Beyond breaking the glass ceiling with Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister (Transcript)
ReThinking with Adam Grant
Beyond breaking the glass ceiling with Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister
July 23, 2024
[00:00:00] Adam Grant:
A quick note on my conversation last week with David Dunning. Thanks to those of you who pointed out that it sounded like I was interrupting him. Our producers discovered a technical glitch that put our audio tracks out of sync by about three quarters of a second. Sorry about that. It's fixed now and a new version of the conversation has been uploaded.
Enjoy.
[00:00:18] Julia Gillard:
For the first woman who gets to a new, um, position, a new position of power, there's this unspoken but very deeply held underlying question. And the question is, can she do the job? Uh, and so once you've had several women do the job, I think that question falls away. It's clear that women can do the job, but for the first woman, there's this extra burden.
[00:00:48] Adam Grant:
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
My guest today is Julia Gillard, Australia's 27th Prime Minister and the first and only woman to serve in that role. In 2012, in her third year as Prime Minister, Julia gave an electrifying speech against misogyny.
[00:01:20] Julia Gillard:
I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. Not now, not ever.
I was offended when the leader of the opposition stood next to a sign that described me as a man's bitch. I was offended too, by the sexism, by the misogyny of the leader of the opposition cat calling across this table at me. And the leader of the opposition should think seriously about the role of women in public life and in Australian society because we are entitled to a better standard than this.
[00:01:58] Audience:
Hear.
[00:01:58] Adam Grant:
Julia chairs the Global Institute for Women's Leadership and hosts A Podcast of One's Own, where she talks with people advancing gender equality, and I have a lot of questions for her about how we can make real progress for women in leadership.
Hello, Prime Minister.
[00:02:20] Julia Gillard:
Hello, Adam.
[00:02:21] Adam Grant:
So great to meet you. I've been an admirer of your leadership for a long time.
[00:02:25] Julia Gillard:
Well, thank you very much and please do call me Julia.
[00:02:28] Adam Grant:
If you insist. I will do that.
[00:02:31] Julia Gillard:
I absolutely insist
[00:02:33] Adam Grant:
I, I appreciate the low power distance, although I found that that women heads of state are much more likely to ask to be called by their first name than men are.
[00:02:41] Julia Gillard:
That's an interesting observation, and I wish I was surprised, but I'm kind of not.
[00:02:46] Adam Grant:
I'm sure you're, you're more than tired of talking about your misogyny speech, but I think it's just, first of all, so iconic. Um, and I rewatched it this morning and was just blown away by it all over again, and I haven't gotten to talk to you about it.
But also about half of our listeners are in the US and it didn't make our TV quite as much as it did in Australia. So I would love a chance to, to talk about that for starters, if you're up for it.
[00:03:12] Julia Gillard:
Of course. Very happy to.
[00:03:14] Adam Grant:
Okay, great. Well, I guess the first, the first question I have for you is, does it bother you that this is probably the most frequently asked question?
[00:03:21] Julia Gillard:
To be absolutely frank. It used to a little bit and there was one part of me that used to think, you know, “Fifteen years in politics, three years as Deputy Prime Minister, three years as Prime Minister and apparently it all comes down to one speech and nothing else gets remembered.” Uh, but all these years later, I'm now completely at peace with it.
What's made me at peace with it is I've come to understand just how much that speech means to women, particularly to young women who still have to go out and negotiate a gender unequal world. And I think for them, the speech is actually not anything to do with the Australian Parliament anymore. In some ways, it's not even anything to do with me anymore, but it's a rallying cry for them.
It's something that gives them energy and that does make me feel proud and like I've made a contribution. So I'm happy to talk about it.
[00:04:23] Adam Grant:
Well, as it should. I thought of you last summer when watching the Barbie movie, um, which I imagine you've seen.
[00:04:29] Julia Gillard:
Yeah. I'm frequently mistaken for Barbie.
[00:04:34] Adam Grant:
I was thinking of the America Ferrera speech. I watched that and thought, “Wait a minute. This is, this is Julia.”
[00:04:43] Julia Gillard:
I've never even really thought of that comparison, but now you've named it. Yes. I can see the comparison. Of course, as an Australian, I was just proudly watching Margot Robbie.
She did such a fantastic job and I enjoyed the movie and the fact it's popularizing feminism for a younger generation is just terrific. And we need all the good speeches we can possibly get about arming yourself to go out and to change the world. So Barbie's given us another one.
[00:05:14] Adam Grant:
Well, I would like to see you deliver that speech in the sequel.
You heard it here first.
[00:05:19] Julia Gillard:
Okay. I am gonna have to reach out to Margo and see if I can get a gig.
[00:05:25] Adam Grant:
Um, has it changed the way people perceive you? Because I, I think people who know you only are primarily by the speech. I imagine they're surprised by how warm and jovial you are.
[00:05:37] Julia Gillard:
I don't think it wholly shapes views.
Look, I can understand if that's the only thing people have ever seen that when they meet me, they might be expecting someone more strident, but I suspect anybody who's ever watched politics knows that there's always a gap between how people can conduct themselves in parliaments, which are inherently adversarial places where arguments are being put and how they conduct themselves as they go about the rest of their lives.
So I don't feel people cowering back in trepidation when I enter a room because they're expecting the mis misogyny speech to be redelivered into their faces.
[00:06:21] Adam Grant:
Watching it again, it, it felt like sort of the culmination of a lifetime of righteous indignation. Is that a, is that an accurate characterization?
[00:06:31] Julia Gillard:
I, I wouldn't say a lifetime. I mean, I would say I've been a feminist across all of my lifetime. I realized very early on that we were in a world where men and women were treated differently, and women were often treated as lesser. I'm of that generation that fought for more women to be included in parliament, and so I brought all of that when I went into parliament myself.
Really, the misogyny speech was about my time as Prime Minister. I think it was what happened in that period that fueled the speech. And when I first became Prime Minister, I didn't feel the need to put gender at the foreground. I mean, it was just so obvious. I was the first woman to hold the job and gendered things did happen immediately after I got elected. Far more interest in my appearance.
Various characterizations of who I was all driven through the lens of gender stereotyping, but I really believed that if I just got on with the job of being Prime Minister, all of this would fall away.
Whereas what I actually found was the longer I governed, the more the gendered critique came to the fore. It became a kind of go-to political weapon. And so that had bred a lot of frustration and that parliamentary day gave me the opportunity to let that frustration out, and that is the misogyny speech.
[00:07:58] Adam Grant:
A lot of people look up to you and say, “Yeah, this is what it looks like for women to be assertive, to exercise their power, to stand up for their group.” Um, but the hope is, at least for me, that it makes it harder for, for people to express gender bias, prejudice. Um, it actually stamps out a degree of, of misogyny and sexism.
Have you seen any of that?
[00:08:21] Julia Gillard:
I have, but I'm conscious too of how big a journey we've still got to go. I think the way the misogyny speech is viewed is part of a changing mode of feminism. I think the #MeToo movement in particular is the hallmark of an era of feminism where women are saying we will no longer be silenced.
That there have been too many things for too long that we've just put up with that we haven't spoken about. That we've thought if we spoke about them, that that would be a shame on us. And I think #MeToo was women saying, “We are not gonna put up with that anymore.” And I think the resonance of the misogyny speech in many ways is that it symbolized a woman no longer being silent.
Obviously in my case, it wasn't silence about sexual harassment, but it was silence about unequal treatment that had been part of the past and I called it out. And I think in this era that does mean that women and men of good will are shining a light on gender inequality and prepared to talk about it and pointed it out, but we still have so much that needs to change.
The World Economic Forum every year does all of this analysis about how long until we get to a gender equal world, and the estimates are always in the 120, 130 years. And we do polling at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership and disturbingly that polling shows us, particularly amongst young people, that young men, that attitudes to gender equality are going backwards in many ways.
So, you know, there is a backlash. We've gotta think about what's causing it. We've gotta disarm it, and we've gotta keep pushing forward because the gender equal world will be better for everyone, not just for women, but better for men too.
[00:10:21] Adam Grant:
You mentioned that you expected things to change when you became Prime Minister, and I would've expected that too.
You, I mean, you, you cracked the ultimate glass ceiling. My read of the evidence is that people are much more uncomfortable with women trying to get power than they are with women actually wielding it. I think about the evidence, for example, that when women are actually in leadership jobs, uh, they're rated as more effective by their peers than men are.
Uh, and what that says to me is sometimes people are hesitant around feeling like women are violating stereotypes of being caring and communal when they're advocating for themselves, but that once they're actually in a position of responsibility, people recognize, hey, women are not only fully capable of leading on average.
They've had to be that much better in order to get that spot, given all the bias and uphill battles they have to fight. So, that's my backdrop coming in. My assumption is you get the job and things are gonna go much better. Why didn't they, and why do they continue not to?
[00:11:23] Julia Gillard:
I think that there were probably some specific factors for me, and then there are some general factors for women.
The specific factors for me, I think in our Westminster system in Australia, it's possible to become Prime Minister because there's a change in your political party's view about who should lead it, and that was the way in which I became Prime Minister, and I think it was therefore easily characterized as me, you know, sort of sca scratching and clawing for power and seeking to knock the man who held the job out of the way.
It was easily wrapped up in this set of stereotypes about the “scheming woman”. I'm putting air quotes in the air there, which is, uh, not gonna show on a podcast. But, uh, I think all of that got wrapped up together in quite a toxic way. And the media in particular wouldn't let go of how I got there.
It became, you know, the predominant prism through which they saw what I was doing for the first woman who gets to a new, um, position, a new position of power, there's this unspoken but very deeply held underlying question. And the question is, “Can she do the job?” Uh, and so once you've had several women do the job, I think that question falls away.
It's clear that women can do the job, but for the first woman, there's this extra burden. “Can she do the job?” And because that's the question people want answered. There's extra pressure on every move. And so when you make errors and everybody in politics makes errors, they're not received as just garden variety.
Oops. The politicians made a mistake kind of error. They're received as almost existential. And then for women, generally, I think you've put your finger on something important, which is that the research shows very clearly that if a man is a strong leader, we say, “That's fantastic. He's a good leader. He's doing a good job.”
Whereas we will only, uh, say that about women if they are both strong and empathetic. We want to still see the nurturing side of their characters. And in fiercely partisan political times, and I certainly governed in fiercely partisan political times, it is very, very difficult to show that empathetic side of your character.
[00:14:05] Adam Grant:
It's, it's true for so many women in power that they end up having to fight to get there, and then once they're there, they continue having to fight and there's a trade-off between establishing their competence and then also showing that they care. Um, it seems like one, one workaround that's well studied is, I don't love the name for it, but it's been called the Mama Bear Effect, where when women are advocating on behalf of others, they're able to look strong without compromising the perception that they're nurturing and caring.
Um, and it seems like there's an element of this that, that can work in politics, uh, where, you know, you're, you're advocating for a group, you're lobbying on behalf of a set of constituents. I imagine there were some barriers to making that clear and I'd, I'd love to hear what that looked like.
[00:14:51] Julia Gillard:
I agree with you that women's leadership will be received differently if it's seen to be a woman fighting for others. We do give ascent to that, and the research does show that very clearly. It's difficult though when political circumstances end up mixing together the fight for others with the fight for your own political survival, and in most democratic forms of politics, those things will often come wrapped up in a bundle.
For me, they were very strongly wrapped up in a bundle because I ended up leading a minority government. People would say or could say, “Is she pursuing this big reform agenda because it will be better for the people whose lives will be changed by it?” And I would obviously be arguing for the reform agenda on that basis, but the media analysis and the analysis of the political opposition could be, “Oh, she's only fighting for that because her government won't survive unless she holds the following people into her coalition and she's just appeasing them.”
So you get these questions of motivations all wrapped up.
[00:16:09] Adam Grant:
There have been legions of books and articles and frankly podcasts helping, helping women purportedly, but actually just sort of twisting women into a pretzel with specific guidance about how to come across as both strong and kind.
And what I always want to ask when I hear that is, wait a minute, what about raising the bar for men so that men are expected to care as well as being highly capable?
[00:16:36] Julia Gillard:
Absolutely, and it drives me a little bit nuts too. We are sort of suckers for thinking, “Oh, you know, a good leader is a strong, charismatic person.” And really in our mind's eye we are picturing a man, whereas the research actually tells us a good leader of a team will be strong and empathetic, will be nurturing, will encourage the team, will have, um, elements of self-doubt will be prepared to take advice, think again, ask themselves a another question before they make a decision.
And these are often the attributes we associate with female leadership. Well, if these are the attributes that get leadership outcomes, why aren't we requiring them of all leaders?
And I think we should. And I think in this time in politics where there is so much fractiousness in global politics, so much fragmentation, it is an era in which we should be putting empathy more to the fore as a desired characteristic because we need so much healing and rebuilding if we are gonna get on a better path.
[00:17:45] Adam Grant:
It reminds me of a little experiment I ran almost a decade ago where I was curious about whether we could move people in the direction of voting for women leaders here in the US and I found that instead of changing the way that we portrayed the candidates. If we just adjusted the way that the job was described, um, we were able to move the needle.
So one of the ways to do that was to highlight Lincoln as a prototype of an American president. Normally, we talk about his great skills as an orator, and we think about his ability to make really tough decisions, and we highlight these sort of stereotypical competence related attributes. I shifted the lens and said, “Let's highlight what made Lincoln great.”
He was able to resolve conflicts between people. He was extremely compassionate. He read letters from ordinary citizens. He held office hours, often four to four and a half hours a day, and painted this picture of, of Lincoln being great. Not just because he was capable, but because he was caring. And when we looked at their willingness to consider female candidates, we did see movement.
I'm getting really sick of the think leader, think male effect. We're just long overdue for change. So tell me how do we get there?
[00:18:56] Julia Gillard:
That's the, uh, big question, isn't it? I think partly by surfacing the kinds of discussions that we're having here, because people don't even realize they're doing it. I think these kinds of unconscious bias issues can't survive if they're surfaced and held up to the light.
And so we've gotta keep doing that. We've gotta keep doing that at the same time that we are discussing and finding new solutions for Democratic renewal, we want, uh, leadership to be inclusive. We want everybody's chance of coming forward for leadership to be an equal one. This is too hard a world to be holding back any potential great leaders on the basis of any form of stereotyping or bias, whether that's, uh, gender or race, or any other form of stigma or prejudice.
Our democracies, all of them, uh, some more than others have lost trust. Uh, people who in the voting public are worried about the efficacy of their democracy. They no longer believe in large numbers that the next generation will get to live a better life than they did. Uh, the fact that they don't believe that undermines social solidarity for big change projects.
I'm a big believer that we should be trying different sorts of democratic experiments, whether it's deliberative juries, where you get groups of citizens together to make decisions and to help guide political processes. Uh, whether it's just new ways of getting people to intersect within parliaments within your Congress and Senate, our House of Representatives and Senate, different ways that build collegiality rather than competition and even toxicity.
[00:20:56] Adam Grant:
I think one of the mistakes that I see people making while we're waiting for some of those systemic changes to be enacted is I see a lot of people celebrating when a glass ceiling breaks thinking, “Okay, now we've solved the problem.”
And marking a lot more progress than has actually been made. You've seen it up close. We're still waiting for another female prime minister to follow in your footsteps. Why is it so common that one woman breaks through and then it's extremely difficult for others to follow?
[00:21:26] Julia Gillard:
One woman breaking through doesn't necessarily give you more women.
I think there's a few potential explanations there in multi-member arrangements, for example, on a corporate board, I think one of the things that happens is the board was all men. Then it appoints a woman. Maybe two women. Then it says to itself, “Oh, that gender diversity thing, job done.” And there becomes a sort of self-limiting staging post.
I think in single member positions, like being a president or a prime minister, partly it can be a backlash to having had a woman in, in the spot, but I think as much as any of that, it's really about who's in the potential class to be considered to be Prime Minister. I mean in, in a Westminster system, like the Australian system to end up being Prime Minister, first of all, you have to be in the House of Representatives.
If that's unequal. And historically it has been unequal, less women in the House of Representatives, then there are less women to get to the next stage, which is to be a minister or a shadow minister. Then there are even fewer women who make it through to be a Senior Minister or Senior Shadow Minister and it is basically impossible to come through as Prime Minister if you haven't served in those roles.
So the lack of, uh, equality in the starting class shows all the way through. And so that really is an argument for saying, “We are only going to change, make fairer who gets to the top if we are looking at the whole pyramid and changing who is represented at every level.”
And then I think in line with democratic renewal, there is a healthy debate to be had around, is there a better way of people organizing themselves so that there's a more inclusive and distributed way of having power exercised?
[00:23:38] Adam Grant:
My read of the data is that, yes, glass ceilings are a major problem, but maybe even more consequential are the sticky floors and the bottlenecks in the middle where, where women have trouble getting the first promotion and are already facing the kinds of biases that you encountered as Prime Minister.
On your first explanation, it reminds me of psychologists like Daniel Effron arguing that there's also a moral credentialing effect at play, that people support or vote for one female candidate, and they feel like they've earned credits. They've, they've gained license now to not think about being feminist in the future.
Um, one of the open questions for me is like, how much does this actually influence the behavior of, of voters, of promotion committees, of boards, selecting future leaders?
[00:24:27] Julia Gillard:
Oh, I'm sure that that is a real effect, that people do feel that they've got some brownie points and that they don't really need to foreground diversity questions when they make the next choice.
I'm sure that that's an effect. Another effect I would point to, you mentioned the glass ceiling. But there's also this concept of the glass cliff, actually, the professor who runs the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, Michelle Ryan. She was one of the original architects of this theory, the glass cliff, which is, you can see that oftentimes when the first woman comes through for a leadership position, it happens in a crisis moment.
Once again, no one says it, but obviously what is going on in the back of people's minds is we need to really shake things up and so they lurch for the first woman.
And then if she isn't seen to succeed, not because she's done a bad job, but because the situation was already very dire when she got there. People won't say to themselves, in future, when looking at a woman, we can't really judge the person, the woman who did it badly, because she was put in a dire situation.
Instead, their memory will be, “We appointed a woman once and she didn't do very well.”
[00:25:55] Adam Grant:
That's such a compelling synthesis of the the Ryan Haslam work and the glass cliff, and also the classic psychology of the fundamental attribution error where we know that people tend to over attribute effective and ineffective leadership to the person as opposed to considering the context in which they were leading.
[00:26:13] Julia Gillard:
Just a bit of hope. I am a big believer that if you can get beyond the first woman and you can have a track record of a number of women, many of the things that we are talking about here start to fall away. And from my region of the world, the example I would give there would be New Zealand where, and I've had this conversation with Jacinda Ardern, when she came to the prime ministership, no one was asking themselves the question, “Can a woman do this job?”
Because there had already been two women who'd done the job, Jenny Shipley and then Helen Clark for more than a decade. So that question had been asked and answered, and because it had been asked and answered, it gave Jacinda the freedom to not only show she could do the job, but to deliberately seek to do the job in a different way than it had been done before.
So she made the watch word of her prime ministership, kindness, and she tried to do it differently. And you know, politics is politics and of course there are ups and downs and things you didn't expect. COVID, pandemics and heavens knows what, uh, but I do think all of that should give us a sense that if we can get enough women flowing through, then it will enable us to have women who experiment with leadership in different ways, who are received in different ways by the community.
So this is not a hopeless submission that we’re on, I think it's a hopeful mission, but it does take dedication and patience.
[00:27:57] Adam Grant:
This is reminding me of, uh, some of Esther Duflo’s research showing that where women are automatically put into leadership roles and not held back by a series of structural and cultural biases that people still maintain some of their sexist attitudes, but they're less likely to apply them to women in leadership roles specifically.
And it does seem to take a critical mass of exposure to either, you know, an effective woman leader over time, or multiple leaders over time to say, “Okay, yeah, I may have views about women, but they, they don't, they're not really relevant to whether they can be effective in this kind of role.”
[00:28:35] Julia Gillard:
I think it's a question of flow of women leaders, but of course that does take us to a question of community attitudes too. Are we gonna get enough women flowing through to seize these benefits? And on that, I do think that there's some troubling, uh, perspectives. Uh, we at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership each year do, uh, attitude polling globally with partners IPSOS on attitudes to gender equality.
And we are certainly starting to see a trend line where more people say that either that gender equality has gone far enough or it's gone so far, it's now discriminating against men. And we are seeing a significant retrenchment in the attitudes of young men to gender equality. In fact, in some questions, you know, has gender equality gone too far?
Is a man who stays home to look after children less of a man? Questions like that. We actually get worse results in young men than we do in men over 60.
[00:29:55] Adam Grant:
Wow.
[00:29:47] Julia Gillard:
Where. Yeah. Wow. Exactly. Where you would think intuitively, each generation is more progressive on these gender questions than the generations that have come before.
It's probably something to do with online influences and a very particular view of masculinity. And maybe it's something to do too with us not being as inclusive as we should be in the gender equality conversation. To be clear to young men, to everyone, a gender equal world is a goal for everyone and better for everyone, not something that puts them in the subsidiary role.
[00:30:30] Adam Grant:
Julia, you promised us hope.
[00:30:33] Julia Gillard:
No, I know and I.
[00:30:35] Adam Grant:
What are you doing right now?
[00:30:36] Julia Gillard:
Uh.
[00:30:36] Adam Grant:
This is bad news. I bet. I want to hear it and I think we need to talk about it.
[00:30:41] Julia Gillard:
This is bad news. It's news we need to hear because we're only gonna be able to address it if we know it's happening. There's quite a lot of polling now, which is telling us that the upcoming generation is more divided by gender on political views than generations in the past.
So young women are much, much more progressive than young men. It's not a question of being, uh, a whole generational cohort experience that they're lurching to non-progressive attitudes. But there are some particular cohorts, a section, not all young men, but a section of young men, where I think this question of how masculinity is defined and how they feel they have to live up to this sort of masculine ideal that is put before them by online influences and others is causing this turning away from the gender equality project.
And we've gotta unpack that and work out what's going on and how we can change it.
[00:31:46] Adam Grant:
This also speaks to the, the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The backlash that I've seen here in the US is, is actually much more along racial and cultural lines than it is gender lines. There, there's some groups that I think are gonna be negatively affected by this backlash more than others.
Uh, there's a brand new paper by Cydney Dupree that looks at the backlash against leaders who use language that's coded as dominant and powerful. And it turns out that when women leaders do that, they are more likely to be portrayed as cold and disliked. But those effects are, are driven by subgroups of women who are Black and Latina.
So, White women don't face the same degree of backlash for being strong, tough, assertive that women of color do. And I think these are the very groups that are most likely to then be overlooked. As we say, “DEI has gone too far, uh, and we need to start dismantling a lot of these bias systems.” Um, there's a big risk of perpetuating the very bias that the systems were built to fight.
[00:32:52] Julia Gillard:
There is a bigger game going on, which is political intervention and particularly politicized funding of groups who are challenging DEI initiatives litigating them, threatening to litigate them on the basis that they are advantaging some groups over other groups. I think that kind of manipulative politics needs to be exposed and discussed so people can see to what extent that is feeding into their attitudes as opposed to the real underlying facts of the matter.
People are judging how much is going on by the noise as opposed to how much is actually going on. So judging from the noise, the amount of talk about DEI, they've concluded that the only people who have got any chance of promotion any longer are women of color, for example. Whereas if you actually strip back the stats, you would find overwhelmingly leadership grades, higher grades in organizations, the most sought after jobs are still not representative of the population overall, and many groups, including women of color and women more generally, are excluded disproportionately from those positions of power.
[00:34:29] Adam Grant:
Alright let's go to a lightning round. I've got some rapid fire questions for you.
[00:34:33] Julia Gillard:
Woo-hoo. I'll do my best.
[00:34:34] Adam Grant:
I think you're a pro at these. Okay. First question is, what is the worst career advice you've ever gotten?
[00:34:41] Julia Gillard:
Worst career advice I've ever gotten. I've had lots and lots of good career advice, but I was told when I was studying law that the most important thing to do on graduating was to join the public sector and get a career government law job, because that'd be safe.
I could do it for a lifetime and I'd get a good pension at the end. Needless to say, I didn't accept that advice.
[00:35:09] Adam Grant:
Glad you didn't. What's a hot take you have an unpopular opinion that you're passionate about defending?
[00:35:18] Julia Gillard:
When I was Minister for Education, one of the reforms that I brought was national testing and school by school results in a very sophisticated system so that we could see how kids are going.
I am a big believer in, uh, academic rigor in the need for us to ensure that kids en up, uh, literate and numerate in their schooling experience, and I left to myself do tend to run to the old style disciplinarian.
[00:35:50] Adam Grant:
So you're anti grade inflation also then?
[00:35:53] Julia Gillard:
Oh yeah.
[00:35:55] Adam Grant:
Fair. What's a prediction you have for the coming decades?
[00:35:59] Julia Gillard:
I think the pace of change we will see in preventative health will make all of our heads spin. I think we are just seeing the front few waves of that, but there are bigger waves to come and the huge question in front of all of us is how we share those benefits equitably.
[00:36:30] Adam Grant:
Mmm-hmm. Okay, earlier this year I finally made it to Australia for the first time.
I had a, a speaking tour where I got to follow Taylor Swift, uh, which I would not recommend to anyone who cares about their self-esteem. But, uh.
[00:36:43] Julia Gillard:
Yeah, something tells me you were in venues of somewhat smaller size.
[00:36:48] Adam Grant:
Just by a couple orders of magnitude. So one of the things that, that I heard a lot about was tall poppy syndrome.
Can you define it for me?
[00:36:58] Julia Gillard:
Yes. In Australia we have this very egalitarian, larrikin kind of culture, so we don't like it if someone is trying to lord it over others, we would use very Australian expressions like, “He or she's got up themselves.” And that means that if we see someone who is above the crowd a tall poppy, then they are ripe for mowing down.
[00:37:27] Adam Grant:
Okay, so the follow up question, is it a net positive or a net negative? Is it more of a force for, for humility, or is it more of a constraint on excellence?
[00:37:38] Julia Gillard:
Oh, I think it's more of a force for humility. I actually think it's a good national trait and it does fit with a certain casualness in our culture.
A non deferential way of being in the world, which I think is a great Australian trait.
[00:37:57] Adam Grant:
You have a podcast of your own, a podcast of one zone. Let me give you the mic. What's the question you have for me?
[00:38:05] Julia Gillard:
In my podcast, we have often asked the women that I talk to about their life stories coming towards the end of the podcast.
I have often asked them, “If you had all the power in the world just for an instant and you could change one thing, what would it be?”
[00:38:25] Adam Grant:
Oh, that's so hard. That is such a hard question.
[00:38:30] Julia Gillard:
Uh, we don't, we don't muck around on A Podcast of One's Own.
[00:38:33] Adam Grant:
Clearly not. The one thing I would change is I would eliminate dehumanization.
I would erase the capacity to look at another person and not appreciate the complexity of their thoughts and the richness of the life they've lived and the the respect and dignity that they deserve by virtue of existing.
[00:38:56] Julia Gillard:
I like that answer. That's a fantastic answer. I've had answers that range all the way from end violence to invent a better pair of tights.
[00:39:09] Adam Grant:
Well, I'm more on the end violence side of the spectrum, and I, I was actually thinking about just peace as my answer, but then I thought, you know what? If we could, if we could get rid of dehumanization, we'd stop a lot of violence, but we could also begin to chip away at polarization and a number of of other problems, including misogyny that we continue to face.
[00:39:30] Julia Gillard:
Mm. And it really is in many ways the underlying vice of, uh, the way that social media affects attitudes, that in the online environment somehow we don't see each other as fully human.
[00:39:44] Adam Grant:
The, the problem of hypocrisy is something I wanted to, to chat with you about. I think that too many leaders get penalized for changing their minds.
Uh, I think we don't live in a world that allows people to grow and learn and evolve, and we fail to recognize that a lot of the times when people decide to rethink something, it's not a sign of moral weakness. It's actually an act of character that they're maintaining integrity to a set of principles.
And in order to stand by those principles of being a caring person, being a curious person, they have to update their views in light of what they've discovered. You did a very public rethinking in your stance on same sex marriage. And I was interested in hearing your reflections on what it was like to do that publicly and what the lessons are for those of us who, who wanna change our minds in public.
[00:40:38] Julia Gillard:
I think politics has always been a bit like that, but it's so much more instantaneous now with the playing of the old footage and because political discourse as course, and then it's not just characterized as a back flip, it's characterized as outright dishonesty or a lie or something like that, and it does mean that people find it hard to work their way through issues.
Whether it's me on an issue like same sex marriage, or whether it's politics more generally. The only thing you can do is be transparent about the journey that you've been on, the thinking that you've done, the influences on that thinking that no one gets everything right all of the time.
I certainly did all of that publicly, but we also, I think, need to not only put the burden on the shoulders of the person whose mind is shifting, whose thoughts are evolving as consumers, as the public, as people in media, we've just got a let a bit of grace and latitude come into the system.
[00:42:02] Adam Grant:
We are definitely not. A follow-up question on hypocrisy then, and this will bring us full circle back to your misogyny speech.
I remember some feminists being critical of the message that you delivered there saying, “Hey, wait a minute, but you're defending a man who's engaged, engaged in very offensive sexist behavior.” Which I would say you called out in that speech. So, I think they might have missed that point. But also I think there were some who were, you know, critical of, can you really call yourself a feminist if you cut welfare benefits to single mothers and expecting every policy you enacted to be perfectly in line with their principles in order for you to count as their kind of feminist?
Uh, what, what would you say to those critics now and how do we give people the freedom and flexibility to, to choose their own stances, but also, you know, recognize what it means to make progress?
[00:42:54] Julia Gillard:
It, there is a particular conundrum here for women, and I was very conscious of it when I was in politics and I was rising up the ranks, which is because women were still relatively few in number when one came through to a more senior position, women would rally around and would be saying, “She's fantastic. That's fantastic.”
And in some ways that sisterly solidarity was wonderful, but it very quickly morphed into putting the golden girl on the pedestal. I used to say, “I do not want to be on a pedestal because the only thing I'm conscious of about being on a pedestal is it's a bloody long way to fall.” And I've been in politics and no one is ever gonna get a class of politicians confused with a class of saints.
Politicians are not saints. Exercising power in complex circumstances, they'll get things right, they'll get things wrong, but we are all strengthened if the people in that class of exercising power better represent the pol population, are a more diverse representative of the population than the one that we've historically had.
So a bit like the discussion we had earlier about, don't just put the need to be empathetic on the shoulders of women. Don't make the barrier being perfect. Because you will always be disappointed and we shouldn't just be supporting women for leadership when hell, they're amazing beyond anything else we've seen before.
We should be supporting women for leadership in the same way that we are prepared to support men when they're good enough to get it done.
[00:45:04] Adam Grant:
Beautifully said. Julia, if you were giving your misogyny speech today, what would you add to it?
[00:45:12] Julia Gillard:
It was a speech that ended really with a reflection on the attitudes of the Australian population on that date, I think I'd wanna add a few paragraphs about how it's our responsibility to come together and to accelerate the pace of change.
I certainly want to live to see a much more gender equal world.
[00:45:37] Adam Grant:
Well, if we're able to accelerate that timeline at all, it will be due in no small part to your leadership and your vision. I'm grateful for it.
[00:45:45] Julia Gillard:
Thank you. That's very kind of you and I very much enjoyed the conversation.
[00:45:49] Adam Grant:
Thank you, Julia.
[00:45:50] Julia Gillard:
Thank you.
[00:45:55] Adam Grant:
Julia gave us a lot of specific ideas about how we can create a world that's less unfair for women as well as for men. But I think my biggest takeaway is that she models the kind of confident humility that I've been looking for more leaders to adopt. I think if you listen carefully to the way that she communicates, it's apparent that admitting mistakes is not a sign of weakness.
It's a source of strength, and that changing your mind is not a mark of losing integrity. It's often a result of gaining wisdom. If we had more leaders and more people who recognize that we would, I think, have a slightly better world today than we did yesterday.
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.
Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.
What's a hot take you have an unpopular opinion that you're passionate about defending?
[00:47:17] Julia Gillard:
Uh, an unpopular opinion. I think many of my opinions about gender equality might well be unpopular.