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Sanam Hey, Sos, how are you doing? We are starting the podcast, if you are in charge. If you were in charge. Thank you. (..) Should we start again?
Kavita Ramdas The pressure that young women feel, and actually women of all ages feel, that they should somehow be likable over their ability to be successful, over their ability to be taken seriously, over their ability to be an intellectual, over their ability to excel in whatever field they are excelling. It's something, I think, that is so deeply socialized into us at very early ages. To be a nice girl, to be a good girl, is something that is very deeply a part of women doing a very good job of oppressing ourselves. (....)
Sanam That's Kavita Nandini Ramdas, my guest this week on If You Were in Charge, with me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. Welcome, everyone. The show is brought to you by the Robert Bosch Academy and my organization, ICANN, where for 20 years we've been working with women peace builders on stopping wars and violence. Around the world. Each week, I talk with other doers and imaginers about the tough issues they tackle, from extreme capitalism to biodiversity and war and peace in the Middle East. And I ask them, what would you do if you were in charge? On this episode, we're talking about the state of feminism in the world and the dissonance we're hearing. A little context. So on the one hand, if we think of feminism in its simplest terms as equal opportunity for women and men, there's definitely change. We're seeing it in politics, including even in far-right movements. You know, there's Alice Weedle in the far-right German AFD party, Marie Le Pen in France, Georgia Maloney in Italy. In other sectors, women are also making headway in medicine, business, law, and so forth. But there are bottlenecks. In 2023, for example, 50.3% of associates in U.S. law firms were women, but they constituted only 4% of law firm partners. And there are some dangerous trends, too. In Belgium, for example, 32% of men below 27 were veering towards the Flemish anti-immigration separatist party. In Germany, too, young women lean left, but the young men are leaning right. In the U.S., feminism itself has become a polarizing issue. Young men favor Trump while women support Harris, and there is a whopping 51-point gap between them. It all reminds me of conversations I had with ex-rebel fighters in Liberia in 2009, when the women were saying, we want equality, but the men heard and perceived it as, women want to get ahead of us. (.) To talk about all of this and much more, my guest this episode is Kavita Nandini Ramdas. She has been a renowned activist and voice of clarity, strategy, and compassion in global feminist movements and philanthropy for the past 30 years. (.) But first, our weekly dose of Sos, my daughter Sohle at Cambridge, who is navigating being a woman in STEM. (........) Hey, Sos. I'm going to be talking to Kavita Ramdas, who is one of the best-known names in this field of international philanthropy and feminism specifically. And I was going to ask you, now that you're in academia, from the lens of feminism, especially the sciences, what are you seeing? What's been your experience so far? (.)
Soleh I think, like, coming from a very techie, STEM-focused school or university and doing a more biological-focused degree, it was interesting and kind of sad because the funnel that they talk about that, you know, you start with a lot of people in the bottom, in the undergrads, and then you kind of go upwards in PhDs, postdocs, to professors, and somewhere along the way, they seem to be losing a lot of the women, even in a subject that is very, very popular with girls, clearly. Somehow, as you go up higher, you lose the women. And then coming here to Cambridge with moving to a more, quote-unquote, like, hard science, you see it even more. They do their best, but you obviously, you can't force it.
Sanam When you were both in the States in your bioengineering degree and here, do you see any difference between how the men and the women work, treat you, think about things? Is there a different perspective that you think people bring or not? (.)
Soleh I don't think the difference is between male and female, no. I think it's, like, American to British, big difference. It's less, like, in an approach to the science and more in an approach to, like, the lab environment and the kind of competition or, you know, lack of, I don't know, that makes it seem like the Brits aren't competitive or something. But it's more about kind of in the way that people speak about what they do and how they present themselves can be very different. The Americans, you're kind of always told to talk louder and, you know, fake it till you make it kind of thing, whereas that's not at all how the Brits function, I would say.
Sanam How do the Brits function? (.)
Soleh I mean, they're very British. (..) It's not, you know, fake it till you make it, talk very loud. I mean, that's pretty antithetical to British culture. Yeah.
Sanam It's almost the opposite, isn't it? It's like the guy's got a Nobel Prize and he's like, I think I might know something about this. //S02: Yeah, exactly. (.)//
Kavita Ramdas That's funny.
Sanam And then, so it's going back to the whole question of feminism. I mean, when you think about it in terms of you and your friends and what are the kinds of issues that people are conscious of?
Soleh Obviously, people are conscious of the gender, like, pay gap and things like that. I think also in terms of, like, safety, like, just, you know, the difference of being a girl walking alone at night versus being a man is still very present. Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, like, we've come a long way.
Sanam Do people stand up and say, hey, I am a feminist or is it kind of strange to say it or to declare?
Soleh Like, the word has been used in, like, strange ways, like the kind of feminine, online feminism. (.) //S02: What is that?//
Sanam What's online feminism?
Soleh Like, in the same way that woke has been, like, co-opted and that, like, pride has been corporatized or, like, the hashtag, I'm with her. (.)
Sanam Right.
Soleh I think there's a lot of pushback on this sense that, like, men and women have to be, like, equal in everything or something. Or a girl can do anything a man can do. Where, like, of course that's true, but it also doesn't, isn't necessary. The kind of acceptance of different perspectives that, like, women can bring rather than just, like, having to mimic being men or just having to want everything that men have.
Sanam That's an interesting thing because it's almost like generationally, if you look back to, say, the Hillary Clinton generation, it was always about, you know, I'm as good as you. I can be as, you know, tough as you and hawkish as you. And in my generation, we were trying to say, well, no, actually, we want to do things differently. We want to come and, you know, like, rearrange the furniture and the room. We, you know, we wanted to bring different perspectives.
Soleh But I don't know if this is, like, relevant to the podcast or if we want to keep it in. But, like, I think one example of a conversation I actually had recently was about, like, dating apps and how, like, there's no kind of, well, we were talking about how there's no female Grindr. I don't know if you know what Grindr is, mommy. I don't, I'm obviously not on Grindr, but, like, and it was me and another friend who were both 23 having an argument with two friends who were kind of older. I mean, they're not that much older. They're, like, 25, 26. And we were saying, like, maybe there's a reason that there is no female Grindr, which is that women don't want that. Whereas their argument was that there's no female Grindr, there's no, like, Grindr for women because women don't feel safe in those situations. And, like, I think it can be both. (.) But I also think that, like, there's no, it's not like there's no Grindr for straight people and there's also no Grindr for lesbians. And, like, that wouldn't be dangerous in the same way that, like, meeting an unnamed man off the internet would be, supposedly, right? //S02: I don't know if I'd explain that.//
Sanam It's a hard one because I don't really know about Grindr or Tinder or, you know.
Soleh But that's, but that's. Sure. But that's interesting. The idea that if it were possible, if, like, society allowed it, that women would want that even.
Sanam Obviously some do, but, like, there's also a reason that it's not popular besides just safety,
Soleh you know, the idea that, like, it's okay to say that women and men approach these things differently, you know.
Sanam And then, so one last thing before we transition to the guest. In terms of your friends, the boys and the young men that you are dealing with, if the word feminism comes up or feminist ideas, values, how do they understand it? What are the reactions that you get?
Soleh I think it probably depends how, like, online they are. (.) Because there's this whole, like, you know, right-wing stuff that's happening online is driving a lot of boys, probably younger than me mostly, to be very, like, anti-feminist and stuff like that. But I think most boys that, like, that I'm friends with would probably, like, they may not go out and around town, like, walking around saying that they're feminists. But I probably wouldn't do that either because why would I do that? But, I mean, I think that most understand that it's not about raising women above men or something like that. (.) Are most people aware of, like, feminist theory? No. (.) But, yeah, I think they know that it's about equality and about societal change in general and not just, like, again, raising women up only.
Sanam Great. I'm going to be interviewing Kavita Ramdas, who, as I said, is a very well-known feminist philanthropist. She was involved with the Global Fund for Women. She's done a lot of work internationally. (.) What do you think I should ask her? You kind of, you didn't tell me that I have to come up with questions.
Soleh No. (11 seconds pause)
Sanam Hello, Kavita Nandini Ramdas. Welcome to If You Were In Charge. I'm delighted to be here. Salaam. Namaste. Salaam. Lovely to have you. You're talking to me from Berlin. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing there, actually, and then we'll get into the conversations around feminism, which are obviously related. (.)
Kavita Ramdas Great. I'm actually in Berlin as a fellow, a Richard von Weizsäcker fellow, which you were until very recently at the Bosch Academy, which is a program of the Bosch Diphthong. I'm going to be looking closely at questions of what is feminism, what does it mean, and how does it translate into European countries that have chosen to pick a foreign policy that they are consciously calling feminist, which is the case with Germany, which just adopted one last year, and some of the underlying assumptions, both about feminism and then how that translates into the space of diplomacy and international politics. brilliant.
Sanam Actually, I'm going to start right there with feminism, because I was having a conversation with my daughter, Sole, who's 23. So, you know, this new Gen Z that they are. And I was asking her whether feminism matters to their generation. Like, do they call themselves feminists? And it was interesting because her attitude was very kind of nonchalant. She said, of course we are, or of course I am, but I don't walk around with a label waving a flag. Do you see a difference in terms of how the generations are thinking about it? If you think back to yourself, when you were in your 20s, how did you even become involved in thinking about yourself as a feminist?
Kavita Ramdas I think Sole has an important point, and I think actually what's interesting is that in the conversations I've been having, we heard from a group of international peacekeepers who were being trained here in Germany from all different parts of the world, about 20 different countries, including Mongolia and Nepal and Rwanda. And I ended up speaking with a number of younger women from different parts of the world about exactly this. Did they think of themselves as feminist? How did they describe themselves? What was their sense of what this actually meant? And fascinatingly, I think it was maybe more difficult for women who were living in the so-called developed world to feel like they needed to use the term feminist or that they wanted to use the term feminist than it was for many women coming from other parts of the world where they felt very consistent with their choice to say, well, yes, I am a feminist. And I believe in gender equality. But I don't necessarily think that your daughter's description is incorrect in part, perhaps because they've grown up with a set of rights and privileges that they have taken for granted in the parts of the world that they have happened to grow up in. And so perhaps the sense of needing to identify themselves with a particular set of beliefs or a particular set of ideals that they're striving towards doesn't seem as strong. If I compare that to the other question you asked, which is, where was I in my 20s and how did I think about these issues? I arrived in the United States just before I turned 21 and I went to a women's college, Mount Holyoke College, which was very consciously and actively a place that offered young women the opportunity to really excel in a whole set of areas in which women had traditionally not been allowed to excel, including, for example, the sciences. And I think that there was a very conscious sense in 1983 that it was important for us as young women to have these ideals that we identified with. And if we gave them a name, maybe the name we gave them was feminism, but I think very clearly we were women's rights activists and we believed in women's rights. So I think that's where I would put myself.
Sanam I think you're right. I think it's this point about what do we take for granted? I, my own experiences, I went to a, came from a family of very strong women, but went to a girls school. And by 18, it didn't occur to me that I couldn't do anything. You know, I was just like, of course, every space is open to us and, and I want to be involved in the space of, I don't know, war and peace. It was, it just, I just took it for granted. But it's only when you enter those spaces that you realize still what, where the barriers are. But what's interesting about what your point about how the Mongolians and the Nepalese see this versus how Western colleagues, I've seen that also in my work. As I was preparing for this conversation, Instagram seems to know what I'm thinking about and doing because I suddenly had Dolly Parton show up on my Instagram feed talking about feminism of all things. And she's asked this question and her response is, of course, I believe in rights, but I don't call myself a feminist because I don't believe that we should be taking men down to raise women. And I wonder whether this is one of the problems in the Western context that somehow there is a misperception that if you say you're a feminist, you're anti-men, or you believe that women should kind of denigrate men or, I don't know, gain superiority. Is that something that you've seen in your work around misperceptions of what feminism is?
Kavita Ramdas Oh, I think there are definitely misperceptions. I think most recently and fascinatingly for me, I have had two conversations with senior women officials in the German government, both of whom actually said they thought it was easier to have a feminist foreign policy than it would be to say that we were trying to have a feminist domestic policy. And I said, well, that's fascinating. Why would you say that? And they said, well, because the term feminism inside Germany is associated with man-hating. I said, so is there a ministry, just as there's a ministry for feminist foreign policy, is there a ministry for gender equality or for gender justice inside Germany? And she sort of laughed a little bitterly and she said, well, there is a ministry and the ministry is the ministry of the elderly, children, the family, and women. And then she added, it might as well say that ministry for the people with disabilities or who are not fully adults in society. And I thought, wow, that is a reflection to be a feminist is to be actively against men. And what I would say, Sanam, is I think in the United States, there has been a long period of time in which there was also an association of sort of man-hating. You heard this term a lot. And when Hillary Clinton ran for president, you heard that she was, quote-unquote, a ball buster. So anybody who was associated with being assertive, being a leader, stepping forward, running for anything, was seen as compromising their likability as a woman. And that somehow to be liked was extraordinarily important. I, like you, was just watching my Instagram feed and on my Instagram feed, Shimananda Adichie comes up giving a talk. And she says, particularly to young women, don't let your desire to be liked get in the way of your ability to be yourself. The pressure that young women feel, and actually women of all ages feel, that they should somehow be likable over their ability to be successful, over their ability to be taken seriously, over their ability to be an intellectual, over their ability to excel in whatever field they are excelling, is something I think that is so deeply socialized into us at very early ages, even more so than perhaps the need to be attractive-looking or beautiful in some shape or form. To be a nice girl, to be a good girl, even more than being a beautiful girl or an attractive girl, is something that is very deeply a part of the way in which patriarchy has actually succeeded in keeping women doing a very good job of oppressing ourselves.
Sanam I have a couple of thoughts on that. One is that people often ask me, who are your role models, right, in terms of women's leadership? And we have a line of verse in Persian, which is that, from whom did you learn your manners? And the answer is, from the ill-mannered. And when I think the women that I had in my constellation when I first started my career, there were some pretty phenomenal women, and I learned a lot from them in different ways. But often it was a case of, they're really, they are tough, they are, they can be mean, and they are difficult, and I don't necessarily want to be like that. So in a way, for me, the question of likability, is it possible to show leadership, be at the forefront of your field, but also be nice and kind? Can we redefine ourselves in the way we want to be, right? So there's that aspect of not likability because they tell us to be likable, but because you actually want to be a decent person in terms of your constellation of folks that you deal with.
Kavita Ramdas But I think, Sanam, one thing that I would say about that is, it's also interesting what it means to be likable for a woman versus what it means to be likable for a man. So a man can have a absolutely firm disagreement with you and not be considered unlikable. If a woman disagrees with you, however pleasantly they disagree with you, they can be considered unlikable. If a woman speaks firmly, not raising her voice, but just firmly, she can be considered unlikable. So I also think that there are double standards. It's not that I think one has to be mean. But I grew up, when you talk about role models, I grew up in India with Indira Gandhi as prime minister. It never occurred to me that a woman couldn't run a country. My father was in the military and I would watch him snap to a sharp salute when this petite woman in a sari would walk by taking the, you know, Republic Day Parade salutes. So I don't think that in my mind I associated being mean or unkind with leadership. And actually, I had a father who himself was extremely kind and thoughtful and actually quite soft-spoken. But what I do think is different is that I think when women have emerged in public spaces to play public roles, the standards against which they are measured invariably become male standards because so many of those roles have never previously been held by women. There is perhaps a tendency inherent in women leaders to feel that they need to outperform men in the particular ways that they did. And I think, again, you and I remember this when Hillary Clinton was running. In fact, I wrote a piece for the nation saying why is it possible for Barack Obama to lean into his feminine side and for Hillary Clinton to be absolutely unable to even humanize herself and have to show how tough she is and how quickly she could press the nuclear button. And so I think I agree with you in that women have felt that they've had to live up to a certain model of leadership. But I think it is also true that they are held to very different standards of what is considered mean or what is considered aggressive or what is considered to be unlikable. And so I just think we need to differentiate between those. I definitely would like us to lead more in the way that I think a newer generation of women leaders, the Jacinda Arden's of this world perhaps, have felt able to lead. And yet at the same time, I do think it is true that there have been a set of double standards that have been applied and that they're never serious enough when you're supposed to be serious. Their laugh is too loud as currently being said about Kamala Harris. I was told, I remember when I came back to India after three years in Germany, that I didn't walk like an Indian woman. And I thought, what does that mean exactly? And what it meant was that my strides were too long. And then I laughed because someone said, oh, that's not how you walk in a sari. And then I thought of all the women who work in saris, who build huge buildings in India in saris, who carry loads on their heads that nobody else would be able to carry in saris. And I thought, no, what this is, is a conflation of upper class assumptions with ladylike Victorian assumptions and then saying that's not womanly or that's not feminine. And in fact, so many working class women do all kinds of things in a sari without batting an eyelid or without, I think, diminishing their femininity in any way.
Sanam So, again, having the conversation with Solis, she was, she was referencing this in her way of saying their generation doesn't feel the need to be like the boys, you know, same ass, right? Which, which I find in the context of West, again, Anglo-Saxon feminism, I think, that there has been a tendency to almost erase away femininity and the power that comes from femininity to say we have to be the same as the pantsuits and the hawkishness and so forth.
Kavita Ramdas Well, in some ways, and yet in other ways, when I look at the, particularly the United States, I think two things are happening at the same time, which is so strangely confusing, right? So, on the one hand, I would say there's an obsession with looking young and having work done on your face. Nancy Pelosi has had God knows how many Botoxes and surgeries. You can't have gray hair. You must keep dyeing your hair until, you know, you're whatever, 92. So, there's an obsession with how you look, which is very much about femininity, which has a pressure that men in those similar leadership roles don't face at all.
Sanam I'm sorry, I do think that Biden has had a few Botox things.
Kavita Ramdas Well, maybe, maybe, but I think that there is, that might have more to do with age. But if I contrast that again with my experience of growing up in India, where, you know, Vandana Shiva and all sorts of amazing writers and artists and Arundhati Roy and, you know, Indira Gandhi and people in every walk of life, their hair could be silver and nobody thought anything of it. They were wearing the same saris that they were wearing. You know, so I do think that the framing of femininity itself is problematic, which is to say, if we actually loved femininity, we would love it in anybody. But actually, we don't celebrate it in men. I've always said feminism has nothing to do with what's between your legs and everything to do with what's between your ears, because feminism is a way of thinking. It's an ideology. It's an ideology. It's an ideology that believes that all people, regardless of their gender, regardless of their age, regardless of their ethnicity or background or racial characteristics, can think about a world in which all people are valued and celebrated equally. And in that sense, I think, for me, at least, feminism is a space that celebrates the fact that all human beings have both remarkable abilities to manifest the feminine and remarkable abilities to manifest what we've traditionally described as the masculine. women. And I think nowhere, nobody modeled that more in some ways than Gandhi, because there were so many things that he was not a traditionally masculine leader in any way, shape or form. (.) He was small and quiet and he did things like care work and spinning that were very much traditionally seen as being the work of women. And there was a celebration of women. And there was a celebration of that in a way. So what I would love to see for me, I think what would be wonderful if we really could create a alternative feminist vision of the world would be a world in which all people, regardless of what you were born with in terms of your sex or how you identified in terms of your gender identity, you could feel comfortable being yourself and embracing all these different parts of ourselves, which I think we all have. And for me, what really I appreciate about young people is their openness and comfort with gender fluidity. I find gender fluidity and gender non-binary actually very helpful for me. It actually opens up the space for us to think beyond these narrow dimensions of masculine and feminine. I think instead it allows us to see how can we all celebrate these very wide spectrums of ways in which we can be humans. I believe deeply that our lived experience as humans is so wide and is so diverse that we have such a wealth of experiences to be able to lean on and to gain from. And actually, I think what's fascinating is that in all our different traditions, there are actually many more layers of even understandings of sexual desire that actually I'm very concerned that a lot of feminism has, for example, for a long time, especially in the world of international development, where I've worked for a long time and where you have worked for a long time, has framed the sexual desire of women as something almost non-existent. So that you have to protect girls from early pregnancy as opposed to talking about how amazing sex can actually be and how liberating it could actually be and how much joy it might bring you. And that you have every right to be able to have sexual desire, just as any boys, but that the experience because of your biological realities might lead to different consequences for you and therefore you should be prepared and educated and able to make the decisions that allow you to both enjoy that sex and to choose not to become pregnant by it should that be your choice. I also think, Sanam, and this is a strange thing to say, but having lived in a family where my husband was the primary caregiver to our daughter, one thing that I think is very interesting is that if you have a very heavy burden of caring for other human beings, particularly small children, your appetite for sexual engagement at the end of the day might be quite different. And it was interesting to talk to my women who had similar roles who were like, oh God, at the end of like a day in which small children have been pulling at me, grasping at me, being held, being carried. And I don't want another human being to touch me at the end of the day. And how much of that has to do with the role of caregiving as opposed to how much of that is women's sexual desire might be interesting to explore. You know, I certainly felt that that was something that because in our relationship we had a different setup, I was like, oh, it may have nothing to do with being a man at all. It may have everything to do with the fact that the role men are playing, which is external, which was the role I've had, external focus, pushing, getting things done, achieving, being out in the world, traveling, being able to go to sleep whenever you wanted to, might actually have a different impact on even things like sexual desire, and perhaps also on other decision making attitudes and behaviors that we're not even aware of.
Sanam I tell you, it reminds me of two things. One is, when I first started looking at the question of women in peace negotiations, one of the people I interviewed was a South African high commissioner to London, and she'd been involved in the negotiations in this transition from apartheid to democracy. And she said, we brought women in, and 50% of the negotiators were women, and they brought the skills that they had acquired in the domestic setting. So how do you deal with grumpy kids? How do you deal with old and the sick? You have to be listening. You have to have empathy. You have to calm down things, right? And she said they brought those skills in. And I remember thinking about it as saying, these are not essentialist natural skills. It's skills you learn on the job, just like you might learn lawyering, and then you take it into business. So that was one thing. And then years, yeah, years later, I was talking to the husband of a friend of mine, and he had children at an older age, and he was retired looking after them. And he said, Oh, my God, this is like doing global diplomacy all the time. He had two twin boys. And, and I was like, it's exactly to your point that depending on the experience you're having, you're learning these skills and you're, and you're acquiring them. So it's got, it's got nothing to do with our biology. It has to do with a perspective and the life experience that you're having, right?
Kavita Ramdas And this isn't to undermine the fact that learning about our biology and understanding our biology and understanding the science is incredibly important. Medicine, for example, we now understand so much medical research was done on the male body that actually, we don't know enough about the female body. We don't know even how aspirin affects us in different ways, because they didn't use our bodies in research. And they've made many assumptions based on kind of a quote, unquote, average, usually white male. So I'm not belittling in any way our need to appreciate and learn and, and get as much as we can out of science and understanding the value of biology. It's just simply to say that we must always be aware of the interactions of social norms and social settings and learned experience, as you said, and how we bring those into our different roles, depending on where we are and what we have. And I often think that as well, is that when people say, oh, well, you know, women, because they bring children onto the earth are inherently more concerned about the next generation. I think that could be true. I think that could be true, or it could also be true that they just have had more of that exposure for the roles that they've been given, even the ones who are dying to be astronauts or physicists or rocket scientists or whatever.
Sanam Yeah, we don't really know. To me, when I think about the work that I do around peace processes and why we say women peace builders should be present and so forth, is that it's really about transformative equality. You know, I say equal opportunity is saying we're going to have status quo and tomorrow if there's a war, it, if we want equality, it means my daughters and my nephew all have to be drafted to go off. Transformative equality for me is that I don't want my nephew anywhere near a gun or anywhere near a uniform or any of our boys having ever to face this kind of violence, right? So, if I wanted to define feminism, it would be about transformative equality and actually about putting an end to violence because it's a human choice.
Kavita Ramdas Actually, Sanam, you know, there's a wonderful sociologist who I know and care about deeply. Her name is Arlie Hochschild. Together with Barbara Ehrenreich, she wrote a wonderful book called Global Women, Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers. And she says, the question we as feminists must ask ourselves is equal to what? Equal to what? We've had perhaps two generations or three generations of Western feminism, certainly that has been about, oh, we've watched these guys playing this game on this field and we're like, let us in, let us in, let us in. And they finally let us in and they let us play. And as we're playing, we realize, oh, my God, what the hell kind of game of this? This is a ridiculous game. There are six billion people living in poverty and affected by war and eight men who own all of the world's resources. And, oh, my goodness, of course, this is not the game we wanted to play. We need to change the whole game. And we need to change it for all of us. And for me, that's really what feminism is about. And I think that's what you just described is we're not fighting so that our daughters can go drop more bombs on Gaza. We're fighting so that nobody's sons and nobody's daughters ever have to be afraid of either being forced into hurting or harming other people or being hurt and harmed by other people, regardless of their sex or gender identity. And I think that's the world we're trying to create together.
Sanam So on that note, two big questions. So right now we're seeing the rise of women in major political spaces. If you were, you know, senior advisor to the next president of the United States, whichever one it is, what would you do? What would you say are the priorities that you would want to put forward from your feminist experience? (.)
Kavita Ramdas I think the first one would be to not be the only person in charge. I would immediately, I don't know, really, I think my biggest lesson from women leaders all over the world is that they had a very different form of collective and collaborative leadership that they modeled right from the get go. And so every grassroots women's organization that we supported through the global fund for women during those 14 years that I led it modeled for us something very different than the heroic single male form of leadership, which does kind of go to the, well, if I were in charge, I would da, da, da, da, da. And instead, women were like, well, actually, the first thing we do is we create a council, and we create a council, it would be a shared council, and we would together bring in all of the different voices. And we would say, what do we need to do together to make this different? And it would be inherently consultative. It would be inherently democratic. It would inherently be something that said, all voices and all perspectives need to be included. So I think that would be the first thing that I would do is to sort of learn from that experience and bring this feminist collaborative model of leadership to bear and say, if we were in charge, what would we do once we had that in place? I think one really important space for us to begin with might be to look at the whole question of resourcing, because I've worked for such a long time in the space of philanthropy, and because I know the truth of Martin Luther King's famous saying, you know, he said, philanthropy is commendable, but as long as it doesn't cause the philanthropists to overlook the circumstances that made philanthropy necessary in the first place. And I think that that is something that we just don't hear enough of, I think we, um, talk and give a great deal of credit to, um, the people who have chosen to give away their fortunes, but we haven't really analyzed enough. What are the circumstances of what are the circumstances of what are the circumstances of a world economic system in which eight people can have more than 50% of the rest of the world? And what is fundamentally wrong with that? And again, I think if we had a council of feminist advisors of all genders, then I think we might actually include some feminist economists who might remind us that the caring economy is a reciprocal economy. It's an economy that is an economy that actually values the care of the planet and the care of people over the privileging of profit. I think then I think, Sanam, we'll have a ability to think beyond the narrow constraints right now of nation states, which I don't think are actually going to be sufficient for us to take on the pressing challenges of climate change. And I think there I also feel young people have to be in that collective we very early on. I think they're teaching us a huge amount about how to think beyond the gender binary, think beyond the nation state, and think beyond war as being the answer. And I see their mobilizations on issues of Gaza, for example, the bravery. So for me, I'm on team future.
Sanam Yeah, you're on team future. So, okay. And then if you woke up tomorrow and you were the billionaire and you've set up your council, let's say you have your council, where would you want to put your resources? What would be the first thing you would do to try and catalyze some of this change that you're talking about, both at the policy level and, of course, the grassroots work? What would you do?
Kavita Ramdas The United Nations would be renamed the United Council of the People. And I think the priority has to be to our mother, the earth. I think the priority has to be to care for her as she has cared for us for all these years. To clean up our oceans, to clean up our water sources, to undam the rivers and let them flow as they were supposed to flow. To stop growing cash crops and to take out the poisons that are currently polluting our atmosphere. So I think that, for me, would be the priorities that I hope that such a council would come to together, collectively. I think women will be a very important, but not the only, participants in that council. And I think young people of all genders will have to play the most important role because I think it is their planet, it is their future. And so I do think that it's not that I think we won't have to suffer more loss and more struggle. What is happening in Sudan and in the Congo and in so many other places feels overwhelming. But I have absolutely no doubt that we also have the ability to have real dreamers amongst us. It is nice that we still sing Imagine at the Olympics. (.) And I also believe that the fact that there is such extraordinary human resilience. And then finally, I think in the arts, Sanam, I think you were making those beautiful sculptures before you left. And I just think that as long as there is art and music and people who can actually help us open our eyes and our hearts to a different world that is possible, So then, like Arundhati says, on a quiet day, you can hear her breathing.
Sanam Yeah, thank you. And, you know, Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. And I, you know, it's not to say that what we should be ignorant. It's I think what he meant is that we know things, but then we have to imagine the next step and the future. And so it fits in with what you're saying. So, Kavita, Nandini Ramdas, thank you for being with me on If You Were In Charge. What a great conversation we had. Thank you.
Kavita Ramdas I loved it. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. (......)
Sanam This is an Africa Digital Audio Production. My executive producer is Pierce Lynch, and it contains original music by Little Monster Media. Remember, you can catch a new episode of If You Were In Charge every Tuesday. A huge thanks from me to the Bosch Academy for making these conversations possible, and to my own organization, ICANN, for allowing me the time to explore these big issues with my guests and spend some time with my daughters. If you want to get in touch, you can find all our social media links on our website and the link is in the description of the episode. So, that's it for If You Were In Charge. I'm Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. See you next time. Bye.