Feminist Leadership

So welcome to the Humanitarian Leadership Academy podcast, Fresh Humanitarian Perfected. I'm Rachel O'Brien and I'm today's host for the podcast. I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Shulatha Batliwala and Archie Law for us to discuss the topic of feminist leadership. So here at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, the HLA, our mission is to inspire a movement of low-key led action and we aim to continue to work with and support local leadership that brings lasting positive change in humanitarian action. To really enable this change and to be part of that change, we need to really understand what needs to be different and how we play our part in social equality. This is something that both Shulatha and Archie have a long history with and I'm very excited to hear from both of you. Shulatha is a renowned feminist activist, scholar and author and he has been a prominent figure in the Women's Empowerment Movement since the 1970s. Archie is a senior leadership expert in coach who has hands-on experience on embedding the principles of feminist leadership into an organisation and who also worked to different leadership models and theories. For the benefit of our audience, it would be brilliant to hear a little bit more from both of you about yourselves just by way of a brief introduction. Shulatha, may I come to you first? Sure, Rita. I think a couple of things I'd like to share is I was one of those people right from my youth, who felt deeply divided about whether I wanted to be out there in the field making change, especially for women or did I want to be a scholar and a thinker and so on because I was always attracted to the world of ideas and concepts and theories. So I think what I feel great about today is that I managed to somewhere bridge these two words and spend a very long period of time as a grassroots activist and movement builder working primarily of course with women and then sort of moved on to building theory from practice and building theoretical and analytical tools and resources for activists which are then used in the academy which always amuses me. So that's one thing I'd love to share and the other is that I am a proud feminist grandmother of four budding feminist teenagers. So that's it for me. It's amazing. Thank you Shulatha and we're going to learn more I know for sure throughout this podcast from your huge experience. You bring to this again. Thank you for coming and Archie, can I come to you? Thanks Rachel. Yeah, I got involved in this work. Digesting, the initial spur for me to get involved was I was come from a background of some privilege in Melbourne, Australia and I was at a boy's school I went to and in year 10 an Aboriginal activist, Old Golden Brown came in and spoke to our year group in year 10 and he was really in many ways quite confronting. He said, you know, the question you've all got to ask yourselves, are you going to hang on to that silver spoon that you've been born with or are you going to make a contribution to society? And that was a real spur for me to see things probably quite differently from many around me at that time and really spurred me into this work ultimately in terms of initially through humanitarian work but then more and more on the social justice and the campaigning work over the years as well. And I think that initially intersected with a really keen interest in leadership and local organisations when I was working in Cambodia. And it was really when I got to back to Australia after a long stint away and started working with what became actionated in Australia that I think I really started that journey around women's rights and connecting women's rights and social justice which has been an ongoing learning journey now for some 15 years or so. So it's something I feel really fortunate to be able to be involved in as as a man and something really excited to talk to you about as well. Thank you, Artie. And I think it's really powerful to share those personal insights and as I said we're going to get into all of this in a bit more detail so thank you. So now that we've got that sense of who you are in your expertise that both of you bring into this it would be great for us to get into the topic. So Shulatha I wondered if you could just start by defining for us what feminist leadership is, how it differs from more traditional leadership models and why is it relevant in today's context? Sure. I would start by saying is it's really a process and the learning journey. It's not a sort of a particular model or a recipe here for a way of doing things but it is a process of transforming ourselves so it definitely begins with the self, our organisations and our movements and transforming these for what to reflect the feminist vision and values of social justice that we are saying we want to advance in the larger world. So my simple challenge to us all is if we can't demonstrate that these values can be practiced by ourselves and in our own spaces, the spaces that are actually relatively under our control, why do we imagine that we can achieve this transformation in the larger world. So feminist leadership is not about positional authority, exercising power, being the boss or even being the shiro or the saviour. It's about unleashing both our individual and collective power to work towards dismantling all the discriminatory structures of power and privilege in the larger world. So it's about starting from within and modeling within what that other world, that better world can actually look like, enabling people to experience in the spaces in which they work and live what that means. So why and how is this different? Famous leadership is first of all not about climbing the ladder and occupying a particular position. It is concerned with leading for a larger purpose. It's about dismantling patriarchy and all the other power structures through which it operates and that operate with patriarchy. So this is unique because other ideologies of equality have been around for a long time but they all stopped at the doorstep in their vision of equality and justice. What feminism did that is totally unique is open the door and questioning how power operates within so-called private and hidden spaces. In our organizations, our homes, our relationships and within ourselves. So it names and addresses all these normalized power differences, hierarchies, discrimination, biases, even violence that are located within these spaces. And most of all, it asks us to recognize and interrogate how each of us is using power both in our personal and professional spaces. So it's based on enacting feminist principles like the personal is political, meaning that we have to recognize the self as a primary site of change rather than focusing on you, on them, on society, the world at large and all these concepts. So, feminist leadership begins with the self. It with recognizing our own internalized power of HGR key privilege. That's why I liked so much what Archie said about recognizing his own privilege. Even recognizing our internalized rage and fear all our psychic baggage. So that we are able to begin to dismantle and transform ourselves. And through that process, we are also understanding what the transformation of our institutions are organizations and our movements and relationships are all about. So for me, this is what makes feminist leadership totally different. - Thanks, Fulatha. I mean, that incredibly powerful is no review. And it's just really clear how it's different and why it's important and so relevant. But I think the greatest difference in feminist leadership and its practice is the realization that the more you share power, the more powerful you become. So I just do want to add that important insight. - And I think it leads really nicely to what I want to ask you, Archie, as someone who you explained in your introduction that you've tried and embodied these principles in your work, it would be brilliant to kind of bring in your perspective. I'm sure that there are people listening who are wondering if feminist leadership is about women in leadership and therefore why you're here. And maybe you can elaborate from your perspective on how feminist leadership transcends gender and why it includes diverse voices like yours and others. - Thanks Rachel. I think from the beginning, as far as the question of, okay, what's a man doing here talking about feminist leadership? To which we might ask the question, well, who holds most of the power in the first place? And when we truly want to share power, we want to transform ourselves in our organizations. We want to decentralize, we want decision-making, shared far more broadly. It probably makes some sense at some level for the people with the power to actually start giving up some of that power and sharing it. And I've always felt in many ways as a man that was part of my role to be able to do that and to probably lead in a different way as well, to lead in a way where sharing decision-making being a lot more collaborative. And that was a journey for me as well. Again, I'm ashamed. I was probably a little bit more of a controller type when I first started leading an organization, which I think was largely because I wasn't really prepared for it in the first place. So that was like a default setting. And it's, yeah, with some joy, I couldn't reflect back on that time, some 20 years ago, and I worked quite differently to that now. So as a personal transformation journey, that's something I'm really, I feel quite joyful about. But I do think it's also about the ultimate ambition of feminist leadership as well as far as, yet when we talk about it unleashing our power and we want to build a world of peace, we want to respect this planet that we live on. We want the rights of everyone respected. And when you consider these sorts of statements in the world that we're actually living in now where everything that I've just mentioned is really heading south, it speaks to the importance of feminist leadership as a vehicle, as a vessel, to enable that transformation to happen in our world and our planet to us. And I do think that something that men have an active role to play in, respecting the role of women and the feminist movement and working alongside the movement and working alongside our sisters. And I think in a non-passive way too, being confident of where you fit into the picture and confident that you're working for the same goals. And I think that's really important for men to make that shift. - Thanks, Erty. I mean, that's incredibly clear. You've both talked about transformation of self and then others. You've talked about the importance of self and individual and so the collective. You've talked about everyone to be respected, which, and you said it in the world in which we're in, that's never been more important. So I now want to get even more into the how and how people can work with this. Shulatha, you again said in your introduction, you've worked with individuals, you've worked with organisations, you started grassroots movements and worked with global organisations. I mean, how do you approach this work? Wherever you start from and what should people expect when embarking on this to explore this area? - Well, I think the first thing I'd like to see is that it began as a kind of very intuitive journey for me in my own work and in my own leadership roles where I started challenging myself to see how am I practicing the feminist values that I had embraced in my own practice. And recognizing that it's not about where you are in the hierarchy, because of course these were all basically very hierarchical organisations, but wherever you are, you have power and can be a leader from any location. And so I started basically with experimenting. And I think later, when I began to kind of theorise this and look at from the leadership as an approach or a methodology that others can more consciously implement and embrace, I realised that there are really, it's funny because at a basic level, it's very simple. And what is very simple is this concept I came up with of a leadership diamond, a feminist leadership diamond and the diamond has these four facets. In every location, wherever you're playing a leadership role, you have power. And in fact, if you work in hierarchical organisations, the thing most associated with leadership is power, decision making power, power over resources, power over staff, policies, etc. So power is one facet of the diamond. But then if you're working in a feminist or social justice organisation or movement, you're working for a certain purpose, with a certain politics, with a certain vision of the change you want to bring about. And that vision, that politics is based on or rests on a set of principles and values. So the other two facets are your principles and your politics or your purpose. And I realised that if you filter your use of power through your purpose and your principles, then your practices will indeed be that of feminist leadership. So I begin by introducing the feminist leadership diamond and then start to discuss why is it hard to achieve a balance in this diamond? Why is it hard to make this diamond a reality to make it sparkle as it were? So then I move on to looking at the fact that yes, this is very simple. It should be so straightforward, right? I have power, but I have to practise my power through my principles and purpose and then I'll be fine. But the problem is that the people performing these roles are human beings, right? They are not three programmed robots. So what we do is we bring to our, our, rules, whether in our personal lives or in our organizational lives, we bring ourselves. And the self is a complicated package of our histories, our personality traits, the kind of social and cultural norms that we've internalized, growing up in a particular society, our psychic well-being or ill-being, and very often our internalized sense of, you know, victimhood or oppression because of where we are in the social hierarchy. So I talk about how and why feminist leadership requires working on the self because we can't get the diamond to balance until we understood ourselves and where we are distorting. For example, our relationship to power, our history with power is very important to recognize and confront. And then I talk about a second barrier which is these hidden power structures that exist in all our collective spaces, yeah. And that is what I call the deep structures of our urbanizations. And these are all these hidden subtlils, sometimes not so subtle, but never sort of confronted ways in which people reproduce so faces. So for example, you know, there are lots of examples of deep structures, but some of the common ones are like there are certain informal norms that are different from the formal rules for the people who work the longer stars, you know, who come in on weekends, etc., are rewarded. And formally they are held in a higher esteem. And there is a gender dimension to that because women often can't do that because they have so many other caregiving roles, etc. There are these sort of hidden groups within the larger organization that have more power, they have more influence. There also sort of informal processes that are influencing the formal decision making. Certain kinds of behaviors rewarded and others are penalized. And of course, there's this whole phenomenon called power under that I don't really have time to go into, but that is when we've internalized a sense of victimhood. And oppression. So we become, let's say subversive in the way we use power. So all of these dimensions I sort of bring in, I often get groups to sit down and do deep structure mapping exercises, which are really quite mind blowing sometimes. To give you one example in the team in Cambodia, we had, they asked to be in separate teams, the women and the men. And one of the deep structure phenomenon that the women's team identified was every single day when we come into the office, some male colleague or the other, if not several, feels they have a right to comment on our appearance. Oh, you're looking very nice today in this thing. You should wear this more often. Oh, you know, your hair doesn't look nice when it's tied up. You should leave it open. And they said, you know, we don't comment on them and their appearance. So for them, this was a deep structure dynamic that was reasserting, you know, the patria or first job is to look nice or, you know, to be pleasing to the male eye or whatever. Anyway, so there are lots of these things that come out. And I think the life moment that happens, which I've seen over and over again, is the realization that comes to people that being a feminist or working in a feminist organization does not make me a feminist leader. Being a social justice activist or advocate, working in a social justice organization does not make a socially just a leader. So if I have a minute more reach of what I'd like to do is just share the kind of steps that I encourage groups to go through. Starting step one is analyzing and working on yourself and aligning your four piece. The second step is really mobilizing others and the organization and build a shared agreement and commitment to this kind of internal transformation because that's often very difficult and often there's resistance even at the leadership level to this. The third is to set up external mentoring and support mechanisms for the process because what I've seen is people embark on the process and then when it starts getting messy or hard, they just abandon it because it's much easier to use Archie's word to go back to the default mode. So I think it is important to have external mentoring and support and facilitation. You have to step four, analyze your deep structure dynamics because until you really get to the root of that, you're never going to change the culture of the organization because that's where the culture ultimately dwells in all these deep structure, phenomenon that we just learned to accept and deal with. And fifth is to create timelines and very concrete targets and how you're going to monitor whether the change process is moving forward or not. And sixth and final, I encourage people to not be taken aback by the problems, the messes, the confusion, the dilemmas that can come on the way, but to make sure that they celebrate that they are engaged in the process itself and to celebrate even the smallest successes. That's how I try to go about it with organization so far. Thank you so much. It is such a deep complex topic but you've managed to break it down for me, for everyone listening so clearly. And I think the way that you've illustrated the four P's but also gone into the complexities that of the self but also the deeper hidden structures, you've given us a huge amount to think about and also those steps about how do I do this as an individual and what would that look like is incredibly powerful. And I have to say, I love the image that you've left me with about the balance in the diamond and making it sparkle. I think that's such a powerful way for me to look at it. I mean, listening to you, Shulatha. I wondered if I can come to you actually just to explore a bit about your previous organization and the journey that you went on with when you embedded the feminist leadership principles and just reflect on that from your personal perspective and also to see if it's maybe influenced your leadership style, you've touched on this a little bit, an organizational approach more broadly. Thanks, Shulatha. So I came back to Australia after some time working out of Australia and joined an organization called OSCAR, which was a humanitarian organization, quite conservative in as far as if you mentioned the words human rights in the board at the time I joined the board chairhead, a bit of visceral reaction just to mentioning the word human rights. Wonderful, wonderful head, but there were things like that, that's not what we do. We do things for poor people. Don't talk about human rights. So it's quite conservative, but then that organization merged into action aid, international and became action aid Australia early on in my time there as the CEO. And action aid was the first place actually where for me, because I used to get very confused when people used to talk about gender work and gender and development as it was at that time, as far as, you know, it's about women and it's about men and it's about both of these things. I did find it both confusing and a bit distracting at time because it seemed it could be whatever someone wanted it to be, but when I joined action aid, an action aid was clearly about women's rights. That was quite a pivotal moment for me, you know, building and understanding around this is about women's rights and this is what we work on. Did that lead to the work with Sri Latha where we were really fortunate? I think we must have been about 25 people in Vancouver working with you in an amazing workshop which was, I know, was quite transformation. for many of us, you know, quite a pivotal moment in our lives and careers, because I think I think I can speak on behalf of some of the men because we had conversations. So as we'd never really been taken back to the beginning before and walk through the development of the patriarchy and how it occurred. And so that was quite an eye out the forest. And I think then working at ActionAid Australia as a man leading a women's rights organisation was quite a unique and at times uncomfortable position to be in as well. Although I always thought, you know, myself, I was in, even though it was a lengthy transition in some sort of transitionary role of how do I transform this organisation whilst I'm transforming myself as well. So it was in quite the liberating in many ways being in that position and to prioritise women's rights. But to also promote women's leadership and to distribute leadership through the organisation, sometimes simply when talking about distributing leadership. If we were in a meeting and I was in a meeting and I'd often be chairing a meeting, the people in the room would make a decision about what they wanted to do at the end of that meeting as far as an action. It wasn't coming to the most senior person in the room or the senior leaders in the room. It was the room that would make a decision. So just making some small inroads culturally in that organisation made things different. And to really promote women's leadership in the organisation to the point where when I left every other, every other executive was a woman on the exact team. My deputy took my role when I left and it became an all women's leadership team. And it was something I still feel really quite privileged by to have been in that position to establish that organisation. And it's striving today thankfully too, which is wonderful. But it was really interesting in terms of looking at hidden power structures and intersectionality. It was interesting where that took me as well because I remember talking with a friend who worked at an institute called the Jambana Institute, which is an Aboriginal Institute in the University of Technology of Sydney. And we were talking at that time the months before I left about how would we decolonise action aid? And it was going to be done through a feminist leadership perspective aligned with an Aboriginal approach to this country as the custodians of this country. We were going to look at how do we combine these two belief systems and decolonise all the policies, practices, procedures of the organisation from those two perspectives but coming across a number of others. So it is interesting in the, I mentioned that in the context of how feminist leadership took me to that point at 2017 when decolonisation only really became an issue in humanitarianism some time after that. So it sort of opened up, freed up the thinking that we had. So that was incredibly valuable. But I think, I mean, like I was saying earlier, certainly became much more collaborative. Then I had been previously, but also the shift in the culture that feminist leadership drove as well in terms of, it goes back to a little bit towards who laugh at saying as well that we could easily become a social justice organisation but would that have had feminist leadership and feminist values in its core without the understanding we're building around feminist leadership? And I, you know, it was probably not. But the whole aim of the organisation and the culture of the organisation around social justice was driven by those values which led to that culture and the organisation. So it was quite a remarkable period really. And I don't think that would have happened, you know, the success we had just reshaping that organisation without that work on feminist leadership, building understanding and the work on transforming self and it's something that we're, yeah, I think a lot of us are very proud of actually. I think a bit of pride is okay sometimes. Thanks, Archie. I mean, thank you for your openness. It's incredibly impactful to get a sense of someone's personal journey and where feminist leadership has taken you and your thinking but also, you know, reflecting on the organisation more broadly. So thank you. I mean, we've talked about, we've heard what feminist leadership is from you both. We've talked about individuals and organisations and how they can embark on this journey and Shalty walked us through those steps and we've talked about what we can expect and what difference it can make. It would be remiss if us not to also focus on the challenges on the pathway to feminist leadership and how to tackle these as well as, you know, critiques of feminist leadership. So my final question is really to both of you and to love them maybe I can come to you first. But what does that look like to you? What if you come across on your journey in terms of those challenges and, you know, if there are any critiques or just, you know, how do we tackle those challenges? Thanks, Rachel. I think Archie's already actually flagged, you know, some of the challenges. So maybe I'll focus on a few others. There is obviously the challenge of the, which I think in some ways is the biggest one, which is certain beliefs about and attitudes to power and leadership. And I think our socialisation about what leadership looks like, you know, which begins from our very, very earliest years, you know, who's the boss of the household, for example, the family. So I think this socialisation and the way we then internalise certain imagery about what is leadership, how it should be practiced, creates a real major psychological and, you know, practical barrier. That's one of the biggest challenges. I, in fact, I remember that one of the senior women leaders in action aid, you know, because after Archie brought me in to do that workshop, there were a series of others also that happened. And one, a very senior woman, a country director in action aid told me that she had to abandon a lot of her attempts at feminist leadership practices, because she felt she was losing the respect of her team. And especially of her senior team, that they felt she was some sort of, you know, soft touch that they could manipulate her, push her around, etc. So I think what that taught me is the challenges, it can't be one person, which is why in my steps to advancing feminist leadership, I talk about the need to mobilise everyone in the organisation, a process that involves everyone in the organisation to understand this. And you can see from Archie's example, it's when it becomes a collective experiment and a collective process that it has a greater chance of success. But this for me is a very serious and important barrier that we have to tackle is the imagery of what a leader looks like, how they behave, etc. Has been so embedded for so many, you know, thousands of years of patriarchal leadership that we really have to tackle that one. I think the other challenge that I'd like to focus on, or maybe what I'll do is mention some of the critiques of feminist leadership that are linked to this point I've just made. about the internalized and widespread and the embedded imagery about leadership and what it looks like and how it should be done. Many of the critiques that I've heard and have come across in my work is, first of all, it doesn't work because this feminist leadership business, you know, it sounds very nice but it doesn't work in the real world, it's too messy. Hierarchy is essential especially in large organizations so you can't have all this. So, you know, there are a lot of stereotypes that feminist leadership means flat organizations that non- Hierarchy means mess. Actually, non- Hierarchy means you have to create different kinds of structures. Lacover hierarchy doesn't mean no structure. You have to have so there's this whole, you know, sort of critique that comes. It's too messy, it doesn't work, blah blah. Then there's the critique of, you see the problem with this is these feminist leadership models is, who's the boss? Decision making and authority chains are so get confused. Accountability gets blurred. Nobody knows, you know, who's in charge. All this collective power, shared leadership, all this business, it makes things much more confusing and difficult. But of course, is that men can't do it because they won't be respected but even women who do it, in the example I just gave, feel that they lose control and that they won't be respected. So, these are some of the common critiques. I think second challenge I'd like to focus on is that there is no recipe, there is no map because every organization is different, every organization is unique and it has to create its own pathway for this transformation and for really advancing feminist leadership. And there will be mess, there will be setbacks and there will be this periodic urge to scurry back to the known and familiar sort of hierarchies and leadership styles. But it's a really, really worthwhile journey if you, but you have to stick with it because each organization and each person in leadership has to work out the pathway for themselves, for that entity which is unique, which is why I feel external support and mentoring is a very good mechanism to. So, what I always say is that look, the goal is not to become the perfect feminist organization with the perfect feminist leadership, that's not the goal, it's about being the next most feminist version of yourselves. The next best version of yourselves based on feminist leadership principles, that's the goal. Let me stop there and hand over to Archie for. Archie any final comments on that or building on what she'll have to say? Yeah, maybe just examples of a challenge. I know when I talked about the journey of transforming an organization, transforming ourselves. It's interesting when we did that because we it's quite an iterative process in terms of how we built an understanding amongst an organization. Of women's rights of feminist leadership and how that inspired social justice. When we started with a conversation around power and talking about power over power with power under power within and through the likes, through the, I suppose the prism of a human rights based approach initially, which a conversation like that had never taken place in the organization. It's a funny story, actually. The first place that landed was in that the place, which is the natural enemy of the NGO, the office car park. It became a conversation around well. People were quite right. Why is it that the senior team have got all the car parks and why are we distributing them a boxy organization? It was right, actually. That's what we were on doing. It was a logical, one of those most complex places like who gets the car park. Every time we used to hear someone talk about the car park, I used to just have to share the tier and walk away because that's one of those conversations has never solved. It was interesting that that was applied to there. It also had big challenging conversations, actually. People would be asking, how do we define poverty? People were used to monetary-focused approaches to what poverty is. When you start talking about a denial of basic human rights, talked about how people weren't receiving the services and having their rights protected by duty bearers who were required to do that and leading to further denial of rights. When we got into these conversations, then that naturally started spinning into conversations, which were still to come in terms of understanding a feminist leadership, but it led to more of a social justice framework. That sounds simple saying that, but that conversation really went on for weeks and months off on memory because to get people into that sort of setting, to understand basic concepts really from different angles, then to overlay onto women's rights sort of feminist leadership lens and social justice. It took some real time. It's funny because now I'm sure everyone in that place feels like it's in the DNA. It's in the bricks of mortar at the building, which it is. At the beginning, I think we started the pre-conversation head. You almost crack open a spice where you can have that conversation and how gentle a crack can you give on that nut to get it open enough so that you can do it. It's challenging but incredibly rewarding. Thank you. I've honestly listened to you both on this topic for hours. I'm going to have to draw us to a flow, but I wanted to say thank you to both. I mean, my takeaway from listening to two bows and you've ended with it as well, Archie, is that there's no recipe, there's no map, there's going to be maps, there's going to be setbacks, but wow, is it worth it? So honestly, the insights that you've shared with us have been incredible. So thank you both. I'm hugely privileged and very grateful to have spoken with you both. It just leaves me to say a final thank you and I hope that to everyone listening that you found it is thought provoking and enlightening as I have. If nothing else, go back to those steps that Shrelath is shared with us so that you've got an idea of how to explore further. So thank you to you, the audience as well, for listening to the Humanitarian Leadership Academy's podcast Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives and goodbye and thank you both.