The Gender at Work Podcast Gender At Work

In this episode of the G@W podcast, we delve into Feminist Foreign Policies and look at some of the opportunities, challenges and contradictions inherent in them. We also explore some of the collective aspirations of feminists for Feminist Foreign Policies. These would be important questions to ask at any time but now they are especially important as some of the very governments that have announced Feminist Foreign Policies support Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza or are themselves major arms manufacturers. Now is a good time to probe and understand how ‘feminist’ the growing slew of Feminist Foreign Policies actually are.
We are going to hear five different and thought-provoking ideas about feminist foreign policies in this episode. This will include perspectives from Nadine Gassman, President of the National Institute of Women of Mexico, Margot Wallstrom, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Hibaaq Osman, founder and leader of Karama, Anne Marie Goetz, Clinical Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, and Foteini Papagiotti, Senior Policy Advisor at ICRW.

Many feminists around the world believe that there is a war on against women and some are calling it “gender apartheid”. The global campaign to end gender apartheid focuses particularly on Iran and Afghanistan. In this episode we explore this term “gender apartheid” – where it came from and what some of the Femilemmas around it are.  We look at its usefulness in addressing what is happening to women and girls in Iran and Afghanistan today. We speak to Dr. Sima Samar, the former Minister of Women’s Affairs in Afghanistan and former chair of the Afghanistan Human Rights commission. We also hear from Roxanna Shapour, an Iranian and senior analyst from the Afghanistan Analysts Network, who has extensive experience in Afghanistan and in communications and media with the BBC and the UN, and we listen to Afghani women’s voices through the research of DROPS, the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies based in Afghanistan and its leader, Mariam Safi.
Join us and tell us what you think!
 
Note to our listeners: We recorded this episode prior to the horrific violence in Palestine and Israel. We join many others who are calling for an immediate cessation of the war on Gaza and accountability for crimes against humanity. Our next episode will focus on Feminist Foreign Policy and explore the complexities, contradictions and hypocrisies that emerge when governments and feminist networks proclaim their alignment with feminist principles without addressing fundamental power asymmetries and the devastating consequences of unfettered militarization. 

In this episode, three graduate students from the American University of Beirut, Maria Hamarneh, Elvira Abi Zeid and Leil Younes, question male allyship for women’s rights and feminist values in a social media context heavily influenced by toxic misogynists targeting young men and boys. They reflect on the ways that, as in many parts of the world, women’s rights are under attack and work on gender equality is being undermined or rolled back, including by ultra-right wing, fundamentalist groups. Nisreen Alami, a Palestinian feminist activist who lives in Jordan and who is also a Gender at Work Associate, joined the conversation. Nisreen opens another dimension of the Femilemma by questioning the value of transnational feminist allyship when critical contextual and historical realities are left out. As she says, “misogyny has become very good at using transnational tools and feminism has not been very successful at being a truly transnational movement.” These are important Femilemmas with no easy answers. Come on in and listen and let’s hear your views!

Femilemmas about gender identities, about who is a feminist, about inconsistencies when government leaders claim feminist mantles and so on, have been percolating for years. We held a Femilemmas PopUp at the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York in March to hear what Femilemmas were on the minds of participants there.  In this episode we share a few - Anne Marie Goetz (New York University, New York City) explores the Femilemmas inherent in feminist foreign policies; Andrea Cornwall (Kings College, London) lays out the complex and evolving Femilemmas around ‘gender’;  Deepa Mattoo (Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, Toronto) spoke about how they resolved a Femilemma by adopting a gender inclusive policy for all services, and Fidele Rutayisire (Rwanda Men’s Resource Organization) addressed the Femilemmas of men as feminists. Are these your Femilemmas? How would you respond? What femilemmas are you grappling with? Join the conversation!  We want to hear from you!

In this teaser, Aruna and Joanne bring up the theme of their upcoming season: Feminist dilemmas, or, as they refer to it, Femilemmas. 

G@W has a new Executive Director  - madeleine kennedy-macfoy. Welcome madeleine! 
In this episode, we introduce madeleine and invite the past EDs of Gender at Work to think about what the opportunity and challenge mix has been over the decades at G@W and what learnings and dilemmas they have to share with Madeleine as she steps in.  We build on a theme that we’ve explored over the past episodes of the podcast: feminist leadership transitions. Like many of those we interviewed, we tried as much as possible to interject feminist principles into the leadership transition and were somewhat successful while also learning in the process. The EDs speak of early choices about co-leadership, the virtual structure of G@W, and dilemmas and questions connected to the emergent nature of the work and how that shaped power dynamics, ownership, accountability and culture. Join us in our praxis of reflection-action-reflection and share with us your feminist dilemmas.
This is inspired by a Gordon Lightfoot song and Joni’s “for the Roses”