Join us to hear about Women Emerging, a non-profit dedicated to redefining women's leadership and our exciting Expedition to discover an approach to leadership that resonates with women.

On today's episode we tell you a little about us, the expedition. Meet our founder, Julia Middleton, as well as two of the incredible women who will be taking part on this virtual expedition. Dr Hinemoa Elder, a Maori Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and author Vidya Shah, Executive Chairperson of Edelgive Foundation.

Welcome to this very, very first Women Emerging Expedition podcast. This has been a moment that I've been working up to for the last year and is incredibly exciting, as we are about to launch the expedition of 20 women from across all the geographies, so many geographies of the world and generations and sectors and specialisms and backgrounds and beliefs. An extraordinary group of 20 women, who, over the next seven months, will go on a virtual expedition, talking to thousands of women to find the approach to leadership that resonates with women.

In January 2023, we'll get together face to face and sit down and gather everything that we've learned on our expedition and find a way to express it. Sometimes in music, sometimes in books, sometimes in online programme, sometimes in poetry, all kinds of different ways, we'll have to be able to express it, but it will all be an approach to leadership that resonates for women.

This journey for me started even further back than a year when two years ago, I started something called Women Emerging from Isolation. It is now called Women emerging. We've dropped the 'from isolation', but it was originally Women Emerging from Isolation. At that time, of course, it was the isolation of COVID. That word 'isolation' became a sort of metaphor for the isolation that women have experienced for thousands of years, as we slowly built up a community of women from across the world interested in the concept of women emerging from isolation, spoke to many, many women. And I think most of us had this deep sense that the world just has to change, it has to change. But we also have a deep sense that it is not going to change much, and it's particularly not going to change much if it's got the same leaders as it's always had. The leaders we have, if they're going to produce change, need energy, they need new blood, they need the innovation, they need the discord, the energy, all of new blood coming in, and what better source of new blood than women, women emerging as leaders to help drive the change that humanity so clearly needs.

When we started, we went out and looked at what was already happening. And of course, there's so much happening for women in every corner of the world. And there's no point in just replicating things or causing wasted resources. So we tried to look very, very hard at where we could add value and add value, particularly to the things that already existed. And that led us sort of to two big issues. The first one is that we, like most women, laugh when people talk about the fact that women don't work well together. We all know that women work extraordinarily well together. But I think all of us felt that we could caveat that— that we do work together. Well, we could work even better together. If we had more cultural intelligence, more ability to understand women in different cultures operating in different circumstances. Too often you find that women say, you know, I wouldn't make that compromise if I were in your situation, to which the obvious answer is, you know, it wasn't a compromise. It was a decision. And by the way, you probably would have made the same one if you were here where I am.

And I think there was a real sense that we had to focus on helping women to understand other women in other cultures, because only then could they become a stronger voice in the world. So we started producing films, weekly films that sort of revealed what it was like to be a woman in a different culture. Nobody ever watched those films for their production quality, but they hugely watched them for the quality of the ideas and the insight. And those became huge fun to do. We culminated that in also launching an online programme called Cultural Intelligence for Women, where we run it every single month and the women who can pay a little bit towards it pay and most don't pay anything, but it gets women together to try and increase their cultural. intelligence — women understanding women in other cultures.

But increasingly, we also became very interested in the very word 'leadership', and the sadness that so many young women would say to us, 'I've seen what leadership is, I've read the books largely written by men, or by women advising you on how to get to the top, or to succeed in a man's world. And if that's the way,' young women would say, 'if that's what leadership is, I'm really not very interested, count me out.' And this, this sort of makes women emerging more difficult.

The expedition idea began to emerge, the idea that we could, as a group, go out and find a way of expressing leadership and bring it to life, so that young women, and old women like me, say, 'If that's what leadership is, count me in.'

Now, why is it me leading this expedition? Because somebody has to, maybe that's one reason, but maybe it's useful to know a tiny bit about me. For about 30 years of my life. I started and then ran an organisation called Common Purpose. Started it in my own community. And it grew and grew and grew and grew and grew. And by the time I handed it on to my successor, it had become a very large global organisation, which was about leadership, and particularly about civic leadership and about trying to develop leaders who could cross boundaries. So in itself, Common Purpose threw me into lots of thinking about leadership, but in itself, also leading Common Purpose through good times and bad times, through the mistakes and the triumphs, mostly mistakes. That taught me a lot too. And in in that process, I also wrote two books about leadership, one called Leading beyond Authority. How do you lead when you haven't got any authority when you haven't got any pips on your shoulders or stilettos on your shoes that say, I'm the leader, or a business card that says, I'm the leader? How do you lead when you've only got influence? Or other ways to lead? I wrote that book. And then a few years later, I wrote a book called Cultural Intelligence. How do you lead people who are not exactly like you, because IQ is fine, but it's not enough. It's important, but it's not enough. Because EQ is great, but it's not enough. The real interesting thing is, can you lead people who are not like you, because that must be the future of the world. And it also must be the source of innovation, which we so badly need in the world.

It's perhaps not a coincidence that the two books I wrote, are all illogically connected to women. Leading beyond authority — women have been specialising in that for centuries. We don't even get given much authority. We have to find other ways of doing it. And the second one was cultural intelligence. How do you work with people who are not like you? Well, women have for generations been conveners: conveners across difference, convenors of people. So both books really sort of played in to the women's leadership issue for me. And when I left Common Purpose, as chief executive, and I became the founder and had some of the freedoms of being a founder, I was actually pretty fascinated that we're 30 or so years away from the issue of women. And that's true. You know, in my early 20s, it was a huge issue for you, for me. Coming back to it 30 years on was quite a disappointment is the truth. You know, if you think of what a computer looked like 30 years ago, and what a computer looks like today, the speed of change is extraordinary. But if you look at the position of women in the world 30 years ago, and the position of women in the world today, of course, it's undeniable that things have changed, but nothing like the speed that anything else has changed.

So a real sense for me that that Women Emerging was high priority, that increasing cultural intelligence was a high priority so that women can work even better together, but very, very specifically, and the biggest issue probably and the one that I've now devoted the next two years of my life to doing, is to leading an expedition to find the approach to leadership that resonates for women and then disseminating that approach through all kinds of ingenious ways. And they are ingenious, you know, when you have a wonderful party and people start coming to the party, and they bring baskets of fruit and drink and wine and all that. It feels like it at the moment. This is a most wonderful expedition and people are coming constantly with baskets of fruit and wine and adding their ideas on how to disseminate it.

So the purpose of this podcast is, firstly to sort of allow you to follow the expedition, to catch up on it. It's a weekly podcast. We'll endlessly be updating you on what people are thinking. You know, expeditions, they call for journals, don't they? People on expeditions write journals, because they capture they hear things, they want to capture them, they want to keep them, they want to keep them in their head, and we'll drag them out of their heads and try and get them to express this in new ideas on a podcast. Even if they're ones that will fly away soon, let's just capture everything that they're thinking and become almost the journal for the expedition.

Apart from letting you know what's going on and and take joy in the learning, take joy in the insights, to share it, because we all want to be better leaders. But the second reason is to prompt you to be partners in this. There's 20 women, that's fine. But there are so many of you out there who know so much more, who've had so many more ideas, who've tried out different things, who have instincts on where we should be looking for the answers, instincts on the dead ends, that we should avoid, instincts on the subjects we shouldn't skirt away from. And so part of the podcast is to tell you what we're doing, put really to prod you, to prompt you to push you, to respond to us, to tell us, to give us your ideas. I'll be reading every single one of them and a plea, send as many as you can. But it's to try and capture all your insight as we go. And I promise to feed that into the thinking of all the members as we go. So as I say, first podcast, learning, no doubt will start your feedback by telling me how we should do it better. And I very, very much appreciate that.

Given that this is the first expedition podcast, I went to speak to two women who have been in as members of the expedition from the very, very, very, very beginning. One is Vidya Shah, who immediately said 'I'm in' and the other is Hinemoa Elder, who also said, 'I'm in' right from the beginning.

Vidya is in India, she is a businesswoman who then created a foundation of which I hope she is enormously proud — she should be. And then Hinemoa Elder who is in New Zealand, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, who is also a remarkable leader, and a particularly remarkable leader in her own community, the Maori community in New Zealand. But first, Vidya. So I asked her, "Vidya, why were you in in on the expedition right from the start? Tell us."

Julia, it's because one, I know it's you who's part of the expedition. You're the curator and creator. But I think personally from where I come from, and as a leader in a foundation, I think the foundation has believed very strongly in keeping women at the centre of the development dialogue. Without them the movement towards a more gender equal world is just not possible. Without them, our children will not go to school, our march towards mitigating, for example, the impacts of climate change will falter, we will not build a better world for our successors.

In your heart, do you think that women lead in a different way to men?

I think so. I think I do. I mean, I can speak from personal experience, I lead differently from some of the men around me and I also lead differently from some of the women around me. I also see that a lot of women, women particularly, tend to imitate mostly other men, you know, leaders and to not give space because they feel they don't have the space to give birth to their own vision of their own leadership. And I think one of the things I'm hoping that we expeditioners actually do is, is bring that out, allow ourselves to be more authentic and be more original or more comfortable in the way we perform our roles as leaders.

I've always thought of you, Vidya, as the kind of person I always wanted to be. I always think of myself as somebody who sort of thumps around and make some noise and you to be somebody who's so much more thoughtful and so much more gentle in your leadership and I love watching your leadership. You're also very much a historian, aren't you? So do you think we're going to be looking for an approach to leadership that resonates for women that women in the past used to do? With your historical mind on, tell me.

I think there are many, many lessons out there. And you know, I've been writing about some of that — women writers in an age when women were not even allowed to go to school and write. The earliest woman writer was probably a slave who wrote about her own experiences of being tortured for her religious beliefs. And that's why we have a lot of history. So it shows a lot of courage from women, from across the ages, who've managed to express their opinion and show themselves as pathbreakers in a sense, from times immemorial, and therefore, I think it's going to be very interesting to go back to those journeys.

I think the lessons and the stories are all there. In India, for example, there are a lot of, you know, queens and women leaders, whether it's through the freedom struggle, whether it's before that, who emerged and a lot has been written about that. But in one of my pieces of writing, I actually wrote about the Bengali women writers of the 19th century, and nobody has heard about them, but they actually ended up making a huge difference in the way their peers, especially women of their generation, began to look at education. And they were leaders in their own right, because they took incredible risks, in going to school and in writing and getting published in the 19th century in Bengali. So I think there's so many great stories out there, lesser known, and I feel lesser known stories have greater power, because they almost empower us to feel that if she could do it in that era, with her background, I can definitely do it today. And I think that exploration will be very powerful.

Tell me, a little known woman that you've studied. Tell me her story.

I'm actually just reading a book on a woman who ended up being queen. She was the second queen of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. A lot has been written about him, he actually held together the Sikh Empire until the early 19th century. She actually fought for the rights of her son, and she was kind of kingmaker in the background. And it's an amazing story of this young girl whose father actually runs the stables for Maharaja Ranjit Singh. So there was no chance that she could ever become queen, but she does. And it speaks about her personal journey, all the troubles she went through in that time. This is the early 1800s, and she had a lot of competition from the concubines, and the other lesser known queens.

So your own foundation has focused so very, very much on women's empowerment. Why do you think that is such a central theme for the future of India?

You know, I think partly it's that we are an important percentage of the population. We are roughly 50%, as is across the world, but we're also a very large country. Aspirationally, Indians as a whole are probably highly aspirational today. Again, it's because of the times we are in, there's a lot more information, there's a lot more connectedness, I think there's very clear evidence now. Unfortunately, we all work on evidence. But there's very clear evidence now that the shifts that you want to make are exponential if you focus on women. And that's just the reality. The facts are showing it again and again. A woman has a little more disposable income, her kids will go to school. A woman knows how to access a primary healthcare centre, her children will get better nutrition. A woman has a job, she will negotiate better, in her own household. A woman knows how to fight an election, the agenda for that village will change. There's so much, reams and reams written by academicians and development scientists on this. So I think the good thing is that the realisation is there. And it's been accepted by broader society and by people in government as well that if we neglect this constituency, we will pay a price and it will be a personal price. The recent elections in India in four states had a higher turnout of women voters than men voters for the first time. Issues in the election manifesto are changing. So I think the evidence is there. And bit by bit, the action is also happening. I think because there's going to be a displacement of power, it's not going to be as logical, the change, or as as smooth as one would expect, but I think the realisation is very loud and clear.

And how do you think this expedition can help play into that agenda?

I think the best thing about the expedition is that the way the expeditioners have been selected, they are women who are multifaceted. It's not diversity for diversity's sake just among us. It's the multifacetedness, the cultural perspectives that we all, bring the personal experiences that we all bring. And it's this rich diversity. I've begun to realise that it doesn't matter which socioeconomic background you belong to, the challenges are remarkably similar. The perspectives may be different, we may have overcome them in different ways. We may not have been able to overcome some but I think by just going together by being fellow journeyman, journeywomen, we will learn a lot from each other.

Thank you Vidya. I love that expression 'fellow journeywomen'. It's it's a beautiful expression, one that I have no doubt Hinemoa will love too, as the second member of the expedition I'm going to interview today. We started by talking about an expedition Hinemoa went on some time ago, to Antarctica. It's fascinating to hear her thoughts on expeditions and women's expeditions. And also her thoughts about the sound of cracking ice, of rippling waves and the total otherwise absence of sound. But at the same time, the fearsome voice of the Maori deity for ice and snow, who began to talk to them.

Hinemoa, tell us about the expedition you went on.

Okay, so I went on an expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula at the end of 2019. If you get a chance to go anywhere close to Antarctica, seize it with both hands. So one of the things that I learned was that large groups of women or get on really well together. And that was something that we all laughed at. We all hear from various sources, "Oh my god, this is gonna be so bitchy, there'll be so many little factions. You'll all be fighting with each other." And we all, at different times, shared this and laughed about it because it just wasn't the case. We'd been prepared very well too, even though most of us only met when we got so Argentina before we embarked on the ship, which was our home for three weeks in Antarctica.

So we learned many, many things. We learned about the fragility of Hina hakupapa, which is one way from my culture, the Maori culture, of expressing the land of Hina hakupapa, the female deity of ice and snow, that she's a fearsome goddess all right. She really looks you right in the eye and challenges you to think about how we are living as humans, really, designed as caregivers and guardians of our precious planet who've gone so far away from that role — most of us anyway.

And she's a woman, Hina hakupapa?

Yeah, she's a woman. She's a woman for us. There's some female leadership right there. she's standing resolute in her the stark white rocky chill, and that implacability. There's, there's a lot of message in there, at times, absolute silence. One of the things that we did, which was extraordinary was we would get in these zodiacs and go on these silent boat rides through the ice, and we had already decided there would be no talking on these boat rides. And all we could hear was a sort of cracking of ice, the rippling wave sometimes and the absolute silence of it, the absence of sound. It was as if the clothing the cloak of Hina hakupapa just soaks up all the sound and so it takes a lot of the extraneous kind of distractions that we're used to in everyday life, strips all that away. And so what I learnt on that expedition was, you know, let's clear the clutter and look at what really matters.

Oh those are my dogs. They're protecting me from the indigenous birdlife.

We learned a lot collectively in a particular way, and I'm thinking about how to express this. As a group of women, how we learned together, how we learned to find commonality and also respect the vast array of different languages that we speak in our different disciplines. Because, you know, we're all coming from different facets of science broadly. One of the things that we did that was really powerful was we did these mini three minute talks to each other, every single one of us did one of these talks. We were only allowed two slides, which for some people was quite a challenge in itself. Many people are used to having lots of slides and having a sort of academic style of presentation. And what was really striking was how emotional these talks were. So I think one of the things I learned was that that is our superpower, as women. We have a relational emotional superpower. And oftentimes, certainly, I've experienced this, as I've had covert and overt messages to not be so emotional. If you're going to lead, if you're going to be out front and be in some sort of position of responsibility, you need to not show your emotion. And I think that's absolutely wrong. I think one of the things that we need to do more of as women who are perhaps often against our against our choosing, put in positions where we're looked upon to provide leadership, is to show the feelings, is to show the vulnerability and the anger.

You know, anger is another thing that I learned about on the expedition, which is our society really is not accepting of us women showing our angry feelings. And that's another thing we really need to do, we need to get bloody angry about some of the stuff that's going on, frankly, and we've all been conditioned, you know, some to greater degrees, to be nice about things and to be looking for some kind of middle ground. And that's a skill too. But that's not the only skill that I think we can bring to situations where we're having to provide some responsible leadership.

One of the other things I learned on the trip was indigenous histories aren't always included. And so we were presented with a lecture about the history of human beings in Antarctica. And absent from that description was a description which I was aware of — some of our ancestors had navigated to the area around Antarctica back in the seventh century. And so we know their names — these great Polynesian navigators. Hui Te Rangiora is one of the names of these people. And so that put me in an awkward situation where I felt, I'd rather not have to put my hand up and stand up and speak about this, but I'm going to have to, because I can't be part of this, and not speak up about the absence of the indigenous histories of that place. So those were some of the really powerful learnings that come to the front of my mind, when I think about that expedition to Antarctica.

There's so much in all of that. It's slightly daunting, isn't it, the thought we're going off on another expedition? When you do something important, and sometimes you think, 'Aargh, I wish I'd thought about something or other before we set off that would have potentially made me better at coping with the dynamics of it'. What's something that you thought through afterwards, and you thought, 'I wish I had thought through' that...that some of us are going to cope with the cold more than others, or some of us will cope with the intimacy more than others. What's something that you should have thought through before you set off?

I'm pondering that and and to be honest, nothing's really coming to mind. What I realised is that in my culture, in Maori culture, we are taught from a young age to always be prepared, to be needed in a cultural sense. So we're taught to be really with our special prayers, karakia, with waiata, songs, with ways to comfort people, take care of people, when people are struggling, when people need to celebrate. We are taught in my culture to always have something at the ready, just in case and oftentimes, it's not needed. You see around that other people are also really in your niche, you're not necessarily the correct person for that particular event, or occasion. And I think that that cultural readiness really served me well.

Right in the early days talking about this expedition, your face came into the screen and you just said I'm in. I thought I wonder if she knows what she's in for. Well, why from the beginning, were you in?

I trust my gut, and I suppose the context of our New Zealand experience of COVID is another reason that I can see, that I want to expand my horizons because I need to refuel and reinvigorate and learn new things, because my communities need me to do that. My communities need me to be up with international thinking, up with pushing aside my own boundaries, my own barriers, let's say. So those are the reasons that I was in from the beginning.

So Hinomoa said, 'Yes, I'm in' because she trusted her gut. I'm very glad that she did. Thank you. We come to the end of this first expedition podcast, indeed, my first podcast ever. Send us feedback. Please, please, please, lots to learn. Be kind because Maria, Pippa, Sindhu and I, we're all feeling very vulnerable, having created this first one, but we want to learn, so do give us feedback. Next week, the next podcast will come out. I'll introduce you to two more members and some of the thinking, but also probably update you on the progress that we're making, and perhaps give you a little bit more insight into how the expedition will actually work. In the meantime, have a lovely week. It's beautiful weather here in the UK, and I'm finally feeling that we may be coming out of the winter.

Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to the podcast. Your voice is crucial to the expedition success and we would love you to become a partner to the expedition. All you have to do is join the Women Emerging LinkedIn group where you can share your own thoughts and perspectives on the expedition and today's podcast.