This week’s podcast is a look back at where the expedition came from. The weekly Women Emerging from Isolation films.  Women from, Polynesia, Egypt, Germany, the UK, Uganda, the US and Zambia. From discussing life as a Trans woman to the isolation of war. This week’s podcast should give you a good sense of where the expedition has come from. The world over!

Julia Middleton 0:26

And welcome to this this podcast, this Women Emerging from Isolation podcast, which is a bit of a look back. It's a bit of a look back to life before the expedition, life before we decided to find the approach to leadership that resonates with women.

Julia Middleton 0:46

Two years ago, I started Women Emerging from Isolation, now known as Women Emerging. It started at the very beginning of COVID. So it was a it was a strange time for me. We were all in strange situations at the beginning of COVID. I was in a particularly weird one, because I was on an island off the west coast of Scotland, a small island off the west coast of Scotland, with my mother in law for about three months, as she slowly faded away and eventually died. It was an extraordinary experience of holding her hand and seeing her pain, and seeing her courage and being extraordinarily isolated. You know, there's no hospitals on the island, no means of testing how far she'd gone on her final journey. And I suppose it was an experience that was extraordinary, because my relationship with my mother in law had never been perfect at all. But it became very perfect in those last few months. And I was overwhelmed by the strength and power, and inspiration and strength and power and inspiration of women, and reminded of it in such an extraordinary, extraordinary way.

Julia Middleton 2:18

And it was during those months that Women Emerging from Isolation began to emerge with me. We were all talking about different levels of coping with COVID. And we were talking about coping with the isolation that COVID was giving us all over the world. And we were beginning to talk about the fact that the world had to be different after this extraordinary experience. And it was beginning to dawn, I think, on all of us that it wasn't going to really be... we could talk about it being different, but it wasn't really going to be different. Things don't change, even with extraordinary things happening, as much as you would hope. And they particularly wouldn't change massively if the same leaders were running the world. When we came out, an overwhelming sense that we had to have more women emerging as leaders, if we were going to see any real change. I started building a community on LinkedIn, not a perfect platform, but the least worst platform and started interviewing women all around the world about COVID isolation and the fact that the word isolation of COVID was a metaphor for the isolation that women have been in and suffered from for centuries. Doing those interviews was an extraordinary journey for me too, because I suppose I thought I was beginning to come out of isolation myself. And it was quite a hard, long journey. I suppose I began to learn from lots of other women and, and, and, you know, when I was interviewed about Women Emerging, began to, to think of very different answers to some of the questions. Things like, you know, realising that the focus of most of my career had been on how to succeed in a man's world. That when I was asked about the imposter syndrome, I would often admit to it, but as a result of talking to so many women, I stopped admitting to it. I started saying, 'Listen, if the alternative to having imposter syndrome is to think that you know the answer to everything, give me the imposter syndrome any day, please. Thank you.' And you know, all those endless questions you get about 'Why are women so emotional and why are women so emotional as leaders' and used to give us those ridiculous questions? And my answer back nowadays is, why what's your problem? Can you not do emotion? Is there a bit of a problem here? It's really to push back and rethink some of the things that we've sort of accepted as women as our weaknesses and say 'Hang on here. I think this may well be my strength.' And you know, when you get asked that question about, are you just trying to redistribute power? I know the answer to that one now. I'm not remotely interested in redistributing power. I'm interested in creating power and creating more power because there are many more women leaders all over the world.

Julia Middleton 5:21

There was a really seminal point during this journey, when I spoke to a young woman from Indonesia, who was just about to do an interview, to get a scholarship to fund her PhD. And during the interview, she was asked a question about leadership. And she gave an answer to that question that I suspect you and I, and most of us would have given. And when she got the feedback from the interview, in amongst all the points was that she was clearly not a leader. And she immediately phoned me up and said, 'Julia, next time I'm asked a question about leadership, shall I give a man's answer?' And I sat there listening to the silence, and thinking we need an expedition, we need an expedition to find an approach to leadership that resonates for women. So that that young woman has a legitimate, solid, straightforward answer to that question that she was asked in that ridiculous interview. In this podcast, I've attempted to capture some of the... they can't be the best because there's so many great moments on all the films over the last two years. But because we sent out one every week, no one ever watched it, as I say, for the production quality, but the content was fantastic. And it was very, very hard to choose just a few to capture for you. So I did.

Julia Middleton 6:54

I started with Sina who was in Polynesia who's talking about about COVID, because that felt like the right starting point. And then I went to Saba, who talks about growing up in the Arab world and all the things that were said to her, that silenced her. And as you listen to them, you think, gosh, that's, that's horrifying. And then you think, actually, it happened to me too. Even if I'm not in the Arab world, I'm just in another part of the world. And Katja, there's her film, young woman from Germany, who's, who's pregnant with her first child, looking back at all the things that were said to her, and that persuaded her to pretend that she was a boy for years. And then Victoria. Knowing Victoria has, has enriched my life over the last year enormously. She talks about gender, and about how a childhood of bullying around her gender has pretty well framed most of her life. And then I chose you two films that are about maybe some of the big issues that seem to isolate women. Firstly, Harriet, who's in northern Angola. We'll talk about how isolating war is. And then Erum will talk about how water isolates women in Pakistan. And then for light relief at the end, we got Chulu, who makes us all laugh, and I did laugh, but I also cringed, listening to her, listening, and remembering that the thing that she's annoyed with all of us for doing is something that I've done for years.

Julia Middleton 8:41

The first Women Emerging from Isolation clip is from Sina. Remember, these were the very, very early days of COVID. And she told me about what she thought COVID would do to the Vā.

Sina 8:53

it's really highlighted kind of some, some ancestral wisdom from where I, where I am from originally, which is from Samoa in the Pacific. In our kind of worldview, we talk about the Vā, and what the isolation has done has really emphasised and amplified how important the Vā is. Now, if you translate the Vā into English, literally, it just means the space. The way however that most Polynesian societies see the space is it's a relational space, it's not an empty space, it's not a physical space that separate. It's actually a really sacred space that connects us, not just humans, but to the environment, to the cosmos, to kind of yeah, us as humans within the ecology of the world. We believe, in Samoa, we believe that our kind of our duty, our responsibility to be in a collective, to be in relationship with each other is to really deliver, which is to nourish and nurture and cherish the space. And what COVID has really highlighted for us is how bad those spaces actually. So for me, the time to be in isolation has been a reflection on the quality of human relationships with the environment. I mean, really, it feels like the planet has said, Okay, enough is enough. Look at the way humans have treated our planet, look at the way humans have treated each other. No, this this has been, I think we've been forced into a space to really reflect on our responsibilities as humans on the planet. It's not that the Vā was was good before. All the isolation has done is really magnified how bad it was. I suppose to create a different Vā, we, we have to have a better idea of what it is we want to create together. And I think that's the biggest challenge. And that's where I get completely frustrated and quite sad and angry when I look at the way leaders in different parts of the world come at it with what I would consider a really Western worldview mindset that says, 'Yeah, well, everybody's got their rights, and everybody looks after themselves. And you do that in your state, or you do that in your community.' And, you know, it's kind of last person standing. And it's yeah, all of that stuff, that's not going to serve us.

Clip two comes next. It's one of a series, all by women, who are recalling what was said to them as young girls, and how it had often sunk into their brains, and really isolated them for much of the rest of their lives. This one was from Saba, who was brought up in the Arab world.

Let me share with you some of the expressions that I grew up listening to, either said to me or to other women and girls around me. And without even assessing whether I have to abide by them or not, I find myself doing that. First, the day you're born, your mother's told that you are a burden. In my language, we say "....". You are a burden from birth to death. So imagine your mother holding you as a child, and genuinely thinking of you as this precious piece of life that came from her, but is going to burden her. Why a burden? Why would a new life of a beautiful, innocent girl be a burden? Let me tell you why. Because everything about her is heavy. Let's start with her body. That's the biggest sin. If she's beautiful, then she is a burden more than not being because this means that other men will be pursuing her. If she's not beautiful, that is a burden. Because no one would fancy her enough to want to marry her. And then you grow up a bit, you start leaving the house and interacting with the real world. Anything that might go wrong, is your fault. Because if you are harassed, if you are mistreated by men in the outer world, then it must be about what you were wearing, or not. How you walk, whether you smile and flirt and send wrong signals. So men's misbehaviour is always caused and is started by you. You are the one who force men to misbehave, but at the same time, and this takes me to the second expression, you do not have a mind of your own. Because, "....". So you do not have a say on how to live your life or who to be. The opinion is for your father, the decision is for the father, or any male figure who appoints himself a guardian over your life, your future and how you think and how you behave. And then you go from there to becoming someone's wife. And you feel that you're being handed over from one man to another. How are you inducted to becoming someone's wife. Your secrets should never be shared. Even if you are burning from within. Keep it quiet, stay silent. You know, it matters that your light shines from the outside. We hear it all the time. "..." No matter how horrible your life is, make it look as if you're living a perfect life. Because social perception of who you are, how your life may be matters way more than whether you are living a real happy live a fulfilled life or not.

So you become someone's wife. You're expected to be sophisticated, to you know, live the, the the role. If you work, then that is a plus that adds to your life. You know, points system, because that means that you generate income. But that does not necessarily mean that you have a say in how you're going to use that income. Men in my culture are taught from a very early age to consult with their women and do exactly the opposite.

And that takes me to my third point, it says, "..." Believe it or not, you are living with a person who would consult with you to do exactly the opposite of whatever advice you may give. So what happens? With time we learn how to give the opposite opinion for them to do exactly what you want. And here comes the dance, we dance around each other, we learn how to, we learn how to live around men. We learn how to anticipate their shortfalls, and then act in a way that make us eventually get what we want. But you never get the full life. Because the full life requires, if you're courageous enough, to stand up for yourself and say, 'I'm not happy now and here'. But if you do that, you are a bad woman. Why? Because the minute you become someone's wife, and someone's mother, it is expected from you to sacrifice. You, as an individual, do not exist. You are always part of, you are someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's mother, and you have duties that you need to fulfil, for you to be a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother. It doesn't matter if you're not good to yourself.

And this makes me wonder how can I be good? In all these roles, if I'm not honest and good to myself, you start thinking of standing up for yourself. Who do you talk to? We're told never to trust the woman. It says, "...". If two women get together and start talking, the result will be two ruined houses. That's how it translates. So when women come together, nothing good can come out of that. You just don't talk to other women. You don't trust other women. I'm confused.

In this series women on the same journey as Saba in Ireland and Nigeria, India and the US recalled what was said to them in different languages. But largely with the same effect. You can find all the films on the Women Emerging YouTube channel. But next is Katja. She captured her childhood ambitions in Germany in a very different way.

Have a look at this picture here. What you can see are two children dressed in sportswear. They may be at a sports event, having a short break before the next big challenge. At first sight, there might be two boys. I can give you the second side. One of them, the right one, is a girl. And this girl is me. And she's acting like a boy. She knows that the camera is pointing at them. And this is why she tries even harder to look and act like a boy. She wants the photo to present herself as a strong and tough boy who's in the winning team. She wants the people to think wow, what a tough boy he is. I think he is a winner. The body posture resembles that tof an adult man sitting at a bar and waiting for his beer. And the following years, this girl will do everything to hide that she's a girl. To become an authentic boy, she will start observing them and act like them. In the following years, this girl will develop into an adult woman which is independent and has no problem to make a stand in a world dominated by men.

Hi, I'm Katja ____. I'm 30 years old and I live in Germany. Just recently, I stopped working due to maternity leave. So I'm pregnant and I will give birth to my first son at the beginning of next year. Thinking about my future son and all the things that I want to teach him made me realise that I would need to rethink some of the things that I would use to call my reality. So here's what you can call my mindset for the last 29 years of my life. If you want to reach something in your life, maybe on a professional or private level, you need to be strong, fast, calculating, rational, analytical and bold. Don't think too much. Don't talk too much. And never let too many emotions get into your way. Stop whining, don't feel pain, all these successful behaviours are connected with boys. So my logical conclusion as a girl was that I need to act like a boy. And that this will automatically lead to success, I created and manifested various beliefs that would guide me through my life. Here are only some of them: don't wear too much makeup, don't talk with a high voice, don't talk with a baby voice. In general, don't be interested in girl stuff. Instead, be sportive, be competitive, live risky and dangerously, don't feel pain, and most importantly, be without a boss.

And the effect of all these curious childhood isolations for some, it's like Victoria, it turned into revenge.

But I felt very lonely and isolated, up until I was almost 16, 16 or 17, that I have my first boyfriend and, and then I found out that the nightlife was was heaven to me. And that opened a gate for my, my art. And I became a drag queen. And I was so famous, and I was... it was my revenge. That was my revenge for all of the years that people bully me. And I just concentrated in being the best artist that I could be. And that took me to, you know, places like United States and to Spain and I work all over. I work in TV. So in a way, it was like kind of like, like a triumph to me to, you know, to keep on being honest to myself, to be myself, to show the world, you know, without any mask, without being in a, I don't know, in some sort of closet, I never been. I always been out out there facing the world. But yeah, but it was very, very lonely growing up.

The Women Emerging from Isolation films gave real insight into different parts of the world and women in different parts of the world who had such similar experiences. But and yet, such different experiences. Maybe just before moving on from childhood films, just worth capturing a last, a last word from from Victoria, who's sick of the word empathy.

People today claims they are empathetic because that's a good word to call themselves. I call myself, I'm very empathetic but in reality, they are not, because empathy it shows by actions, not by words.

Next, I choose two issues that that illustrate the isolation of women, the first one being war, how war isolates women, and indeed, very tragically, how the peace building after war continues to isolate them. This is from Harriet in Northern Angola.

I remember when I was speaking at a peace conference, and I was sharing my experience in terms of how do we then make sure we bring these women who are survivors on the tip of peacebuilding, such that they're able to experience and share what they're going through. Because when we don't bring them into that case, we're still isolating them. Maybe we understand that we're doing it, maybe we don't, but the fact that you're speaking on my behalf as a survivor, you're literally isolating me. I'm supposed to share this experience that will help me come out of that isolation. But even as we're talking about empowering women out of conflict, empowering women who are survivors, we're speaking for them and not bringing them into the space. I think also, when you look at Uganda, for example, right now we have this case in the ICC. The woman who was affected or who was raped, who was, who went through all these things, is deep down in my community. And where are they? They're not part of this process. They're not part of this here. They, they're not given a chance to even decide if they want to forgive or not to forgive, if somebody should account or not account. And for me, that made me come back to to my community in northern Uganda to continue helping and continue doing the work that I do that I'm very, very passionate about, to help the girls and the women rebuild themselves, but also help them rebuild our own community, because nobody's going to help us rebuild our communities. We have to do it ourselves. We have to find in us what we felt was lost, and rebuild that community and tell our story like we used to, when we used to sit under the tree and share stories about our community. How do we share that story of peace, and change the stories, the negative stories that are being told about our community, and change those stories into peace, because right now you find some of the survivors, especially as a community would expect the community to be violence free, but violence continues to happen in the community. Why? Because everybody is struggling. We have men who has abused we have men who are who are also abducted during the war. And then when they come back, they came back with a lot of anger. And when they came back, they had children, and these children become violent children as well. So that's generational violence that is reborn, that is that is brought back is what we're trying to fight to ensure that as a community, we build a community based on people.

War should not determine who we are. War effects should not determine our generation, the war effect should not determine how we bring our children up. Northern Uganda was covered with darkness, darkness of rape, darkness of killings, darkness of slaughtering people. But that's the narrative that my community and myself can change, to ensure that people know...as people of peace, as women of peace, that we as the women in this community, it is us rebuilding this, even if we were broken during the time of the war. But we are coming out of that isolation, we're coming out of that place of darkness, and bringing light into where we are, and bringing peace in our community.

So war, isolates women. Water does too, according to Erum, and she should know. But perhaps, it's not just water that isolates women. Its decision making.

This is situated in rural Sindh in current day, Pakistan. The temperatures are very, very high, they can range between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius. So this is a hot part of the world. And rural women, obviously, as you can imagine, have no access to pipe water. They have nothing, you know, coming into their homes directly. So what women have to do is, that's where women sort of walk long distances to whatever the well, or the watering hole is, to sort of collect water and bring it back for the day's supply, or the day and a half supply that the family, some of the farm animals will use. So it's back breaking work, and none of us should at all try and romanticise it that, you know, for a little while women are like free of their burdens, and they can relax and they can do that. It's... the water is very, very heavy. So when you always see those pictures of women sort of getting big water sort of pots on their heads, I mean, you know, if you, I mean, try carry a few books or something on your head and see how you feel right, it's not easy carrying heavy water pots, without spilling them, without spilling anything but water more so. So it's really hard work. But it falls to women. And what it's doing is that it is sort of, in a way, placing them in their traditional roles, right. And it's saying like the men or the young boys and never sent out to gather water. So this is also a marker of social status and that marker of social status, this kind of jaw work is always pushed on to women — you have to take care of it. So it is that women are very much present in the field. They do the work, they have very good intonation of how resources should be managed. Or when you come to how water is governed right now, you're going at these big systemic levels, where are decisions made? So let's get to one thing that the World Bank has done. The World Bank over the last several decades wanted something called farmer managed irrigation, and farmers managed irrigation water. So the idea was turn these big irrigation systems over to the farmers. But what they did is, interestingly is that they just went and look at these rural hierarchies. And they made these farmer groups and other sort of water user associations. And there's sort of different sort of levels of how this all works. But when that happened, all of the representatives of those farmer groups, and those water user associations were basically men, so they were men farmers, and there was no representation of women in those, in those management units. So it's, to me, it's obviously it's very tragic. As it should be to all of us, right? So there was not even a sense that there should be a token representation of women. So imagine that you're the user of a resource, you have to manage it for your family, and yet you are left out of any decision making about that resource. So for the most part, that I think is a huge way of isolating. That is cutting us off from any say about how we use the resource. So I think that's really, I mean, it really it's, it's, I guess it's not confounding, but it's very angering in some way. It's very frustrating.

And the last one, it just had to be Chulu. Just had to be Chulu. You're gonna enjoy this one.

My name is Chulu Lucy Tendai Chansa. Chulu means an anthill. I, it's odd, I know. But however, an anthill in Zambia or across any African nation, if you've been to Africa, and you've seen an anthill, they can be as high as 25 feet, or seven metres, you know, they're very big and majestic. And this is something that is made by something as small as an ant. And it speaks to the limitless potential that we, as a community can do if we come together. And, you know, it just brings about that feeling that we are greater together than as an individual. Now, the names Chulu and Lucy were the names of my paternal grandmother, and those were gifted to me at birth. Tendai, on the other hand, means give thanks to God, and that was the name that was given to me by my maternal grandmother. And at the time that I was born in 1984, she was a political refugee in Zimbabwe, so she gave me the name and it is a Shauna name, even though we are Zambian. Chansa is my family name, and it means wealth and prosperity. So I hope you can see that my names are a symbol of my heritage, the legacy that I inherited. They are a reminder of the history of my family's struggles, and also the triumphs. And my names are the means by which I can trace my family lineage. And they're also a source of my pride and strength. I am also very spiritual so my names are also somewhat of a prophecy. And it's it's, it's how... the words call forth certain attributes to my life going forward. That's what we believe.

The repeated inability or unwillingness to learn my name, the way it's supposed to be said and pronounced deeply saddens me. My name only has five letters. And yet I have been called everything from Chula, Chuli, Chalu, Zulu. I mean, the list goes on. And, you know, I can give you an example. Where I come from, in my language, Chula means to suffer. And that completely changes the destiny that was intended by my ancestors when they gave me the name true. So if you've ever met somebody from another country, and you did not learn their name, the way it's supposed to be said, have you ever considered how much value there is in that particular name? Have you ever considered? I mean, just when you look at my name there, there was so much thought that went into giving me that name. The names were given with intention, they were given to be a blessing to me to the rest of my life, but when you don't bother to learn my name, what does that mean? What? What are you saying about me? How am I supposed to feel about you when I learned your name, but you don't learn mine?

That was a masterclass in cultural intelligence Chulu. Thank you very much. So it leads me to tell you what next week's podcast is about. Trouble is, I haven't got a clue and thought it through yet. So it'll be a surprise. But I leave you towards the end with some of these sort of slightly silly snippets, tiny snippets from the WEI films, the Women Emerging from Isolation films. They were such fun to make. They reveal yeah, that it was fun. Two, it was very frustrating on occasions dealing with the Internet. And third, they do actually reveal just how bossy I can get.

You can catch all the Women Emerging from Isolation films if you go to the YouTube channel of Women Emerging.

Thank you for listening to the podcast. Your voice and perspectives are crucial to the success of the expedition. And we would love you to become a partner to women emerging. You can do this by subscribing to this podcast and joining the women emerging group on LinkedIn.