Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and present

Prime Minister Julia Gillard spoke passionately in Parliament on 9 October 2012. Many people around the world took notice of what has come to be called her ‘Misogyny Speech’. By the following day, footage of the speech had been viewed more than 300,000 times online, ‘Gillard’ was one of the top trending words on Twitter and newspaper headlines around the globe reported the speech.(3) Just more than one year later, the video clip on YouTube had been viewed more than 2.5 million times. This speech was clearly ‘heard around the world’.(4) The Liberian peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee spoke of her excitement in watching the speech and the high value she placed on it as an example of a woman leader breaking the bounds of public priority to make a personally political statement about the still radical idea of misogyny.(5)