Julia Gillard on making space for other female leaders

When Julia Gillard visits the Australian National University (ANU) campus, she keeps a busy schedule. 

In between high-level university meetings and recording episodes of her show, A Podcast of One’s Own, the former prime minister makes time to sit down with ANU Reporter.  

It’s perhaps no surprise that Gillard was interested in leadership from a young age.  

“I suppose in many ways it all stems from the values and attitudes in my family home, which was a home that very much valued education,” she says. 

“Neither of my parents got to finish secondary school, so my parents certainly wanted my sister and I to focus on education and to take all the opportunities which were before us.  

“And because we migrated to Australia, because of the Whitlam government, those opportunities included being able to go to university.” 

Gillard developed a sense of how to operate as a woman in politics from her formative experiences watching and learning from changes occurring in student politics, in the trade union movement and in the Labor party. 

In the student movement, she says, “you could experiment, learn about yourself, learn about your capacities, learn to lead, make some errors, come back and do it better”.  

Even early in her career, Gillard knew that the fight for gender equality was not an easy one.  

“I saw and watched in all three how hard it can be to bring about change on gender. But if you fight for it and you land it, how big a difference it can make,” she says.  

Gillard names Joan Kirner, Victoria’s first female premier, as a key mentor and inspiration. Kirner’s affirmative action rule within the Labor party required women to be pre-selected for 35 per cent of winnable seats in all elections by 2002 – it was a win against the ‘glass cliff’ that still impacts women to this day.  

Gillard recalls observing the ways Kirner was treated as a woman in politics during her ride up to the role of premier.  

“I learnt about the nature of gendered attacks and the resilience that you need to face them from her, and the importance, too, about giving back when you’ve got the opportunity,” she says. 

During Gillard’s time as prime minister, Kirner stayed in touch, offering advice and support. But when ANU Reporter presses for any tidbits, Gillard is discreet. 

“Not all pieces of advice can be spoken about in an august journal like your own,” she jokes. “Too many four-letter words, normally directed to my political opponents.” 

Writing her own story

It’s practically a rite of passage for Australian leaders to write a book after they have left office. But penning a political memoir is fraught with tensions. It’s tough to share your journey, in your own words, while tightrope-walking through the political calculations of the inevitable reactions from allies and foes.  

But it was the chance to tell her own story to found the Global Institute of Women’s Leadership (GIWL) – the research institute first opened at King’s College London in 2018, with the ANU chapter established two years later.  

“The origin story really is that after I left politics and decided to write my memoirs, I wanted to write really thoughtfully on the question of gender,” Gillard says.  

“I wanted to write not just my story, but sort of cite what had happened to me in politics against what happens to women globally. And when I looked at the global research base, I did find some fantastic things and learnt a lot, but I also thought, given how long we’ve been all campaigning for gender equality, the research base was quite thin.” 

Amid the US-led backlash against gender equality initiatives, Gillard believes it’s now more important than ever to continue to build that research and for evidence-based pathways to change. She cites GIWL polling research that shows many people either think that gender equality has been achieved, or that it has gone too far.  

“What that tells us is we haven’t described the remaining problems as well as we should,” she says.  

“And we’ve perhaps allowed the frame to settle that gender equality is a sort of zero-sum game, more for women must mean less for men, whereas really, a gender equal world will be better for everyone.” 

Now, it is not just a question of how to accelerate progress towards gender equality, but how to prevent moving backwards.  

“Everybody will have seen the way in which the Trump administration has taken the axe to anything that is bannered diversity, equity and inclusion, and so that is forcing businesses organisations to no longer focus on questions like gender equality,” Gillard says. 

“The job is by no means done, and we can’t let the current political trends, even in a country as powerful as the United States, stop a movement, which is really about change and better lives for all – about more choices, more opportunities for men and for women.” 

But Gillard still has hope for the future. Despite the challenges, people are now more familiar with women’s leadership because of the number of female leaders that have held positions of high office around the world.  

“I would go to schools and girls would talk to me very openly about how they wanted to be prime minister.”

“I think more people now are alive to the way gender stereotyping and perceptions of leaders intersect,” she says. “I think it’s quite well known now that because we haven’t historically seen women as leaders… that we can be discomforted by images of women’s leadership. 

“We can quickly conclude that a commanding woman leader is not very nice, she’s not very nurturing, she’s not very empathetic, irrespective of what she’s actually like.” 

And like the mentors that inspired and supported her own leadership journey, she too is now witnessing the next crop of young women grow into capable leaders – she’s even interviewed some of them on her podcast.  

“I would go to schools when I was prime minister, and girls would talk to me very openly about how they wanted to be prime minister, and they’d only be six or seven or eight or nine,” Gillard says. 

“And I thought that’s the benefit of them growing up in an era where they can see a woman doing the job. …I was amazed that some messages about gender equality were there and sinking in and making a difference even for the youngest of girls.” 

Surely some of these girls have taken heart from Gillard’s famous misogyny speech? It has continuing popularity on social media – appearing in ‘get ready with me’ Tik Toks and rave remixes.

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“Yes, it certainly has become something of its own. And you know, I’m kind of delighted to see that,” she says.

“I think it’s really got a life now that’s well beyond the political context in which it was given. It’s even, in some ways, got a life well beyond me.  

“It’s being used now as a bit of an anthem, a kind of fight song, something that I think many women and girls and some men use to get the energy to keep going and fighting for gender equality. I am proud of that.” 

The new path forward

She seems to briefly relish in the subversion, announcing that she had arranged her questions to lull Sales into a false sense of security.  

“Perhaps you recognise this tactic,” she jokes.  

At one point Gillard wonders if both Sales’ recent work and the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast could be “used as a sort of revenge tool”.  

It is hard to not connect it to Gillard’s own life post-politics.  

But sometimes revenge on the wrongs of the past means simply paving a clearer path for those who follow after you. And in the founding of GIWL and through A Podcast of One’s Own – that’s exactly what Gillard has done.