The Power of Feminist Leadership: From Rhetoric to Action

Episode: 1 Podcast Title: Power Of...  Episode Title: The Power of Feminist Leadership: From Rhetoric to ActionWelcome to the Power Of…podcast series, a production by the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH). In this collection of conversations, we dive into critical, thought-provoking, and contemporary content to stimulate debate and dialogue with the aim of driving gender equality in global health.  Host, Johanna Riha, works at the UNU-IIGH in Malaysia and is passionate that the bold commitments towards gender equality in health be met with commensurate action.  In this mini-series, Johanna focuses on the power of the feminist leadership and how this type of transformative leadership can be used to advance gender equality and health equity. In this episode, you will hear more about what feminist leadership is and why it is important, as well as practical examples from those who have been striving to put feminist leadership into practice. At the start of the episode Srilatha Batliwala, senior advisor on Knowledge Building at Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action (CREA), introduces the think piece she authored on the value of transformative feminist leadership in global health. Srilatha highlights that feminist leadership is a good starting point to facilitate the kind of change needed to transform deeply imbedded power structures. This is because, fundamentally, feminist leadership is a process of self-transformation, one which recognises that to achieve the type of social transformation and justice we advocate for, we need to engage and mobilise individual and collective power to dismantle oppressive power structures to build a better world for all. However, as Srilatha points out, this may seem simple, yet there are many challenges to overcome. Leadership is not practiced in a vacuum – we need to address the organisational deep structures and practices which serve to (unconsciously) reproduce biases and hierarchies within organisational spaces. To better understand the navigation and action required to advance deep organisational transformation, Srilatha discusses the application of the Gender at Work framework which highlights the interlinkages between gender equality, institutional change and institutional practices which are framed by power dynamics. The framework is divided into 4 quadrants focusing on the informal to formal on the x-axis and the individual to systemic on the y-axis. To transform organisations, we can use the framework to uncover what changes are needed within each quadrant and identify opportunities and barriers to achieving gender equality.  Following this, an amazing group of panellists – Rudo Chigudu, a Zimbabwean feminist, activist, artist and current board member of Zimbabwe's Women's Resource Centre Network, Bettina Baldeschi, the CEO of the International Women's Development Agency in Australia and Lucy Kombe, a women's rights advocate and program assistant at Zamara Foundation in Kenya – share their thoughts and experiences on implementing feminist leadership within themselves and the spaces they work in. For example, Rudo shares how her experiences working in a feminist organisation led her on a journey of self-transformation to question her own biases, insecurities and reactions following rising tensions within the organisation. As Rudo states: ‘It doesn't matter what the space is, you carry yourself whatever space you end up in... if we really want them to transform, we really hope for that kind of transformation, how do we get to the individual being?’.Similarly, Bettina reflects on the role she followed as a CEO when confronted with accusations of racism within her organisation and how her perceptions and actions changed once she stopped ‘listening with her head’ and learned to ‘listen with her heart’...