Women in Power

Women and Leadership

FORMER AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER

Julia Gillard and Nigerian economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala come from different continents and different political worlds, but they join together to discuss the shared challenges faced by many women in public office. From the February 2, 2021, online program “Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: Women and Leadership.” JULIA GILLARD, Former Prime Minister of Australia; Co-author, Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA, Former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Coauthor, Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons In Conversation with JENNIFER PALMIERI, Former White House Communications Director; Co-host, “The Circus” on Showtime; Author, She Proclaims: Our Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World

JENNIFER PALMIERI: Both Julia and Ngozi are trailblazers. Julia spent her time in office rebuilding the Australian economy, prioritizing national health initiatives. Ngozi served twice as Nigeria’s finance minister, where she successfully negotiated the cancellation of over $18 billion in Nigerian debt. These women led and sought to create a better nation while simultaneously fighting public sexism and gender stereotypes.

I want to thank both of you, Julia and Ngozi for joining us. I spent a lot of time with Hillary Clinton, as you both know, in planes in 2015 and ’16, and she spoke really highly of both of you, the work that you have done and also just some of the great moments that she had with you at these international

Photos, top right: Julia Gillard, as prime minister, greets new Australian citizens. (Photo by Nick-D.) Bottom right: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala arrives for a press conference. (Photo by Jay Louvion.)

conferences where it seems like the women might get together and swap some stories and experiences. I understand that is where you two had the idea for writing this book.

What was it that you really wanted to convey? I just wrote a book that’s A Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World, and my sort of fundamental belief was I want women to understand why they have the doubts that they have about themselves so that they can move on, because I really believe in them.

Did you feel like sexism was too prevalent but people weren’t talking about it or that women were not seeing what they should see? What was the underlying goal here? JULIA GILLARD: Jennifer, thank you for your works, too; for both the Declaration of Independence and Dear Madam President. You caused an incident on my local beach. I go walking on my local beach in Adelaide, Australia, listening to audio books and podcasts. And I was listening to Dear Madam President at one point and getting a little bit teary when you talked about your sister. Someone came up to me on the beach and said, “Are you all right?” Which was very, very nice of them. I’m like, “Oh, I’m listening to this book.”

But for me, the motivation in writing our book together particularly was I certainly came out of my experience in politics with a lot of questions in my head about gender and politics. When you’re living it in the moment, you often don’t have time to analyze it, so you get more reflective afterwards. I was constantly asking myself the questions, How much of what I experienced was about that era in Australian politics? How much of it was about judgment calls the government I led made and I made? And how much of it was simply because I was the first woman to do the job?

That was bubbling in me. Then Ngozi and I increasingly got to know each other at international meetings. I am the chair of the Global Partnership for Education. Ngozi then was the chair of the Global Vaccine Alliance. We served on an education commission together. So we were thrown together, and we started talking about these questions. There were so many big events happening in the world right then for women, including of course what we could see happening with Hillary and the very gendered nature of the campaigning against her. So increasingly we thought, We’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to do something about this. What are we going to do about this? And the idea was born to write a book, which brought together the research and evidence about women and leadership, but to also put it in the context of the lived experience of eight great women leaders.

We wanted through that to sort of globalize and systematize the debate. It’s very hard for an individual woman to come out and say, “This happened to me,” because often people will say, “Oh, she’s just complaining about something that happened to her.” And it’s hard to get traction on these issues globally.

Australians might know about something that happened to me. Brits might know about something that happened to Theresa May, but you don’t often get the bringing together and the compare-and-contrast right around the world. So we wanted the book to do that, to give women permission to speak, because it wasn’t just them. And to make sure that this was a book that spoke across cultures and contexts. PALMIERI: That’s really a smart way to approach it. . . . People are so sure that they’re not sexist, they’re blind to gender bias. So they just think it’s that woman that’s having the problem. Seeing these eight women, all world leaders—people like Hillary Clinton and Theresa May and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Jacinda Ardern—there really was a commonality that was interesting to me.

Ngozi, did you approach it from a position of hope or optimism for women? You said that a lot of young women come to you, they look to you as a mentor, and there’s only so many women you can take on as projects and that this book is sort of a manual for them. But are you optimistic about women’s future, and is that how you’re approaching the book? NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA: Yes. I’m optimistic about women’s future, but I’m also in a hurry. I think that if we continue at the pace we’re going, it will take us years and years. I think one of the things we wanted to see, based on the experience that we had— which was not always easy, even though I told people is a privileged to have been able to serve my country—you ask why political leadership, even business leadership, is so gendered? Why is it that only 57 countries out of the 193 United Nations members have had women leaders? Why is it that in any given year it’s like 13 or 14 leaders that we have? I mean, some people might say there is progress, because there were four in 2000, and now we have 13 or 14, but just look at the pace at which—only 57 countries—then you ask yourself, Why is it that only 6.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women or 6 percent of the FTSE 100?

So these are the issues that we’re asking. Why is leadership so gendered, and what is the experience? How can we help women leaders also put their experience in a broader context and see that they are not alone and their lived experience—as Julia put it—is the same? They can find similarities, even with women at the top. And the women don’t know it all—that’s the interesting thing. PALMIERI: One of the lessons that you have in the book is, Don’t expect women [to have all the answers]. Women even at the highest levels—when Julia Gillard is the prime minister of Australia, it turns out she didn’t have exactly all of the answers. I worked for Barack Obama; he didn’t have all the answers and he was president of the United States. But women feel like they have to. I feel like there’s such good practical advice in here for women. Let go of this notion that you’re going to always know exactly what to do. Did you have an experience like that, Ngozi?

I graduated from college in 1988, so I started working in the late eighties, and I found that the women’s rights movement was done. It moves over. It was solved. I thought I might have to work harder than the men, but that we would eventually catch up. Then about 20 years in, I just looked at the stats that you just named, and taunts about people like Hillary, like, We’re not getting there, we’re not making that kind of progress.

But what did you expect when you came into the workplace? You started from the financial side of governing; what did you expect your life was going to be like as a woman in that industry, and how did it play out? Is it similar to what Julia relays in her side of the book? OKONJO-IWEALA: Well, a little bit different in the sense that I had no illusions that things were going to be all right and we were done. I didn’t feel that. But I thought that things would move a little faster than they have with respect to women in positions [of] leadership. Being the first female finance minister was a lot of pressure in the job. I was just focused on making sure—because this had never happened, and there were people who felt this is a powerful job, why is a woman in it?—I felt the pressure to make sure I delivered, because if I didn’t, then women would be done.

So there was a lot of that pressure. I felt we had to go faster. I absolutely have to show that women can deliver on this job and do it well. I’m happy to say that in my country, after my service, we’ve had three female finance ministers since then. So it really did deliver in terms of showing that we can do it and

“Being the first female finance minister was a lot of pressure. . . . I felt the pressure to make sure I delivered, because if I didn’t, then women would be done.”

—NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA

there should be no reason why we shouldn’t be in that job. PALMIERI: And then America with the secretary of state, because Madeline Albright was the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice was the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was the secretary of state. One of my colleagues from the Obama White House, their daughter said something about when John Kerry became secretary of state, “But I thought only women could be secretary of state; why are they letting boys do it?” Boys can do it, too. OKONJO-IWEALA: Well, we are certainly ahead of the U.S. in Nigeria, because you’re just getting your first female finance minister in Janet Yellen, right? PALMIERI: The first one, and we have our first female vice president. It was remarkable to see yesterday they had a meeting with Republican senators about a COVID relief bill. It was the first time I had seen our new vice president in sort of a relatively casual setting, which was sitting in the Oval Office. You know how if you’re looking at the Oval Office, the president is in the chair on the right and the vice president is in the chair on the left. And there she is, our first Black woman biracial vice president doing her job. It’s really exciting.

But Julia, there was a lot that I related to when you were describing your way up in politics. Because I sort of knew I needed to get along with men and I enjoy working with men and I had good male colleagues, but I was also sort of aware of, Am I playing the guy’s game too much? I think you said someone had to push you on this. Did you get to be prime minister by playing the boys’ game and playing it a little too well?

Can you talk about that, in real time, what it was like for you coming up and then at some point you had this reflection that, “Oh, I just thought it was the way the world was and then I realized what I’m doing is modeling myself after the men and trying to fit into their world?” That’s probably part of the reason why we keep hitting these glass ceilings. GILLARD: Absolutely. I think this is an important question for us all to be talking about now, about how much we want to take current power structures and how much we want to change current power structures. For me, I’m sitting in my hometown of Adelaide, Australia. This is where I grew up. I went to school here. I got to go to university here. That wasn’t a usual thing for the Gillard family, so I thought it was a real privilege. My journey into politics started at Adelaide University. I got involved in a campaign against government funding cutbacks, and then I got involved in the student union, and then got involved at the national level and on and on it went. Like you, I made the assumption kind of early on that, yes, life was still different for women, but it was changing fast. I could be part of that change and contribute to that change, but I would . . . spend most of my working life in a time when gender equality had happened.

So I’m of that generation of Labor [Party] women that fought for the affirmative action rule to bring more women into Parliament. It made a huge difference. When we got the rule in the early 1990s, the number of women going into parliament from the Labor Party was like 14 percent. Now the national parliament, the state parliaments around the nation, the Labor team is generally around 50 percent. So things have changed, which is fantastic. And better than the other side of politics, which hasn’t gone for an affirmative action target. So it does show even in the Australian environment that it can make a big difference. But I certainly accepted political structures as I found them.

The essence of prospering in the Labor Party is there are factions. . . ; you’ve got to be able to work rooms, you’ve got to be able to work numbers. I did all of that. I got into what is a very adversarial political environment, the Parliament with our ritualized question time where everybody really has a go at it. You know obviously our Parliament is modeled on Westminster, modeled on the House of Commons in the U.K., but we’ve had British members of Parliament come and watch our question time and they’re like, “What on Earth was that?” Because it’s so fiery and so combative. I set out to show that a woman could lead, could dominate in this very adversarial environment. I don’t regret doing that. I think it had to be done to show that this is an environment where women can prosper. PALMIERI: They can do the job done the way it’s always been done, which means just the way a man has always done it, but she can do that. You felt the need to prove that. GILLARD: Yes. In our politics you can’t come through for leadership unless you can hold your own in this very contested structure. So I had to show that I could do that. I didn’t have time or the space as the first woman to lead Australia to open up the next set of questions, which is, Do we have to do it like this?

I really think about the contrast between where we are and where New Zealand is. Jacinda Ardern is the third woman to lead her nation. No one in New Zealand, least of all Jacinda Ardern when she was thinking about politics and she said this clearly in her book, she never thought that “I can’t do this because I’m a woman.” She knew women could do this. She’d seen Helen Clark do it for a decade or more; that question had been answered. She was asking herself a set of questions about, Can I do this, the sort of individual I am? Can I do this?” But being the third to come to the job, she’s got the space to ask those next round of questions, which is, Can we have a political structure that works with kindness and empathy at the foreground, because that’s the kind of leader that I want to be. She’s made that the watch words of her leadership—kindness, empathy—but she’s very clear that that’s part of her as an individual, but also part of the political space she inherited because they’re beyond the question of, Can women do this? And they’re asking those deeper questions about what’s the different way of doing this.

I think your work, Jennifer, causes us to look at those questions, those sort of secondround questions about how else can we do this and allow people in all sorts of styles to be leaders. I’ve often joked, I think “Well now, we’ve got to gender equality when a woman who presents for political office says, “You should elect me because I’m the hardest bitch in town and I get things done.” She can get elected and the man who comes forward and says, “You know what, what’s central to me is I like to be really kind and to have really high performing teams. And if I was your leader, then that’s the kind of leader I would be.” When we can mix it all up so no one is judging anyone through the prism of gender, that’s when we know that we’ve gotten to gender equality. PALMIERI: With Hillary’s experience I feel like we had to prove that she could do the job the same way as it has always been done. Then you’re like, well, that’s how a man would do it. We had to put her on stage with Donald Trump to prove that she could hold her own there and not get flustered. Then people will come back at her and they say, “Well, why can’t she show any emotion?” That’s where you get to the next generation. A woman didn’t win the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, but we had a lot of candidates. It’s six candidates that were on the debate stage—six women—and they were doing it all their own way. And they were being judged differently. There was still sexism and gender coverage and all that, but it was much better.

Ngozi, Julia had mentioned you all put hypotheses in the book based off of the conversations that you had with these women leaders about things that might help them get a good start. Like, has a young girl been raised to believe that you could do anything? It’s interesting, that does seem to be a commonality. That was something that I know from talking with Hillary that she thought [about regarding] her parents. Interestingly, she told me she has never felt insecure about her looks. Even though her wardrobe and her hair was constantly commented upon, to say the least—it bothered her that they weren’t talking about issues, but she was confident and secure in who she was and what she looked like, and didn’t really care because of that rearing as a young girl. Can you talk about why that’s important and what you found with these other women on empowering girls? OKONJO-IWEALA: Jennifer, you set it out very well. One thing common to all the women was that in growing up, nobody ever told them they couldn’t do things boys could do. PALMIERI: And was this true in your experience too, Ngozi? OKONJO-IWEALA: Absolutely my experience as well—and in Julia’s experience. In my experience and my culture—well, I’m sure it’s in other cultures too—the first child is expected to be, I don’t want to say a leader, but to show a good example to all the others. That means you have to be able to do so many things. In essence, I had parents that believed there should be no difference between the boys and girls. I actually thought they expected more of us; myself and my sister, we were expected to do a lot more than the boys. They got away with a lot more.

So I feel that if you look at the experiences of all the women—you look at [former Liberian President] Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was fearless growing up; she felt she could do anything and everything that the boys could do. You look at [European Central Bank President] Christine Lagarde and you see her the first of, I think, three or four boys. They were four, and she was expected to be in charge. If you look at each and every one of them, there wasn’t this questioning. You’ve mentioned Hillary already; there was actually the expectation that you could do this. We believe that the kind of nurturing that you get as you’re growing up, the environment you grew up in, matters a lot. PALMIERI: It’s such a great piece of advice, because that’s something any parent can do right now. No matter what else changes in society, if you empower your children, girls and boys both, to believe they can, that really does take hold and sort of inoculates these women against other obstacles they are going to encounter.

Another thing, Ngozi, your first year as a finance minister was sort of maybe not quite the situation, but talk about the glass cliff. People have heard about glass ceilings; glass cliffs is sort of when a woman is like, “Sure, you can be in charge now that everything’s a mess.” [For example,] Mary Barra in the United States, who walked into GM when GM was not in great shape. This is something that we have seen repeated, particularly in business in the U.S. But I don’t think people really know that term. Tell us about that, and if you do feel like your experience as finance minister was for a trial run as a glass cliff? OKONJO-IWEALA: Glass cliffs—exactly when things are not going so well, that’s when women are called in. If you look at our women leaders, they’ve had many glass cliff moments. My favorite one is when Christine Lagarde was a partner at Baker McKenzie and the firm was going through so many troubles, so none of the men wanted to touch it, and they came to her to try and pull it all together, and she foolishly accepted to do it. And she did it. So in my own career I’ve had quite a few glass cliff moments. Even as a fairly junior person at the World Bank, I remember one particular mission where it was a mess. Nobody wanted to lead it, and I got the chance.

But as the minister of finance, yes, in a sense you could call it a glass cliff moment in the sense that my president said he brought me there so we could get debt relief. We had $30 billion in debt, and debt service was about $2 billion a year, and it was getting very expensive. I had to figure out how to get around and get rid of that. I think the second thing was the economy was growing at about 2.3 percent. And with a population growth rate of about 2.5, we were having sort of negative per capita growth and that wasn’t good enough. So the other thing was, How do we lift the economy? So very, very tough issues, but putting together a good team with the backing of the president we were able to do it. We got debt relief—$30 billion wiped off, of which $18 billion was completely wiped off. And our economy tripled in growth, almost to 6 percent, during my time as finance minister.

So we met that glass cliff. But it was very tough going and there was always this feeling

that if I don’t do it, this is going to be a disaster not only just for me or the country, but for women. PALMIERI: It can be an opportunity too, right? That’s what you’ve also said. OKONJO-IWEALA: Absolutely. Julia puts it very well when she says that the other thing is that men feel they can get other opportunities so they will often walk away from a glass cliff, but women feel this may be my only chance and so they go for it. That’s another thing, and that is true. I joked elsewhere that perhaps the WTO I’m trying to get to will be the biggest glass cliff moment I ever have in my life. [On March 1, 2021, Okonjo-Iweala assumed her new position as director-general of the World Trade Organization; she is the first woman and the first African to hold that position. —Ed.] PALMIERI: When Theresa May becomes prime minister after Brexit falls apart and keeps falling apart, and then the conservatives in the U.K. are like “Yeah, you tried”—it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know that was called a glass cliff, but I definitely understood what was happening in there. GILLARD: Jennifer, I think it’s important just where this term comes from. It raises an important issue. It comes from research which was undertaken after the very established newspaper, The Times of London, had published a piece saying women CEOs cause low share prices. So they’d done a simple correlation: businesses with women CEOs, low share prices, women CEOs are the problem. And researchers came along and unpacked all of that and said, No, no, no, no, no; what’s happening here is low share prices, businesses in trouble, appoint women CEOs. So if a business is going well, you keep that male CEO. [When] you’ve got to get another CEO, you get one a lot like him, another man; if it’s going badly, then you say, “Ah, let’s try something completely new. I know, we’ve never had a woman.”

The reason it’s important to understand that is whilst many women step forward for a glass cliff moment, like Ngozi did or Christine Lagarde and make a success out of it, many women will step forward for a glass cliff moment and it’ll still be a big problem. The business won’t go well, or the politics won’t go well. People would say that looking at Theresa May, the politics of Brexit didn’t go well. And we’ve just got to be clear [about] cause and effect, otherwise people will walk away saying, “Ah, I knew she couldn’t do it.” And if she couldn’t do it, maybe women generally can’t do it. So we’ve got to be really clear that often women are

“When we can mix it all up so no one is judging anyone through the prism of gender, that’s when we know that we’ve gotten to gender equality.”

—JULIA GILLARD

only given permission to lead when it’s pretty close to mission impossible. PALMIERI: Yeah, which is why you should give women permission to lead. Which is why Kamala Harris is walking into a tough vice presidency, because things are harder in the U.S. right now, but that is not a glass cliff moment. That is handing the button of leadership to a woman that’s just ready to lead and be a good partner. But this is so great about this book and the practical advice in it; you’re shedding specific light on a specific problem with an action for what women should do about it; not all books accomplish that.

Julia, the hypothesis of “She’s a Bit of a Bitch”—this is one of the chapters, friends, I’m just saying—but you wrote that you thought as a first female prime minister, that you might encounter some sexism early on, but that would abate. Instead it got worse, and that was certainly my experience with Hillary. I think it’s because with her coverage, because reporters don’t want to be sexist, don’t think they’re sexist; I think that makes all of us—men, women, not just reporters—sort of blind to the gender biases that we all hold in our heads. What I found was her press coverage just compounded. It kept getting worse, because it was like they were suspicious of her. Then they got more suspicious of her, and gender could never be part of it because then that would unravel all the work they had done previously.

But with you, my impression is that kind of coverage and sexist attacks sort of built up to the point where you gave what is known as the “Misogyny Speech.” I think most women in America are not familiar with this. So can you explain what was happening that drove you to give this speech? Tell us a little bit about it and the reaction. It’s really important for people to hear about this. I went back and re-read it today. It’s remarkably bold, direct, like all the things women are told not to do when they’re talking about sexism and gender. But you did it and it had such a big impact. GILLARD: I’m happy to talk about that, but the foundation stone of all of this is me making an error in thinking that when I became prime minister, that everybody would be very focused on the fact that I was the first woman in the early days of my prime ministership from both positive and negative perspectives. I expected that there would be a lot of “That’s fantastic; we’ve got the first woman, this is incredibly meaningful for Australian women and girls,” and there was a lot of that. But I also expected the

maximum discomfort of people like, “Oh, I’m not sure, this hasn’t happened before. Yeah, there’s something about her. I’m a bit uncomfortable.” I expected the maximum of that to be in the early period, and then time would pass. I’d just been doing the job and, we’ve talked about doing the job, hopefully succeeding in the job and people would just start concentrating on that.

So then the dialogue would move from “She’s the first woman” to “Oh, I really liked that health-care policy” or “I really hate that schools policy” or whatever it is, but sort of politics as usual. What I actually found was as I governed, you end up making decisions that some people find to be controversial. We particularly decided to enact an economy-wide emissions trading scheme here in Australia as a climate change policy, Australians and Americans by far being the most carbon-intensive people on the planet. So this was a big and controversial policy. As that political [issue] played out, . . . the gender insult became the go-to weapon. They were people at rallies holding up signs, referring to me as a witch and a bitch and things like that.

The frame that was put around me was “She’s ruthless, she’s ambitious. She doesn’t have kids. She doesn’t understand families. How does she understand what impact all of this is going to have on ordinary family life? Because she’s just a ruthless career woman, not a mother, not a nurturer, not a carer.” It all played out like that. And because in the early days of my prime ministership I had decided I wasn’t going to foreground gender, because everybody else was doing that and I thought it would fall away over time, when it got as contested as that, it was hard for me to start foregrounding gender at that moment. And even if I had, people would have said, “Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she, because now she’s trying to distract from the fact that the government’s in controversial political times.”

What ended up happening with what’s come to be known as the “Misogyny Speech” is the question time that I spoke about before in Australian politics. Parliament used to sit about 20 weeks a year, four days a week. Every parliamentary day, there’s an hourand-a-half where the opposition without notice can ask the government ministers and prime minister any question, no notice given at all. And almost always overwhelmingly the questions go to the prime minister, maybe a few to other senior ministers. It’s an incredibly combative time. Actually president Obama once said to me that he envied the question time structure, because you could get your message out to the nation. To which I undiplomatically replied, “Are you mad? This is a pretty crazy thing to wish for. This is a blood sport.” PALMIERI: He would love to take Republicans on directly, if he could argue [and] refute their arguments in real time. That would have— GILLARD: He would have enjoyed it, I think. But gee, it’s tough. It’s really tough. So there was a political incident in Parliament where the man I had supported to become speaker of the house of representatives had been unmasked as having sent some dreadfully sexist text messages, not something I could have known at the time I supported him, but don’t let the facts get in the way of a good political story. So I walked into Parliament that day, thinking the opposition is going to use this question time to try and

skewer me as a hypocrite on the question of sexism, because I supported this man to be speaker.

And after everything I’d listened to about myself, the number of times I hadn’t replied, the number of times I’ve bitten my lip not to reply, what really welled up in me was cool anger and I was ready to take this on in question time. What actually happened was the opposition, instead of starting to ask questions, moved a motion to have an immediate parliamentary debate. So the “Misogyny Speech” is my off-the-cuff reply in that immediate parliamentary debate. I think you can see the calling at work as I sort of finally address all of the sexism and misogyny that I had had to put up with as prime minister. A lot of women look at that speech and say, “I could never do anything like that.” My responses were, one, Parliament’s a pretty stylized environment. People don’t wander around workplaces, quite conducting themselves like that. So don’t mark yourself down because you’re not about to channel Australia in question time when you go to work or go to your local community group, or even your meeting of your political party locally.

But the other thing is I couldn’t have done that several years before, either. Standing and putting your case in the moment—that’s a honed craft. I had to hone it in Australian politics. Then I brought it to the fore in that moment. So I hope that that gives people some comfort that if they are going to start taking sexist arguments on, men and women, that the more you decide “I’m going to be upfront about this,” the easier it will become, the more you do it. These are ultimately not innate skills; they are learned skills. They’re things that people can get better at over time. PALMIERI: And when you’re pushed and right is on your side in the moment, you’re going to be able to summon what it is that you really want to say. Because, I can’t believe that you did that off the cuff. Everyone has to go read it and watch it. It is amazing. I mean, you said that it’s gotten so much attention that you feel like it’s overshadowed some of the things that you have done. I know that with President Obama, maybe a sort of corollary experience was he didn’t talk a lot, particularly the first time, about race. And he would not usually talk about his own personal experience. And then after Trayvon Martin, a young Black teenager, was shot by sort of a vigilante, the guy was tried and was acquitted. It was just devastating to Black Americans. And President Obama went to the briefing room and for the first time [said], “This is what my life has been like as a Black man in America.” And it’s just pretty devastating to hear from him.

It was not scripted. He just was like, “This is what I’m going to say.” And he went down the next day and did it, but very personal, which he normally didn’t do. I experienced this. People said this to me. I think that probably there are things that he maybe thought he was going to be remembered more for and that speech is one of the things, but how do you feel in retrospect now seven, eight years out about having done that speech and the sort of moment, how it is remembered in history? GILLARD: It’s taken me a while to kind of be at peace with it. I was in Parliament for 15 years, I was deputy prime minister for three years, I was prime minister for three years. We did big things that really mattered to the Australian community. We had an impact internationally and it apparently all comes down to one speech, and I did feel a frustration with that. But I’d have to say the more I moved away from my immediate parliamentary career, the more I traveled and did things internationally, I would literally walk down a street in London or New York or wherever, and a woman would dive across the road to say, “Oh my God, Julia Gillard, I’ve watched your speech.” It would be apparent after a few minutes conversation with them that that’s the only thing they knew about me. The only thing they knew about Australian politics and for most of them, other than the very basics— you know, koalas, big sharks, big spiders, snakes, the sorts of things people know about Australia, unfortunately, despite being a very beautiful, safe place, other than that, it was the only thing they knew about Australia. That helped me settle with it. I thought, “Well, if in this quick look at Australia, this is one of the things they know about us, I’m happy with it.” PALMIERI: Yeah. It’s better than focusing on spiders and sharks.

Ngozi, Julia says that she’s always been sort of a feminist. Julia describes herself as an analytical feminist early on, and that you feel more of the emotional tug of feminism. Ngozi you described yourself as a womanist, which I know actually has an American origin, but talk about what that means. You also talk about how networking with other women hadn’t been a priority for you in real time, but that you feel like being in community with women is important. Can you talk about those things? OKONJO-IWEALA: Yeah. I think that the term womanist was coined [by] an American, Alice Walker, but it was magnified by my very own aunt, an aunt who was a professor of English at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. She amplified that term. When I thought about it, I wanted to use it to describe myself in the sense that I never ceased to be amazed at how women managed to accomplish so many things. Whether it’s out here or in my own continent, everywhere. I just look at them and I am filled with awe. I’m a woman myself, but when I look at other women and what they can do, I just feel this feeling of empathy, pride, awe at what they can do. Juggling so many things at once while trying a career, sometimes a family, sometimes not. Having to cope in gendered environments. So it’s that feeling of being proud to be a woman, feeling what women feel and empathizing with them that makes me say I’m a womanist, because I really do relate to that. PALMIERI: What about networking with other women? You wrote about that, too; maybe when you were working in finance, you’re one of the only few women, that’s not something that’s a priority, but why is it important? OKONJO-IWEALA: Well, I think networking is important. But for me, I think it’s networking both women and men. And we haven’t talked about men and we need to bring that to the fore that we can’t solve this gender gap, this gender issue, the gendered environment, unless we have men with us. And one of my dreams about this book is to talk to an audience of only men. PALMIERI: Yes. OKONJO-IWEALA: Because I think that they have a role to play. Networking is good, but encourage women not just to network with women, but network with men. And encourage men to feel that they really can do something about the environment in which they can call it out when they see a sexist gendered moment. They can mentor women. There are so many things that they themselves can do. So it doesn’t have to feel like this is all for women trying to solve women’s problems. When you talk about networking, that’s how I come about it.

But I think it’s something that women should not neglect, because men do it very, very well. That is why they also have an edge. It may be golf; they’re playing golf, they’re networking. It may be a drink somewhere in some club, they are networking. Women don’t do that, and they don’t even have the time [to do it] most of the time. But we strongly encourage [women] not to get away from it because men do it. Just broaden the number of people and the type of environments in which you do it.