An idea quickly agreed to: Julia Gillard's next move (2024)

“Power”, says Julia Gillard, “usually looks like a king.” Australia’s former – and first female - prime minister has just finished reading She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, the romping tale of queens who reigned in the 15th and 16th centuries when female power was considered, as Protestant Scottish reformer John Knox said, “repugnant to nature”. God, wrote Knox, had deprived woman of “authority and dominion”. (Unsurprisingly, but unfortunately for him, his warning about the “monstrous regiment of women” did not endear him to Elizabeth I.)

Men, then, were born to rule. Women were usurpers, interlopers and aberrations.

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The fact that this view of women and power as fundamentally incompatible has endured for centuries is part of the reason that today Gillard is launching the first Global Institute for Women’s Leadership with Kings College London. She will be its inaugural chair.

The remit is simple and global: find out what removes obstacles to equality, dig up and provide empirical data on which strategies are known to work, and ensure people employ them.

The institute’s concept note says the job of attaining equality for women is far from done, pointing to global data that show women make up only 23 per cent of parliamentarians, 26 per cent of news media leaders, 27 per cent of judges, and 15 per cent of corporate board members.

The number of women in senior management positions virtually stalled in the past decade, only going up by 1 per cent – from 24 to 25 per cent.

Many of the barriers to full equality, it says, are implicit, such as influential male networks, and “pervasive gender stereotyping [that] can mean woman are simply not as readily associated with competence, decisiveness and assertiveness, and are thus overlooked for leadership roles.”

To counter this, the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership aims to pull together the best research on women in positions of power, identify the gaps in understanding when and how progress is made and, by working with policy makers, present evidence-based plans for progress. In short, analysis, “global outreach and tangible action”.

The official vision is: “To contribute to the creation of a world in which being a woman is not a barrier to becoming a leader in any field, or a factor leading to negative perceptions of an individual’s leadership.”

The idea was Gillard’s own, hatched when she spent two weeks at King’s College as a visiting fellow, and quickly agreed to. Gillard has signed a three-year contract but says she would consider staying longer. She plans to spend two months a year there.

It’s been almost five years since Gillard was deposed by her nemesis, Kevin Rudd, the man she pushed from power herself in 2010, years she has spent avoiding weighing into political debates, fuelling internal Labor Party divisions or sniping from sidelines. Speaking from London this week, she says she remains positive about politics and about women’s place in it, even praising Tony Abbott as a “very able” opponent, and saying she would do it all again in a blink if a time machine gave her that option: “Hell yes.”

The ferocity of the criticism she received in office, she says, stemmed from a “perfect storm”: the reaction to the way she became prime minister in an overnight coup, the fact she formed a minority government which, she believes, made her vulnerable to charges of self interest over national interest, a concentrated media market, political journalist group think, and yes, “the curious question of gender”.

Since leaving office and forming global networks of female leaders, Gillard has become more and more interested in unconscious bias. The cultural underpinnings of how we view men and women, she says, means that men possess power naturally while women are binary, good or bad: “We very rarely see women in all their complexity. This makes politics hard [for women], because it’s hard to be perceived as good. All of the mechanisms of power mean you are likely to be categorised as a bad woman.”

“There was a bit of that on display in my experience,” she says.

Repeating the sentiments she uttered at her final press conference, she said: “Gender most assuredly does not explain everything but some of the reception around the leadership change, was, say, qualitatively different to Paul Keating replacing Bob Hawke … [gender] was one of the elements, definitely.”

Meanwhile, Gillard has been working as the chair of Beyond Blue, aiming to raise awareness of mental health, and in her quiet moments, curling up with books about bloody, strong-minded queens.

The author of She-Wolves, Helen Castor, aimed to "expose the paradox which the female heir to the Tudor throne had no choice but to negotiate. Man was the head of woman, and the king was the head of all. How, then, could royal power lie in female hands?"

Gillard finished the book pondering this thought: “The perceived image and sight of power was the king and if women ended up with authority, either she ended up being made a Madonna figure or a she-wolf, a self-seeking, hard-grasping immoral woman.”

But it’s a myth that wolves howl at the moon. In truth, when they howl, they are calling to their pack.

Julia Baird is the author of Victoria: The Queen