Julia Gillard, former Australian PM: The backsliding of gender equality

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Hello, I'm Lucy Hawkins, 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.

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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 we'll ask, what are the factors

that influence these attitudes?

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 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?

So they felt left behind.

They felt left behind.

Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service

with 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.

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.

And this is really different from their parents' generation.

Why do you think we've seen such a generation or shift?

Why is there that disconnect?

I wish we had all of the answers.

At the Global Institute for Women's Leadership,

we would love to do a very deeper,

valuable 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,

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, 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?

So they felt left behind.

They felt left behind.

I think the change that there has been in understandings

about sexual consent, the Me Too movement,

the shining of 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 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 with slightly better algorithms.

There are actually different elements to it.

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.

I mean, when you mention some of the sort of basics

of feminism and gender equality to young men's dead,

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.

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 cohort.

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?

But it is also caught up in the sort of anti-workism.

It's almost that feminism is now lumped in with being work.

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-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

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 channeled that into a political campaign

against woke, against gender equality, against feminism.

And as the society in general failing to provide

sort of role models of what a quality looks like

and a more sort of positive way from men and from women.

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 starter and you see

amongst young men and more young women,

particularly young men, but also young women,

there is more of a latch on to traditional gender,

norms and stereotypes.

I think we need to remind those norms and stereotypes

can find 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

or 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 give an 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 opening up, taking the sort of gender stereotype bars

now actually gives everyone more options, more choices.

So why do you think it is that so many women are drawn

to this tradwife trend?

I mean, the millions of followers on social media,

this lifestyle that they promote around submission

and the domestic life, they often dress up in 1950s,

kind of close.

I mean, what is it about that that is so appealing for women?

It's kind of amusing to me that anybody would think

it was appealing to be in a 50s outfit

with a full face of makeup at five in the morning,

milking the goat.

You know, this is not 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 tradwife content

actually don't want to be tradwives,

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 old generations of women,

you know, really work every hour in the day times 10

to manage a career, having children, a home, all of it

and they've just looked at it and gone, oh, it's too hard.

I'm not going to 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 want to wake up as a tradwife.

One of the other bits of data that was interesting

that I think people will latch on to is that

Gen Zedman 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 stay at home and a baby.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how this adds up,

I don't think it does add up.

It's a real duality.

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.

And are there regional and country specific differences

and some of this data that's worth pointing out?

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

is 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 behaviors in the real world.

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?

I think a great deal.

We've got a main strength 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,

claimed 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 metastasized into a world

where all of those things come with a big dose of misogyny

and dismissal of women.

And pornography, 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?

Oh, I think it's distorting sexual behaviors

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,

there to be used, there to be judged entirely on.

Look, so, you know, obviously,

the kinds of images people would see

if 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 cocktail.

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It's time to put my balls on the dashboard.

As he starts the engine.

In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance on conscious.

In 15 years, he's a billionaire.

This is Total Wolf,

Formula One's most powerful team boss

and a breakout star of Drive to Survive.

This week on Good Bad Billionaire,

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Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

I met Julia Galad in our studio's

at Broadcasting House in London.

I've interviewed her a couple of times before

and we always bond over our integrity and 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.

Okay, let's return to my conversation with Julia Galad.

Can I ask you about female leadership?

Sure, 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?

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 likeable.

And so they'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.

So then how do young female politicians navigate this?

You know, this demand for strength.

And yet they're naturally obviously empathetics

why they want to do the job.

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 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, you know, doing well in politics.

I'm going to do it for another five years

and 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.

How bad is that trolling and the diversity?

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.

And 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.

That's hard. Very hard.

Incredibly hard.

You said that you were the first Australian female prime minister.

You're the only one to date.

To date.

And it wasn't until 2025 that the Liberals

were 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?

I think that things have changed profoundly

over many years on the Labour side.

I was a Labour politician, the Australian Labour 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 Labour 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 Labour has.

And so I think 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 and Australia and Australian women.

Can we talk about the speech?

Sure.

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.

I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man.

I will not.

And the government will not be lectured again.

I just listened to it again.

And one of the really striking things,

you can hear the this rural rage and outrage in your voice.

Let's go through the opposition leaders, repulsive,

double standards, repulsive double standards,

when it comes to misogyny and sexism.

We are now...

Can we tell us about the moment?

I mean, what you were feeling,

even what you were experiencing in your body as you made that speech.

Yeah. I didn't feel head up angry.

A lot of people who watch that speech.

No, it was recontrolled.

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,

our 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,

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.

And you mentioned that things have improved,

particularly within the Labour 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?

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 US,

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.

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.

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,

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 there was lots of early stuff talked about

where large language models would use pronouns

and would put he for doctor and chief nurse.

So it 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 meant 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 going to be talking about how this is an instrument

from Sojourney, they would have said,

what on earth are you talking about?

That's not going to happen.

So having been that naive once,

let's not be that naive again.

So despite the research and the findings

and what we've discussed today,

are you feeling optimistic?

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 at saying

they want more of.

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 where the Ukrainian president

for a lot of Mazalinsky and the former New Zealand Prime Minister

Jacinda Ardub.

Until next time, bye for now.

It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains.

Amanda straps himself into a car on the world's most dangerous racetrack.

He whispers to himself.

It's time to put my balls on the dashboard.

If he starts the engine.

In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance on conscious in 15 years.

He's a billionaire.

This is Total Wolf,

Formula One's most powerful team boss

and the breakout star of Drive to Survive.

This week on Good Bad Billionaire,

how Total Wolf made his billions.

Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.