foundational essay in 1975, titled Wages Against Housework.

“To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of cooking, smiling and fucking,” Federici wrote. “At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled and fucked throughout the years, not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling.”

In response to the argument that women should do this work for free as “labourers of love” because they were just naturally better suited to care work, Federici was scathing. It was not “natural” for care to be the soul preserve of one gender, she argued, nor was it natural for some to be subjugated by an economic system that benefited a few; they were merely conventions of an all-encompassing economic system that had become so dominant we could scarcely imagine an alternative.

In 1988 the New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring took up the cause and published her ground-breaking book Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. The book explored how mainstream economics and the systems on which modern calculations of gross domestic product are based (the universal measure of a nation’s economic wellbeing) exclude and make invisible women’s contribution through “life-sustaining” unpaid labour — that “reproductive labour” Federici and her generation wrote about.

Waring had been appointed chair of the New Zealand government’s Public Expenditure Committee in 1978. This experience opened her eyes to how invisible and marginal women’s experiences were in the policy process, even though as half of the population they were profoundly affected by the spending decisions the powerful committee took. Waring demanded access to information from every government department about the gendered impacts of spending decisions. She also asked a treasury official to explain why GDP excluded women’s unpaid work. The answer: GDP formulations were based on the United Nations’ System of National Accounts.

“Right, I want to see the rules,” Waring said, according to a 2018 profile in The Monthly. But it turned out there wasn’t a copy of the UN’s National Accounts in New Zealand, or Australia for that matter. “So, all these nations were using the United Nations System of the National Accounts, these rules that run the whole of the data that everyone uses, without anyone having read them … that’s what we call propaganda,” Waring told The Monthly.

Waring later travelled to New York to research the System of National Accounts. A soul-destroying moment occurred when she read a 1953 edition that casually dismissed women’s unpaid labour as “of little or no importance”. GDP, in excluding the unpaid labour of one gender, is based on “an ideology of applied patriarchy”, she told The Monthly. “Human activities of great value are rendered meaningless.”

Though the System of National Accounts was revised in 1993 and again in 2008 as a result of Waring’s work, the exclusion of women’s unpaid work remained consistent, though the National Accounts made a provision for a separate but consistent set of satellite accounts that gave value to women’s unpaid work but always sat alongside GDP.

The monetary value of unpaid care work in Australia has been estimated to be $650.1 billion, equivalent to 50.6% of GDP. This makes it Australia’s largest industry, larger than any in the formal economy. That’s the equivalent of the value of three mining industries.

Other economists, like the US-based Nancy Folbre, a professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Political Economy Research Institute, have devoted their life’s work to this issue. In 1998, Folbre received a MacArthur Genius Grant for her work exploring how the care sector, defined as activity in the home and the market, was a crucial part of the economy but operated differently to other parts of the economy. “You can’t measure the productivity of a childcare centre the way you would, say, a car factory … the incentives are nothing alike,” Folbre explained in a 2021 interview with The New York Times. “The profits don’t go only to the centre owner. Instead, the benefits are shared by children and their parents, and society as a whole.”

Nearly two decades after Folbre was awarded that Genius Grant, the term “infrastructure” in reference to care-related work was first used by Ai-jen Poo, an American labour activist and director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, in her 2015 book The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.

“If we can deliver water and electricity to every home in the country, we should be able to create good care options for everyone,” Poo wrote. “If the definition of infrastructure is that which enables commerce and economic activity, what could be more fundamental?”

The book sets out a roadmap for how America could become a more caring nation, provide solutions for fixing the fraying care sector and provide opportunities for women, immigrants and the unemployed. A bestseller, Poo’s book put the idea of care and care feminism on the contemporary feminist agenda. “Care is the strategy and the solution toward a better future for all of us,” she proclaimed.

By 2019, those who had long sounded the alarm about the ticking time bomb of care were being taken seriously. The care economy was on the agenda of the four female senators who ran for the presidency, bringing attention to the issue even before the pandemic threw it into even sharper relief.

In 2020, the newly elected Biden administration wove care as “infrastructure” firmly into its pandemic recovery plans. President Biden included money for home-based care for the elderly and the disabled under the umbrella of infrastructure, as part of a $2 trillion package he proposed in March. The next month, he proposed more funding for paid family leave, universal early years education and care, and $225 billion for childcare. And in May, business leaders lent their support to the cause when Time’s Up launched the Care Economy Business Council, a coalition of nearly 200 businesses across industries with a mission to reimagine the nation’s caregiving infrastructure so people could get back to work and build a stronger, more resilient economy.

Governments and industries could now see the need to actively invest in care industries and ergo valued them more highly, seeing them as an essential part of the economy and not just some adjunct that women do because they love it.

Here in Australia Elizabeth Hill, an associate professor of political economy at the University of Sydney and co-convenor of the Australian Work and Family Policy Roundtable, has been foundational to this shift.

“It is absolutely extraordinary that we’ve got to this place,” Hill told me. “We used to be a voice in the wilderness, and now we have so many friends and colleagues of all persuasions making the kinds of arguments that we’ve been making for a really long time. And making them in powerful ways and from really powerful platforms.

“It is edifying,” Hill said. “See? We were right all along.”

I could, however, recall a time in recent memory when this was most certainly not the case, and the dire warnings of what would happen — and did happen — if we failed to change tack.

Caring time bomb

When I was working at the UK’s Equal Opportunity Commission more than a decade ago, a policy officer came to me with a paper on the undervaluing of women’s work. I was the head of media at the time, and she was hoping I could get a bit of press for this beige-sounding but vitally important feminist issue.

The undervaluing of women’s work accounts for about one-fifth of the gender pay gap in Australia, but it is rarely talked about outside of the most earnest of policy circles. The situation in the UK at the time was broadly similar. The EOC paper warned that the undervaluing of women’s work was contributing to “a caring time bomb”. Those words, and that stark warning, have stayed with me ever since.

The undervaluing of women’s work is essentially the fact that female-dominated industries are valued less than male-dominated industries simply because the work is done by women. Working in a female-dominated occupation can reduce pay by as much as 9%. Nowhere is that clearer than in the caring professions, where we have — for too long — expected women to work for poverty wages as “labourers of love”. The tragic consequences of that became visible in the course of the pandemic, as each and every day our aged care homes, early years sector, the disability sector and nursing struggled to cope.

We had reached the end of the fuse on the “caring time bomb” that the EOC paper warned about more than a decade previously. And the impacts have been horrific.

In aged care, a 2021 report warned that poor pay, stress and excessive paperwork had pushed Australia to the precipice of an aged care staffing crisis. The report warned of a “mass exodus”, with 65% of workers intending to leave the residential aged care industry within the next five years.

By the summer of 2022 — in the midst of the Omicron wave — those dire predictions came true. Against a backdrop where more aged care residents died of COVID-19 in January 2022 than in the whole of the previous year, and amid shocking reports of neglect due to understaffing, unions and industry groups jointly appealed to the federal government for help to resolve desperate staffing shortages. The clearest sign of that desperation: a call for the federal government to deploy the military to residential aged care homes.

Over in the childcare sector, the January 2022 Omicron wave was also taking its toll. Four hundred and twenty childcare centres had closed across Australia due to COVID-19, and more were warning they would have to close due to staff shortages and reduced attendance. By February, the federal government was being urged to inject $1 billion into the sector to fix the crisis. More than one in eight childcare centres had waivers from the sector’s quality regulator to allow them to operate for at least 12 months without meeting legal staffing requirements. Personally, as a parent of two children, I daren’t let my mind entertain the possibilities of what understaffed childcare centres might lead to. It’s too distressing.

In the healthcare sector, where 75% of the workforce is female, thousands of fed-up nurses took to the streets in New South Wales for the first strike in more than a decade to demand better pay and conditions. Such was the strength of feeling, they marched in defiance of orders from the Industrial Relations Commission to call the action off. Keep your “claps for carers”, was their message. We need more than that.

As Mostyn suggested in her speech at the National Press Club, Australia was indeed a “lucky country” to have availed itself of these women’s good will to work for so little or no pay. But Australia’s luck, it was clear, was now running out.

People across Australia could connect the undervaluing of women’s care work to their own lives, to the lives of their elderly relatives, to the lives of their children, to the lives of their disabled friends and family in a real way that they, perhaps, couldn’t before.

A clear sign of this shift and new momentum towards care feminism: the unlikely coalition of Women for Progress in early 2022, a group of prominent women from diverse backgrounds and experiences whose aim was to highlight the role of women and girls in the COVID-19 recovery as a critical policy issue for government. The group ranged in membership from an icon of the Australian women’s movement, Wendy McCarthy, and former foreign minister Julie Bishop to ACTU president Michele O’Neil and Business Council CEO Jennifer Westacott. It also, notably, included Chief Executive Women’s Sam Mostyn.

Among their calls to action was an unprecedented investment in Australia’s caring infrastructure, including greater investment in early years education and the proper remuneration of the (mostly women) who did vital, dare we say essential, care work.

By early 2022, the movement from career feminism to care feminism was well advanced — and long overdue. It goes without saying that an army of carers, paid and unpaid, should not have been forced to pay such a high price in the course of the pandemic in terms of their wellbeing and mental health to help prompt this reappraisal, but we have arrived at a very different place. This has set us up brilliantly to reassess some of the issues so vital to a new deal for women at work who have not been at the top of the lean-in agenda.

This article was published by SmartCompany.

Kristine Ziwica’s book Leaning Out will be published as part of The Crikey Read series.

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It’s All About Women.

Yep. The All About Women Festival is now in its ninth year, and as usual, it’s packed with international superstar guests who will challenge the norms of feminine identity, celebrate pivotal moments, and share strategies on how to live in a world that’s still unequal.

Taking place on Sunday March 7, the festival also includes film screenings, contemporary art installations, workshops and panel discussions.

Festival Director Dr Edwina Throsby believes the world has shifted so dramatically in the past year that negotiating the various roles women hold across society, politics and culture can only be improved by coming together as a community of diverse voices, and talking about it.

“We’ve seen the distinction between the public and the private spheres collapse, female world leaders emerge and thrive, and traditionally feminised areas like home, family and community be emphasised like never before,” she says.

“One of the things that the pandemic has done is it’s put even more of our lives online. Our social lives, our work lives, our entire lives have been completely shifted online.”

Throsby believes that this circumstance-driven shift could signal a long-term one; where home life is merged into our work lives.

“Home life used to be separated from work. I think that has had an impact on women. Historically, the domestic space has been coded feminine. And work and professional spaces coded masculine.

Whether you’re a male CEO or female assistant, that separation just collapsed. You can’t pretend that family life doesn’t ever incur on professional life.” she says. “Hopefully it’s a positive development, and we’ll see things such as flexible working conditions continue as a result of that.”

Ultimately, it was this recognition that helped Throsby build out this year’s program and ensure it reflected the unique time (some would say turning point) we’ve moved into.

“There are quite a few concurrent considerations I make when I’m thinking about the shape of the program,” Throsby shares.

“I want to reflect all current arguments around the broad themes of the festival. All About Women is about people affected by the patriarchy. What are the issues that are most salient at this point? Who is saying the most interesting things about these things?”

For Throsby and the rest of the program’s coordinators, making sure all attendees leave with some tangible take-aways is important, irrespective of their stage of life.

“I want people to come and find something for themselves,” she says. “One of the things I love about this festival is that you’ll see audience members aged from their teens through to grandparents. It’s multigenerational. There is huge diversity among the crowd.”

This year’s speakers include some big international names including literary icon, Isabel Allende, and British journalist Caitlin Moran. But Throsby also boasts about a couple of newer voices she expects will make their mark. 

Former editor-in-chief of Jezebel and co-host of “The #MeToo Memos”, Koa Beck is one of them.

“She’s been able to articulate the issues around an ideology she calls ‘white feminism’. This ideology has at its core that the driving goal of feminism is equality with men – usually white men – without realising that this often comes at a cost for marginalised women, women of colour, working class women, and so on. And this has been completely embedded in a whole bunch of other historical events— like the fight for suffrage, or the emergence of “bossgirl” feminism. It’s a relatively new conversation here in Australia.”

Laura Bates is another speaker that excites Throsby.

“She’s written several books about misogyny, including the famous Everyday Sexism (a book which chronicles hundreds of personal experiences, stories and facts about what it means to be a woman).

She’s also the founder of Everyday Sexism Project, which focuses on the daily indignities women face. From this came her most recent book, Men Who Hate Women, which looks at the spread of extremist misogynistic online communities that are radicalising boys and young men against women, with real-life consequences.

These are online groups. They’re actually groups and actually targeting boys with these beliefs. They spill into real life violence. This old fashioned idea that the internet and real life are different is just no longer the case.”

Now in its 8th year, the festival has commemorated and celebrated some pivotal moments in history including the #MeToo movement; a milestone which Throsby believes advanced feminism in an astonishing way.

“What it showed was the universality of the female experience—and how often just being a woman exposes you to all sorts of harassment and violence”, she says. “It created a real sense of solidarity — it was truly a global movement which has shifted arguments in a good direction.”

A stellar lineup of extraordinary women from across the world will be appearing at All About Women Festival on Sunday March 7, 2021. Livestream tickets will also be available to select events, for audiences to livestream or watch on-demand from across Australia and around the world. 

Click here to get your tickets today. 

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So, it’s not entirely surprising to learn that she describes her younger self as “outrageously ambitious”, something she tells Kate Mills in the latest episode of The Leadership Lessons, a Women’s Agenda podcast supported by Salesforce.

In fact, Dowrick says she “was probably a bit pushy”, but “pushed by the best things, wanting to do work that had value”.

It was this drive to do work with true value that saw her flourish in the world of publishing. In 1977, at the height of second wave feminism, Dowrick co-founded and became managing director of The Women’s Press in London, which went on to become the major feminist publishing house in the English language.

Reflecting on that time, Dowrick says the work that was being done at The Women’s Press was “very radical, very ground-breaking, very innovative and courageous.”

It was there that she learnt how to be leader; one who was constantly dealing with fierce pushback from all directions. The pushback came from those who opposed the ideals of feminism, but also from those people who were indifferent, preferring the status quo. And then there were those who had constructive opinions on how a feminist press should be run.

When asked about leadership, Dowrick believes that while it’s important to consider the values we bring to leadership, it’s equally important to ask ourselves what it is taking us towards. She says both women and men can make decisions that have true value and flow in a direction that benefits the whole of society.

“Long ago when I started The Women’s Press, we made a lot of assumptions about what women could do and what men were less likely to do. All of those assumptions, I think, have been fairly, resoundingly trashed,” she explains in the podcast.

“There are women with privilege and opportunity who are making decisions that are no different in any way from male colleagues. We also see men who are more than capable of making decisions that have true value, that bring benefit widely not just to themselves, to their vested interest or support group, but to society generally.”

It’s this kind of leadership, Dowrick says, that has proved valuable in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is the great teaching of this time…that we can’t any longer delude ourselves that we can benefit some tiny group at the cost of another.

“We need to radically democratise the very notion of leadership. We’re not leaving it to a privileged few, or a more ‘ambitious’ few, or a luckier few who have opportunities. So much of it is luck, timing, opportunity…it staggers me how grateful I need to be that I’ve had opportunities.”

Dowrick has recently released a new edition of her bestselling book Intimacy and Solitude, which was first published in 1991. This latest edition was revised in light of the pandemic, with the book’s core messages perhaps more relevant than ever.

Dowrick explains that the pandemic has shown that we can no longer pretend we’re independent of each other, or independent of the planet on which we totally depend.

“This notion of inter-dependence really goes to the heart of how we are meeting the challenges of this time. And it goes to the heart of what we could call women’s leadership or feminist leadership or conscious leadership,” she says.

In the same way that we cannot be independent of each other, Dowrick impresses that the value of your life is not dependent upon worldly achievements.

“It is quite heart breaking how much sacrifice many women – as well as many men – but women in a particularly poignant and painful and sometimes self-judging way, pour into identity questions while neglecting the deeper, more trustworthy feelings of self,” Dowrick says.

“However humble your life is according to the world’s standards, you have opportunities every single day to make this world, in some slight way, a slightly better place. And therefore, your own world also.”

The Leadership Lessons podcast series, hosted by Kate Mills, is a set of interviews with brilliant female leaders across industries, sharing their perspective on the critical decade ahead.

The Leadership Lessons is supported by Salesforce.

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