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Jenelle: Hi, welcome to Season 5 of Change Happens. I’m Jenelle McMaster and I have the great privilege of speaking with influential and interesting leaders on their experiences of leading change and the lessons that they’ve learned along the way.

News broadcasters: “The mounting loss of life” – “almost a woman a week” – “in the fight against domestic violence” – “killed by men they knew”

Jenelle: Are we going backwards?

It’s a big topic. When it comes to the achievement of gender equality and the fighting for human rights, the path to success requires big changes to happen. It needs to happen in homes, in workplaces, in communities and societies. It also has to happen at many levels. It needs to happen at policy, system, mindsets, cultures. A whole lot of things have to change. The goals are big, they are hairy, they are audacious. The KPIs and the markers of success for achieving them can be unclear and at times seem immovable. With International Women’s Day coming up this month. We thought the CEO of UN Women Australia, Simone Clark, would be the perfect guest to discuss what success looks like in the arena of gender equality and women’s rights.

When it all feels overwhelming, and it certainly can, Simone looks at the impact that can be made on a granular level. She talks about stories. She talks about the creation of empathy. And the changing of lives, one person at a time, and how that can fuel hope and ignite something much bigger.

Simone:  The imagery of the large aircraft leaving Afghanistan and people literally climbing up the landing gear trying to get out, she was pregnant, standing in a drain near the tarmac, breastfeeding her baby and subsequently being able to come to Australia; resettle.

Jenelle: Simone is dedicated to fulfilling her purpose of making an impact that is felt rather than tangibly counted. She’s worked in lots of places, from UNICEF right through to the AFL. And her work has benefited the needs of women and children everywhere and has empowered communities all around the world. Simone’s passion for the causes she believes in and the roles that she takes on makes her journey even more captivating. Here, she shares the lessons she’s learned on being comfortable with discomfort, with creating the space to make big changes and looking for moments of hope even in the darkest of times.

Jenelle: Well, hi, Simone and thank you so much for joining us and kicking off what is now Season 5 of Change Happens.

Simone: Fantastic. Great to be here with you.

Jenelle: I want to start – we can start all over the place – but where I’d like to start is with where you are today. You are the CEO of UN Women Australia and you have been for the past two and half years. What led up to you taking that role?

Simone: It’s been quite a journey as the cliché goes. I have spent a large proportion of my career working in international development, in sustainability, both for the private sector and for the UN as well as for individual organisations and causes. So, it’s been a cumulative build, if you like, to this point. My focus has always been on women and children, to a large extent, and then more broadly in terms of the environment and how we treat the environment and how that has an impact on our livelihoods and humanity more broadly. So, somehow, I’ve always been involved in spaces that try to tackle our big, sort of, hairy, audacious goals as a planet and as humans and really it is the culmination, I think of probably the last 30 years of my work. In particular, working for sustainability and international development and for women and children more broadly. So, it feels like absolutely the right place at the right time after, you know, quite a lengthy career and quite diverse career really. Interesting the things you learn along the way that contribute to where you end up, so to speak.

Jenelle: As you say, a bit of a culmination of so many experiences that you’ve had. What does it feel like now to be personally seated in that position of leadership and to be part of this massive global movement?

Simone: It’s very interesting, I think, in terms of timing, there’s probably been no better nor worse time to be in the gender equality space, and I mean that with all due respect. I think there is collective will globally around the value of women and what they bring and obviously that’s reflected in the sustainable development goals, in particular, number five around gender equality. So, it’s certainly an opportune time to be working in that space, but cumulatively we are also seeing a regression along a number of the statistics. So, it is both a huge responsibility, I think, and a challenge, but also a coalescence of intent which really is the thing that spurs me on every day because I feel like there are a lot of colleagues, a lot of people, including yourself, Jenelle and others who are working in the space who are committed to the contribution of women and how is that is best reflected and how we move the barriers for that sort of full participation of women. So really important time and I think it’s a generational shift; it will continue to be a long game not a short game. So, it’s a wonderful role, a lot of responsibility in terms of trying to bring people along but also it’s very hard to point to a definitive outcome and say, if you invest X you will return Y. We try to do the lot, but I think it’s particularly in the role where we are generating funds for programs in developing countries as well. It’s building that empathy base and that collegiality, for want of a better word, between women and men globally to ensure that women have an equal role to play; an opportunity more than anything really.

Jenelle: You’re right. I mean these are big, hairy, audacious goals that we’ve got here and necessary ones. When I looked at the focus areas of the UN Women Australia website, or actually it was the UN website, there was no shortage of very lofty goals in there, and amongst a number of them were ending violence against women and girls, there was ending poverty through enhancing women’s economic empowerment. There was women’s inclusion in peacemaking processes and negotiations. So lots of really important audacious goals in there. You’re, I mean I think you’re amazing, but you are still human in this. What do you see as success on your watch? How do you measure your contribution? Talk to me about that for yourself.

Simone: Sometimes it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenges we face and with all due respect and with most of my colleagues in the UN and others working in the sector and beyond, it can be a bit overwhelming and I suppose so when you talk to impact it’s really about looking at the outcomes and the impact on a much more granular level. I have had the joy of meeting with individual women that have been touched by UN agencies, like UN Women, UNICEF, UNHCR, and the thing that keeps all of us going I think that work in this sector, in particular, and those who support us, is the fact that there is - even if it’s one woman’s life that we can change – if there is one opportunity or possibility we can open up for a single woman or a community or a country or a gender, that is a really positive thing. So the scale is vast, the challenges are vast, but for me the thing that keeps me going I think is that hope that when you meet women who we work with and they tell you their stories about the impact that we have had in whatever organisation or agency I’ve had the fortune to work for, that’s really at the core, what it is we’re trying to do. You know change takes time, but it is also very individual. So how do you make an impact on one person’s life when you are also reporting on global goals and things like the SDGs and the gender gap report. Those stories are the things that keep us going and there’s a litany of those and most of them are positive, although often in really appalling situations. So, it keeps us all going really.

Jenelle: Yeah, and it’s an interesting point about the power of story in there and moving things. When you and I spoke; we were chatting last week, and I was talking to you about, you know, change and you said, change is less often about that, you know, seminal moment on the big thing that happens, and you said it’s often super slow and happens over a thousand iterations. Tell me a bit more about that and one of those stories that has stood out to you is potentially one of the moments that made that difference to you.

Simone: So I think on a really personal level, throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to women one on one about you know the challenges that they face and more recently towards the middle of last year we held a round table in Brisbane and it was focused on Afghanistan and the women of Afghanistan and I had the good fortune to have a conversation with an amazing woman. I’m sure you’ll remember the imagery of the large aircraft leaving Afghanistan and people literally climbing up the landing gear, trying to get out of Afghanistan in what was a pretty appalling situation, and the woman that I met; she was literally pregnant standing in a drain near the tarmac, near the runway, on that very day, breastfeeding her baby, and had subsequently been able to come to Australia, resettle and had been supported by agencies along the way. And when I stopped and had a conversation with her and she said thank you, and I was like, thank you, I haven’t done anything. But she was – she said you know again, and again, thank you, because support of UN Women and organisations like yours means that I am now here, sheltered, in a transition program, I’m employed and I’d like to do more work and my family are safe. Yeah, when you’re standing there literally putting yourself in her shoes and understanding, albeit from a distance, what she must have gone through, the faith and the hope around that is that we’ll continue to be able to do that. So it goes back to the starting point where we talk about you know one woman’s life, one child’s life, one family’s life, that’s where it starts with.

To know that you can have an impact that’s – I mean to me that’s the reason why we do what we do and why colleagues far braver than I work in these hotspots all over the world. Our rep in Afghanistan is an Australian woman. She’s absolutely amazing and every day she literally risks her life to work with women in Afghanistan and I don’t think you can put a price on that or a value on that, and as you can appreciate, working as a woman in Afghanistan, particularly after recently when international workers in particular, women, were told that they weren’t allowed to work in the country, that became really problematic for a lot of women who were working in international development. So it’s situations like those that really give you grounding in being part of something bigger but also engaging Australian women and men here to understand what that looks like for other women and the shoes that they walk in.

Jenelle: That’s really powerful and I guess even just listening to you describe that woman on the tarmac and talking about her gratitude for being able to work and feeling safe. I mean these feel like basic human rights that should be afforded to anybody. So the fact that that is something that’s being called out is remarkable; is really sad to hear actually, it’s bittersweet.

Simone: It is.

Jenelle: It’s so distressing that we find ourselves in a situation that that should be an exception for her.

Simone: And you know another story was around the FIFA Women’s World Cup last year. I had the good fortune to meet a young team of female footballers who were under the stewardship of a local football club in Melbourne, and they were just excited that they could play football. I mean for them it was just about to be able to get out on the pitch and kick a ball around. But knowing that they were here alone and that their families were back home, potentially unsafe, but they were able to be here under the stewardship of a program. Incredible to think that something as simple as playing football or soccer as we call it, is denied to so many and yet here was a, you know, a great example of Australians doing amazing things for young women and girls who are living under threat of violence every day. It’s those sorts of stories; it’s knowing that somehow we are making a difference, and I mean that collective “we”. It’s not just our organisation. We work in partnership with literally hundreds of different organisations. That’s the critical mass we need for change.

Jenelle: You mentioned something a little earlier around one of your measures of success, around building an empathy base. What did you mean by that? How do you build an empathy base?

Simone: Yes, that’s a very good question. One of the key challenges we have in Australia is to share the stories and the understanding of what life for women looks like in countries other than Australia, because granted we absolutely have our own challenges; we have an aging population of women who are homeless in this country, which is appalling; we have high gender based violence statistics as other countries do across the globe. But to do the work that we do, and don’t get me wrong, Australians are incredibly generous per head of population and as well as our government and our overseas aid program. But one of the things we often struggle with is trying to get people here to understand, just the day to day challenges, and I think sometimes it’s really hard to even begin to comprehend what it would look like for a woman in Papua New Guinea going to the markets and knowing that she was under threat of violence every step of the way. What the life for a young girl going to school in Iran looks like and taking off her head covering so that she can have her own autonomy. When we look at Roe v. Wade in the States and sexual reproductive rights. There are things that do affect us, but then there are things that we have to try and create an understanding and empathy for the fact that things we take for granted are so often not even available in other countries.

So when I talk about that empathy base, very often we have conversations about, well you know charity begins at home and we need to look after our own women and children; absolutely. But when you look at the comparative scale of gender issues facing women in other countries, compared to ours, whose lives are actually at risk even for talking about gender based issues, some countries they’re accused of being witches, there is violence against women who choose to speak up. So it’s really trying to get Australian women and men to understand the challenges of women elsewhere and what they can do about it. Because, it’s also very easy to feel powerless and I think that’s one of the things that we as human beings, absolutely identify with. It comes back to those stories. How do you build an empathy base, how do you get people to care? I think fundamentally people care but sometimes I think the extent of the challenges. I mean if you look around the world at the moment, there is war crisis conflict in a range of countries and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. And I think it’s easy also to go, well that’s not our problem, it’s someone else’s issue to deal with. Unfortunately, it does have a ripple effect.

Jenelle: What have you seen personally, Simone? You’ve lived a very global life which must have helped to see how women are treated in different parts of the world. You were born in Fiji, you grew up in Sydney, you’ve had a chance to work across South East Asia and North America, what was some of the things you saw that then has impacted your world view?

Simone: It may sound incredibly basic but I’m always struck by the fact that it doesn’t matter who I meet and in what situation, we all want fundamentally the same things. We want to be able to feed ourselves and our children. We want our kids to be safe. We want to be able to live safe. I’ve been in parts of remote China and met a woman who was dying of pancreatic cancer and she had young children and she was concerned that her children were not going to be able to fend for themselves. That she would die. Who was going to look after them? And it always just strikes me that somehow, sometimes, we think, oh that’s, you know, that’s other people’s problems, that’s other women’s problems. We all face the same challenges. We all want the same things for our families. We want the same things for our kids and we all want peace and security, and yet everywhere I travel - I was in Timor Leste, after you know, in the late 90s. Same situation there. I’ve worked in quite a few different emergency situations. The response that’s needed. It’s the same, you know, it’s water, it’s sanitation. For women it’s sanitary products. We do a thing called the Dignity Kit because if you think about – if all of a sudden your home was being bombed, what would you need. You know, it’s like the bushfires, when there’s emergencies. What do people do? What do you grab? What are the key things that are so important? So you know we’re looking at technology and how even personal records can be protected in and through things like blockchain. So it’s fascinating that the number of things that can be done but it always, to me it comes down to that commonality of how do we want to live our lives, and that’s pretty fundamental as a basic human right; water, sanitation, somewhere to live and a livelihood and food; these are the pretty basic needs. I don’t think people are asking for too much and sometimes I think we forget that. My experience is just again the commonality of humanity more than anything.

Jenelle: Such a great point about that. I’ve often said there’s more that unites us than what divides us.

Simone: Absolutely.

Jenelle: And sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, but I think that’s what you’re speaking to there. You’ve certainly worked with an impressive collection of organisations. You had that role with UNICEF, Mission Australia, Safe the Children Alliance, even AFLW. There seems to be a real commonality around social conscience and purpose. Am I reading that correctly, and if so, where does that come from?

Simone: I don’t know. I think I’m probably the – well I’m not probably I am the youngest of five children. You had to fight to get a word in. So I think that’s probably the – living in a challenging environment is not something that’s new to me. But I think it’s just always been something that’s driven me, that being purposeful has been at the core.

I mean, I remember when I came back from working with UNICEF and I joined the AFL and I got a lot of questions; what are you doing working for a football club? And I was like, well, okay firstly, what woman in Australia gets to be part of a start up of a football club - (a) - and (b) the genesis for the football club in Western Sydney, the Greater Western Sydney Giants, was really about creating the community club that embraced all the community. It’s a very culturally and linguistically diverse community and it was really about how football could be a way of bringing people together. So at the core of what others saw simply as setting up a football club, the really strong driver for me was, but here’s a really interesting vehicle around how sport can bring people together, how it can cut down barriers and it can mean, you know, different cultures, different approaches. We had a large population in Western Sydney of women who wanted to play AFL and there was a really strong local club of women who were involved. You know, wearing the head scarves while they played. They were amazing. I mean these were just amazing women who loved playing AFL and they brought this, you know, culturally and linguistically diverse dimension to Australian Football League. It’s that galvanising purposeful driver that is the thing that gets me out of bed I suppose very morning. It’s also the thing that depresses me sometimes because we feel so far away.

How do you make an impact? An impact can be felt in lots of different ways. Like I often speak to people who work in the private sector and say, oh wow you know what you’re doing, you know it’s so altruistic and it’s great and yes it is, but don’t underestimate the impact and the change that you can have wherever you are. You don’t have to work in the not for profit sector. You can have far more impact working in the private sector, for example, in government. I think it’s really just about what is an impact you want to make and how do you make it?

Jenelle: How did you learn where best you can have impact? What gave you the strength of conviction where others might have looked at something that had a really lofty set of ambitions, and go, yeah yeah I think I am the one to be able to effect change here, I can make impact? What has given you that self assurance and level of conviction?

Simone: It certainly started I think way back with my first role with UNICEF because at that stage it was about children and women and children firstly and then women and I always believe that you know children were absolutely innocent, they have done nothing but been born into a world where for better or for worse they will struggle, whether it’s through nutrition or access to water or whatever. So I think we need to be their champion.

Jenelle: We’ll use that as a segue to my next question, speaking of children. You can’t be a woman working on gender issues and not be expected to ask about the impact of motherhood on your outlook. So even though it might be slightly cliched, I do want to understand your perspective on that. You’re a mother of three, two daughters and one son. Are there differences in the way that they see the world because of what you do?

Simone: Absolutely. I think it would be an absolute understatement if I said it – it didn’t have an impact on them. They are all in their 20s and they are adults in their own right. It’s obviously had an impact on them. How they choose to respond and live their lives I think is probably governed by being exposed to that and seeing mum go off to work each day and thinking well what are you doing mum, and why are you doing that? So I think it’s built in just through osmosis that that’s been built into their DNA.

Jenelle: And maybe also the other way around. Their impact on you and your view, your world view.

Simone: Yeah. Well, and again, you know, I look at my children when they were young kids. I mean we would go away on holidays and invariably it’s just a very weird thing. But usually at Christmas time and around that time of year you’ve got disaster season, you’ve got emergencies that happen and I used to sort of pinch myself and think here am I with my three young children and we’re incredibly safe and you know there’s much to get caught up in.

Can I pay the mortgage or whatever those day to day concerns are. When you compare your life and your livelihood here in Australia with what is being experienced – I mean it was back when the invasion of Kosovo happened and that was back in the late 90s. I was away with my kids who were very young then. How would I feel if all of a sudden I had to pick up my belongings and walk across the Victorian border, for example. Because this is what some of these women and families were doing and the kids were with them and I just – everything we talk about, every type of impact is predominantly generational so I need them to be better humans. There’s a bit of hope there when I look at my daughters’ generation because even when they tell me about things about you know what’s happened at work, and you know, how things are going, they have much more confidence in negotiating salaries or being able to have a conversation about their worth and their value.

Jenelle: Absolutely.

Simone: Way more than I did as a young woman starting out in my career, right. So I take absolute hope and the faith in that. It’s interesting with my son because I often, you know, look to him and you know he’s an amazing young man as well and works really hard. But the interesting distinction is I don’t think my son ever questions his seat at the table. I don’t think my daughters do either as much as I possibly did but it’s just an interesting observation that, you know, and we joke and he always gives me a hard time about the gender pay gap and just because he knows it will give his mother a rise, but

Jenelle: My kids do the same to me.

Simone: Yeah, exactly. Just prod the beast. Don’t do it Sam I’m not in a good mood. You know I just think it’s the difference between women now, hopefully and in the future. You know that notion that women question or challenge themselves around whether or not they should be at the table. Well I think that’s changing, and you know that you can’t do what you can’t see. The more women in senior roles like yours, the more women who are speaking out. And young women can see that when they are in the office, wherever they are working. That’s a really important message because how do I aspire to be something that I can’t see? Quite frankly when I finished school a lot of girls were told, well you can be a secretary, you can be a dental nurse, you can be a teacher if you’re really lucky. You know the conversations around graduate programs and working in large corporations certainly wasn’t happening in my cohort of friends. And that’s not because they weren’t all educated.

Jenelle: It would be nice to see the load not just fall on the women to push to have more of a seat at the table but maybe the men also helping in redesigning the table itself.

Simone: Absolutely, and I think we’ve seen that now. I mean I speak to a lot of men about this and you know gender equality isn’t a women’s issue, it’s a community issue, it’s a human rights issue, and there’s a lot of men that see the value. Again it comes back to making space at the table, absolutely, and you know being able to also juggle parenthood as well as time out from careers with having families, because that is a reality. Or trying to do it all, and you know I think a lot of us try and do it all and we do as well as we can. But there’s always trade offs and so I think it’s probably a combination of opportunity, possibility and I heard somewhere recently, someone said possibility is a privilege, and I thought what a great way to capture it, because possibility is a privilege. Because when you don’t have any possibilities where do you go? Where’s the aspiration, where’s the ambition?

Jenelle: Staying on the theme of gender equality here and we do have coming up March the 8th, it’s International Women’s Day, and I know that that’s one day and we’re talking about this every day, but it’s a real opportunity to shine more of a light on the issues that we’re talking about. Tell me what does International Women’s Day mean to you on a personal level? What does it look like on the day?

Simone: Well again it’s been a bit of a progress. I remember talking about International Women’s Day years ago and you know you get the same old, oh why do we need an International Women’s Day, you know that’s every day of the year, and you know I sort of say now, well you know it’s one day of focus but we need 365 days of action. But what it does do is increasingly we’re seeing more and more businesses, corporations, even schools and other things, really focus on women, focus on the need for more women engaged in you know leadership. We’re seeing more conversations around investment in women. So for me International Women’s Day is a really important day to say let’s not forget what we do in those other 364 days a year, but also to really focus on what are those barriers, whether it’s political leadership, whether it’s representation, whether it's leadership in companies, whether it’s living a peaceful and secure life without threat of violence, and gender based violence against women. So I think it's a really important day to remind everybody of also the value of women because you know when we look at first responders through COVID, when we look at front line medical workers, when we look at teachers and we look at those lower paid occupations by and large, the majority of those people are women. They take on amazing amount of responsibility doing those roles. How do you assess value and it’s not always in a pay packet? Recognising the value of women I think is really what it’s about. And even if it sparks a conversation that goes on, on that day, but continues with friends, with families around the dinner table cause the more conversations we have, it’s more about visibility and understanding. That’s a good thing.

Jenelle: Now this year’s theme for International Women’s Day is count her in. So it’s about accelerating through economic empowerment. Talk to me about that. You mentioned – you know when we were talking last week about if ever there was going to be a silver bullet in something that’s so complex and so layered that we should be looking to financial literacy and economic empowerment. Tell me a bit more about your observations of that.

Simone: As an organisation financial empowerment is a strategic priority for the organisation and we know that if women are at risk or don’t have control over their own livelihoods or their finances, it’s very hard to fundamentally reach equality. It’s also very difficult to avoid and/or remove oneself from an abusive relationship. We know financial coercive control is a big problem as well. So if we look at investing in women and women understanding that and being more across and in control of their own financial literacy and their own livelihoods, then it means that they are less at risk of those other things that undermine them. Whether it’s gender based violence, whether it’s leadership, whether it’s in emergencies and in times of crisis what they do. So it is a silver bullet insomuch as if we can address financial and economic empowerment, then we know that that is going to be the silver bullet for addressing some of those other cross cutting issues that impact women.

It’s also really important because you are investing in a cohort of people who have a huge contribution to make and continue to do so, but often considered as a less value. Venture capital for female led enterprises. We know that female led enterprises are more productive. They are usually more profitable, and yet less than 4% of venture capital, even in this country, goes to female led organisations or endeavours. So what would that look like and we know that there’s been a raft of studies that have been done around, you know, if you invest in women the returns are tenfold. India at the moment are looking at this very complex problem around not having enough women in the workforce and/or not enough investment in their own enterprises. And so again if you go back to the stats and the data that sit behind it, we know that if we invest in women, and we have more female led enterprises, and we have more women in leadership positions and running businesses, the profitability and the return on investment is higher. So why wouldn’t you? So there is an economic case for support and I think sometimes that gets lost and then sometimes you get a bit frustrated cause then – why do we have to keep creating a business case almost for why women should be equally represented in a boardroom or why they should be equally invested in. But again, if we look historically – the Industrial Revolution – it’s been largely driven by men, for men, and so I think now we’re playing catch up. But we have to play catch up a bit faster because there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Jenelle: There is and you talked about how change and frustration go hand in hand, particularly when there’s no real visible measures of success. You talked just then about your daughter or how the next generation have got a level of confidence that perhaps you and I didn’t have in negotiating things which is fantastic. But I mean alongside that I see week after week after week a woman is killed at the hands of a man that they generally know. You see report after report that talks about, you know, whether it’s 80 years to 150 years to 300 years before we get gender equality. Are we going backwards?

Simone: Yeah, probably we are. Look in certain indicators I think the other thing is too is we’re starting to measure more. So there is a sense sometimes that we’re going backwards and it’s taking us longer. But if we look at the complexities and the indicators that we’re using to measure that progress, they are becoming more complex in and of itself. The point that you made at the start of that was really around violence against women and gender based violence. And I suppose out of all of the priority areas that we work in, that’s probably the most flummoxing to me, because we can stop it. It’s not something – we’re not trying to find a cure for cancer. We can stop violence against women. So what’s holding us back?

Jenelle: That was going to be my question to you.

Simone: Well, I don’t have the answer except to say that you know I think it fundamentally goes to the value of women. So if there was still people wanting to control and to undermine and to exert that control, the power through physicality and violence, how are we ever going to address that imbalance? And I mean the fact is, and I have this conversation with women all the time, gender based violence could stop tomorrow if we just stopped doing it. So why aren’t we? So that’s where it comes back to – you know we talked about either building empathy or understanding all value around women. Why is it okay to – for a partner or someone that you know, abuse and or you know inflict bodily harm on a woman? I don’t get it and I know that I work with a lot of other organisations on the ground. Here every year we do a campaign about ending violence. So what’s at the heart of that? And you know we often talk about it’s really – it’s a cultural change. But it’s also not just an Australian cultural change. We’re seeing it across the globe, so again to me, it always comes back to the – well how do we value women and how do we let others exert their power over us?

So again I’ll go back to the coercive control example where a woman through her bank account, her former partner was sending her one cent into their back account a hundred times a day and saying I’m going to kill you. So you imagine when you get an alert saying that you’ve paid for something. This was coming up almost you know a hundred times a day. So the coercive control – and that was through the banking system – was not enabling that but he was able to do it, and we’ve just seen some recent reforms around that which have been fabulous because the major banks have now said, if we see behaviour like that now, we will shut down those accounts. There’s a role around systems change, around protections that aren’t just about physical violence. They’re around what are the systems that are enabling those kind of behaviours to perpetuate and why are women still at risk. Then there are policy levers. Then there are systems levers. Then there are you know the way that we think and the way that we act and then there’s cultural and there’s ethnicity and there’s a whole lot of other things that impact the way we view women. So we’re not just working on one front, we’re working on a whole range of fronts and that’s where the complexity can sometimes be overwhelming.

Jenelle: How do you make sure that you don’t get overwhelmed, that the overwhelm doesn’t take over?

Simone: That’s a very good question. Look I think we all get overwhelmed at certain stages and it doesn’t matter whether you work in this space or not. I mean I get overwhelmed when, for the last two years, every time you look around there is something else awful happening to women. You know we look across the globe, whether it’s Africa, whether it’s the Middle East, whether it’s Central Europe, and to be perfectly honest it’s hard not to get overwhelmed. A number of times that I know colleagues do the same thing. It’s just, this is just too hard. Like how do we get traction? I think the only thing that gives you hope is that some things are changing, and so we do get overwhelmed and I think you know when there’s criticism about – oh you’re not doing enough – you know as part of the UN system you’re not doing enough, you’re not doing it fast enough. Look I appreciate that. I completely agree with that. But also conversely it’s what would you have us do differently? And so that’s where innovation, technology, new ways of thinking. You know the old construct of philanthropy of here’s a dollar go away and feed yourself, or let me teach you how to fish. You know that old adage, it’s that, it’s how do we use new technologies, new ways of doing things that are going to help us overcome some of the – I mean the climate crisis is also having – you know - and that’s an intersectional challenge that is impacting women more greatly than men. So where do you work? Do you focus on climate change? Do you focus on gender equality? These are all joined up and so that’s why it’s hard to sometimes to decouple them. So organisations like ours choose to work on the priority areas where we see are the greatest risk to women and try to do something about them. But yeah it’s – sometimes it’s a lot easier to be overwhelmed than to maintain the rage, so to speak.

Jenelle: And in those times is there a particular story, image, policy change, system change that you take your mind to, to help you kind of keep going with it? Remember when we did this, or you know, what do you do to pull yourself out of a situation when you were in the overwhelmed stage?

Simone: I think sometimes other people do it for you which is fabulous as well. So not so long ago I received an email from someone who was more or less defending an aspect of work that we were doing years ago and sort of went out unasked and unprompted – sort of took a position to defend the work that was being done and outlined the list of reasons and sent it back to me because it had come across her desk in a different world and it wasn’t about UN Women, it was about a program that was being run, and there were criticisms of it. I think it was context within the UN system and when she came back, and as I said, unprompted and unbeknownst to me, she went back and said well actually I think that’s incorrect. So let me tell you this is actually what did happen and this is what’s happening and this is what’s being done, and to have that happen, to have somebody else step in to defend or lend a hand or that solidarity. And I think that’s one of the things about the women’s movement that is the most all encompassing is you know women looking out for each other and that notion of solidarity. That’s what pulls me out of my hole sometimes. Because it’s very easy to go, wow this is all too hard, it’s all a bit personal, it’s all about me. Well it’s also about half the population. So it’s those moments and those acts of humanity at its best, that’s when it drags you back out and says, okay we’ve got this, there is hope on the horizon. I think you know we’ve had this chat before about hope being the eternal motivator, cause if you didn’t have hope you wouldn’t stay doing any of this, and if we lose hope then we lose any sense of ability to change what it is we have in front of us. So I think that’s the other thing that keeps all of us as humans going, as you know hope for a better world, and what’s the legacy we want to leave our kids. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where you know women are abused and racism is just part of the DNA. Absolutely not required. Shouldn’t be here, so how do we change it?

Jenelle: And what is the legacy that you hope to leave in the time that you are in this role? When you move on what would you want to be able to point back to?

Simone: It would be ridiculously, and incredibly overstated, to think that you know I would be able to go, great my work is done, and we move over. I think, and there was a great quote; I think it was from a former head of UNICEF which was all about, you know, we don’t inherit the world from our parents we actually are custodians of it for our children and for the future. So I think what I would like to leave is perhaps, whether it’s a positive view or perspective about how we can change things, whether it’s pointing to a group of women or a program or an initiative and over the course of my career you know there’s been some where I’ve thought, no I’ve had a hand in that, I’ve had a part of that. The legacy I want to see left is that our children, our daughters and our sons, we have an absolute joy living in this country, being incredibly grateful for what we have, having empathy for those who don’t have the same opportunities that we have and that the privileges that we have and that we leave, that basically it sounds very corny, but that we leave Australia a better place than we found it. And not just Australia, the globe perhaps.

Jenelle: I think that’s a really powerful legacy. Really powerful legacy Simone and I do think it’s easy to get disheartened by what seems so massive a task. But what you’ve achieved and your ability to keep going despite those challenges is phenomenal. From the conversation today, you know, it’s really reminded me about the importance of building a strong empathy base, sharing the stories, helping people understand what it looks like to walk in the shoes of other people that might not be in our natural orbit. A reminder about the commonality of humanity that regardless of who we are or where we are – actually we all fundamentally want the same thing – peace, security, sanitation, dignity. These are human rights, and so why would one person be more entitled to that than another. The reminder that you gave us to not underestimate the impact that all of us can have, no matter what sphere that we’re working in. To challenge ourselves on where we think we can have impact.

A reminder we’ve got International Women’s Day coming up and it is a great opportunity to listen to the stories of others, to reflect, to think about the value of women, to learn, to engage, to spark a conversation that hopefully sparks further action. When you talk about change you’ve talked about the power of story telling. The power of invoking images, whether that’s an Afghan woman standing on a tarmac holding her baby to ignite something, couple that with systems change and policy levers, it happens at multiple levels, and I think when the overwhelm gets high, remember that we cannot lose hope. We need to remind ourselves who we’re doing it for. We can get caught up in ourselves and whether or not it’s us making enough of a difference. But to remember who we’re doing it for and lean into the solidarity of that very group to remind us what we’ve done. So lots of takeaways, Simone, I really, really appreciate your time.

Simone: Great – thanks so much for the opportunity. Thanks Jenelle.

Male voiceover The Change Happens podcast from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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