Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.
Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.
What is “stunning and unexpected”, she told the Hay festival, are the differences according to age, with 60% of men aged 16-27 thinking “women’s equality has gone too far”, more than any other age group.
Gen Z is also more than twice as likely as boomers to agree with the statement that “a man who stays home with his children is less of a man”.
“We have got to get to grips with this, and we have to ask ourselves as feminists a fairly difficult and deep question about whether we have in our rhetoric and campaigning for gender equality been as careful as we should be to explain that actually gender equality will be better for everyone,” she said.
“This isn’t about women getting unfair advantages, it’s about creating a world where nobody is hemmed in by gender stereotypes, and that’s better for men and for women.”
More needs to be done to dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women take men’s jobs, noting that female quotas in Australian politics had proven successful, and that these initiatives are often “sensitive in transition but end point is one that people embrace”, she said.
As chair of Kings College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, she said she would like to feel that there was no longer a need for the organisation, but the “research base is thin” and there was desperate need to “see problems clearly”. “I’m very passionate that we accelerate the pace of change, and good research is critical to that,” she said.
Noting that the World Economic Forum estimates that gender equality around the world is still 130 years away, she said that, in 1998, a person would have more chance of being CEO of a FTSE company if they were named Dave or David than if they were a woman. That has improved marginally since, though Daves and Davids combined with Steve, Stevens and Stephens still outnumber women in the top corporate jobs.
Unconscious biases need to be challenged as research suggests people tend to think that “confident, charismatic men” make the best leaders, when in fact they typically perform worse than more collaborative and cautious women and men, she said.
Kings College London research suggests that the gender split on political views is the biggest it has ever been, with young men more likely to lean right on gender and inclusion issues, whereas women are more progressive.
“That spells trouble for the future of politics,” she said. “We really have to understand what’s happening around attitude formation in young men.”
While she said the drivers remain unknown, she suggested that it may be connected to early exposure to violent porn and “toxic influences online selling a version of masculinity that your manhood is best expressed by subjugating women”.
Although she had wanted to “get on with it” starting her job as Australia’s first female prime minister, she couldn’t ignore the growing characterisation of her building on social media as a “hateful, ambitious, clawing woman who didn’t understand what empathy was, what nurturing was, what kind of woman chooses not to have children”, and was moved to address misogyny head on in parliament.
While research suggests that the traditional media is treating gender in politics better than it used to, she said “the seamy underside of social media has got so much worse”, with abuse primarily targeted at women and in particular women of colour.
“Why do we allow this to happen?” she asked, saying she “can’t believe” it has not yet been possible to design better social media regulation.
While she said she “wasn’t a shrinking violet when it comes to parliamentary debate”, she warned that “we have pushed the pendulum so far now across democracies … to hyper-partisanship fed by the thinness of social media, everything’s a binary, you’re for or against it”.
She advocated “deliberate remedies and measures to put in place political and democratic systems that take us away from that” such as involving citizens more in shaping decisions and other forms of direct democracy.
She suggested reconfiguring parliaments to allocate members’ seats randomly, so they are not sat in adversarial opposition, but would be encouraged to form bonds with each other.
She also recommended the Australian model of compulsory voting, as well as the preferential voting system, meaning if you vote for a minor party as your first choice and it is eliminated, your second vote still counts.
Asked about whether female leaders would improve progress in mitigating climate breakdown, she said the fact that people now for the first time believe their children’s lives will be worse makes this challenging.
“It’s very hard to get people to come on big change journeys and show the social solidarity needed to do that if they no longer have faith that we can build a better future together.”