Progress and Pushback: How NGOs Keep People With Us

Featuring Simone Clarke (UN Women Australia) and Hayley Cull (Plan International Australia)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There has to be some form of punishment. For the woman. Yeah. There has to be some form. I don't care if you're in the middle of speaking. You're in the middle of a debate. It's over. Glass ceiling. Dude, it's a ceiling made of bricks. You will never break it.

SPEAKER_05 0:16

I'm the leader of the opposition. I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the government will not be lectured about.

SPEAKER_03 0:29

What if we stopped arguing with the loudest voices and focused on the ones that might actually change? This podcast helps us use the gender compass. Presented by Plan International Australia. Moving the middle is about cutting through the noise and having conversations that actually land. Less shouting, more listening, real movement. Let's move the middle.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

When it comes to gender equality, the social impact sector has long been on the front line, from grassroots programs to global advocacy.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

And right now, progress around the world is under threat. Hard-won gains in women's rights are being rolled back, and conversations that once brought people together can feel increasingly divided. How can we bridge that divide?

SPEAKER_02 1:14

I'm Dr. Rebecca Huntley, Director of Research at 89 Degrees East.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

And I'm Hailey Cull, Deputy CEO at Plan International Australia. Welcome to the latest episode of Moving the Middle, the Gender Compass podcast, where we share research and real-world examples to help you shift attitudes and foster more productive conversations about gender equality.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Each episode you'll hear from people in different sectors who are applying gender compass in their work, showing what works, what doesn't, and what you can try in your own context to move the middle. Today it's actually a lot of the, I'm going to be doing a lot of the hard lifting because I'm going to be talking to two people who are leaders in the NGO sector that is who are kind of really trying to tackle inequality globally whilst also connecting Australian supporters and donors to this work. So one of those leaders you've been hearing on the mic with me throughout this podcast, and that's Hayley. So she's representing Plan International. I'm on the other side of the mic. You are, you can you can kick back and answer the questions, and I'll do all the question asking. But one of our other guests is Simone Clark, CEO of UN Women Australia, and she's also joining us. I've had the great pleasure to present Gender Compass to Simone and her team. Welcome, Simone.

SPEAKER_04 2:34

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Today we'll explore how organisations like ours are applying Gender Compass across the social impact sector and why it's such a powerful tool for connecting Australian audiences, especially the Movable Middle, to global gender equality issues.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

This is the Movable Middle, the Gender Compass podcast brought to you by Plan International at 89 Degrees East. So let's set the scene a bit. Simone, I'm going to start with you. In case anyone isn't familiar, can you share a bit about UN Women and the work you do?

SPEAKER_04 3:06

Sure. So UN Women Australia is the national entity representing UN Women, which is a global United Nations entity. We are tasked with as an agency to accelerate and achieve sustainable development goal number five, which is gender equality. But as we know, at the moment, the current rates for us achieving gender equality, depending on who you speak to, is somewhere in the vicinity of 100 to 300 years away. So for you and I, and anyone living in our generation and subsequent generations, I think that's just a bit too long to wait. So while it's an ambitious target, an ambitious goal, we certainly have our work cut out for us.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Hailey, how does that compare with what you are doing at Plan International when you hear Simone talk about it?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Oh, we are 100% on the same page. The very same mission. We're here to achieve equality for all women and girls, and in particular for Plan International, our focus is on girls. We are a child rights agency, and so we focus really on where gender equality and children kind of come together and where girls and young women in particular are having their rights not being met, and whatever we can possibly do from here in Australia and all around the world to create the policies and the funding and all the different things that are going to change the game for girls.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Sound like both are really great complementary organisations to be talking about this. Simone, UN Women, Plan International, different organisations, but a lot of you know complementary goals.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

A lot of common ground. Simone, coming from another organisation with a global view of gender equality, I'd love to know what you're seeing right now, both in terms of progress and also the pushback that's emerging in many parts of the world.

SPEAKER_04 4:42

Yes, well, I think there has been no more pivotal time to be working in this space than certainly the last six to twelve, eighteen months and certainly the next decade moving forward. So I think we both share common goals. Obviously, um, we act on behalf of all women and girls, but we also do it in cohort and in consultation with amazing organizations like PLAN. None of us can achieve the uh ambitious goals we've set for ourselves on our own. So I think that's that's really important. And the fact that we are complementary in terms of our policies and our advocacy work is really important in Australia. But also when you look across the globe, equality is seen on a spectrum. And depending on who you speak to and which countries you engage with and the women and girls there, we have extreme polarization of rights. But unfortunately, we are seeing that those that are most accelerated in terms of human rights, in terms of women and girls, um, are certainly facing quite a bit of pushback. I am an eternal optimist and I am choosing to ignore the pushback. It might sound incredibly naive, but uh I'm hoping that it is a moment in time that is politically driven but not with the best intents for humanity more broadly. Because I think on its most logical, rational level, when you have a conversation with any about anyone about equality, there's gains in that for all of us. Very often we present it as this kind of polarizing proposition of men versus women, and that is absolutely not the case. We know that communities, economies, families, companies survive and thrive when women and men are A, treated equally and B, equally recognized for the contributions that they make. So I am hoping that the pushback is a temporary aberration. Some would call me naive and foolhardy in the current environment. But I believe, you know, we we've come to a point that has been off the back of two, three, four hundred years worth of effort by many, many actors to get us to this point. And I refuse to accept that that will all be erased or diminished in the space of six or twelve months.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Love that optimism and for naivety as the case may be. Well, I mean, I think one of the good things about the gender compass is that it's, you know, when you're a child baser and you start to see, particularly not just coming out of the United States, but globally, this kind of pushback and real change in laws and real, you know, a real threat to women's safety and economic security across the country, across, across the globe. Um, it can be very scary, but one of the good things about gender compass is it kind of clearly quantifies what the pushback is, but also highlights the common ground in the rest of the community. We have to keep telling ourselves that the majority of people want this to happen and see the value. They just need a refresh and a reconnect. And we also know from the gender compass work as well that the kind of anti-equality narrative is not a popular one more broadly. So that's kind of useful. So your optimism isn't polyanner-ish, like it's just it's a strategic decision, I think. Yeah. I want to ask both of you we know that progress on gender equality isn't just about women and girls, and you've kind of talked about the importance of inclusion, of engaging men and boys. Um, a very big finding from the gender compass is that we find a way for men and boys to see themselves in the story, not as the central actors, but as contributors and allies. What are both of your organizations doing in relation to this? How are you applying this principle in your work?

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Yeah, oh look, engaging with men and boys is absolutely critical in what we're trying to achieve here. And Simone, I'm sure you have the same in your work. We know that wherever we're running programs around the world that are trying to shift social norms and trying to create more inclusive societies for women and girls, we know the only way to do that in a way that is lasting and sustained and kind of at scale is to make sure that men and boys are included in those conversations. It's a core part of how we drive this sort of change. So, of course, it follows that that also needs to be the case here in Australia when we're having communications and when we're talking about things. We know it's it's crucially important. You talked before, Simone, about the amount of progress we've made in the past couple of centuries, and I think that's absolutely true. And a lot of that has been women holding up half the sky, to be honest. A lot of that has been driven by trailblazer women really pushing for kind of the most basic tenets of equality. But we're at a point in time now where achieving the next phase of progress is really going to require men and boys stepping up as allies, and we also know that it's going to require them to recognise that it's not just that they're doing that out of the goodness of their heart to be better for women, they're doing that because it's going to create societies that are better and more equal for all of us, regardless of our gender. So for us at Plan, it's an absolutely core principle of how we work and how we engage with all people.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

What about you, Simone? I mean, UN Women, it's kind of tagliners for all women and girls. So, you know, you're focusing very much on global diversity within women and girls. Obviously, there's a lot of diversity there. But your thoughts about the role about how do we engage men and boys in the conversation on gender equality?

SPEAKER_04 9:43

Yeah, I mean, I think I see it probably as a bit of a build on what Haley was just saying, which is really around the fact that even in our name, as you mentioned, UN Women, the automatic assumption is that women will hold up half the sky and will do that alone. And we all know that any meaningful change takes every act in society. UN Women has had a programme called He for She for, I think about 10 years now, and that is a deliberate global campaign to engage male leaders in gender equality and that movement for equality. Um, and it's had some successes. I think if we look at Australia, even looking back as recently as the last decade here, we had male champions for change, which when I heard it as a middle-aged general manager, you know, some it might be 15 years, 20 years ago, I sort of snickered at a little bit thinking, oh great, now the men are going to tell us how to be what we need to be. I think we've all moved on from that. And I'm delighted that we have a range of actors who are recognising that men, women, trans, you know, every dimension of ethnicity, spirituality, sexuality needs to be included and respected because as soon as we marginalize one group, we're all at risk. Yeah. So I think men are really important and young boys, and I think we're seeing an increasing, you know, with things like the manosphere and all these other things that are, you know, are sort of red-hot topics at the moment. You know, young men and I think um, you know, boys in particular also really struggling with what their masculinity looks like or what their world looks like. And um, you know, I haven't talked to schools and there's young boys in the in the in the room, and you know, it's to me, it's just a fundamental notion around human rights. And I think Australia, and I think this is what the gender compass does so brilliantly, is through the research, it really draws out that, you know, that moving from the middle. There is a core humanity in Australia that is built off the back of our Australian ethos around fairness and kindness and a whole lot of other things. And, you know, you whenever you go and talk to somebody, you don't say, well, do you, you know, do you want to be a bad person? Or do you do you want to do you want to treat women like that really? Like when we look at family violence, we you know, I'm often um confused and I say to people, but is this really the Australia that we want? Do we want to accept that this is the level of humanity we show women, or the level of violence rather that we show women in this country? And resoundingly, it's a no. So I think that's what the Gender Compass does so brilliantly and lays out so clearly is that there is this cohort of the middle who are moderate and understanding and appreciate and respect human rights. And if that's not the starting point for a modern society, I don't know what is.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

Simone, I presented to you and your leadership team, it actually wasn't that long ago, maybe it was about eight weeks ago or so, and it was a fantastic conversation. I know that you're in, you know, you're talking to your leadership team and those people who are engaged with UN Women about the implications of the gender compass to your work. At this early stage, you know, what do you find that it is, how is it helpful? What what what are what are some of the insights that you're taking from it that you think are particularly important for the work that UN Women is doing?

SPEAKER_04 12:46

At face value, I think the importance of it is that it is an incredibly rigorous piece of work that gives all of us, no matter what disciplines we work in, a common foundation and platform or a pulse check on Australia currently. That then, by extension, gives us an informed and what previously was largely intuitive view of how Australians viewed things like gender equality. It gives us a much more informed base. And it we often have conversations internally about we're preaching to the converted, we're talking to ourselves, we're talking to our neighbors. And to a large extent, I think that's true. So in reviewing the report and you know, some of the archetypes and other things that were shared and the research, it was really affirming of our fundamental belief that you know this does have a place in modern Australia, but also gives us the tools to think about how we communicate, the words that we use and how we position it. Because our fundamental belief is that as an organization, gender equality should not be polarizing. It should not be a binary proposition. It is an inclusive. So when I hear people say, oh, inclusion is not important, sorry, core fundamentals being a human being is to feel connected and included. And I think that's what this report does. I think it's what the research does. So if nothing else, it gives us all, I think, a common baseline to then build off and on and to be able to inform our communication because how and what we communicate is the secret to how and what gets changed, I fundamentally believe.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Yeah, and I remember in that conversation, particularly the the your staff and who are involved in the communications, you know, I even saw them present a bit before, and they could see as I was presenting the gender compass that that really connected with their experience of what they're finding is working and not working in the communications landscape. Haley, what about plan? What are you and your team seeing when you see the gender compass research? You'd be you know you're all across it, you're probably um honorary researchers now. But there are implications for this work in what PLAN does more broadly.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Yeah, there are. There's sort of two sides for us. One side of it is we're just here trying to help as many organisations as possible to use the research and to know about it and build that kind of critical mass. But we are also trying to apply it to our own work that we're doing at PLAN, our own communications. So we exist to raise support in the Australian community for issues around girls' equality and gender equality, but it's still the case, unfortunately, that when you talk about things like every girl should be able to go to school and should be able to choose if and when to get married and should be able to be free of violence and those sort of things, there is still backlash against that in the Australian community, and there are still people who often disagree with those messages. And we have sort of had a long-standing belief at plan that actually, if we can communicate those things better in the right language, meet people where they're at, actually they shouldn't be polarising and they're probably not going to be polarising with the majority of the population. It's about how we communicate them in a way that's going to work. And so we've been applying that to everything we do. We're applying it to our communications, our brand, our fundraising. It's going across all of it. I think one of the most powerful things I'm finding, and my team are kind of doing really, really great work with this, is that it's about our fundraisers, our communicators, our team really having a lot more empathy about how they're engaging with the community. We often talk about the fact that, you know, and we hear this often as trailblazers, we think this, I just wish people would have more empathy for what it's like to be a woman in this world. But actually, to build that empathy, you have to demonstrate it yourself. It has to be two ways. And so, what the research has helped us do is understand that people who might not have that same trailblazer mindset are not bad people. They've got values, they've got things they care about, there's things that are pressures on them, there's lived experiences that come into play. And so, really understanding them better helps you have more empathy with them, helps you communicate with them on a more human level. So, if you think about our fundraisers who are having, you know, really interesting conversations with people day to day about the work we do, trying to get them to be supportive of our work. The gender compass research has helped those fundraisers. We've used it in our training, we've embedded it in how we kind of train our fundraisers, how we train our communications teams. It's helping them to understand those people that they're talking to so much more deeply, I suppose, and therefore they're having better quality conversations. They're not jumping into conversations that polarize people. So we're seeing that working really, really well. And it's trickling through in our brand communications as well. We had, you know, one example recently where our digital team were putting out, you know, case studies and stories, and they used some stories that were including men and boys in the story, talking about the role of men and boys as caregivers and how they're kind of engaging positively with girls in the community. Um, and it it engaged, we had so much more engagement around that than a lot of the content that we have that's purely about girls standing up as drivers of change. Now, in some ways that's a shame. You know, we want girls to be able to be celebrated as drivers of change too. Um, but it does show you that there is this appetite in the community to have men and boys written into the story a little more.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

From your perspective, what's one piece of advice that an NGO or a social impact organisation wanting to use the gender compass, any advice you give them or any kind of parts of the research that you'd really say, hey, focus in on this because I think it's got real implications for either you know what you're doing to improve membership or to improve salience or for communications and strategy. So Martin, any thoughts, you know, if an NGO leader was coming to you and saying, why should I get my head across gender compass? Why will it be important for me and the goals of my organisation?

SPEAKER_04 18:13

I I think it'd be foolish not to, as a starting premise, because there is so much wealth of knowledge and it it is, as I mentioned before, such a rigorous uh research process and report. What I would love to see it not only in the not-for-profit sector, I know that Rebecca, you've been doing some of this work, but as much as we can share it with others outside our own sector, because while we be we can become quite introverted in the way that we look at what we do, we need to bring others with us. So conversations with the private sector, I know that you've started to have some of those conversations around companies and how they embed this. How do we take this when we talk to our partners about what it is we do so that the conversations don't uh, you know, don't sort of go into that us versus them mentality or only half of our workforce. It's really about creating a common language and common platform. I think so I'd love to see it more taken on by the private sector. Um, UN Women also has a program called the Unstereotype Alliance, which is working with large FMCG companies, some of the largest advertisers, and that's about removing the bias, the inherent bias that's in advertising. I think there is a wealth of knowledge within the gender compass, the archetypes and other things that if they were to be adopted by the content creators in this country and beyond, we would change the face of advertising, the dynamism of it, the inclusiveness of it, beyond where I think a lot of them would come from, which was, you know, the ticker box, we have to have, you know, representations of ethnicity and representations of gender to a much more nuanced representation of a bit more sophisticated, yeah, yeah. Yeah, their consumers, their purchasers, their um competitors, even. So uh I just think there is so many ways this can be used in meaningful ways, whether it's content creation, policy design, the way we talk to our supporters, the way the way we even talk about you know, men, women dynamics uh society, the language in it and the language it uses, I think is particularly useful for Australia because it's obviously Australian-centric, but I know there's also some work being done in different cultural settings, which I think, again, the way and the types of conversations you might have about women inequality in a country like Papua New Guinea or Thailand or you know, northern Africa will be a very different conversation and communication than what we would in Australia. So, you know, I'd love to see this report replicated into a number of different languages, cultural settings, and with other um sort of lenses put over it, because I think the value of it in other settings is equal to what it has in Australia, but if not more so. So I think there is a range of um applications for it, whether regardless of sector, government, academia, schools, um, but also different cultural settings and and different um ethnicities, I think would uh definitely something we'd love to do is to put it in the world.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

Watch this case. Haley, for your perspective, I mean, you know, PLAN's a very large organisation. How many employees do you have in Australia? In Australia, we're around the 70 mark. All of your staff in Australia would be aware of it. But if you had somebody new coming into PLAN, uh new employee, why would you encourage them to look at Gender Compass to help them?

SPEAKER_01 21:21

It's become really fundamental for us to thinking about how we communicate everything we do and everything that we are. So absolutely, we're encouraging, you know, all of our people to connect with it and engage with it. I think for me, I try and and our team are doing a brilliant job at this, try to apply the kind of there's a few kind of key questions that we're applying to every conversation we have, every presentation we give, every campaign that we write. It's is this, are we making this real for people? Like, is it tangible? Like, can people understand it? Talking about abstract concepts around gender equality are nowhere near as compelling perhaps as talking about the real-world everyday examples that help people understand it and see it. And for those of us working in gender equality day in and day out, we understand exactly what gender equality means. But for people who aren't thinking and living and breathing it all day long, um, we need to make it a little bit more tangible and a little bit more relatable, perhaps. So asking that question quite often. And the other one is I think we're we're really trying to take the to heart the finding in gender compass that people react really badly when they think that you're pitting men and women against each other. And we never try to do that. Nowhere in our work do we attempt to pit men and women against each other, but that is how it's often being heard. And that's a really, really important insight for us is that even if we don't mean to do that, people are hearing that. So can we read our communications and listen to our communications with that lens and make sure that it doesn't seem like we're pitting people against each other because that's not a way to build any kind of unity.

SPEAKER_02 22:48

Simone and Haley, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation and for sharing the work you're both doing and the implications for gender compass for your work. It's so great to see the research for as a researcher, it's so great to see the research being used by people and really making these big, complex global gender equality issues more reliable. Thanks, Rebecca.

SPEAKER_04 23:08

Thank you. Everything you've done in the report and beyond, it's it really is a compelling piece of work. So thank you for sharing it with us, and um, I'm hoping that we can create a broader social movement in Australia, certainly with the foundations of the Gender Compass Report. So thanks to Plan for obviously for your funding of it and the involvement, and also obviously, Rebecca, the work that you do every day. So um really thank you. It's a gift.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Thanks so much, Simone. Having partners like you is a big part of it as well. Amazing to have been connecting on this lately.

SPEAKER_03 23:37

Presented by Plan International Australia, moving the middle is about cutting through the noise and having conversations that actually land. Less shouting, more listening, real movement. Let's move the middle.