Introducing... Impact Talks at UTS. 

A podcast that brings you ideas and research from leading thinkers, every two weeks. 

Get fresh insights  and dive deep into what matters. Based on Gadigal Country, in the heart of Sydney’s creative and digital precinct, the University of Technology Sydney is Australia’s top university for research impact.  

Introducing... Impact Talks at UTS. 
A podcast that brings you ideas and research from leading thinkers, every two weeks. 
Get fresh insights  and dive deep into what matters. Based on Gadigal Country, in the heart of Sydney’s creative and digital precinct, the University of Technology Sydney is Australia’s top university for research impact.

Impact Talks at UTS brings you ideas and research from leading thinkers, every two weeks.  

Get fresh insights and dive deep into what matters. 

Based on Gadigal Country in the heart of Sydney’s creative and digital precinct, the University of Technology Sydney is Australia’s top university for research impact.  

Impact Talks at UTS brings you ideas and research from leading thinkers, every two weeks.  
Get fresh insights and dive deep into what matters. 
Based on Gadigal Country in the heart of Sydney’s creative and digital precinct, the University of Technology Sydney is Australia’s top university for research impact.

Impact Talks at UTS

Introducing... Impact Talks at UTS

Australians must change how we consume goods and services to reduce our environmental impact, but what can businesses do when consumers resist change? How can companies encourage more sustainable behavior while decarbonizing supply chains?

In this episode of Impact Talks at UTS, a panel of experts explores the challenges organizations face in driving this shift.

Credits

Catherine King is the Chief Strategy Officer at Leo Burnett with over 20 years of advertising experience that focuses on the intersection of brand building, human behaviour, culture and influence. To develop this perspective, Catherine has held leadership positions with creative, consulting, strategic, PR and digital teams across both multinational and independent agencies in partnership with a broad range of brands that include Suncorp, Destination NSW, Diageo, Royal Caribbean, Sony, Microsoft and Nestle. In her role at Leo Burnett, Catherine leads an ongoing research study called "What good is doing good", affectionately known as the "Good Study", which aims to better understand the role that brands should and could play in the areas of public interest, encompassing human, social, environmental and financial impact.

Nicky Sparshott is an experienced CEO, Board Director, and Change Agent with 30 years of global experience working in leading blue-chip organizations such as Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Procter & Gamble. Most recently, she was the Global Chief Transformation at Unilever, designing and deliver value creating change initiatives across the enterprise with a focus on organisational design, performance culture & portfolio optimisation. Prior to this appointment, Nicky was CEO of Unilever Australia & New Zealand and Global CEO of luxury retailer, T2 Tea.

Nicky also serves on a few Boards - Chair of the University of Technology’s Industry Advisory Board; Chair of Global Sisters, Non-Executive Director for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and NED on Moose Toys Advisory Board. She is known for building competitive advantage in business by being a force for good; simultaneously delivering economic, environmental and social outcomes and in 2022 was awarded CEO of the Year by CEO Magazine for consistent delivery of business outcomes whilst spearheading transformative ESG programs - bringing together profit & purpose.

Siobhan Toohill is a Sustainability advisor having established and led sustainability functions in listed finance and property over the past 20 years. As the first chief sustainability officer at a major Australian bank, she was responsible for Westpac’s sustainability strategy, as well as policy and action on climate change including net zero transition planning, natural capital and human rights. Siobhan has led a wide range of initiatives, including customer vulnerability (including problem gambling), Indigenous engagement, child safeguarding, strategic philanthropy and social impact and is currently a trusted advisor to business and government through a range of governance roles.

John Lydon is Co-Chair of Australian Climate Leaders’ Coalition, a member of the NSW Net Zero and Clean Economy Board, Chair of Generation Australia, and serves as an Industry Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney Business School. Previously he was the Managing Partner of McKinsey Australia & New Zealand, holding several roles across the global Firm. John also served as Economic Commissioner of Greater Cities Commission from 2021-2023.

Professor Martina Linnenluecke is an internationally recognised scholar who conducts research on the strategic and financial implications of corporate adaptation and resilience to global environmental change, with a specific focus on the impacts of climate change. Professor Linnenluecke is the Director of the UTS Centre for Climate Risk and Resilience where she leads an interdisciplinary team of experts undertaking work on climate adaptation and resilience, decarbonisation, sustainable finance, climate analytics, metrics, targets and disclosure, and well as climate policy responses. 

Sound engineering by Alison Zhuang.

Impact Talks at UTS is produced by Impact Studios.

Australians must change how we consume goods and services to reduce our environmental impact, but what can businesses do when consumers resist change? How can companies encourage more sustainable behavior while decarbonizing supply chains?
In this episode of Impact Talks at UTS, a panel of experts explores the challenges organizations face in driving this shift.
Credits
Catherine King&nbsp;is the Chief Strategy Officer at Leo Burnett with over 20 years of advertising experience that focuses on the intersection of brand building, human behaviour, culture and influence.&nbsp;To develop this perspective, Catherine has held leadership positions with creative, consulting, strategic, PR and digital teams across both multinational and independent agencies in partnership with a broad range of brands that include Suncorp, Destination NSW, Diageo, Royal Caribbean, Sony, Microsoft and Nestle.&nbsp;In her role at Leo Burnett, Catherine leads an ongoing research study called "What good is doing good", affectionately known as the "Good Study", which aims to better understand the role that brands should and could play in the areas of public interest, encompassing human, social, environmental and financial impact.
Nicky Sparshott&nbsp;is an experienced CEO, Board Director, and Change Agent with 30 years of global experience working in leading blue-chip organizations such as Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Procter &amp; Gamble. Most recently, she was the Global Chief Transformation at Unilever, designing and deliver value creating change initiatives across the enterprise with a focus on organisational design, performance culture &amp; portfolio optimisation. Prior to this appointment, Nicky was CEO of Unilever Australia &amp; New Zealand and Global CEO of luxury retailer, T2 Tea.
Nicky also serves on a few Boards - Chair of the University of Technology&rsquo;s Industry Advisory Board; Chair of Global Sisters, Non-Executive Director for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and NED on Moose Toys Advisory Board. She is known for building competitive advantage in business by being a force for good; simultaneously delivering economic, environmental and social outcomes and in 2022 was awarded CEO of the Year by CEO Magazine for consistent delivery of business outcomes whilst spearheading transformative ESG programs - bringing together profit &amp; purpose. Siobhan Toohill&nbsp;is a Sustainability advisor&nbsp;having established and led sustainability functions in listed finance and property over the past 20 years. As the first chief sustainability officer at a major Australian bank, she was responsible for Westpac&rsquo;s sustainability strategy, as well as policy and action on climate change including net zero transition planning, natural capital and human rights. Siobhan has led a wide range of initiatives, including customer vulnerability (including problem gambling), Indigenous engagement, child safeguarding, strategic philanthropy and social impact and&nbsp;is currently a trusted advisor to business and government through a range of governance roles.
John Lydon&nbsp;is Co-Chair of Australian Climate Leaders&rsquo; Coalition, a member of the NSW Net Zero and Clean Economy Board, Chair of Generation Australia, and serves as an Industry Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney Business School. Previously he was the Managing Partner of McKinsey Australia &amp; New Zealand, holding several roles across the global Firm. John also served as Economic Commissioner of Greater Cities Commission from 2021-2023. Professor Martina Linnenluecke&nbsp;is&nbsp;an internationally recognised scholar who conducts research on the strategic and financial implications of corporate adaptation and resilience to global environmental change, with a specific focus on the impacts of climate change. Professor Linnenluecke is the Director of the UTS&nbsp;Centre for Climate Risk and Resilience where she leads&nbsp;an interdisciplinary team of experts undertaking work on climate adaptation and resilience, decarbonisation, sustainable finance, climate analytics, metrics, targets and disclosure, and well as climate policy responses.&nbsp;
Sound engineering by Alison Zhuang.
Impact Talks at UTS is produced by <a href="https://impactstudios.edu.au/">Impact Studios</a>.

The Consumption Conundrum

Change for Good at UTS means a transdisciplinary, strategic, systems-thinking approach, combining critical, participatory, and multi-level strategies to create practical solutions for addressing complex health and social issues.

In this episode of Impact Talks at UTS, the UTS Business School launches its new centre Change for Good with an expert panel discussion addressing the question:

What are the biggest behaviour and social change challenges facing Australia now and into the future?

Speakers
Host and moderator, Professor Ross Gordon, Director of Change for Good at UTS - a Research Centre focused on transdisciplinary behaviour and social change for social good.  

Ross is an interdisciplinary behaviour and social change activist with degree qualifications in marketing, public policy, and politics and history. He researches social issues and behaviour and social change, through a critical, reflexive, and multi-perspective lens. Ross served on the inaugural WHO Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health from 2000-2024 and is currently serves as an observer for the group. He works on various behaviour and social change issues including gambling, non-communicable diseases, Covid-19, energy hardship and energy efficiency, climate action and environmental sustainability, alcohol, tobacco control, mental health, childhood obesity, workplace bullying, and power and politics in the neoliberal university. Ross has been a principal or named investigator on projects attracting over $9.2m in research funds. He has published over 120 academic journals, book chapters and conference papers and a leading book: Strategic Social Marketing: For Behaviour and Social Change published by SAGE.
Professor Maria Raciti, Co-Director, Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre at University of Sunshine Coast.

Professor Maria Raciti (Kalkadoon-Thaniquith-Bwgcolman) is a social marketer who uses marketing tools and techniques to bring about social justice and behaviour change. Professor Raciti is co-founder and co-director of the UniSC Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre, co-leader of the education and economies theme in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures, a member of the executive of the Australian Association of Social Marketing, board member of International Social Marketing Association, the 2018 Research Fellow with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education and was part of an Australian Government departmental task force assisting with the 2019 National Regional Rural and Remote Tertiary Education Strategy.
Estelle Grech, Policy Manager at the Committee for Sydney

Estelle is an urban planner, passionate about improving social equity in cities. With experience in local government, consulting, and as a senior advisor in the NSW Government, she now leads planning and housing policy at the Committee for Sydney. A Churchill Fellowship recipient, Estelle recently travelled to over 13 cities across Europe and the US to research how to design better cities for women and girls. She has worked on a wide variety of projects, from community and cultural strategies to affordable housing studies, and has overseen the development of initiatives such as the Safer Cities program, Greater Sydney Parklands and policies to increase women in construction.
Belinda Duckworth, Australian Association of Social Marketing

Belinda is a dedicated public health marketer and health promotion professional with 25 years of experience across national, state, and local health district levels. With an early career as an Occupational Therapist in both community and hospital settings, both in Australia and internationally, Belinda brings a deep understanding of consumer and stakeholder engagement. Belinda also serves as a board member of the Australian Association of Social Marketing Management Committee.

 

Sound engineering by Alison Zhuang.

Impact Talks at UTS is produced by Impact Studios.

Change for Good at UTS means a transdisciplinary, strategic, systems-thinking approach, combining critical, participatory, and multi-level strategies to create practical solutions for addressing complex health and social issues.
In this episode of Impact Talks at UTS, the UTS Business School launches its new centre Change for Good with an expert panel discussion addressing the question:
What are the biggest behaviour and social change challenges facing Australia now and into the future?
Speakers
<ul>
<li>Host and moderator, <a href="https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Ross.Gordon">Professor Ross Gordon</a>, Director of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.uts.edu.au/about/uts-business-school/research/change-for-good">Change for Good at UTS</a> - a Research Centre focused on transdisciplinary behaviour and social change for social good. &nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Ross is an interdisciplinary behaviour and social change activist with degree qualifications in marketing, public policy, and politics and history. He researches social issues and behaviour and social change, through a critical, reflexive, and multi-perspective lens. Ross served on the inaugural WHO Technical Advisory Group on <a href="https://www.who.int/initiatives/behavioural-sciences/TAG-on-behavioural-insights-and-sciences-for-health-biographies" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="2">Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health</a>&nbsp;from 2000-2024 and is currently serves as an observer for the group. He works on various behaviour and social change issues including gambling, non-communicable diseases, Covid-19, energy hardship and energy efficiency, climate action and environmental sustainability, alcohol, tobacco control, mental health, childhood obesity, workplace bullying, and power and politics in the neoliberal university. Ross has been a principal or named investigator on projects attracting over $9.2m in research funds. He has published over 120 academic journals, book chapters and conference papers and a leading book:&nbsp;<a href="https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/strategic-social-marketing/book260452" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="3">Strategic Social Marketing: For Behaviour and Social Change</a>&nbsp;published by SAGE.
<ul>
<li><a href="https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/_wfLCgZ0kVUAENjJ7s8f1T4jCHY?domain=usc.edu.au" data-extlink="">Professor Maria Raciti</a>, Co-Director, Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre at University of Sunshine Coast.</li>
</ul>
Professor Maria Raciti (Kalkadoon-Thaniquith-Bwgcolman) is a social marketer who uses marketing tools and techniques to bring about social justice and behaviour change. Professor Raciti is co-founder and co-director of the UniSC Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre, co-leader of the education and economies theme in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures, a member of the executive of the Australian Association of Social Marketing, board member of International Social Marketing Association, the 2018 Research Fellow with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education and was part of an Australian Government departmental task force assisting with the 2019 National Regional Rural and Remote Tertiary Education Strategy.
<ul>
<li><a href="https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/oio5CjZ1nVUnoAw0vCzhBTmD4mC?domain=sydney.org.au/" data-extlink="">Estelle Grech</a>, Policy Manager at the Committee for Sydney</li>
</ul>
Estelle is an urban planner, passionate about improving social equity in cities. With experience in local government, consulting, and as a senior advisor in the NSW Government, she now leads planning and housing policy at the Committee for Sydney.&nbsp;A Churchill Fellowship recipient, Estelle recently travelled to over 13 cities across Europe and the US to research how to design better cities for women and girls. She has worked on a wide variety of projects, from community and cultural strategies to affordable housing studies, and has overseen the development of initiatives such as the Safer Cities program, Greater Sydney Parklands and policies to increase women in construction.
<ul>
<li><a href="https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/AF1vCk81oVHO24RvpI3iyTGwA8F?domain=linkedin.com/" data-extlink="">Belinda Duckworth</a>, Australian Association of Social Marketing</li>
</ul>
Belinda is a dedicated public health marketer and health promotion professional with 25 years of experience across national, state, and local health district levels. With an early career as an Occupational Therapist in both community and hospital settings, both in Australia and internationally, Belinda brings a deep understanding of consumer and stakeholder engagement. Belinda also serves as a board member of the Australian Association of Social Marketing Management Committee.
&nbsp;
Sound engineering by Alison Zhuang.
Impact Talks at UTS is produced by <a href="https://impactstudios.edu.au/">Impact Studios</a>.

Change for Good

Anna Funder, award-winning writer and author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life, unpacks how the patriarchy continues to maintain the status quo – using the extraordinary lives of Eileen O’Shaughnessy and George Orwell, and her thoughts on the 2023 hit movie Barbie.

In a patriarchal system, women’s relationships transform into a role – Mother. Wife. – that erases their individuality and signs them up to a motherload of unpaid labour.

In Australia, women do more than nine hours more unpaid work and care each week than men, and do more unpaid housework than men even when they are the primary breadwinner.

Nowhere in the world is this trend reversed.

Women’s domestic labour upholds households and economies but is too often devalued and unacknowledged.

 It’s a bargain few people, including men, want to be part of. Yet it stubbornly persists.

The event will also feature panel discussion with A/Prof Ramona Vijeyarasa and Prof Peter Siminski, where our speakers will share insights and expertise on how we can move towards more equitable models.

This event is co-hosted by the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. 

Keynote speaker

Dr Anna Funder is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and awarded writers. Her books Stasiland and All That I Am are prize-winning international bestsellers and translated into many languages. Her book, Wifedom, is hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ and was chosen as a Notable Book of 2023 by the New York Times and a Book of the Year by The Times, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph (UK) and The Telegraph (UK). Anna’s signature works tell stories of courage, resistance, conscience and love, illuminating the human condition in times of tyranny and surveillance. Anna is a University of Technology Sydney Luminary and Ambassador.

Panellists

Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa is a legal academic and women’s rights activist. She is the Chief Investigator behind the Gender Legislative Index, a tool designed to promote the enactment of legislation that works more effectively to improve women’s lives. Ramona’s academic career as a scholar of gender and the law follows ten years in international human rights activism, which has informed her impact-driven approach to research.

Professor Peter Siminski is an applied microeconomist. He has over 20 years of policy-oriented research experience and is the Head of the Economics Department at UTS. Peter’s work applies modern impact evaluation techniques to estimate the effects of Australian Government policies and programs on people’s lives. The measurement of inequality and intergenerational economic mobility is a key theme of his work.

Amy Persson (MC and moderator) is the interim Pro Vice-Chancellor (Social Justice and Inclusion) at UTS. Amy is a public policy specialist who has worked across the private, public and not for profit sectors and was Head of Government Affairs and External Engagement at UTS. Previously, she held Senior Executive roles in the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet and also ran the Behavioural Insights Unit and Office of Social Impact.

Sound engineering by Alison Zhuang.

Impact Talks at UTS is produced by Impact Studios.

Keynote Speech Transcript

It is a great honour for me to be standing here today with my colleagues, friends, and all of you at this great university. I thank Vice-Chancellor Andrew Parfitt, Interim Pro Vice-Chancellor Amy Persson and her predecessor, Professor Verity Firth, for this opportunity, and I am very much looking forward to the discussion with Associate Professor Vijeyarasa and Professor Siminski. 

I am part of a generation before pointy, painted nails and false eyelashes were standard glamour. I have a wardrobe of fairly androgynous suits in different colours – blue, red, white, green – my husband says I dress like a Wiggle. But today, I stand before you in this extremely uncharacteristic bubblegum pink dress doing something I never imagined I’d do in my life: channelling Barbie. Less the doll, more the movie. Let me tell you how this happened. 

Last year, my UK tour for WIFEDOM started with a publishing team lunch. I was extremely jetlagged but had to stay awake for an evening event, I took myself off to see BARBIE. Afterwards, I walked straight out of the cinema and, in an act of mad, sleep-deprived solidarity, bought this shiny pink number. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to wear it ever since. Today’s the day.

Barbie is a work of genius. Part of its cleverness is that the movie posits two worlds. 

One, in which Barbies (women) can be anything they choose to be. They are supreme court judges and park rangers, doctors and barristers and presidents, dentists and pilots and plumbers. 

And another, the real world, represented by contemporary LA, where men are central and women are peripheral. In the real world men run the corporations and the country; they have most of the power and most of the money and most of the leisure time. When Ken, who comes to the real world with Barbie, quietly asks a businessman if patriarchy is still working as well as it did here before #MeToo, the man leans in and whispers, ‘We’re doing it well, just hiding it better.’ 

Men working on a building site feel entitled to humiliate Barbie as she passes by, just for fun and to make sure she knows her place in this world. This is the kind of frontline, basic abuse that is the most obvious way that patriarchy tells us, loud and clear, on the street or in the boardroom that men are central and powerful, and women are to be defined by them, in their interest. 

In our world, Barbie comes to feel ‘ill at ease, conscious … but it’s my self that I’m conscious of’, she says. She feels ‘a definite undertone of violence’ and ‘a sense of fear … though without any specific object’. A school mum explains this that this is the normal feeling of anxiety being a woman involves, as we are overloaded and responsible for so much, though relatively powerless in the wider world.

Ken says, ‘I feel amazing.’

One of the reasons I never had a Barbie doll was that my mother was a feminist. In our household, we thought that things were getting better for women and girls. Indeed, my mother’s work as a research psychologist contributed to changes in Australia’s taxation system so that divorced fathers would contribute to the financial support of their children. We assumed that the Barbie world, where women would be central to themselves and able to do anything, was coming, at least to our progressive, rich, post-Whitlam corner of the planet, pretty soon.

A full house in the Great Hall for International Women's Day 2024.

But it has not come. Yet.

People at this great university and many others, in think tanks and governments all around the world are occupied with this question. We know that the world needs the talents and time of women to be a just place, as well as to improve our nations’ economies, while looking after the planet. We see progress in women’s equality going forward by some measures, though stalling or going backward in others. 

When I was a little girl in the 1970s and a teen and then a student in the 1980s, it would never have occurred to me that the male idea of the world would express itself in tsunamis of anonymous, horrifying and pathetic misogyny online, expressing the terror that being male will cease to mean being superior to a woman.

Or that pornography would become about choking and doing other things to women that cannot be about pleasure or love, but plainly about pain and submission. 

Or that poverty, globally, would be predominantly female.

Or that Chanel Contos, who was not a gleam in her parents’ eye, would have her work cut out for her calling out a culture of sexual assault among the most privileged gilded youth of the nation. 

Or that there would be such a thing as a gender pay gap in the 2020s, let alone in many industries, one of nearly a quarter of pay difference, double if you include bonuses. 

Or that women would continue, by powerful, unspoken social expectation, backed by punitive tax measures and a privatised childcare system, to bear the burden of being both unsung CEO and labour force in the home: generally doing double the work of life and love and care that keeps families going. And all this, right here, in what is by many measures the richest but at the same time one of the fairest countries on the planet.  

In WIFEDOM, I also examined another world, the one of the marriage of Eileen O’Shaughnessy and George Orwell 80 years ago. It was fascinating to me how the work of a brilliant, highly educated woman could be, apparently, invisible to her husband at the same time as it was, intellectually and practically, indispensable. Eileen kept George going domestically, supported him financially, saved his life in the Spanish Civil War, had the idea for Animal Farm as a novel, which she worked on with him each day, making it, he thought, the best of his books. But he never felt the need to acknowledge her in any way, and nor, really, did his biographers after him.

As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me. But as a woman and a wife, her life terrifies me. I recognise in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining herself and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy, which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time, which are indispensable, are made invisible. 

Time is valuable, because it is finite. So, as with all other finite commodities, there is an economy of time. Time can be traded, bargained for, snuck and stolen. A weekend is finite – as any parent trying to juggle space and a portion of time within it with a spouse will tell you. A life is finite. Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered. One person’s time to work is created by another person’s work in time: the more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him. To examine a marriage of eighty years ago involves the faux-comfort of distance (surely we are more evolved than that?) along with a frisson of horror: things have not changed nearly enough. 

Every society in the world is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women. If it had to be paid for, it would cost, apparently, US$10.9 trillion. But to pay for it would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and de-fang patriarchy. 

How is it that all this work, so indispensable, can be invisible? One reason is because patriarchy attaches the work of care to the definition of what it is to be female, and not to what it is to be male. An example: decency was a core value to Orwell. When we say a man is a ‘decent bloke’, ‘or a good bloke’ we mean that he is a man of his word, trustworthy, a good friend. When we say a woman, wife or mother is ‘decent’ or ‘good’ those things have other meanings, which are attached to the care, work and time she gives those around her. You can be a decent bloke without doing any domestic or care work. But you could never be a decent a woman, mother or wife without caring for others. This is the swift and dirty trick of patriarchy: to attach work done for others to the definition of what it is to be you. It’s not really ‘work’; it’s just you proving you’re a decent (female) person.

There are many individual exceptions to this situation. Single-parent households where one person (most often, a woman) does it all. Heterosexual and homosexual couples in which the work of love and life is shared more equally. And we live in an age in which the gender binary (along with what it is to be a ‘good’ woman, or a ‘real’ man) is being challenged. Maybe a more fluid understanding of gender will eventually also free us not only from the fictions of what it is to be female and what it is to be male but also from the assumptions about work and care that those definitions carry. 

I am married to a wonderful man who’s emotionally astute and deeply engaged with our children and our domestic life. Craig and I share the financial load; we share most things in our lives. For him, care is central. But our experience is that the patriarchy still allocates a lot more of the care work to me – either to do or to raise in a conversation and delegate.

I don’t think we can or should be tackling this issue of male entitlement to women’s domestic labour one marriage at a time. It is no longer a private matter. It is an epidemic of inequality, and it needs a society-wide response. In the same way that at the end of the 19th-century society decided that everyone should be literate – a huge social change – and instituted free public primary education and free lending libraries, we need to decide, collectively, that society should have the benefit of women’s work and time, and make it possible. 

Like lifting people out of poverty or into literacy, we need social measures – free childcare and reform of the tax system for a start, and measures to ensure the removal of the barriers to women claiming equal representation in every sphere, including, of course, the boardrooms and parliaments of the nation. 

I am not saying it will be easy. Power and privilege were never given up easily, only taken justly. 

Possibly the most fictitious element in BARBIE, is how easily Ken gives up power, after he took it illegitimately. 

He says he didn’t really like it. ‘At first,’ he tells Barbie, ‘I thought the real world was run by men. And then I thought it was horses, but then I realised that horses were just men extenders.’ 

Patriarchy is the man extender, the imaginary horse they ride about on. We – especially many of you in this room – know what to do to get them off their imaginary steeds and to invite them to share with us the work of life and love and our time together on this planet. 

Time, as I say, is valuable, because it is finite. It’s time this was over.

Thank you so much for your time today.

Copyright: Anna Funder.

Anna Funder, award-winning writer and author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life, unpacks how the patriarchy continues to maintain the status quo &ndash; using the extraordinary lives of Eileen O&rsquo;Shaughnessy and George Orwell, and her thoughts on the 2023 hit movie Barbie.
In a patriarchal system, women&rsquo;s relationships transform into a role &ndash; Mother. Wife. &ndash; that erases their individuality and signs them up to a motherload of unpaid labour.
In Australia, women do more than nine hours more unpaid work and care each week than men, and do more unpaid housework than men even when they are the primary breadwinner.
Nowhere in the world is this trend reversed.
Women&rsquo;s domestic labour upholds households and economies but is too often devalued and unacknowledged.
 It&rsquo;s a bargain few people, including men, want to be part of. Yet it stubbornly persists.
The event will also feature panel discussion with A/Prof Ramona Vijeyarasa and Prof Peter Siminski, where our speakers will share insights and expertise on how we can move towards more equitable models.
This event is co-hosted by the <a href="https://www.uts.edu.au/partners-and-community/initiatives/social-justice-uts/centre-social-justice-inclusion">UTS Centre for Social Justice &amp; Inclusion</a> and the <a href="https://www.uts.edu.au/about/faculty-arts-and-social-sciences">Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences</a>.&nbsp;
Keynote speaker
<a href="https://www.uts.edu.au/partners-and-community/alumni-and-supporters/alumni/your-alumni-community/uts-luminaries/dr-anna-funder">Dr Anna Funder</a> is one of Australia&rsquo;s most acclaimed and awarded writers. Her books Stasiland and All That I Am are prize-winning international bestsellers and translated into many languages.&nbsp;Her book, Wifedom, is hailed as a &lsquo;masterpiece&rsquo; and was chosen as a Notable Book of 2023 by the New York Times and a Book of the Year by The Times, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph (UK) and The Telegraph (UK).&nbsp;Anna&rsquo;s signature works tell stories of courage, resistance, conscience and love, illuminating the human condition in times of tyranny and surveillance. Anna is a University of Technology Sydney Luminary and Ambassador.
Panellists
<a href="https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Ramona.Vijeyarasa">Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa</a>&nbsp;is a legal academic and women&rsquo;s rights activist. She is the Chief Investigator behind the Gender Legislative Index, a tool designed to promote the enactment of legislation that works more effectively to improve women&rsquo;s lives. Ramona&rsquo;s academic career as a scholar of gender and the law follows ten years in international human rights activism, which has informed her impact-driven approach to research.
<a href="https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Peter.Siminski">Professor Peter Siminski</a>&nbsp;is an applied microeconomist. He has over 20 years of policy-oriented research experience and is the Head of the Economics Department at UTS. Peter&rsquo;s work applies modern impact evaluation techniques to estimate the effects of Australian Government policies and programs on people&rsquo;s lives. The measurement of inequality and intergenerational economic mobility is a key theme of his work.
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-persson-a8971622b/?originalSubdomain=au">Amy Persson</a> (MC and moderator)&nbsp;is the interim Pro Vice-Chancellor (Social Justice and Inclusion) at UTS. Amy is a public policy specialist who has worked across the private, public and not for profit sectors and was Head of Government Affairs and External Engagement at UTS. Previously, she held Senior Executive roles in the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet and also ran the Behavioural Insights Unit and Office of Social Impact.
Sound engineering by Alison Zhuang.
Impact Talks at UTS is produced by <a href="https://impactstudios.edu.au/">Impact Studios</a>.
Keynote Speech Transcript
It is a great honour for me to be standing here today with my colleagues, friends, and all of you at this great university. I thank Vice-Chancellor Andrew Parfitt, Interim Pro Vice-Chancellor Amy Persson and her predecessor, Professor Verity Firth, for this opportunity, and I am very much looking forward to the discussion with Associate Professor Vijeyarasa and Professor Siminski.&nbsp;
I am part of a generation before pointy, painted nails and false eyelashes were standard glamour. I have a wardrobe of fairly androgynous suits in different colours &ndash; blue, red, white, green &ndash; my husband says I dress like a Wiggle. But today, I stand before you in this extremely uncharacteristic bubblegum pink dress doing something I never imagined I&rsquo;d do in my life: channelling Barbie. Less the doll, more the movie. Let me tell you how this happened.&nbsp;
Last year, my UK tour for WIFEDOM started with a publishing team lunch. I was extremely jetlagged but had to stay awake for an evening event, I took myself off to see BARBIE. Afterwards, I walked straight out of the cinema and, in an act of mad, sleep-deprived solidarity, bought this shiny pink number. I&rsquo;ve been looking for an opportunity to wear it ever since. Today&rsquo;s the day.
Barbie is a work of genius. Part of its cleverness is that the movie posits two worlds.&nbsp;
One, in which Barbies (women) can be anything they choose to be. They are supreme court judges and park rangers, doctors and barristers and presidents, dentists and pilots and plumbers.&nbsp;
And another, the real world, represented by contemporary LA, where men are central and women are peripheral. In the real world men run the corporations and the country; they have most of the power and most of the money and most of the leisure time. When Ken, who comes to the real world with Barbie, quietly asks a businessman if patriarchy is still working as well as it did here before #MeToo, the man leans in and whispers, &lsquo;We&rsquo;re doing it well, just hiding it better.&rsquo;&nbsp;
Men working on a building site feel entitled to humiliate Barbie as she passes by, just for fun and to make sure she knows her place in&nbsp;this&nbsp;world. This is the kind of frontline, basic abuse that is&nbsp;the most obvious way that patriarchy tells us, loud and clear, on the street or in the boardroom that men are central and powerful, and women are to be defined by them, in their interest.&nbsp;
In our world, Barbie comes to feel &lsquo;ill at ease, conscious &hellip; but it&rsquo;s my self that I&rsquo;m conscious of&rsquo;, she says. She feels &lsquo;a definite undertone of violence&rsquo; and &lsquo;a sense of fear &hellip; though without any specific object&rsquo;. A school mum explains this that this is the normal feeling of anxiety being a woman involves, as we are overloaded and responsible for so much, though relatively powerless in the wider world.
Ken says, &lsquo;I feel amazing.&rsquo;
One of the reasons I never had a Barbie doll was that my mother was a feminist. In our household, we thought that things were getting better for women and girls. Indeed, my mother&rsquo;s work as a research psychologist contributed to changes in Australia&rsquo;s taxation system so that divorced fathers would contribute to the financial support of their children. We assumed that the Barbie world, where women would be central to themselves and able to do anything, was coming, at least to our progressive, rich, post-Whitlam corner of the planet, pretty soon.
A full house in the Great Hall for International Women's Day 2024.
But it has not come. Yet.
People at this great university and many others, in think tanks and governments all around the world are occupied with this question. We know that the world needs the talents and time of women to be a just place, as well as to improve our nations&rsquo; economies, while looking after the planet. We see progress in women&rsquo;s equality going forward by some measures, though stalling or going backward in others.&nbsp;
When I was a little girl in the 1970s and a teen and then a student in the 1980s, it would never have occurred to me that the male idea of the world would express itself in tsunamis of anonymous, horrifying and pathetic misogyny online, expressing the terror that being male will cease to mean being superior to a woman.
Or that pornography would become about choking and doing other things to women that cannot be about pleasure or love, but plainly about pain and submission.&nbsp;
Or that poverty, globally, would be predominantly female.
Or that Chanel Contos, who was not a gleam in her parents&rsquo; eye, would have her work cut out for her calling out a culture of sexual assault among the most privileged gilded youth of the nation.&nbsp;
Or that there would be such a thing as a gender pay gap in the 2020s, let alone in many industries, one of nearly a quarter of pay difference, double if you include bonuses.&nbsp;
Or that women would continue, by powerful,&nbsp;unspoken social expectation, backed by punitive tax measures and a privatised childcare system,&nbsp;to bear the burden of being both unsung CEO&nbsp;and&nbsp;labour force in the home: generally doing double the work of life and love and care that keeps families going. And all this,&nbsp;right here, in what is by many measures the richest but at the same time one of the fairest countries on the planet. &nbsp;
In WIFEDOM, I also examined another world, the one of the marriage of Eileen O&rsquo;Shaughnessy and George Orwell 80 years ago. It was fascinating to me how the work of a brilliant, highly educated woman could be, apparently, invisible to her husband at the same time as it was, intellectually and practically, indispensable. Eileen kept George going domestically, supported him financially, saved his life in the Spanish Civil War, had the idea for&nbsp;Animal Farm&nbsp;as a novel, which she worked on with him each day, making it, he thought, the best of his books.&nbsp;But he never felt the need to acknowledge her in any way, and nor, really, did his biographers after him.
As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer&rsquo;s wife fascinates me. But as a woman and a wife, her life terrifies me. I recognise in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining herself and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy, which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time, which are indispensable, are made invisible.&nbsp;
Time&nbsp;is valuable, because it is finite. So, as with all other finite commodities, there is an economy of time. Time can be traded, bargained for, snuck and stolen. A weekend is finite &ndash; as any parent trying to juggle space and a portion of time within it with a spouse will tell you. A life is finite. Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered. One person&rsquo;s time to work is created by another person&rsquo;s work in time: the more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him. To examine a marriage of eighty years ago involves the faux-comfort of distance (surely we are more evolved than that?) along with a frisson of horror: things have not changed nearly enough.&nbsp;
Every society in the world is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women. If it had to be paid for, it would cost, apparently, US$10.9 trillion. But to pay for it would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and de-fang patriarchy.&nbsp;
How is it that all this work, so indispensable, can be invisible? One reason is because patriarchy attaches the work of care to the definition of what it is to be female, and not to what it is to be male. An example: decency was a core value to Orwell. When we say a man is a &lsquo;decent bloke&rsquo;, &lsquo;or a good bloke&rsquo; we mean that he is a man of his word, trustworthy, a good friend. When we say a woman, wife or mother is &lsquo;decent&rsquo; or &lsquo;good&rsquo; those things have other meanings, which are attached to the care, work and time she gives those around her. You can be a decent bloke without doing any domestic or care work. But you could never be a decent a woman, mother or wife without caring for others. This is the swift and dirty trick of patriarchy: to attach work done for others to the definition of what it is to be you. It&rsquo;s not really &lsquo;work&rsquo;; it&rsquo;s just you proving you&rsquo;re a decent (female) person.
There are many individual exceptions to this situation. Single-parent households where one person (most often, a woman) does it all. Heterosexual and homosexual couples in which the work of love and life is shared more equally. And we live in an age in which the gender binary (along with what it is to be a &lsquo;good&rsquo; woman, or a &lsquo;real&rsquo; man) is being challenged. Maybe a more fluid understanding of gender will eventually also free us not only from the fictions of what it is to be female and what it is to be male but also from the assumptions about work and care that those definitions carry.&nbsp;
I am married to a wonderful man who&rsquo;s emotionally astute and deeply engaged with our children and our domestic life. Craig and I share the financial load; we share most things in our lives. For him, care is central. But our experience is that the patriarchy still allocates a lot more of the care work to me &ndash; either to do or to raise in a conversation and delegate.
I don&rsquo;t think we can or should be tackling this issue of male entitlement to women&rsquo;s domestic labour one marriage at a time. It is no longer a private matter. It is an epidemic of inequality, and it needs a society-wide response. In the same way that at the end of the 19th-century society decided that everyone should be literate &ndash; a huge social change &ndash; and instituted free public primary education and free lending libraries, we need to decide, collectively, that society should have the benefit of women&rsquo;s work and time, and make it possible.&nbsp;
Like lifting people out of poverty or into literacy, we need social measures &ndash; free childcare and reform of the tax system for a start, and measures to ensure the removal of the barriers to women claiming equal representation in every sphere, including, of course, the boardrooms and parliaments of the nation.&nbsp;
I am not saying it will be easy. Power and privilege were never given up easily, only taken justly.&nbsp;
Possibly the most fictitious element in BARBIE, is how easily Ken gives up power, after he took it illegitimately.&nbsp;
He says he didn&rsquo;t really like it. &lsquo;At first,&rsquo; he tells Barbie, &lsquo;I thought the real world was run by men. And then I thought it was horses, but then I realised that horses were just men extenders.&rsquo;&nbsp;
Patriarchy is the man extender, the imaginary horse they ride about on.&nbsp;We &ndash; especially many of you in this room &ndash; know what to do to get them off their imaginary steeds and to invite them to share with us the work of life and love and our time together on this planet.&nbsp;
Time, as I say,&nbsp;is valuable, because it is finite. It&rsquo;s time this was over.
Thank you so much for your time today.
Copyright: Anna Funder.

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