The Gender at Work Podcast

This final episode of our series "What's Love Got to Do With It" features Kumi Naidoo and Amitabh Behar. Kumi is a South African human rights and climate justice activist who is currently President of the Fossil fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative and former head of international organizations including Civicus, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Amitabh is the Executive Director of Oxfam...

It isn't often that we interview social justice activists working in the United States but in the last few years the US context has dramatically worsened. Democratic freedoms have been curtailed, women's rights have been eroded, immigrants are being expelled and incarcerated, and we are seeing armed responses in several major cities to civil society protests. So, in this episode we talk to three e...

In our second episode on exploring love as a basis for organizing and solidarity, we interview Pregs Govender (South Africa) and Srilatha Batliwala (India) – both globally well-known feminist activists and authors. Pregs aligns love with the inherent dignity of human beings and speaks eloquently of how oppressive systems, from apartheid in South Africa to Israel's genocide against the Palestinian...

In the new season of the Gender at Work podcast – What's Love Got to Do With It? – we ask the question - can love in the vision of Audre Lord, bell hooks, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi and so many social justice leaders worldwide, help us in shifting systems of oppression. How does social justice action from the basis of love help us to transform ourselves while also eliminating...

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 announce...

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 wom...

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...

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 67 th  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...

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...

How do feminist organizations get beyond 'calling out' to repair and care? What can we learn from feminist leaders who are experimenting with strategies to build trust, reverse practices that undermine feminist collective action, and prioritize care, connection and thriving?   In this episode, we talk to Michal Friedman, a longtime associate of G@W, a feminist activist and a personal and social ch...

What is driving the growing numbers of implosions that many social justice groups around the world – including feminist organizations and networks -- are experiencing? Coming on the heels of the #Me Too movement, the flashmobs inspired by the " El Violador Eres Tu!" movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, we started to witness staff in feminist organizat...

We just completed the seminal month for women's rights globally – worldwide celebration of International Women's Day on March 8 th,  innumerable events worldwide for Women's History month in the United States, and the 66 th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) recently concluded. Women's rights and feminist organizations and movements are the drivers of change for gender equality yet, the qu...

In our last episode we talked about the challenges of dismantling patriarchy and promised that our next episode would start to unpack different strategies to topple patriarchy. We have chosen to focus first on how leadership transitions happen and what happens to the leaders who choose to leave. There is a generational shift in leadership of feminist organizations around the world and we can see t...

In a passionate and wide-ranging conversation, Kumi Naidoo and Aruna Rao explore hope, fear, Black Lives Matter, feminist principles, intersectionality and structural change. They ask whether the institutions that were set up to protect us, like the police, and to enable social change, such as social services, the UN, and international development organizations, have failed us and whether we shoul...

Look around you and you'll find many conversations about reimagining and transforming how we live and work – from how we enable the plant to thrive, to new ways of envisioning economics. And in all kinds of organizations, we are seeing real challenges to what was previously unchecked -  abusive power dynamics, toxic work environments, sexual harassment, racism, and discrimination against all kinds...

On the eve of the Generation Equality Forum (GEF) in Paris, Aruna Rao and Joanne Sandler – veterans of the 1995 Beijing conference – have an intergenerational talk with three young activists: Priya Kvam and Amani Jui from Breakthrough US and Natalia Escruceria Price, an independent consultant formerly with JASS. Our exchange with these young activists highlights our differing vantage points on a n...

Gender mainstreaming and the two-track approach to achieve gender equality were two strategies for strengthening organizations' action on gender equality that grew out of the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women.  Twenty-six years later, the world looks very different with multiple crises of  inequality, violence against women and LGBTIQ people, climate extinction and less faith in democracy and the o...

Can the UN Deliver a feminist future? This question is posed by Anne Marie Goetz (Professor, NYU) and Joanne Sandler (Senior Associate G@W and former Deputy ED, UN Women) in the June edition of Gender and Development. Join us for a lively discussion on this question in the latest episode of the Gender at Work podcast. Anne Marie and Joanne are joined by long-time feminist activists Geetanjali Misr...

How do you break up violent ways of behaving and the exercise of power over? How do change what is considered normal? How do you create a new culture that values others no matter how different they are? A community in Gauteng, South Africa, supported by Gender at Work and the Labor Research Service, launched an initiative called Letsema 5 years ago to end gender based violence in their community....

We are living in a time, which adrienne marie brown describes as apocalyptic - a time that demands that we draw our imagination to think beyond what is politically possible, which she says is "simply not enough".  What does feminist leadership look like in such times? In this episode, we talk to two globally recognized, inspiring feminist warriors from South Africa, Pregs Govender, a former ANC me...

This episode walks us through Catherine Claxton's story, which has been assembled by G@W Senior Associate Joanne Sandler and Julie Thompson, both long time UN staffers. Catherine's lawyers -- Mary Dorman and Ellen Yaroshefsky -- recount the events that led Catherine,  a junior UN staffer, to charge an Undersecretary General with sexual abuse. What unfolded in response mirrors the Me Too stories of...

At a time when conservative, fundamentalist and fascist forces appear to achieving political dominance, the need for progressive movements to build strong alliances and collective resistance appears paramount – yet, few such alliances are visible and sustaining cross-movement solidarity is very hard work.   This episode explores why this is the case, what are the fault lines, and some success stor...

This episode examines why we need to reimagine prevailing ideas around consent, pleasure and danger as embedded in our laws, social norms, and feminist movement politics.   The discussion explores why pleasure needs to be moved from the margins of feminist agendas   to be viewed as integral to dismantling patriarchy; why the connections between pleasure and danger must be rethought; and why consen...