Do we unsee the future of gender inequality at work with one *special* day a year? International Women’s Day was a couple of weeks ago but its memory has stayed with me thanks to an event I was invited to be part of, and it’s shown me something about how to lead a new world.
How do we start the world we want?
..I mean, what do we do first?
Do we put on a costume? A stab proof vest certainly projects a worldview, for example. Do we find collaborators using code words and meet in furtive basements? Do we write some words?
It’s international poetry day as I publish this and, having been to two local events this week, collaborators, furtive basements and belief in the power of truthful words are certainly big themes in such gatherings. The sheer number of people cramming into the upper room of the Goat & Trike for Words Of Wellbeing says much about people’s need to express their feelings. And together in there, people taking their lives in their hands in front of each other, you can hear how all sorts of us are confronting structural problems.
But what about at corporate leadership events? How are we supposed to confront structural problems at work?
I think it’s got a lot to do with creating a basic sense of solidarity wherever you are. And although I am used to jumping the tonal shift between subversive art groups and establishment business lunches, I’m also getting used to seeing leadership and empathy as natural to both.
It’s just, to be any sort of ally, you do have to be ready to be caught off guard by your own bum-faced ignorance.
Leadership is empowering.
I remember after last year’s Strong Female Lead event, organiser Nella Pang shared perplexed frustrations about why so very few men had attended it. Did no-one identifying as male think there was anything to discuss or learn about the female experience?
So this year she asked me to co-host a couple of panels at it.
Now, you’d think that the boy who was asked by his teacher to join the girls’ relay team at the 1978 St Katherine’s Primary School sports day “because I know you won’t mind” wouldn’t turn a greying hair at an apparently similar request, half a century later. But after half a century, I understand that Strong Female Lead wouldn’t even have happened in 1978 without it sounding like a radical feminist protest, and that my own privilege easily blinds me to others’ experiences.
In thinking about the event beforehand, I half imagined declaring the phrase: “Settler Colonial White Supremacist Patriarchy!” from the front but picturing two different audiences reacting to it. At a leadership bash without “female” in its title, I know I would follow that phrase with a short pause and: “I may as well have just spoken to half of you like a fax machine there, or been reciting a line of HTML source code from a web page”.
But if I’d said it at this event, I’d have looked for how many knowing nods were agreeing that the same apparent technobabble sounded like a freeing medical diagnosis.
I didn’t say it. I didn’t need to. Speakers and delegates alike were simply talking about leadership. And simply demonstrating it.
To me as an artist, leadership doesn’t look like stage-hogging charisma. I have plenty of that and I know I’m no leader. It doesn’t look like a lectern in front of some flags either and it certainly doesn’t look like a slick presentation at an industry event. Plenty of people at Strong Female Lead were admitting out loud having to manage their imposter syndrome, acknowledging each other’s achievements and skills in the process – and this sounds closer to good leadership to me. I heard more than a couple of references to male gatherings wasting time with willy war waffle, always shared with an efficient roll of the eyes, and this sort of thing reassures me I’m with grown-ups too.
To me, leadership looks like holistic eldership. The leaders who have my attention are good listeners with their sleeves rolled up – I’d like to think reassuringly revealing a few tats, some stubborn paint splats and ideally even traces of potting compost under the fingernails. They’ll all know more than they want to about local bureaucratic procedures and will be efficiently attuned to neutering time-wasting bullshit. I’ve met leaders beyond counting at community creative expos. Their presence is empowering, because people feel seen by such people and such people seem to not worry much about how they are seen.
Because Nella herself is such an entrepreneur and leader, she attracts them. Valiantly going to work in the property sector, she isn’t putting on community creative expos. But in creating industry experiences to champion values and innovation, and doing so also as a woman, she encourages a naturally holistic expression of leadership, direct as she is. This event was full of honest testimonies about developing confidence as a whole person – mind, emotions and soma – all flowing as naturally as how to build comfortable teams and work around prejudices in different industries.
Whole person stuff. Not just “strategy” stuff. I felt at home.
Until my own difference suddenly showed itself in my natural use of one word, and how differently it landed for some of us.
“Speaking with passion is always a bit magnetic” I pronounced.
One of our panel guests pulled a slight wincy face.
“I’m not sure,” she said, “it’s no fun being labelled *emotional*”.
“Really?” I said with surprise but had already seen it. A male colleague can be passionate, a female colleague… well, I think there are still some unspoken Victorian echoes of the word hysterical there. I’d forgotten the structural tradition of women downplaying their emotional convictions to avoid being “too challengy”. Still, in 2025, in some situations.
Personally, I just want to hug anyone who sounds like they actually care about something. It’s the only conversations I want to spend time on – and everyone has a trigger thing for passion of some sort. But easy for me to say, confident male artist and performer.
I had a number of great conversations all day, and one of them was with a person who felt similarly to me about leading with passion. And it reminded me of the role I’m supposed to play at any event, no matter who or what gathers us.
Art is freeing.
In showing up in corporate spaces as a very slightly provocative figure of creativity, I find gender isn’t a factor. Amanda Chard and I fell into conversation early in the event but when she later appeared on our second panel, she shared with the room something of her journey through breast cancer.
She spoke diffidently but it had clearly been life changing. Yet she also easily put it into the context of her whole life – her professional development, her family, the things she cares about, including her passion for the public sector. It felt to me like everyone in the room could easily do this. I felt like I was always talking to a whole person and little would be off limits to reference or ask about.
Only afterwards did Mandy share an extra detail with me. As part of finding her way forward though treatment, she took part in a creative experience.
Mortal And Strong is a health charity founded by Dr Liz Murray. A charity looking for original ways to support people struck with serious health issues “in the prime of life”, its campaign this year is called Scars Of Gold and Mandy was featured. A beautiful series of images with an upcoming exhibition.
“Putting the spotlight on health inequalities through the power of art. A doctor led campaign bringing together 100 Voices of lived experience sharing their story of facing life changing or incurable health conditions at a young age. With a powerful photography series inspired by Kintsugi capturing the strength found in scars, and a collection of artworks inspired by the stories. Bringing together education, support and advocacy in an innovative way.”
You’ll see from the link how the work communicates. The portraits highlight the scars and pain areas of each person’s body, flipping the implication of the suffering into strength and beauty. The dignity and poise each composition bestows on its subjects utterly vanquishes any notion of the word victim.
The charity expanded the idea to a national call out for female artists and they commissioned 100 of them who were eager to respond with their own illustrations of empowerment.
This all sounded like a completely natural extension the the whole day at Strong Female Lead, but not just the talking about and reframing of personal experiences, the creative re-invention of it. I’m sure every surveyor, manager, engineer and CEO at the event would have been inspired by a whole talk on this, but I can’t imagine any of them thinking the artistic interpretation was in any way weird. They’d see it as just more leadery inspiration, I suspect.
Proud as she was of her place in, and humbly deferring to Dr Murray’s passionate leadership of Mortal And Strong, Mandy had actually shied away from sharing the work online for fear of social media censorship – those Settler Colonial White Supremacist Patriarchal algorithms absolutely freak out at breasts, even when they’re no longer there. A point depressingly up to date, as she did pluck up the courage to write a moving testimony on Linked In after our conversation and promptly had it taken down.
Just another structural cut to pick yourself up from fast.
I think we create the world we want in little spaces. Strong Female Lead felt “normal”, a room full of people behaving like people owning themselves and their senses of purpose, so much they were openly inspired by each other. And in that particular space they felt free to be themselves, no explanations necessary.
There is a need for solidarity in our human experiences. This includes leadership in general – to band together for healthier leadership, period. The sort that naturally accounts for periods, ordinary hormonal battles, life-changing experiences and the power of creatively flipping our scars into empowering symbols and stories of strength.
When we find ourselves with people who know they don’t have to have been the person going through something to own the truth of it, we’ve already made a start on realising the world we want.
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Nella’s repost of this article is lovely and worth a minute of your time also >
And this video summation of the event really nails the vibe and value of it.