Gender Inequality in Leadership is Solvable

women get access to leadership positions. That is Julia Gillard, the first and so far the only woman to be Prime Minister of Australia. She left Offers in two thirteen. As you'll hear, leaving Offers was tough for her. Getting there in the first place was even tougher, though, and this isn't surprising. Around the world and throughout different industries

and rules, women leaders are actually on the decline. Forbes reported that women held under a quarter of senior roles across the world in twenty eighteen, and women represent just five percent of Fourtune five hundred CEOs. But we're jumping ahead. Globally, girls are more likely than boys to be excluded from primary school and women make up more than two thirds

of the world's nearly eight hundred million illiterate people. But say you're one of the lucky ones, you go to school, you go to college, you excel in your field, it's still unlikely that you'll actually become a leader. Just in the United States alone, that figures are pretty bad. Take medicine, where women represent forty percent of all physicians and surgeons, but fewer than one in five are permanent medical school deans.

Or look at academia, women have actually earned the majority of doctorates for eight consecutive years, but they are only thirty two percent of full time professors. And looking again at the world of business. Here in the US, the Government Accountability Office recently published a report on improving gender diversity on boards. It says the importance of diversity must be emphasized and a diverse set of underrepresented candidates required.

It also says boards should have age or term limits, and other countries have done that and more and they've seen results, and that includes Australia. Today we have this really great exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and Julia Gillard. Gillard started her career as a lawyer in Melbourne coming to politics in nineteen ninety eight when she was elected to the Australian House of Representatives, before becoming their first woman

Prime minister in two and ten. She was the first woman Deputy Prime Minister and the first woman leader of a major party. Following her term as Prime Minister, she's accepted fellowships and visiting professorships at universities around the world, and she currently chairs the Global Institute for Women's Leadership over at King's College in London. They have omitsion to better understands why women continue to be underrepresented in positions of leadership. So let's hear what you've got to say.

You served as Prime Minister of Australia and you had the question that faces anyone coming out of high office, which is what do I do next? And tell me how you came to decide what you wanted to do next and what was sort of the what led you on the particular course that you're on now. It's a fair old punch when you come out of a big position like that. You don't realize how tired you are until you stop. So I did give myself a little bit of time to do some grieving about what was

lost in some physical recovery. But in that period I tried to think through what is it about this that I want to take with me and what is it I want to discard? And when I worked my way through that, it was clear that the ongoing passion I'd had was around education, so I wanted to take that with me. And then, having had a really transformative set of experiences around being a female leader, I wanted to do something to make a difference for other women and

their prospects for coming through for leadership. It's what do you use the word grieving? But so you didn't think of it. I mean, as I would have said, you would have come out of it with a sense of triumph. Oh no, you don't. There aren't too many elegant ways out of politics. Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating rang me the day after I lost office and by way of consolation, said to me, we all get taken out

in a box. Love. Thanks for that, Paul. But the truth of politics is either your party knocks you over or the electors knock you over. Not many people actually pick the moment that they're going to gracefully exit politics, And so you know it's in such a public high wire act and then such a public defeat that I think grieving is the right word. Yeah, but you didn't take how much consolation did you take in the fact that you had broken through for women? You were the

first female prime minister of Australia. Oh, I'm very proud of that, and I don't want to overdramatize this some grieving period. I don't feel like that now, But I did let myself have a number of weeks where I didn't do very much. I just recuperated, and I did allow the emotions of the loss to be with me. And then you can put it aside. But if you've never let it course through you, then I think it probably manifests several years down the track, probably in a

mutated and unpleasant kind of way. But since that period, I've been very focused on the new challenges, and when I look back on the past, it's with a sense of pride, with less learned, with things to share. I'm very glad I did it, and I'm a great advocate for people doing it. I don't think there's any better opportunity than politics to put your values into action and to make the most change when you said that you came out of this experience with a desire to further

opportunities for women in positions of leadership. When you think back in your time in office, how many female peers did you have in your political circle? Fortunately, quite a few. We were on a journey of change as a political party. We'd had a lot of women come in around the time I came into parliament in the mid nineteen nineties, and so some of my most senior ministerial colleagues were women, Jenny Macklin and Nicola Roxon and Tanya pleber Sek, and

the list goes on, Penny Wong. So I did feel well supported and surrounded by women. Are still a minority in our political party, in the ministry and certainly in the Parliament, but a sense of sisterhood there. Yeah, what percentage when you were primaries to what percentage of parliament was? Were women round? About twenty five percent in the House

of Representatives and about a third in the Senate. And that number had already increased dramatically over the course of going back at ten or fifteen years previously, what would it have been? Oh, yes, that had increased dramatically. If you went back to the early nineteen nineties, the figure

would have been around fourteen percent for the Parliament. So yes, there'd been a big change, and particularly a big change in the Labor Party because we'd adopted an affirmative action rules, so a certain percentage of seats had to go to women, and that percentage had grown over time to forty percent. So a very dramatic change in Labor. Yeah. Yeah, I want to come back to the role of these those kinds of rules in terms of bringing about changes opposed

to attitudes. I think it's really important one, but I wanted to before I get there. I'm curious about a couple of things. One is that this question of numbers. So if you said it was twenty five percent when you were there, how high does it have to be

before the issue starts to go away. I'm not sure that you can put a mathematical number on that, but there's plenty of research that says, you know, one woman can't make the difference, but once you get up to figures like a third, then you do start to see changes, And intuitively that seems to me to be around about right that to have an impact on cultural mores and

the way that institutions work, you need at least a third. Yeah, do you think that had there been a third or see, let's see, forty percent of the Parliament have been female at the time you were Prime Minister, that would have tempered some of the misogyny virtue feast, not necessarily, unfortunately. I'd love to be able to say yes to that question. But it wasn't just within the Parliament that there was

an issue about gender and gendered insults. That was you know, profoundly in the media, in social media, and so I think it would have flowed anyway. And then because the political contest is a fierce one, and I think it should be. I mean, you're contending about values and big picture issues, so people should be strongly engaged in that clash of ideas. But because that clash is so strong, it's you know, it would really be naive to say, well,

women never participate in using that gendered imagery. That's not my experience. Yeah, but it doesn't change the claimate for someone in gigaging in that kind of rhetoric. Is it different when they look around it and they see lots of female faces and when they look around, do they have last permission to speak that way when they're in a more female environment. I think ultimately, the more women there are, the less permission there is to speak that way.

And second, the more or public pressure and advocacy about being better about women and leadership, the more things will change. I mean, I lived with the phenomenon of social media, but you know, it was relatively recent. I mean, social media is being turbo charged in the time since, and now social media is often used to call out someone who's engaged in sexist conduct. I mean, this is the legacy of the Me Too movement, but it goes beyond

the issue of sexual harassment. There wasn't much of that when I was there, so in some ways we were getting the negative side of social media without that more positive side of trying to advocate for better ways of including people in dialogue without name calling or using gendered insults. There's an interesting distinction between the participation of women as a whole and participation of women in the highest levels of leadership. And I'm wondering, are there one problem or

are there two problems? Can you if you solve the first question of general participation, do you inevitably solve the second, or is there a whole different battle that has to be fired about getting women from the backbenches to the cabinet or to the prime minister's office. I think they're related,

but not the same problem. So you're never going to see equal ministries or women be prime ministers an equal amount of time unless you've got a backbench that's round about half half, because you don't even have people in the qualifying ring. But you then still need to change a set of other things to make sure women are coming through for leadership, including this public media reception and how gendered that is very practical set of questions for

women with kids around work and family life. Even the attraction or lack of it for women to these combative sort of occupations. I think all of that needs some attention,

but it starts with getting half half on the back bench. Yeah, in terms of because I was thinking this in terms of if you think about from the perspective of a voter, I've always wondered whether the act of voting for a female candidate prepares you adequately for the act of supporting a female leader, or whether one might actually be an excuse night to do the other. That because I've voted for a female candidate and no longer feel I need to support a female female leader. So the get I've

given it the office kind of. I think in this area of gender and leadership there is a bit of giving it the office. I think that's true in the corporate world as well as in politics. There is actually research that shows that many chairs of boards of directors and CEOs, when they get the one woman, you know, the one woman on the board, the one and in the c suite, then go take that box, that gender thing. We've done that, let's move on. So a bit of

giving it the office. I think in politics, voting for a female candidate is a great start, but we shouldn't assume just because people are prepared to vote for female candidates that they'll look at a female leader and receive

her and evaluate her equally. There's plenty of psychological research about all unconscious biases, the little whispers in the back of our head that tell us that when women come through for leadership, they're probably not very likable, probably very hard bitten, difficult to get along with, and that then refracts into how much sense of connection do you feel to the leader, how much are you prepared to follow her, how critical or harsh your evaluation is if she gets

into some political trouble, And inevitably, if you're in politics, you'll get into trouble one day. So I think that there's a set of other things that have to happen. But I don't think people sit there and say, oh, I've voted for a woman, so job done. I do think that there's an appetite in the community to see more women come through. If your task is to increase your goal is to increase the number of female leaders, particularly in areas where there have been very few, I'm

curious about how strategic one should be. So I'm remembering during the Civil rights movement in America. You know, there was a Rosa Parks was the woman who was chosen to desegregate the buses of Montgomery, and she was chosen very deliberately. They wanted a woman of a certain age, of a certain background, of impeccable character, of and on, because they knew they had one shot to sort of make their And I had the same feeling when I met. She's now left, but she was the Secretary of the

Air Force in the current administration in America. I happen to meet her and I thought, Oh, there's a woman. If she ran, could become president. I don't know why I felt that, but I felt that, and we can talk about why I felt that. But I'm curious about is that a worthwhile activity, that kind of strategizing at the beginning about who and do you have it? Do you have a picture in your mind about who the

pioneer should be. I'm really cautious about that. And I'm cautious about it because I sort of learned my feminism doing things like reading and summers. A great Australian feminist wrote an incredibly important book called Damn Who's and God's Police, and it was an analysis of women's roles in the early days of when the United Kingdom started sending convicts to Australia, and she was making the point that there

were really only two ways to be a woman. You were either the virtuous one or you were a damned whore, and there was nothing in between. And I would worry that we're going to uplift that template and say, you know, here's Pearl pure Heart, who is this incredible person who's never put anybody's needs in front of her own and she's the perfect candidate. You know, why do we lift that burden up and put it on the shoulders of women when we don't lift it up and put it

on the shoulders of men. They can be self interested, petty, angry and still end up president and prime minister and all of the other things around the world, CEO, chair of the board. So I'm anxious about that, but I'm not naive either. You know, when the US, and obviously we're in primary season now, when the US next looks towards a female candidate, I think there will be a lot of reflection on what is it that will make her the most electable, particularly having been through the scarring

experience with Hillary. But just something in it me just feels quite itchy and irritated by the stereotyping. But it's interesting though that the rules are different for the dominant group and the group that's trying to get in right. The dominant group has extraordinary latitude and who they as you. I don't need to nickname names, but you can be boorish, narcissistic, unqualified,

ill equipped for you know, unknowledgeable. I could go on and be elected as a man like bar is quite low, but the bar very high for the first woman or the second reading the second woman, that's the only reason I But now I'm thinking of this woman who was

the secretary of the Air Force. But I'm wondering, is my perception of what electability is am I simply reinforcing my own stereotypes about women when I when I go through the analysis of what electability means, I think it is a little problematic in the sense that there's a

set of assumptions about potential stereotyping of women candidates. So I think you're attracted to a candidate with a military background because you're working off the assumption that a female candidate is going to be looked at and people are going to think, is she too soft? Press the button one day if that's ever needed in the defense of the United States, And so you're all ready going for the stereotype and trying to then counteract the stereotype in

the candidate. And that's practical and smart, and if you were getting a job as a political advisor, you'd probably need to be doing all of those things. But I still worry about the stereotyping underneath. Is the problem different? For business and politics. Is it harder to get women into the c suite in corporation and it is to get a woman into a relationship position in politics or

the opposite. I think they're different kinds of hard, And if we look at the global statistics, it's telling us that they're different kinds of hard, because the number of women who are either political leaders or senior managers is around about the same in the twenty five percent zone globally. When we actually look at women on corporate boards globally, it's down at the fifteen percent range, And by the time you're talking about senior leaders in it, you're down

at the nine percent range. So it's a different kind of hard. I think the heart in politics is a lot about how women are received in the public square and treated in the public square. I think a lot of the hard in business is about the tracks the pipeline where the women are in the areas that take you to leadership already from the start of their careers in those areas that might take you to being head

of HR, but no further. And then there's a set of unconscious biases and male networks which come into play that make it harder for women to come through. When it comes to business, there's been a lot of focus on the role of the number of women on boards. I'm curious, do do we think that solving the board problem is the most important thing in in increasing a number of women in the c suite? Or is that? Well?

I was, well, why is that such a priority? I would naively I would have said that's down on my list of things of priorities. I think it's important in the role modeling effect because boards are very celebrated and public. There is evidence that more women on boards do make a difference to the nature of the conversation and particularly the nature of the conversation around diversity and inclusion, so

it's a trigger point for them getting further change. But I agree with you that if we ended up with businesses where the boards were always half half, but when you looked at the pipeline in the business, you still saw women clustered in the junior grades, big gender pay gaps, are not enough attention paid to work in family life, that would not be a victory. I think we want every point in a woman's life journey, and particularly from the work I'm doing at King's College, London, with the

Global Institute for Women's Leadership. We're focused on the work journey. We want every point in that to be one where a woman is not treated in a lesser way than a man. Yeah, so let's talk about, first of all,

who does this. Well, when you look around in your current position, King's College, in this program you just talked about, you must look around the world and you must say, Okay, there is someone who's a group, country, community, what have you, that's that's solving this problem in a way that we

can use as a model. So your models. We're certainly looking for models, but there's an information problem that we've almost got to solve first, which is we've got any number of indexes about gender, but they are not focused

on this question of women's leadership. And because they tend to include statistics about women's general health, women's education levels, then they cluster at the top the wealthiest nations in earth that have largely solved those problems, but they don't give you a fine grained look at women and leadership. So we are working to build an index that would do that, which would enable you to just do a comparison on women leaders politics, business, civil society. The law technology.

If we had that information, we'd be able to surface some clearer examples. But just looking at the moment you get all sorts of interesting things popping up. Malaysia there are more women in it, far more than the global statistics would lead you to believe. So then you can go and unpack why is that Slovenia we looked at because there are far more women judges than the global statistics would lead you to expect. When we unpack that, we actually found that they've got a very rules based

legal system with very little discretion. So being a judge is not viewed as that fantastic a job. It's a more mechanistic job. So we want to get more information to keep looking. Many big businesses, you know, I'm thinking of the biggest global companies in the world are very serious about this agenda. And you know, you can point to individual things they're doing that are working, but no one's done the big solve. There's no one that you can just point to and say, if everybody did what

X is doing, then we would fix this. But if I was I was a twenty one year old woman whose ambition was to be the leader of a country, and in the world, and you could wave a magic wand and make me a citizen of any country in the world. Where would you Where would you send me to maximize my chances? The statistics that tell me that I'd have to send you to Iceland or one of

the Nordic Scandinavian style countries. The statistics would tell you I could send you to wander But then we'd have a complex debate about how much power is in the parliament versus how much is in the hands of the president. But they're the nations on Earth that come up with the largest numbers for women. MP's on the business, could send you to New Zealand? Yes, Yes, on the business?

What did the business say? The one of the questions I had about the business was there seem to be two You were talking about how there's very few women in a T and women tend to be overrepresented in HR and HR is not nearly that kind of pipeline to upper leadership as areas for companies? What is the

rate approach to solving our problem? Is it elevating those areas where women are already strung so that you could it becomes legitimate to become CEO if you came up through HI or is it getting women out of HR. I think it's a bit of both, and I think it's a profound reworking of what we think merit is. And there's some fantastic writing on this at the moment, a great book about why we keep promoting incompetent men, and it challenges us to look at the way in

which selections get done in businesses. So our interviews where we look really and we're assessing charisma the best way of selecting people to go into jobs. And then as we go up the promotion track, the frames around men and women. You know, he's always there in the office, so valuing sort of presentism rather than outcomes. People who have got a lot of confidence, who are there grasping at opportunities, who may not be leading their teams well

or actually delivering, but everybody notices them. They are more likely to be the ones that get promoted. And he's done in this book, are the author a wonderful analysis of how that is gendered, how our very view about what merit is is gendered. Let's let's talk about the kinds of steps one would practical steps one would like to see to kind of reverse that. But let's start with that. So if in fact that where we assess merit is gendered, how do we ungender it? How do

we ungender it? Well, first, I'd say we don't know everything we need to know, which is why we're still researching it. But of the things we do know, gender blind selection processes make a difference. So instead of sending in applications you know John Smith, you know Sue Jones where you can see from the front, you take the names of other forms of identifiers. Instead of doing CVS style explorations, you ask candidates to solve a problem and send it in and assess on that that you in interviews.

Instead of just having a chat, which might allow a charismatic candidate to structure the conversation, you have a very clear set of questions that every candidate gets asked to respond to in the same order. So you get clear comparatives, more metrics, you around what achievement is, so not dealing with things on the face of them, but digging behind when you're looking at promotion tracks. All of those things

make a difference. The introduction of structure, in other words, has the even if it's not explicitly intended to favor one group of another has the effect of loveling the pen playing field. Yes, it does, because if you imagine yourself and where we all as human beings respond to this. If you and I were sitting here now on an interview panel, and we're going to see ten candidates today, then the one that bounces into the room full of

confidence seems charming. You think to yourself, well, I wouldn't mind having a drink with them at the end of the day when we get through this bloody interviewing process, they're the one that you're most likely at the end of the day, when we're exhausted to say who should we give this job to? They will be the candidate that we remember. But have we really made a thoughtful selection or just fallen for a sort of confidence? Charisma?

And some jobs require you know, if we were selecting someone to be an on air television presenter, then maybe confidence and charisma would be right at the top of the list. But if we were running a business and we were selecting a new head of our technical division, or even a new head of our financial division, actually confidence and charisma probably we aren't anywhere near the top of the list in terms of the skills we need. Why is searching I don't I'm not I don't disagree,

but I'm curious. Why is something I've always puzzled about it. Why are informal selection processes that default to rewarding people for confidence in charisma gender? There are plenty of women

who are incredibly charismatic. I've never insered why so there's it's an attraction to a male variety of charisma that seems to be the issue, not an attraction to charisma as a whole, right, because there's toun Like I said, yes, yes, plenty of confident charismatic women, but unconscious bias research would tell us that we easily put a frame around a confident charismatic woman that she's pushy, too strong, because she's going again the stereotypes whispering in the back of our brain,

that we expect women to be a little less forthright than that, whereas we have an unconscious bias that we expect men to be pretty out there, pretty comfortable in their skin, owning the space, and so we don't in any way mark a man down for that. So it's not I'm not trying to put the proposition that confidence and charisma are somehow unequally distributed between the sexes. I don't believe that. I think they're differently. Yeah, yeah, that

makes sense. Yeah, And you know, once again, I'm conscious in all of this we end up talking in sort of generalities and some stereotyping when we're actually trying to get away from stereotyping. So I'm not trying to say every human interaction is like that, but the analysis would tell us that on average, more of those things come into play for women than come into play for men. You had that the Labor Party in Australia had an affirmative Action policy which sat clearer goals for how many women,

how many seats are to be held by women. Talk a little bit about that approach, that idea. Instead of using soft methods of changing things, you go in and you sat hard standards that reflect on how well it worked for the Labor Party in Australia, And do you think that is a strategy that should be used in many different domains To give you the Australian story just in snapshot, if you go back to the nineteen nineties, in our National Parliament, both sides of politics conservative and

progressive we're around about fourteen percent women and the Labor Party looked at that and said we need to change it, and so it ultimately went for a structural solution for an affirmative action target and different jurisdictions. Even though we're sending people to a national parliament, there are still some differences between how in the State of Victoria's seat selection will be done compared with New South Wales or South Australia. So there wasn't just one answer to how to get

that done. But for example, in the State of Victoria where I was, the system was you preselected for the whole round, every member for the House of Representatives, every senator, and if you hadn't hit the target for winnable seats, so you couldn't cluster the women in the unwinnable seats. If you hadn't hit the target for winnable seats, then you'd have to have the whole preselection round again. Now

in politics, this is an unimaginably bad sanction. Every vote, every double cross is on the table because you've already done the round once and now you're going to do it again. So people delivered to the target and it worked and so labor has been as high as forty

eight percent women. On the other side of politics, they went for a less structural approach or a zero structural approach, and they said they'd have training and mentoring and all the sort of softer stuff, and they have incrementally inched their way forward to about twenty two twenty three percent

women in that zone. Now, I think when we come back from that Australian experience and say, what's that telling us, it's really telling us something about the big debate, and the big debate that sort of rages is do we need to fix the structures or do we need to fix the women. Do we need to say to the women be more confident, lean in, you know, exhibit these kinds of behaviors and you'll get through. Or do we

need to fix the structures. And once again, like all debates that rage back and forth, there's a bit of truth on both sides. But I'm a real believer we need to fix the structures. And I think the Australian example helps prove that that it's not just about more training and you know, sort of mentoring and things like that for women. It's about a more profound set of issues than that. Do you think of those kinds of quotas as permanent or are they're temporary until you get

women and men into rough alignment. I think they're temporary and once you get to a world and it doesn't mean that you'd have to go through the mechanical process of getting rid of the rule. I mean we're almost at that point in Australian politics, Australian Labor politics, where the rule is no longer uppermost in people's mind. Oh heavens, are we going to meet the rule? That we're going to meet the rule? Because now we've just got to a stage where as it comes out, is going to

meet the rule. So there's less of a drive coming from the statute that we adopted as a political party, and it's more just the norm. So it'll fall away in impact once you get to a critical mass of women. Did you notice down steam of facts from that rule? Did you wither more women entering into politics as a result, Well,

certainly there were more women selected for parliament. I think more women who came into the Labor Party could imagine themselves in parliament, and because of our Westminster system, because he had more women on the back bench, it was more likely they'd come through into the ministry, and so we had ministries that could have more women at the

front of them. So yes, it flowed through everywhere. The argument that was used in Australia on the conservative side of politics was all know, that means that you're not selecting people on the basis of merit. But once again, that takes us back to the point about what's merit and if you believe that it's equally distributed between the sexes, and you're seeing a result that's seventy percent or more men, and that's telling you that there are women of merit

who didn't get to come through. Was there a backlash within talking about within the labor universe? Was your backlash and what was the nature of the backlash? How long did last and what were the what were the kind of argument Presumably that argument was used. Oh yes, that argument was definitely used there. This was a fierce debate. This wasn't I feel like I may have told the history in a more benign way than it was lived.

This was a fierce debate within the Labor Party as to whether this rule was going to be adopted, and it was finally adopted at a national conference, and right up until the moment of adoption there was fierce resistance to it. Fortunately the then Prime Minister Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating was a supporter of it, so that profoundly helped.

But I remember one of the women who had been right at the front of this campaign telling us afterwards that a very senior may or politician rushed over to her after the rule was adopted and said, quote unquote, you bitch, as you've won, to which she said, I want that on my gravestone, you know. Would you recommend that for any country. I'm always conscious that in our complex world, you can never just pick something up and smash it down into someone else's system and say job done.

And we've seen too much of that done around the world. But I would certainly advocate that every political party thinks through whether a mechanism, a target, a quota would work for them, you know, and you'd have to adapt it to systems. But I think unless you've squarely looked that debate in the phase, you're probably not going to get to the profound change we need to see. You have a good natural experiment in Australia if you have one

party that has them and one party that doesn't. You can track and see how the two rates of female participation differ over time. Yet little study and to talk about let's talk on other instito no things around things that family leave and what will be next on your list if you so, let's talk about the institutional agenda

of female leadership quality. What's next on the list after? Well, I think quotas can play a role, but you know, many of the other things we've talked about in terms of how merits viewed and who gets promoted, those things need to be looked at. Then on the sort of work family life. Once again, we don't know everything we need to know. And you know, the toolbox that we have for change in big businesses, in political parties is

a pretty thin toolbox. And I was absolutely persuaded of how thin the toolbox was when I studied it after being in politics and wanting to write my book and write thoughtfully about gender. So there's lots of us, you know, lots of work for us at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership and others around the world to do to multiply the number of tools in the toolbox. But all the things we know work now, an important one is work life flexibilities, but making sure that they are used

by both men and women. So there's very clear evidence that if you've got flexible work policies and it's only ever used by women, then that's the mummy track, and that's the second track, and it's the track that's hard to get promoted out of. Whereas if those flexibilities are used by both men and women, then it is no longer a neck detriment towards promotion. So actually, you know men stepping up and saying I'm going to take leave

at the time of the birth of my child. I'm going to not work in the office on Thursday or whatever it is because I'm going to stay at home and look after our baby. All of those things. If those flexib abilities are used by men, then there will be less punishment involved in using them. How do you get men to use them as much as women? Well, it's one of those Once it gets started, I think it will spread, But initially I think you need men at a leadership level to do it, to give permission

to other men. I mean, I can understand why a man would think I've never been in a workplace where anybody else has done this. If I'm the first one to do it, is everybody going to be looking at me going wow, that's kind of No one's going to say it to my face, but are they going to be thinking wow, that's kind of interesting. You know, how invested is he in his job if he's looking for all these flexibilities? You know, can I afford that risk?

Because I want to be promoted to well in my career, So role modeling from the top that yep, it's okay and your career will be fine, I think is really important. I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning. I think this is a good place to wrap up, and that is I was curious about this connection between educational opportunity and leadership rules, because it does strike me that if you looked at least at industrialized countries in the educational battle is more than being one.

It's it's women are now performing men educationally and at many levels. So does that once again, is this one problem or is it two? And or do you think we're just going to see that that's the fact that we've now seemed to be winning the educational battle in the industrialized world mean that the leadership battle is an inevitable electric down the line. I think education is necessary, but not sufficient condition to fix the rest of gender equality.

If it was sufficient, then you and I would live in gender equal societies because in our societies more women get in the US context college education my context, university degrees than men, So we would have won. So we know that it's not the silver bullet. But unless we've got equal chances in education, then I think the rest

becomes a bit of a pipe dream. So when I look at statistics from around the world, and obviously my focus through the Global Partnership for education is not in the developing world, and you see statistics like only one in ten girls finishes secondary school, that is not a society where we can see gender equality coming onto the landscape anytime soon. So we do have to invest in that education challenge. Make sure girls get a great education.

It ultimately matters for their prospects for leadership, but it matters for so much more. The evidence is clear that a educated girl will tend to marry later, she'll have fewer children, she'll be able to earn income for a family, be less likely to get HIV AIDS should be more likely to send her kids to school, and so it goes and you get on an upward cycle of development and empowerment. So we do need to make sure that that is happening, and that requires a huge global efforts

because there's so much to do. But even as we do that, we've got to be solving this leadership challenge. And one of the things about getting to work in both spaces is I do get to talk to women from right around the world, including women from many developing countries, from many parts of Africa, and people would look at the leadership challenge and say, wow, you know that's so culturally specific. It'll be incredibly different in Australia than it

is in Nigeria or something like that. And that's partly true, but not one hundred percent true, because when you talk to women in Nigeria or other parts of Africa, many of the things that'll rise that are holding women back are things we've talked about in this conversation. So Wow, Iceland, Rwanda, or in New Zealand, that's where you need to be for a shot add equality. At least, that's where a lady version of a twenty one year old Malcolm Gladwell

needs to be. It's a relief to hear that somebody with Gillard's experience is now figuring out how to level the playing field for other women. Ultimately, her advice about quotas and fixing the structures versus telling us to lean in, That's what I'm taking away, and hopefully that's how one day I'm going to be one of those bitches who wins. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and

Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Neia LaBelle, Research by sher Vincent, Engineering by j Gambrel and the great folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton, Carli mcgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving Today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org slash Solvable. I'm Mave Higgins, Now go solve it.