‘I wish I’d called out the sexism earlier’, admits former-prime minister Julia Gillard

Julia Gillard regrets not taking a stand against sexism earlier than her 2012 parliamentary attack on Tony Abbott.

Then-PM Julia Gillard delivering her ‘Misogyny Speech’ in 2012. Picture: Kym Smith

As the debate around gender continues to rage across the Australian political spectrum, former Prime Minister and Australia’s only ever female leader has spoken of the regret she still feels for not taking a stand earlier against sexism which led to her now-famous “misogyny speech”.

“Looking back on my time in politics, I do wish I’d called out the sexism earlier,” Julia Gillard told the Financial Times this week.

It’s been more than six years since Ms Gillard delivered her 15-minute speech during Question Time — the video for which has since been viewed more than three million times.

In an interview published yesterday to mark her appointment as inaugural chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Ms Gillard spoke about her time as prime minister and how she was treated by the media, which she claims was different to male politicians. The institute, recently launched out of King’s College in London, plans to address the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions across industries and countries.

“The dominant ethos in the press during my time in office was that gender was completely irrelevant to the reception of my premiership. In actual fact, I was treated very differently to how men would be,” she said at the Financial Times Women summit yesterday.

While Ms Gillard did not make reference to the current political crisis and bullying allegations made by Liberal women, she has previously hit out at male colleagues who failed to back her up. Today, the advice she gives to other women seeking leadership positions is to “seek out more male champions from outside your immediate sphere”.

“You only solve big problems when there’s a concerted effort to analyse and get to grips with them, and we’re at least in that phase,” she said.

“Why are women more likely to be [in] parliament in Rwanda, lead news organisations in Estonia, preside in courtrooms in Slovenia and work in technology companies in Malaysia?,” she said. “It’s clear that there are cases where learning from other countries is currently not being harnessed.”

Despite the passage of years, Ms Gillard said, internationally, she is still strongly associated with the 2012 speech which quickly became known as “The Misogyny Speech’’ and made headlines in the United States, United Kingdom, India, South Africa and Canada.

Then-PM Julia Gillard listens as then-Opposition leader Tony Abbott addresses the Parliament in November 2012. Picture: Ray Strange

However, the speech — delivered in response to criticism over her support of then-speaker Peter Slipper — also drew criticism, notably from Julie Bishop who is among those leading the charge against the current government’s problems with bullying and treatment of women. At the time, the then-deputy Opposition leader Ms Bishop called Ms Gillard’s’ speech a “vile slur” and demanded she apologise.

Ms Gillard maintains she had moved on but plans to continue lobbying internationally for the advancement of women in leadership positions. “There’s lots of things I miss about being prime minister and the main thing I miss is … to not be able to make things happen because you no longer have those levers in your hands,” she said. “But life moves on, you move on.”