The gender agenda: Gillard and the politics of sexism

Monday, February 27th, 2012

By: Anne Summers

February 26, 2012

Source: The Age

IN JUNE 2009, 23-year-old Giorgia Boscolo became Venice’s first certified female gondolier, breaking into an occupation that traditionally had been passed from father to son with the result it had been all-male for 900 years. To qualify, Boscolo had to demonstrate she could manoeuvre the narrow gondola, which is 10.66 metres long and weighs 227 kilograms, through Venice’s winding waterways using a single oar, all the while speaking English and telling stories to her tourist passengers. She also had to be able to predict the treacherous Venetian tides and currents.

Other women had tried and failed to pass the rigorous 400-hour course, so Boscolo clearly has what it takes. Except in the eyes of her gondolier father, Dante. He was reported as saying that while he was proud of his daughter and believed she’d eventually gain the experience to be good at it, ”I still think being a gondolier is a man’s job”.

Julia Gillard would undoubtedly feel some sympathy for Giorgia Boscolo. She too has passed the tests, steered her minority government through the treacherous currents of federal politics, all the while trying to find the right language to convey to voters the journey she is taking them on. Her tenure has been controversial, characterised by mistakes and by a collapse in her party’s electoral support.

Gender will no doubt be the last thing on the minds of caucus tomorrow when it meets to decide her future. Yet, from the moment she became leader in June 2010, she has run into the view that ”being a prime minister is a man’s job”. Even if it is not expressed in the brazen terms used by Dante Boscolo, this attitude underpins much of the hostile commentary on Gillard. It is ironic that this should be the case, given the initial rapture that greeted Gillard’s elevation to the top job, yet there can be no doubting that Australia’s first woman prime minister has had to endure levels of vitriol never before seen in federal politics. And it is extremely personal.

”The vilification of the Prime Minister [has] reached unprecedented levels,” Geoff Kitney wrote in the Australian Financial Review this month, while the Sydney Daily Telegraph‘s Simon Benson reported on February 5: ”People … believe they can say things about the PM which, if she were a bloke, would never have been said … Underlying this is obviously a belief that the harder and more personal the attack, the more likely she is to break – because she is a woman … John Howard copped it from the left, but never as bad as the language that is often used against Gillard.”

Looking at this vituperation, you would never know that Australia has in fact had 10 female heads of government. We should be used to women running the show. As Bob Katter put it recently, how can we be a sexist country when the Governor-General, the Queensland Governor and the Queensland Premier are all women? (Not to mention the Tasmanian Premier, the ACT Chief Minister and the Prime Minister.)

But Gillard is the first to run the entire country; she is in a totally different league, and one that evidently many of us are not entirely comfortable with. It has not happened before and so we tend to obsess about the externals: her hair, her clothes, her make-up, her voice. She finds it hard to get traction with the electorate on what has been a remarkable record of legislative reforms.

Many (on both sides of politics) make the case that Gillard’s current unpopularity is due not to her being a woman but to a combination of incompetence, untrustworthiness and a retrospective and increasing revulsion at the means by which she became prime minister. ”It’s fair to say that the way Kevin Rudd was removed from office has a lot to do with how people see her,” says Julie Bishop, Deputy Leader of the federal opposition.

Her very tenure is portrayed as illegitimate. Yet in the eyes of a number of past and present women political leaders, such criticisms are evidence that in politics (and, to a large extent, also in the corporate world) women are held to a different standard. ”Change is never pretty. There is always blood on the floor, but having a woman do it – that offends the natural order of things,” says a Labor frontbencher. ”There is the idea that women should not seize power.”

”The judgments made about Julia are exactly the same as those that were made about me,” says Kerry Chikarovski, who seized the leadership of the New South Wales Liberal Party to become leader of the opposition from late 1998 to early 2002. ”I was asked: How did I feel about having the blood of Peter Collins on my hands? She has been judged in the same way.”

In politics there is usually no other way. A fortunate minority – Anna Bligh and Brendan Nelson come to mind – were able to step into a vacancy created by the leader resigning or losing his seat, but most leaders have tussled the job away from a usually unwilling incumbent. Like Gillard, Paul Keating toppled a sitting prime minister, but there were two important differences. Unlike Hawke, Rudd did not contest the ballot that put Gillard in the job because his support had collapsed. It is ironic, therefore, that her legitimacy is questioned in the way it is. The other difference is that Bob Hawke accepted his party’s verdict and, while he was certainly not happy about it, he did not engage in a relentless undermining of his successor, thereby becoming a permanent millstone around Keating’s neck.

And, amazingly, the fact that Gillard subsequently won an election and negotiated four separate agreements with independents and the Greens to form a minority government is seen by her critics not as a crowning achievement but as sneaky and treacherous. What does a girl have to do!

ARE women leaders treated differently from men? And are such differences a disadvantage or, worse, outright discrimination? And how do women themselves feel about the ongoing vilification of the Prime Minister? These are very hot questions at present, especially after the near hysterical reaction from politicians and much of the media to Senator Bob Brown’s recent comment that ”quite a bit of the criticism [of Gillard] is sexist and unfair and unrelenting”.

To explore this, I speak to a number of past and present women political leaders, seeking to draw on their experiences as well as their opinions. The Prime Minister declines to be interviewed and others prefer not to go on the record; some are happy to go public with their thoughts.

The conversations are a somewhat sobering reminder that, despite the quite respectable number of women political leaders Australia has now produced, our comfort level has not undergone a commensurate improvement. There is disagreement about the basic proposition: ”I achieved the confidence of my electorate, the leadership of my party and the premiership of my state,” says former New South Wales premier Kristina Keneally. ”I can’t ever consider that I experienced some kind of disadvantage because I am a woman. I won’t lend support to such a thesis.”

Most of the others have stories to tell of differences and disadvantages.

Gillard has been criticised for not having children (”deliberately barren”, in the infamous phrase of Senator Bill Heffernan) but so has Julie Bishop: ”Sometimes it’s used as a slur,” she says. ”As public figures we are subject to very harsh judgments by people.”

For the increasing number of women politicians who do want to combine their career with having children, there are issues men never have to deal with. ”It might mean you have to travel with the Esky and the breast pump and the baby if you want to make it work,” says Sophie Mirabella, shadow minister for industry, whose second baby was born in June 2010, a few weeks before the federal election was called.

Nicola Roxon, the Attorney-General, gets irritated that ”the media is more interested in me as someone with a young child than anything to do with policy. My male colleagues who have young children don’t get asked these questions.”

”You literally cannot win,” says a cabinet minister. ”You are criticised if you dedicate yourself to your career and don’t have children. Or if you do have them, you’re told you are neglecting your family. Or, when you spend time with them, that you are not doing your job properly.”

Often women politicians overcompensate, feeling they need to prove they are totally up to the job. ”The successful women I see are tremendously good at their jobs, and are phenomenally well prepared, ” says a Labor frontbencher. ”They turn up at local events with a written speech, while the men just turn up.”

Clare Martin, who was chief minister of the Northern Territory for 6½ years until 2007, agrees that women often overachieve in the diligence stakes. ”I can see with Julia, she’s like me. I read all my briefs, I knew what I was doing when I went to a meeting.” Martin now says, in retrospect: ”I worked too hard. I got very tired. You are not flexible enough when you are tired.”

Yet these issues pale before the avalanche of hatred that has at times almost crushed Gillard. At an anti-carbon tax rally in Canberra in March last year, angry protesters held up signs that said ”JuLIAR” and ”Bob Brown’s Bitch” and ”Ditch the Witch”. It was a long way from the mockery that Australia’s first two women premiers, Carmen Lawrence and Joan Kirner, had to put up with. ”Lawrence of Suburbia” and ”Spot on Joan” (a reference to her clothes) seem pretty tame by comparison.

It was nasty and it was personal but it was also sexist for using that word. A ”bitch” is ”a malicious or disagreeable woman”, says Macquarie Dictionary. It is one of Kevin Rudd’s preferred descriptions of the Prime Minister, according to Andrew Probyn, federal political editor of the West Australian newspaper.

”Women are expected to be tougher than tough, but there is a fine line between that and being a bitch,” says Chikarovski, acknowledging the negative power of the ‘b’ word.

And although Liberal women recall that John Howard was mocked for his eyebrows, his glasses, his voice and his tracksuits, no one can point to an example of a gender-specific term being used to attack Howard, or any male politician for that matter. ”Is there a comparable male term to ‘bitch’?” asks Judi Moylan, the Liberal member for Pearce and a former minister for women. She could not think of one.

On July 6 last year, Sydney broadcaster Alan Jones said on air, referring to Gillard: ”The woman is off her tree and quite frankly they should shove her and Bob Brown in a chaff bag and take them as far out to sea as they can and tell them to swim home.” The comments caused outrage. Tony Abbott joined in the denunciation and Jones later said he regretted the remarks but by then they had become part of the firepower that was being aimed at Australia’s first female prime minister.

These inflammatory (and verging on violent) sentiments have now become commonplace in Parliament. During the last sitting, Christopher Pyne compared Gillard’s leadership to ”a person with a gangrenous wound [and] the body is now seeking to excise the sick limb”. Nicola Roxon considers the Abbott/Gillard contest to have gone ”beyond the normal push and shove of Parliament”. She says the level of personal abuse and vitriol in the current parliamentary debates are of a substantially different nature from anything we have seen in the past.

SO IN Parliament and in the community, it is now apparently deemed OK to subject the Prime Minister to cruel, violent and often gender-specific commentary and insults. And many in the media join in. The Herald Sun described her as ”coquettish” and ”giggling” with President Obama. Andrew Bolt described her as ”weak, even girlish” with the US President.

But it is on talkback radio where the hatred really gets out of hand. She has been labelled, by hosts Alan Jones or Ray Hadley or by callers to these programs: ”a menopausal monster”, ”a lying cow”, ”a lying bitch”, a ”vitriolic, bitter, lying, condescending facade of a prime minister”, ”a horrible mouth on legs” and ”brain dead”. One of Alan Jones’ listeners even said: ”Does she go down to the chemist to buy her tampons or does the taxpayer pay for them as well?” (These were included in a compilation on The Hampster Wheel by The Chaser on ABC TV last November.)

”I can’t remember ever seeing anything like ‘Ditch the Witch’ and I can’t imagine Jeff Kennett sanctioning that by his appearance,” says Joan Kirner, who was premier of Victoria from 1990 to 1992. ”The level of media and political sanction that has been given to this gender bias attack is greater.”

”There is an ugly part to the community and if you give them license it will emerge,” says Clare Martin, reflecting on the ”Ditch the Witch” signs. ”Wedge politics always brought people out and made them feral.” In the territory, it would happen with potent issues such as land rights, especially when claims could affect access to fishing areas or parks or waterfront areas in Darwin. ”We managed it by talking calmly and acknowledging it was an issue,” recalls Martin. ”Not by feeding that hysteria.”

The problem with these attacks on Gillard has been that there was no one to calmly dispense with them. ”I started to get really scared for Julia’s sake when Alan Jones said she should be taken out to sea,” Kirner says.

Much of the attack on Gillard goes to her competence, not her gender. ”Our feedback is that people feel let down, especially women,” says Bishop. ”Her competence, honesty and integrity are being questioned and these are not gender-related.”

Chikarovski disagrees: ”I feel there is an undercurrent in a lot of the commentary. Whenever she makes a decision that is unpopular and she is criticised for it, it is said she is not up to it because she’s a woman.”

After Bob Brown made his comments about sexism, many commentators seemed to wilfully miss the point and claim that Brown was suggesting that any criticism of Gillard (or other women) was sexist. Some went even further, stating that if a woman said it, it could not be sexist.

In fact, women can, and do, dish out sexist commentary about other women. For instance, a Labor frontbencher tells me of an occasion when Kate Ellis, the young and attractive Minister for Employment Participation, Childhood Education and Childcare, went to the dispatch box in the House of Representatives to answer a question.

”Here comes the weather girl,” called someone from the opposition benches.

”It was Sophie Mirabella,” says the person telling me the story. ”We all heard her.”

When I put this to Mirabella, she initially says: ”That was not me. I like Kate Ellis.” I tell her that government members had told me they’d heard her say it. Did she in fact say it? ”I can’t recall,” she replies, then counters with her own example. ”When Mark Latham referred to Janet Albrechtson as a ‘skanky ho’,” she says, ”there was not a whimper from the women in the Labor Party.”

But for other women, such attacks are unconscionable, even across party lines. ”There is a view that is really vicious, that [Gillard] is not able to do the job,” says Chikarovski. ”I have said loud and clear, I don’t agree with a lot of her policies but I do think she doesn’t get any credit for some of the things she’s done. She has been very courageous. She has managed to get legislation through the Parliament; she has managed a very difficult process in which she’s got the results and has managed to do it in the face of tremendous pressure from interest groups.”

Some are worried that these attacks on Gillard will jeopardise future opportunities for women in politics.

”If Julia Gillard, as an eminently capable person and leader, is not able to continue serving as the first woman prime minister, it will set us back decades,” says Mary Crooks, executive director of the Victorian Women’s Trust. ”Every time someone makes an attack on her authority to lead (as distinct from her policies), they are sending a subliminal message to every woman and girl that they are not welcome to sit at the table of real political power.”

The trust is currently working on an initiative that will encourage people to challenge the ”debasing and relentless attacks on our country’s first female prime minister”. This will be a non-partisan effort, says Crooks, ”because of the importance to our nation’s maturity and future development that capable women are deemed able to hold senior and powerful office”.

Although the picture might look rosy at the moment, as Bob Katter says, there are already signs that the surge in women’s political representation might be stalling, or even going backwards. The 2010 federal election saw women’s representation in Canberra decline from 27.3 per cent to 24.7 per cent. And while women in politics, like Giorgia Boscola the gondolier, are going places they have never been before, there are plenty of barriers that have yet to be breached. ”I am now often the only woman in the meetings,” says Roxon. ”When I had [the] health [portfolio], there were usually lots of women in the room. Now, often the only other woman in the room is the Prime Minister.”
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/the-gender-agenda-gillard-and-the-politics-of-sexism-20120225-1tv7n.html#ixzz1nXKyVLSU

Photo Source:  Andrew Meares

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Tonga delegate to represent Pacific women

Friday, February 17th, 2012

The Director of Tonga Women’s and Children’s Crisis Centre will represent the Pacific on the Commonwealth’s Gender Plan of Action Monitoring Group.

The other three delegates are from Uganda, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago and Ofa-Ki-Levuka Guttenbeil-Likiliki will present the Pacific’s interests.

The meeting will take place ahead of the 56th UN Commission on the status of women conference.

Profile of Ofa-Ki-Levuka Guttenbeil-Likiliki
Director, Women and Children Crisis Centre (WCCC)
Tonga

Ofa-Ki-Levuka Guttenbeil-Likiliki is the Director of the Women and Children Crisis Centre (WCCC) in Tonga.  She has a post-graduate degree in media from the University of Auckland and also has a Diploma in International Broadcast Journalism with the Thomson Foundation in collaboration with the University of Cardiff, Wales.  Her passion is telling women’s stories in the context of advocating for their rights, particularly in situations where women and girls’ rights to development and rights to accessing public services are violated. She believes that when you share the lived realities of women’s struggles and challenges, only then can you start talking about REAL solutions. She is passionate about the issues of violence against women and girls, women in decision making and women’s property and land rights and how all these issues relate to each other in the context of advocating for the overall achievement of Gender Equality and the meaningful empowerment of women and girls in Tonga and the Pacific.  In 2010 the WCCC, under the leadership of Guttenbeil-Likiliki, received the prestigious South Pacific Commission (SPC) Human Rights Award in recognition of their work in promoting women’s human rights in Tonga.

(Source: CGMPG Profiles)

Listen to the ABC Radio Interview Here: Tonga delegate to represent Pacific women

Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker:Ofa Guttenbeil Likiliki the Pacific delegate for the Commonwealth Gender Plan of Action Monitoring Group

To view more about the Commonwealth Gender Plan of Action Monitoring Group:   Commonwealth Gender Plan of Action Monitoring Group

Photo Source: Kaniva Tonga Online

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