As Covid-19 continues its relentless march throughout the world, so too is recognition of what is now becoming known as the Shadow Pandemic. Emerging research gathered from the front lines by the United Nations, shows that since the outbreak of Covid-19, all types of violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, has rapidly increased. On this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 25, the UN is calling for a global collective effort, as essential services such as domestic violence shelters and helplines around the world reach capacity. In some countries, calls to helplines have increased five-fold. Griffith University researcher and phd candidate Elise Imray Papineau is investigating the importance of grassroots activism in this mix. Her research focuses on the cross-cultural experiences of activist women in Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In this episode of The Gender Card, presenter Nance Haxton meets Elise at a renowned gathering place for activists in Brisbane’s West End called The Burrow, where she’s coordinated an art exhibition highlighting the subversive work of protest groups such as Needle N Bitch from Indonesia, and how art can powerfully challenge the status quo.

Episode 24: Grassroots Activism

The United Nations International Day of People with Disability has a long esteemed history, celebrating understanding and acceptance of people with a disability around the world for almost three decades. It’s a day to honour the benefits of an inclusive and accessible society for all. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a key touchstone moment for disability rights, as it’s a historic and comprehensive legally binding international treaty that Australia was pivotal in developing. The CRPD as it’s become known, came into force in 2008. 

Today on the Gender Card, our guests examine how far we have come, and how much more there is to achieve for disability rights in Australia. Lawyer and marathon runner Henry McPhillamy brings insights from his own lived experience as a person who is blind to the panel. Eloise Hummell is a Research Fellow at The Hopkins Centre, at the Menzies Health Institute of Queensland, who is researching disability and rehabilitation, particularly how the National Disability Insurance Scheme is moving away from the key principles of the CRPD. And we are also joined today by internationally renowned researcher and Senior Policy Officer for People with Disability Australia Frances Quan Farrant.

Episode 25: Disability Rights in Australia

Today on The Gender Card, we delve into the contested territory that overlaps consent and sport. Griffith University’s Dr Indigo Willing is leading the research project called Red Flags, Banter and Blurred Lines: Exploring Consent in Sport. She’s working alongside Dr Adele Pavlidis, going where many have feared to tread, asking male sports leaders about respectful relationships, violence against women and consent. With Dr Willing’s background as a skateboarding and masculinities expert, combined with Dr Pavlidis’s expertise as a roller derby and women in sports scholar,  both sociologists hope to reveal why cultures of exclusion and harm persist in sport, despite many official programs especially designed to tackle the problem. And as they reveal in this interview, issues of power, masked by banter on the sporting field are a central aspect of this dilemma.

Episode 26: Consent in Sport

Episode 27: Like the octopus she sees herself to be, Griffith Business School’s Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation Naomi Birdthistle has spread her tentacles worldwide in support of women entrepreneurs. Her passion for entrepreneurship started at home, supporting her family business. Now Naomi has multiple projects on the go, in the same way as the women she supports to find the confidence to go on to their next level of success. Naomi’s work with women in business has led to incredible research output, with more than a dozen book chapters and more than 50 research papers about managing and developing sustainable development goals. She does this by enabling women to overcome what she describes as “the insular narrative”, to stop holding themselves back, and instead identify when they are entrepreneurs and wear that badge proudly.  
Her main goal now is to stop the Australian government from lagging behind other countries, and instead provide more targeted support to entrepreneurial women.

Episode 27: Women and entrepreneurship

Episode 28: We delve into the complexities and wide-ranging experiences of women recovering from depression. Griffith University’s Professor Simone Fullagar and Dr Adele Pavlidis have just released a book along with their colleague Wendy O’Brien, called Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery. Their creative analytic writing approach uses poems and feminist memory to explore why women report much higher rates of depression than men, yet gender is often ignored in medical and therapeutic responses. As they write in their introduction, “We invite readers to engage with this book as a co-constituted process of reading-writing through visceral connections - guts, brains, hearts, skin, words, images, surfaces - to explore how gender matters…we all feel the weight of another woman’s suffering that remains invisible, unrecognised in ways that matter deeply”. Their years of research are shining a light on society’s hesitancy to talk about gender as a crucial factor shaping depression, and what implications this has for more effective prevention, treatment and recovery options.

Episode 28: Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery

Episode 29: Today on The Gender Card, we explore teacher activism, and how that resistance translates into the classroom. Phd candidate Carla Tapia has delved in detail into how teachers can bring about social change through resistance, despite constant scrutiny and limitations on their teaching. Using Indigenous methodologies to understand how teachers engage with their students, she showed how teachers have developed ways to give them space to resist - by giving alternative views to history in the classroom, that have traditionally been dominated by male perspectives. Senior Research Fellow Dr Debbie  Bargallie was one of Carla’s supervisors, bringing her expertise on Indigenous methodologies, and they both join us on the Gender Card today. Carla’s use of Indigenous Australian methodologies and decolonisation approaches has shone new light on the struggles that teachers face, finding their motivations to create a fairer society are often thwarted by bureaucracy, and how they overcome those challenges.

Episode 29: Exploring Teaching Activism

Episode 30: Today on The Gender Card, we explore the emerging research around critical race feminism and how that intersects with feminist practice in arts and academia. Griffith University’s Dr Nilmini Fernando’s innovative research was recently featured in the Journal of Intercultural Studies - particularly her work in a participatory theatre-based project in Ireland creating a platform for women seeking protection - to self-represent their stories of gendered race in their encounters with the asylum system. The live performance space fostered voicing of stories that connect past to present, disrupt power relations and speak back to gendered racial constructions of "African women" to remake meanings and assumptions on their own terms. As a Sri Lankan Australian interdisciplinary feminist researcher, educator and practitioner, Dr Fernando uses her lived experience and expertise in critical race theory to expand on Sara Ahmed’s seminal work, to distinguish specific forms of Black female agency and resistance in Australia. She’s also co-editing a book based on Senior Research Fellow Dr Debbie Bargallie’s groundbreaking work on Racial Literacy.

Episode 30: Critical Race Feminism

Episode 31: Violence against women is a major human rights violation and public health problem the world over, prevalent across all societies.  Today on The Gender Card, we speak to three academics who are leading the way in a landmark Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, which will investigate the causes of this violoence. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women - or CEVAW - will become the world’s leading research program to stop violence against women. It will be interdisciplinary, focussed on the Indo-Pacific, and Indigenous-centred, to lead research that redresses power imbalances and enables new cultural understandings. Monash University’s Professor Jacqui True joins us today as Director of the Centre, along with Griffith University’s Professor Sara Davies as deputy director of the centre’s Indo-Pacific research and relationships. Professor Patrick O’Leary tells us about his role as a chief investigator in the Centre, and the hope they all have that by gathering all important data, CEVAW will bring integral breakthroughs so desperately needed, for lasting societal change.

Episode 31: Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW)

Episode 32: Today on The Gender Card, we speak to two esteemed Griffith University researchers, Professor Leonie Rowan and Dr Dhara Shah, who are investigating how gender discrimination impacts both the personal and professional lives of academic women in Australian universities. They're leading a dynamic interdisciplinary team that will use intersectionality theory to gather the experiences of academic women, and find out why so many still experience job insecurity, teaching overload, expectations around emotional labour, reduced opportunities for research and everyday sexism.

Epidsode 32: How gender discrimination Impacts lives of academic women in Australian universities

Episode 33: Today on The Gender Card, we will speak to Griffith University phd candidate Sofia Ammassari about her research across three countries with Duncan McDonnell from Griffith University and Marco Valbruzzi from the University of Naples - looking at how gender impacts young people’s political ambitions. Studies have long and consistently shown that women tend to be less politically aspirational than men, as they are less interested in standing for election as candidates. But Sofia’s research found that women are as likely as men to want to pursue a political career within the party’s organisation. These findings are important because they help debunk well established myths around women being less politically motivated than men, when in reality, it is more the type of politlcal career that is important. These results were recently published in the European Journal of Political Research, providing new insights into the gendered nature of political ambition.

Episode 33: Gender impacts young people's political ambitions

Imagine for a moment if you will, what the world would look like if all genders were equal. What would that mean for society, for work, and play, and for women’s place in those structures? That’s what this podcast, The Gender Card, is all about. 

In this first episode of The Gender Card, we find out why and how women win or lose in big transitional periods, both on a global scale, and in their own personal lives. 

And we discover what brought together our esteemed experts Griffith Law School Associate Professor Dr Susan Harris-Rimmer, and Griffith Business School Associate Professor Dr Sara Davies, to start a radical research network for gender equity at university level.

Episode 1: What is the Gender Card? With Susan Harris Rimmer and Sara Davies

Today we look at how gender plays out in sport, and how that affects the society in which we live. Dr Adele Pavlidis is a Griffith University social scientist and specialist in the politics of gender on the sporting field.  On this episode of The Gender Card, she tells how she started her academic career by joining a local roller derby, to totally immerse herself in her PhD research. Now having graduated with her PhD in Sport and Leisure Management, she understands how increasing female participation in contact sports can not only better reflect society on the sporting field, it can also influence society’s attitudes towards women far more broadly.

Episode 2: The Gender Card in Sport with Adele Pavlidis

Women travelling alone are a growing demographic, but many assumptions are still made about their motivations and why they like travelling solo. Griffith Institute of Tourism lecturer and researcher Dr Elaine Yang has studied this phenomena. The expert in gender based tourism tells this episode of The Gender Card podcast how tourism companies can better support women who choose to travel on their own.

Episode 3: The Gender Card in Women's Solo Travel with Elaine Yang

We know what geography is, but what about human geography? 
Griffith School of Environment lecturer and Urban Research program researcher Dr Natalie Osborne investigates the links between the person, the society and physical space around us, and how women are often left out of planning. She focuses on social and environmental justice in human settlements and the development of more just, resilient and sustainable futures. And she’s finding there’s more than just history and politics at play when it comes to gender politics in this realm.

Episode 4: The Gender Card in human geography with Natalie Osborne

Household finance. It’s something we all have to deal with, but are woefully underprepared for by the education system and power networks in society. On this episode of The Gender Card podcast Griffith University Business School lecturer and member of the Gender Equality Research Network Dr Tracey West explains how her research has found the accumulation of wealth depends on our ability to make informed decisions on saving and investing. Which leaves women, and those on low incomes, generally the worst off. She’s looking into why this is the case, with reasons such as being excluded from money conversations at home, ongoing impacts of the gender wage gap, and low levels of financial literacy.

Episode 5: The Gender Card in women's finances with Tracey West

Domestic violence remains a scourge of society, with shocking attacks and brutality continuing on thousands of women around Australia. Griffith Criminology Institute's Robyn Holder is hoping to help change that by exploring the role of victims in criminal justice and giving them a voice in the often fierce policy debates about what rights are owed them. In this episode of The Gender Card, Robyn tells how she's combined 20 years of public policy experience with academic research to hopefully change the system and bring more justice to the victims of gendered violence.

Episode 7: The Gender Card in criminal violence with Robyn Holder

In this episode of The Gender Card podcast, Nance Haxton speaks to Professor Jenny Gamble, the head of midwifery at Griffith University and director of the Transforming Maternity Care Collaborative. Jenny leads innovative research on the principles of gender empowerment and gender equality that crosses traditional boundaries and aims for a complete redesign of the maternity care system. Despite overwhelming evidence showing its benefits, few women have access to the ideal model of midwives providing continuity of care. Professor Jenny Gamble hopes this project changes that, giving women more choice and control over how they bring their babies into the world with better health outcomes for all.

Episode 12: The Gender Card in maternity care with Jenny Gamble

While many social equity programs have had to pause or stop altogether this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, one vital Griffith University project has found a way to continue. On this episode of the Gender Card, presenter Nance Haxton explores The Sisters Support Business Together—a project empowering women over 50 years of age to break the cycle of underemployment and homelessness, with older women now the age group most at risk of suddenly losing their home. The program created by Dr Dhara Shah is cross-disciplinary, bringing business and social welfare experts together to tackle the underlying issues behind these statistics. And by giving older women the training and confidence to start their own businesses, it's resulting in remarkable outcomes that couldn't have been achieved otherwise.

Episode 13: The Gender Card in empowering women over 50 in business with Dhara Shah

Inclusive education: What is it and how can we help women around the world break down the barriers to full inclusion in school. Today on The Gender Card we talk to two former teachers and now Griffith University researchers about how their paths are leading to more truly inclusive education and a better path for all. Julie Ballangarry and Nina Ginsberg — are doing groundbreaking research into the way we think about education and education policy. Julie's research explores why Indigenous education policies are continually failing by investigating the current approaches to policy-making in this arena. Nina explores how bicycles can enable or constrain rural African girls' access to secondary school. She manages a popular blog called 'Bicycles Create Change’. Nina is finding through her fieldwork that sometimes the most simple out of school solutions like bikes as transportation are key to overcoming gender discrimination and improving access to essential services.This episode of the Gender Card comes as we celebrate International Women’s Day 2021.

The Gender Card

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