Name: Australia's Julia Gillard on fighting for gender equality - The Interview podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2026-03-17T10:13:07.000Z
Duration: 27 min 45 s
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Reflexive pronouns

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.

Adverbs of manner

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.

Hello, I'm Lucy Hawkins and this is the interview for the BBC World Service.

For this interview I'm joined by Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia and now the Chair of the King's Global Institute for Women's Leadership.

I know that this is research that you conduct along this vein every year, but when I first saw this year's data from the research, I was quite shocked and quite depressed by it.

And I wonder what your reaction was when the data first came in.

Well, I'm sorry that we depressed you in a world where so much is already pressing on us, but I think it's important to understand.

Yes, we've been doing this research at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership with Ipsos Mori for several years now.

We were one of the first to shine a light on the fact that gender equality attitudes seem to be going backwards amongst young men and boys, teenage boys.

And year after year we've tried to dig further and further into that.

In the time period, more and more, more people have come to recognise that there's a difference now between how young people are seeing the world, particularly young men and older generations.

When I first saw this research, I too 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 generational shift?

I wish we had all of the answers at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership, where 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, 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 in leadership, girls in science and all the rest of it.

But maybe they looked at that and thought, why are they getting.

Getting all of these things and we're missing out?

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.

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 today, they almost roll their eyes.

Some of that messaging that we were raised with doesn't cut through anymore.

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.

And, you know, 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.

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

It's almost like feminism is now lumped in with being woke.

I think, 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 prose.

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.

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.

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?

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 women, 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.

Can 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.

So why do you think it is that so many women are drawn to this trad wife trend?

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?

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.

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, a home, all of it.

And they've just looked at it and gone too hard.

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.