Julie Bishop, the first woman to serve as Australia’s foreign affairs minister, has described how she becomes more determined to avoid the “feminist” label when people demand she embrace the term.
During a wide-ranging discussion among an all-female panel of the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night, Bishop urged Australians to focus on actions rather than terminology and said she was proud of her decision to refocus the foreign aid budget on gender inequality.
Bishop also affirmed the importance of International Women’s Day, saying the initiative was necessary and relevant while women continued to be subjected to human trafficking, sexual violence in conflict, abuse “in the most horrific circumstances”, a gender pay gap “that seems to be widening”, and systemic barriers to achievement.
The program, hosted by Annabel Crabb, began with a discussion about feminism and its place in the world today. Holly Kramer, the chief executive of retailer Best and Less, said she was proud to call herself a feminist because it showed support for women’s rights and choices, but noted that her generation had previously been reluctant to use the term because it “had a lot of baggage associated with it from the early days”.
Bishop, who also serves as deputy Liberal party leader, said she did not want to be stereotyped or pigeonholed and she would “self-describe” how she wished.
“Instead of focusing on so much analysing the labels, let’s look at what people do,” she said. “It’s being judged on what you actually seek to achieve rather than how you label yourself.”
Bishop rejected a suggestion from Crabb that it might be inconvenient for her politically to adopt the term feminist. “Not at all,” said Bishop, who has previously spoken about eschewing the label. “I just never have. The more people demand that I describe myself as a feminist, the more I say ‘well hang on, let me describe how I wish’.”
Bishop prompted laughter from the audience by telling the host: “Annabel, you wrote in the paper yesterday that you are disappointed that I don’t describe myself as a feminist. I am so disappointed that you don’t describe yourself as a Liberal.”
Bishop was backed by the feminist author Germaine Greer, who said the minister was “perfectly entitled to put it that way if she wants to”.
“I think part of the difficulty here is that we talk about equality the whole time, but we don’t really know exactly what it is or what it is equal with,” Greer said.
“We never talk these days about liberation. We never talk about women becoming self-defining, about women escaping from the constant blackmail about their appearance, about their weight, about their duties to other people and so on and so forth. At the same time as we talk about equality, we have to register the fact that in fact the pay gap in this country has widened in the last few years.”
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the founder of Youth Without Borders, called for a focus on structural inequalities and addressing “unconscious bias”.
“I feel like I’m a broken record when I talk about the fact that unconscious bias exists, but what we do about it is the important part,” she said, suggesting that part of the answer was addressing stereotypes and expectations while children were growing up.
When an audience member asked about statistics suggesting male panellists were typically given more opportunities than women to speak on Q&A, Bishop quipped that it might be because women were “more efficient and effective in saying what they want in a shorter period of time”.
Kramer said the media was one of the industries in which women were inadequately represented at the top levels.
Roxane Gay, the US-based author of Bad Feminist, was asked whether women needed to “sell” feminism better to men. “No, we don’t,” Gay replied. Men need to get over themselves … men don’t need to be sold. Why do we have to roll out the red carpet and jump through hoops and do all sorts of cartwheels to get men on board with feminism which is just the basic idea that men and women deserve to have the same rights and freedoms? It’s ridiculous.
“Time and again we worry about how do we market feminism to young women, how do we market feminism to men? I don’t care. I’m not trying to do market feminism to men. I want men to grow up and to learn how to get over themselves. That’s really it.”
In a discussion widely praised on social media, the panel talked about ways to promote more women into leadership roles in business, strategies for dealing with sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, the issue of balancing work with family and the importance of affordable childcare.
Asked by an audience member whether her ability to pursue a successful career as foreign minister would have been compromised if she had had children, Bishop said the role was “extremely demanding” and she spent a lot of time overseas.
But Bishop said she was “not suggesting for a moment that a woman with children couldn’t be Australia’s foreign minister”, and she noted that many men with children had performed the role.
During the program, Bishop also reaffirmed her pleas to the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, to grant clemency to the two Australians facing execution for drug-smuggling offences.
Bishop said Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran had shown “immense remorse” and Indonesia was “about to deprive other prisoners in their jail system of two role models who have been rehabilitated after 10 years in the Indonesian prison system”.
