The Gender at Work Podcast

In this episode of the G@W podcast, we delve into Feminist Foreign Policies and look at some of the opportunities, challenges and contradictions inherent in them. We also explore some of the collective aspirations of feminists for Feminist Foreign Policies. These would be important questions to ask at any time but now they are especially important as some of the very governments that have announced Feminist Foreign Policies support Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza or are themselves major arms manufacturers. Now is a good time to probe and understand how ‘feminist’ the growing slew of Feminist Foreign Policies actually are.

We are going to hear five different and thought-provoking ideas about feminist foreign policies in this episode. This will include perspectives from Nadine Gassman, President of the National Institute of Women of Mexico, Margot Wallstrom, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Hibaaq Osman, founder and leader of Karama, Anne Marie Goetz, Clinical Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, and Foteini Papagiotti, Senior Policy Advisor at ICRW.

Many feminists around the world believe that there is a war on against women and some are calling it “gender apartheid”. The global campaign to end gender apartheid focuses particularly on Iran and Afghanistan. In this episode we explore this term “gender apartheid” – where it came from and what some of the Femilemmas around it are.  We look at its usefulness in addressing what is happening to women and girls in Iran and Afghanistan today. We speak to Dr. Sima Samar, the former Minister of Women’s Affairs in Afghanistan and former chair of the Afghanistan Human Rights commission. We also hear from Roxanna Shapour, an Iranian and senior analyst from the Afghanistan Analysts Network, who has extensive experience in Afghanistan and in communications and media with the BBC and the UN, and we listen to Afghani women’s voices through the research of DROPS, the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies based in Afghanistan and its leader, Mariam Safi.

Join us and tell us what you think!

Note to our listeners: We recorded this episode prior to the horrific violence in Palestine and Israel. We join many others who are calling for an immediate cessation of the war on Gaza and accountability for crimes against humanity. Our next episode will focus on Feminist Foreign Policy and explore the complexities, contradictions and hypocrisies that emerge when governments and feminist networks proclaim their alignment with feminist principles without addressing fundamental power asymmetries and the devastating consequences of unfettered militarization. 

In this episode, three graduate students from the American University of Beirut, Maria Hamarneh, Elvira Abi Zeid and Leil Younes, question male allyship for women’s rights and feminist values in a social media context heavily influenced by toxic misogynists targeting young men and boys. They reflect on the ways that, as in many parts of the world, women’s rights are under attack and work on gender equality is being undermined or rolled back, including by ultra-right wing, fundamentalist groups. Nisreen Alami, a Palestinian feminist activist who lives in Jordan and who is also a Gender at Work Associate, joined the conversation. Nisreen opens another dimension of the Femilemma by questioning the value of transnational feminist allyship when critical contextual and historical realities are left out. As she says, “misogyny has become very good at using transnational tools and feminism has not been very successful at being a truly transnational movement.” These are important Femilemmas with no easy answers. Come on in and listen and let’s hear your views!

Femilemmas about gender identities, about who is a feminist, about inconsistencies when government leaders claim feminist mantles and so on, have been percolating for years. We held a Femilemmas PopUp at the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York in March to hear what Femilemmas were on the minds of participants there.  In this episode we share a few - Anne Marie Goetz (New York University, New York City) explores the Femilemmas inherent in feminist foreign policies; Andrea Cornwall (Kings College, London) lays out the complex and evolving Femilemmas around ‘gender’;  Deepa Mattoo (Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, Toronto) spoke about how they resolved a Femilemma by adopting a gender inclusive policy for all services, and Fidele Rutayisire (Rwanda Men’s Resource Organization) addressed the Femilemmas of men as feminists. Are these your Femilemmas? How would you respond? What femilemmas are you grappling with? Join the conversation!  We want to hear from you!

In this teaser, Aruna and Joanne bring up the theme of their upcoming season: Feminist dilemmas, or, as they refer to it, Femilemmas. 

G@W has a new Executive Director  - madeleine kennedy-macfoy. Welcome madeleine! 

In this episode, we introduce madeleine and invite the past EDs of Gender at Work to think about what the opportunity and challenge mix has been over the decades at G@W and what learnings and dilemmas they have to share with Madeleine as she steps in.  We build on a theme that we’ve explored over the past episodes of the podcast: feminist leadership transitions. Like many of those we interviewed, we tried as much as possible to interject feminist principles into the leadership transition and were somewhat successful while also learning in the process. The EDs speak of early choices about co-leadership, the virtual structure of G@W, and dilemmas and questions connected to the emergent nature of the work and how that shaped power dynamics, ownership, accountability and culture. Join us in our praxis of reflection-action-reflection and share with us your feminist dilemmas.

This is inspired by a Gordon Lightfoot song and Joni’s “for the Roses”

How do feminist organizations get beyond ‘calling out’ to repair and care? What can we learn from feminist leaders who are experimenting with strategies to build trust, reverse practices that undermine feminist collective action, and prioritize care, connection and thriving? 

In this episode, we talk to Michal Friedman, a longtime associate of G@W, a feminist activist and a personal and social change facilitator based in South Africa and Janet Wong, a close partner of G@W and former UN Women Country Representative in Timor Leste and Cambodia. Several years ago, Michal and Janet collaborated on a process of supporting Cambodian feminist activists. Janet lays out what it takes to create safe spaces for activists who live in contexts where trust is understandably elusive and Michal shares the methods used to help activists become more at ease in their bodies, recognize each other as persons, acknowledge trauma and its impact on self and the collective, and use storytelling that enabled communicating from the heart. Much of this work is emergent; it can’t be scripted. 

We also reflect on what this means for how we work to change the cultures of our organizations. How do we, as individuals, build our capacity to confront with respect and nurture cultures of care? How do we let go of rage? How do we remain open and curious in order to fuel stronger collaborations and solidarity? How can we nurture allyship and trust to challenge patriarchal ways of working and find new pathways to fortify organizing and organizations driven by our feminist principles? 

Join us and take a listen! 

What is driving the growing numbers of implosions that many social justice groups around the world – including feminist organizations and networks -- are experiencing? Coming on the heels of the #Me Too movement, the flashmobs inspired by the “El Violador Eres Tu!” movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, we started to witness staff in feminist organizations publicly calling out abuse of power, racism, gender discrimination and other forms of exclusionary practices in the very organizations that we joined to reverse these. As de-stabilizing and paralyzing as these implosions might be, this is a reckoning that is long past due. How can we leverage this momentum to build more sustainable and impactful organizations and movements that fully reflect feminist principles? Join us to listen to the inter-generational insights and experiences of Lina Abou Habib, Lebanese feminist and Board member of the newly created Doria Feminist Fund in the Middle East; Dildar Kaya, from Kurdistan, who specializes in access to mental health services and the recovery of survivors of conflict and is a member of the Board of the Nobel Women’s Initiative; and Shawna Wakefield, a Gender at Work Associate who has worked for 25 years on feminist leadership and transformative approaches to ending violence against women, strengthening movement building for women’s rights and building cultures of care and who is a co-founder of Root, Rise and Pollinate. 

We just completed the seminal month for women’s rights globally – worldwide celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8th, innumerable events worldwide for Women’s History month in the United States, and the 66th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) recently concluded. Women’s rights and feminist organizations and movements are the drivers of change for gender equality yet, the question of how feminist organizations grow and thrive, the tensions they experience between principles and how those get practiced, and around how power is exercised are really topics at events like the CSW.  In our last episode, we interviewed three founder leaders of feminist organizations and for this episode, we talked with a group of fierce feminist leaders who invested their hearts and souls in four very different organizational contexts over the past 30 years. Ruby Johnson and Devi Leiper were co-EDs of FRIDA, the young feminist fund and stepped down when they turned 35, about 2 years ago. Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng was ED of ISIS WICCE, based in Uganda, for more than 20 years and stepped down in her 60s, about 5 years ago. Sara Gould was with the Ms. Foundation for Women in the U.S. for 25 years, including six years as its President and stepped down ten years ago at 60. And Katherine Acey led the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, based in New York, for more than 20 years and stepped down 11 years ago. The Ms. Foundation works exclusively in the U.S. while all the other organizations work transnationally. Three of the organizations are women’s funds. Each of the leaders in this conversation had unique experiences and thoughts about their transitions. And each brings huge amounts of wisdom and experience to the question of how leadership transitions can center feminist principles more intentionally. Come and listen to their stories!

In our last episode we talked about the challenges of dismantling patriarchy and promised that our next episode would start to unpack different strategies to topple patriarchy. We have chosen to focus first on how leadership transitions happen and what happens to the leaders who choose to leave. There is a generational shift in leadership of feminist organizations around the world and we can see that these shifts happen differently in different contexts. They  represent a way in which we both wrestle with and challenge patriarchy. Older leaders, many founders of organizations, are stepping down in new ways. In this episode, we talk to three leaders who voluntarily stepped away to make way for new leadership and new voices in the organizations that they founded and dedicated themselves to for nearly two decades. We’ll be  hearing from Mallika Dutt who created Breakthrough in 2000 and stepped down in 2017; from Lisa VeneKlasen who founded Just Associates or JASS in 2002 and stepped down at the beginning of 2020; and from Aruna Rao, who co-founded Gender at Work in 2003 and was its Executive Director for 14 years, stepping down in 2017. Some of the questions we explore are: Why did they step down? How did it feel once they stepped away? What did they gain? What did they miss? How can we prepare better for leadership transitions in feminist organizations in a way that continues to build community around a shared purpose for our work? Do join us in this conversation and let us know what you think. Please email us at [email protected]