Listen, believe, act: this International Women's Day platitudes are not enough

There’s a new season of truth-telling taking place. One where school children are proving braver than leaders, braver than me, in telling their stories. We remain in a perpetual cycle of disbelief, where it still takes individual women to stand up in the full public eye and declare: this happened to me! And somehow the collective conscience is able to swell up around those statements and wash them away, again. Can this be the moment Australia allows those stories to stand on firm ground and listen?

Because this isn’t the story of one or two or one hundred or one million women, it belongs to us all.

A couple of years ago, my mother - my fiercely strong, independent, feisty mother - and I were having a conversation about sex discrimination.

We began, intuitively, to create something of a timeline, a terrible catalogue of cumulative harm. Overt, blatant instances where we had been treated differently or badly because we are women.

The professional transgressions: job offers taken away, lost superannuation, gender pay gaps, requests to complete demeaning tasks, mansplaining, being the only woman in the room - they are experiences we’ve both endured. They cover a field from the 1960s when my mother entered the workforce to today as she exits having made a lifetime contribution as an educational leader and I continue as a Director for human rights and social impact.

We are both privileged and products of that privilege. White, middle class, educated, born in a wealthy democracy. We are not fighting the additional injustice layered when other statuses intersect - race, ethnicity, disability, and more. Our burden cannot possibly compare; and with extraordinary admiration I acknowledge and see that.

Then our catalogue took an even darker turn. The derogatory comments, the unwanted touching, the experiences of extreme danger and fortunate escapes, the harassment, abusive and demeaning situations and relationships.

What? Hang on! What about our privilege? Surely I can just lean in? Choose not to be in particular places? Choose to leave? Choose to wear something else? Choose not to speak? Choose not to persist?

But that would be a choice not to be. And nevertheless, we persist...

Neither of us would describe ourselves as survivors. And still less victims. So how do we describe these experiences? These decades of being women?

This is how it is, but not how it should remain.

I am a human rights practitioner. I live and breathe models of normative change. I look for and design the practical application of progressive socialisation. Right now it feels as though we might merely be on that first rung: where some language, some of the time, spoken by some people has opened a space for transformative dialogue.

It might be fair to say we are already beyond instrumentalism, that the public discourse has led to decades of structural wins.

But literally as I write, a group of adolescent males sits across the public square from me. I estimate that they are just franchised, adults in the eye of the law. With great jocularity they are rating women. This is a public discourse. In this instance, I am standing up. I shouldn’t have to, but I choose to leave. I do not choose not to be.

Back home, and I ponder patriarchy from my privileged position over a glass of wine, while my husband cooks lunch and my two boys play with our neighbour’s three boys. The floor is strewn with lego and train tracks. This week, my eldest asked me to choose my favourite Ninjago character. I asked him to take me through my options. After he’d finished, I said, "In protest I am not selecting one." "Why?" "Well," I continued, "based on what you’ve told me only 17% of the ninjas are women and 0% of those in leadership identify as a woman." It was a joke. My kids laughed. But it also wasn’t a joke. Collectively, my husband and I bear the responsibility of raising respectful boys, and we are doing so in a context that doesn’t yet support that.

We have a series of options at this point, but influenced by some of the remarkable conversations I’ve had this week, here are the practical, immediate, next best steps:

First, listen. Just listen. If you’re yet to hear the stories, then I encourage you to sit with their weight, their messiness, their horror and their mundane repetitiveness.

Second, suspend your disbelief. This doesn’t happen to particular women, in particular situations, at particular times. It is ever present, even where it is unacknowledged. It is pervasive, normalised and sometimes hard to spot. More often than not, it’s there if we choose to see it.

Third, consider your own actions. Take the personal lived experience you’ve heard and carefully re-examine the structures around you. What needs to change now that you’ve listened?

I called my mother just now to ask her permission to tell a little of our story. Our boundaries and approach must be our own and this was not mine alone to share. We stand together.

So, this international women’s day, let’s move beyond the platitudes to active listening, believing what we hear and taking practical steps in our own sphere of influence, however small or powerfully systemic they may be.