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The Interview
Julia Gillard, former Australian PM: The backsliding of gender equality
00:28:04
Lucy Hockings speaks to Julia Gillard, Australia’s first woman PM, about gender equality
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- [00:00]
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- [01:15]
Lucy Hockings
Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings, BBC News presenter and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC people shaping our world from all over the world. If you're not a little bit afraid then you're not paying attention. We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing do not make that journey Being born in America, feeling American having people treat me like I'm not. We're more popular than populism. For this interview I met Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia and chair at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College whilst in London for International Women's Day, still the only woman to have held the premiership. You're going to hear about the misogyny she faced as Australian Prime Minister and how women in the public eye have an even harder time now because of online abuse. A champion of equality and breaking glass ceilings, Julia shares her view on why the scales seem to be tipping towards a more macho culture and what that means for women and men. We discussed new research that shows a growing number of young men think that women should obey their husbands and believe in traditional gender roles and will ask what are the factors that influence these attitudes?
- [02:34]
Julia Gillard
There is the manosphere and increasingly a cultural zeitgeist that masculinity is about physical fitness. It's about the ability to project force. It's about dismissive attitudes, even misogynistic attitudes towards women. Early access to pornography, I think is probably part of the mix. I think too that the generation of young men would be the generation that were in school when a lot of programs were coming through for the girls and people like me were creating those programs. Girls in leadership, girls in science and all the rest of it. But maybe they looked at that and thought, why are they getting all of these things and we're missing out?
- [03:15]
Lucy Hockings
So they felt left behind.
- [03:16]
Julia Gillard
They felt left behind.
- [03:21]
Lucy Hockings
Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Julia Gillard.
- [03:26]
Julia Gillard
When I first saw this research, I was very confronted by it because as a progressive politician, I've always lived with the sense that every generation is a bit more progressive than the generation that went before. And one of the things that was going to combat gender inequality in our world was that sense of progress. And then to see in the research, actually the younger generation is more conservative on these questions than people my age. That deeply troubled me and it continues to.
- [03:59]
Lucy Hockings
One of the headline findings that a lot of people will pick up on is that a third of young men interviewed believe that a wife should always obey her husband. And one third also said a husband should have the final word on important decisions. This is really different from their parents generation. Why do you think we've seen such a generational shift? Why is there that disconnect?
- [04:23]
Julia Gillard
I wish we had all of the answers at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership. We would love to do a very deep evaluative project into the attitude formation of young men. We're working at the moment on intuition. But I think the intuition would lead you to a few conclusions. One, of course, there is the manosphere and increasingly a cultural zeitgeist that masculinity is about physical fitness. It's about the ability to project force. It's about dismissive attitudes and misogynistic attitudes towards women. Early access to pornography, I think is probably part of the mix. I think too that the generation of young men, Gen Z, to use the terminology, would be the generation that were in school when a lot of programs were coming through for the girls and people like me were creating those programs. Girls and leadership, girls and science and all the rest of it. But maybe they looked at that and thought, why are they getting all of these things and we're missing out.
- [05:24]
Lucy Hockings
So they felt left behind.
- [05:26]
Julia Gillard
They felt left behind. I think the change that there has been in understandings about sexual consent, the MeToo movement, the Shining a spotlight on issues of consent. For some young men, I think that probably has also made them more tentative and anxious about relations with women. So I think all of that is in the mix. It's quite complicated. And then it is difficult to do the transition for any young person from teenage years to young adulthood. That's always been true, but the statistics tell us it is particularly true for young men today. It can be very hard to make that transition. And of the young people who are not in training, not in work, it is disproportionately young men.
- [06:16]
Lucy Hockings
Now, you've raised a lot of issues there, so let's delve into some of them. I mean, do you feel like misogyny itself has actually changed? What we're seeing now is not sort of the sexism that we saw in the past, but. But with slightly better algorithms. There are actually different elements to it.
- [06:31]
Julia Gillard
I think misogyny has always been with us, and I think it's been perhaps more expressed and less expressed. I think in my generation, the more that people came to understand gender inequality, the cultural predisposition of workplaces, of politics, even became more and more that you shouldn't show misogynistic behaviour, that there was a price to be paid. I'd like to think that I was one of the people who helped bring that change. But for others to judge, I think now with the online environment, there are plenty of ways of letting your inner misogynist out without paying any price. So it's partly that, but I also think it's partly new elements. I mean, you know, men my age did not grow up with this kind of manosphere. Men my age did not grow up with the very early access to very violent pornography that young men have today.
- [07:27]
Lucy Hockings
I mean, when you mention some of the sort of basics of feminism and gender equality to young men today, that they almost roll their eyes. I mean, that's not resonating. Some of that messaging that we were raised with doesn't cut through anymore.
- [07:43]
Julia Gillard
It doesn't. And I think as feminists, as activists, as someone who's been at this for literally decades, there is a sort of deep, reflective piece here that the research is calling on us to do. When we look at the research across all age cohorts, it's different cohort to CoH, but we see substantial numbers of people say either gender equality in their country has gone too far or it's gone far enough. And this is a survey of almost 30 countries. So we're talking right around the world. Yet we know the statistics show it hasn't gone anywhere near far enough if we're looking at life outcomes for women, leadership outcomes for women and all the rest of it. So what is explaining that disconnect?
- [08:31]
Lucy Hockings
But it is also caught up in the sort of anti workism feminism is now lumped in with being woke.
- [08:37]
Julia Gillard
Absolutely. I think we've been talking about gender equality for a long time and a lot of people have heard all the noise and they think that it has resulted in lots of progress. So there's a difference between the noise and the progress, but they're hearing the noise. In terms of the self reflective piece, I think we, and I lump myself in with this. We have allowed to settle an impression that more for women always means less for men, that this is a zero, zero sum game. Whereas actually the research clearly shows, my own life experiences show that when we rise, we rise together. A gender equal world would be a better world for men too. But that is not commonly believed. And then I think there have been programs done in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, which were ineffective, which were easily parodied, which were resented by the workforce that they were brought to. And figures like President Trump and others have channelled that into a political campaign against woke, against gender equality, against feminism.
- [09:45]
Lucy Hockings
And is society in general failing to provide sort of role models of what, you know, equality looks like in a more sort of positive way from men and from women?
- [09:56]
Julia Gillard
Yes, I think we haven't provided enough of a sense of what that world could look like. And when you just reflect on this data and you see amongst young men and more young, particularly young men, but also young women, there is more of a latch onto traditional gender norms and stereotypes. I think we need to remind those norms and stereotypes confine men too. A significant proportion of young men say, to be a man, you've got to be physically strong. Well, there are lots of men who are not ripped, who are not in the gym every second day. That's not their body type, that's not who they are. And all of this clutching for traditional stereotypes is just going to make them feel bad. There are young men who would, given every choice in the world, possibly say they want to go into the caring professions. They might want to be a nurse, they might want to be a childcare worker, they might want to be an aged care worker. But if traditional stereotypes settle, they will just be viewed as odd if they select those pathways. So, you know, opening up, taking the sort of gender stereotype bars down, actually gives everyone more options More choices.
- [11:06]
Lucy Hockings
So why do you think it is that so many women are drawn to this trad wife? I mean, there are millions of followers on social media. This lifestyle that they promote around submission and the domestic life, you know, they often dress up in 1950s kind of clothes. I mean, what is it about that that is so appealing for women?
- [11:24]
Julia Gillard
It's kind of bemusing to me that anybody would think it was appealing to be in a 50s outfit with a full face of makeup at 5 in the morning, milking the goat. You know, this is not my aspiration for myself. We actually did some research on this last year and we found when we dug into it that young women who consume a lot of that trad wife content actually don't want to be trad wives. It's a fantasy. And it's a fantasy about having taken off your shoulders all of the difficulties that the world currently presents in navigating work and family life. So these young women have looked at older generations of women, you know, really work every hour in the day, times 10 to manage a career, having children, home, all of it. And they've just looked at it and gone too hard. I'm not gonna do that. And then there's this quite beguiling, you know, swan around in a penny looking amazing and apparently raising the perfect kids with the perfect husband. So there's something relieving in that. But it's not that they actually wanna wake up as a tradwife.
- [12:41]
Lucy Hockings
One of the other bits of data that was interesting, I think people will latch onto, is that Gen Z men are most likely to believe that women who have a successful career, there's a duality here, are attractive to men. 41% agreeing with this statement, compared to 27% of baby boomers of both genders. This is a real renegotiation in a way of these sort of gender roles we have in society that successful women are very sexy, but I still want my wife to sort of see, stay at home and obey me.
- [13:07]
Julia Gillard
Yeah, I mean, I don't know how this adds up. I don't think it does add up.
- [13:11]
Lucy Hockings
No, it's a real duality.
- [13:12]
Julia Gillard
Yeah. So you're absolutely right. Young men are disproportionately saying success at work is sexy. And maybe there's a practical end to that too. You know, people know, young people, it's very tough to make out your economic pathway to maybe end up owning a home, to have the options that income brings you, including the options to have children without, you know, worrying about every cent, every pound where that's going. But they want someone who is forging ahead at work, but apparently submissive at home. I mean, these women don't exist, I don't think.
- [13:50]
Lucy Hockings
And are there regional and country specific differences in some of this data that's worth pointing out?
- [13:55]
Julia Gillard
Yes, there are differences. One of the things we always point to is the data in South Korea, and that is because South Korea is often the sort of one that is indicating where other countries might go next. It has one of the most gender divided cohort of young people in the world, where attitudes to gender equality are fundamentally different between young men and young women. And that then plays through in South Korea to fewer and fewer young women saying that they want to marry. And that actually has consequences in the real world. The birth rate, for example, in Seoul at the lowest levels in human history, seen outside the context of war or famine. So these things are not academic in the sense of. They're just what people say to a research survey. It actually affects behaviours in the real world.
- [14:53]
Lucy Hockings
In terms of the manosphere, if we were sort of to delve into it and look at what's happening with education, with parenting, with society and then the Internet and what's happening online, how much of it do you think is being exacerbated simply by the amount of time that young people are spending online and those algorithms and social media?
- [15:15]
Julia Gillard
I think a great deal. We've got a mainstream culture that is also sending a message to men and young boys that masculinity is about, you know, prowess, power, being big. And then we've got the manosphere subculture that is telling them all of that. I mean, the original Jordan Peterson, who's a manosphere influencer claim to fame was really about telling young men to get up, get out of bed, go and look after yourself, get physically fit, those kinds of things. But I think that has metastasised into a world where all of those things come with a big dose of misogyny and dismissal of women and pornography.
- [16:01]
Lucy Hockings
Julia, what role does that play? I mean, it's prolific. Younger and younger children are accessing it sort of everywhere. What role does that play?
- [16:08]
Julia Gillard
Oh, I think it's distorting sexual behaviours because young people seeing that think that violent pornography is actually what sex is about. And I think it's women are often submissive, women are often submissive or physically hurt. And I think that is, you know, knitting in with a culture that says women are the, you know, secondary, disposable, they're to be used, they're to be judged entirely on looks. You know, obviously the kinds of images people would see of women in that kind of pornography are completely unrealistic. People don't look like that in real life. And so I think that's part of the copy home.
- [16:55]
Lucy Hockings
You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service.
- [17:03]
Julia Gillard
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- [17:50]
Lucy Hockings
I met Julia Gillard in our studios at Broadcasting House in London. I've interviewed her a couple of times before and we always bond over our antipodean heritage. But it was hard to ignore the screens all around us which were showing the events unfolding in the Middle East. And she talked about what it was like to be a leader on the world stage at a time of crisis. But we did quickly move on to something that all Australians and New Zealanders love to talk about as the seasons change, the weather over the summer. Ok, let's return to my conversation with Julia Gillard. Can I ask you about female leadership?
- [18:24]
Julia Gillard
Sure.
- [18:25]
Lucy Hockings
It is tough to be a female politician at the moment, particularly if we look at the world of politics. And there's always been a tightrope, hasn't there, between being strong and showing empathy. Men don't have that pressure, do they?
- [18:38]
Julia Gillard
No, they don't. Research does show us that we will give permission to lead to men if we think that they are strong, charismatic, strong men, we go, you look like a leader. Whereas to give permission to women to lead, they've got to show a mix of strength and empathy. If they come across as too strong, people will think that they are nasty. So strength for women is correlated with being nasty. For men, it's correlated with being likable. And so they. You've got to introduce that element of empathy. But if they go too far on the empathy side, then they look too nice, too kind and probably not strong enough to lead. So It's a very narrow pathway.
- [19:20]
Lucy Hockings
So then how do young female politicians navigate this, you know, this demand for strength, and yet they're naturally, obviously empathetic. It's why they want to do the job.
- [19:32]
Julia Gillard
Yeah, well, I think it's not all cohorts and it's not all young men either. I mean, we are pointing to a growth in a percentage of young men, but it's not all young men. I mean, I think women politicians now, I always joke with, you know, young women who are interested in politics. You've got the benefit of having seen this movie before. You know, for some of us who ended up coming in and being the first to hold a position like Prime Minister, we didn't have the benefit of seeing the movie before, so we got blindsided by a whole lot of things. I think women politicians now are much better prepared, much more understanding of these gender dynamics. I don't mean to suggest that makes them easy to navigate, but clearly we see young women coming through and doing very well. What worries me is how hard it is then tends to shorten political lives. We've certainly seen women who, I think in earlier ages would have said, I'm, you know, doing well in politics, I'm going to do it for another five years, another 10 years, actually choose to exit because of how toxic the social media is, how bad the sense of violence and threat can be in the real world.
- [20:50]
Lucy Hockings
How bad is that trolling and toxicity?
- [20:54]
Julia Gillard
All of the research shows that, you know, of the really horrible things sent to politicians, not just, I don't like you and I don't agree with you, but the really horrible things, you know, murder threats, those sorts of things, they are disproportionately sent to women. They are disproportionately sent to women of colour. When you talk to women politicians, often the threat crosses from the online world to the real world. So something absolutely revolting will come with a picture of their front door. So the person is sending them a message, we know where you are.
- [21:28]
Lucy Hockings
That's hard, Very hard, Incredibly hard. You said that you were the first Australian female Prime Minister. You're the only yes.
- [21:37]
Julia Gillard
To date.
- [21:38]
Lucy Hockings
To date. And it wasn't until 2025 that the Liberals voted in their first female leader and she didn't last very long. So are things changing in Australia in terms of the environment for women?
- [21:49]
Julia Gillard
I think things have changed profoundly over many years. On the labor side, I was a Labor politician, the Australian Labor Party. I was of that generation of women who in the 1990s fought for affirmative Action rules to get more women into Parliament. That's worked. And the current labor government, the Albanese government, is more than 50% women. I think in terms of the environment that women step into, mainstream media is much better than it was when I was prime minister. And I think when people reflected on the treatment of me as prime minister, the media did learn a series of lessons. And they do deal with women politicians differently now on the conservative side of politics. I don't think they have had the big change project that labor has. And so I think, you know, there's a whole lot of things that need to play out on the Conservative side to get more women selected for Parliament and to have a better connection between the Conservative Party in Australia and Australian women.
- [22:54]
Lucy Hockings
Can we talk about the speech?
- [22:56]
Julia Gillard
Sure.
- [22:57]
Lucy Hockings
Life changing for you, defining for so many women around the world such a powerful moment when you tore into Tony Abbott, your opposite number in Parliament in Australia, about misogyny. I mean, that speech went viral. It was so empowering for so many women.
- [23:15]
Julia Gillard
I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the government will not be lectured.
- [23:23]
Lucy Hockings
I've just listened to it again and one of the really striking things, you can hear the visceral rage and outrage in your voice.
- [23:35]
Julia Gillard
Let's go through the opposition leaders. Repulsive double standards. Repulsive double standards when it comes to misogyny and sexism. We are now.
- [23:47]
Lucy Hockings
Can you tell us about the moment, I mean, what you were feeling, even what you were experiencing in your body as you made that speech?
- [23:53]
Julia Gillard
Yeah, I didn't feel head up angry. A lot of people who watched that speech, I was very controlled. Yeah. Asked me about that. I did feel a sense of kind of cool anger and, you know, I needed in politics on a lot of occasions to, you know, kind of be on the balls of your feet in the parliamentary chamber having a very hot contest with the opposition. You know, Tony Abbott is a very strong, able parliamentarian, very honed in his craft of sort of hard hitting attacks. And I needed to be honed in my craft of pushing them back. And really one of the prices of entry to major political leadership in Australia is that you can dominate the chamber when you need to. And for our government, I'm a minority government, often under a lot of attack, particularly from the media. I needed to do that off the back foot. So, you know, people say to me, young women particularly, oh, I could never give a speech like that. And I'm always very keen to say, you know, it was a speech in the moment, but it was also a speech where I'd been learning my skills as a parliamentarian for years. So don't beat yourself up that you couldn't give that speech. These are learned skills. And, you know, it came together for me, that experience with that moment to create that speech.
- [25:22]
Lucy Hockings
And you mentioned that things have improved, particularly within the Labor Party in Australia. But when you hear some perhaps sexist or misogynistic language from, say, President Trump or from other world leaders, how does that feel?
- [25:36]
Julia Gillard
Yeah, I mean, clearly I would want us to be in a better world in all sorts of ways. I would prefer a world where a brand of politics, President Trump's brand of politics, which is not just in the U.S. but in many other parts of the world, that a key element of that was not anti women's rights. But I'm knowing enough that when you look at that kind of politics, anti women's rights is always an element of it. That is true in Hungary with the Orban administration. It is true in many parts of the world. And so, as politics continues to play out, I think it's incumbent on people like me, but political actors more generally to be shining a light on the way in which many of these politicians actually want a world that wouldn't just be worse for women, it would be worse for everyone. Because a less gender equal world would also be a more difficult world for men.
- [26:39]
Lucy Hockings
There is growing concern at the moment about AI. It really is gathering pace the concern, particularly about what it means for people's work and the future of work. What about the role of AI when it comes to women and equality, though? Because some AI models are apparently advising women even to ask for lower salaries. They may have identical qualifications, but they have an AI bot saying, if you're a woman, go in there and ask for something that's lower. These are really concerning kind of bits of data coming out about what's happening with AI.
- [27:13]
Julia Gillard
Yes, there's lots of concerning data. I mean, at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London, we do focus on the modern workplace. And our sister institute at the Australian National University in Canberra has looked a lot at emerging technologies, AI and women in the space industry. And it has definitely found what you're pointing to. I mean, if you train a large language model on all of the stuff that's on the Internet, well, every human bias that has ever been showed is going to feed in to the model. And, you know, there was lots of early stuff talked about where large language models would use pronouns and would put he for doctor and she for nurse had absorbed the bias in the system. And if we have unregulated AI and no one is correcting for that, then it is just going to spew the biases back out. So it is something that we need to keep researching, thinking about and working on and regulating. And regulating. I'm a huge proponent of regulating social media, of regulating AI. I think we've seen in the rise of social media that you end up in bad places you weren't expecting. I mean, to be fair to people like Mark Zuckerberg, when he was first coming up with Facebook, when people were first coming up with Twitter, when they were first coming up with all sorts of new technologies, if you'd asked them then, you do know that in 10, 15 years time, everybody's gonna be talking about how this is an instrument for misogyny. They would have said, what on earth are you talking about? That's not gonna happen. So having been that naive once, let's not be that naive again.
- [29:00]
Lucy Hockings
So despite the, and the findings and what we've discussed today, are you feeling optimistic?
- [29:05]
Julia Gillard
I'm a realist as well as an optimist. The realist in me tells me that we're in some troubled years and the things that are making these years troubled are not going to just magically melt away. So I think we've got a few more troubled years in front of us, but I do think we will emerge from these troubled years with people saying to themselves, we don't want to do that again. And once again, as has been true throughout human history, coming together and looking for a better path forward. And I think gender equality will be part of what people come out saying they want more of.
- [29:46]
Lucy Hockings
Thank you for listening to the interview. You'll find more in depth conversations on the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ard. Until next time, bye for now.
- [30:12]
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