[music playing]
[electrical sounds of data]
- Good morning.
Uh, good morning.
crowd: Good morning.
- Welcome.
This is the 2016 NASA Ames Summer Series,
which is sponsored by our Chief Scientist Office
and also, our Women's Influence Network
is helping to co-sponsor this special event today.
Today's presentation, which is entitled,
"How to Create a Social Movement"
is going to be given by our wonderful guest speaker,
Miss Elizabeth Nyamayaro.
She is the Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary-General
and the global Head for the HeForShe Initiative.
This is a global solidarity movement
which seeks to engage men and boys
as advocates for gender equality.
Prior to UN Women,
she was the Director of External Affairs and Policy, Africa,
and part of the Corporate Strategy Office at Merck.
Miss Nyamayaro holds an MS in poli--in politics from the
London School of Economics and Political Science.
I want you to please join me
in giving a very special welcome to our guest speaker,
Miss Elizabeth Nyamayaro.
[applause]
- Thank you, Karen.
Good morning, everyone.
crowd: Good morning.
- What if I told you
that there's a solution that could change
many of the things that you thought possible,
a solution that could make you happier
and positively improve the relations in your life?
What if that solution also had enormous economic benefits
from increasing your team's productivity
to enhancing NASA's overall innovation?
And what if that same solution
could benefit the US economy,
increasing GDP by $1.2 trillion,
according to a McKinsey 2016 report?
And what if those benefits were not just US specific,
but could bring 12-- $12 trillion
to the global economy?
And that same solution
could also bring other societal benefits
from putting an end
to one of the world's greatest inequalities,
impacting more than half of the world's population
to addressing one of the leading killers of men
in the US, which is suicide.
That same solution
could also decrease global poverty
and end world hunger.
The solution of which I'm speaking
is the fundamental equality of women and men.
Today I'm here to talk about
"How to Create a Social Movement."
And although it may not appear so
in the same on the surface,
we're all in the same business: movement.
Different kind of movement, but movement nonetheless.
At NASA, you are moving our sensibilities and knowledge
to the highest and furthest reaches of the universe,
while at UN Women,
the United Nations Global Entity on Gender Equality,
we are moving towards greater acceptance
of a long-overdue concept
that women and men are equal.
Today, that's the kind of movement
I'm going to be talking about:
mobilizing people towards social progress.
I should begin by stating
an important point of clarification.
Just as there's no consensus
on the definition of "a social movement,"
there is also no one way to go about
creating a social movement.
So the insights from today
are not based on general observation
of social movements at large,
but rather from lessons learned
from being on the front lines of the HeForShe movement.
Let's go back to the beginning.
HeForShe was launched on September 20, 2014,
when a young woman stood in front of a large audience
at the United Nations to deliver a simple message.
[mouse clicking]
- Today, we are launching a campaign called "HeForShe."
I am reaching out to you because we need your help.
We want to end gender inequality.
And to do this,
we need everyone involved.
This is the first campaign of its kind at the UN.
We want to try and galvanize as many men and boys
as possible to be advocates for change.
- That young woman is Emma Watson, British actor
and UN Women Global Goodwill Ambassador.
With that invitation, she ignited
a momentous movement,
galvanizing more than 100,000 men
to the cause in just three days.
Within a week after launching HeForShe,
at least one man in every single country in the world
had answered her call,
creating more than 1.2 billion conversations
on social media.
And with that, the HeForShe movement was born.
Technical issues. [crowd chuckles]
- We're NASA. - Okay.
Like with any g-- any good strategy...
It's all right.
Okay.
Like with any good strategy,
HeForShe came into being by asking why.
Why is it that despite the universal belief
that all human beings are created equal,
there continues to be disparity among genders?
Why is it that despite concrete evidence
that show that equal societies are good for families,
for communities, for business,
for government, and even for social development,
there continues to be gender inequality?
And according to a report from the World Economic Forum,
it could takes us, at the current rate of progress,
81 years to achieve gender equality
and 118 years to achieve equal pay.
By asking why, we realized
that we needed to think differently.
We needed to challenge the status quo.
We needed to dismantle the notion
that gender equality is a zero-sum game,
that women win and men lose.
This is not so.
This is about creating better societies for everyone,
one that creates more opportunities and benefits
for everyone and all of society.
We realize that a whole-of-society issue,
such as gender equality,
requires a whole-of-society solution.
It's a new paradigm,
but it's a better paradigm.
This became our vision
to create a solidarity movement for gender equality,
HeForShe.
Thus the first important component
to creating a social movement
is to have a clear vision.
Social movements that enjoy lasting success
have a core purpose and core values
that remain fixed while their strategies
adapt to an ever-changing environment.
Vision provides guidance on what to change
and what to preserve, uh, in the moment
of the evolution.
The second component to building a social movement
is to have a simple activation.
Most successful social movements
have a clear and simple call to action.
And sometimes the name becomes the rallying call,
eliciting an immediate response.
Now this is a-- not an endorsement
of any of these movements,
but to illustrate a point,
some of the movements that have been successful in the US
include things such as same-sex marriage,
Occupy Wall Street,
Black Lives Matter,
and Yes We Can.
Equally with HeForShe,
the call to action is simple.
It's about he supporting she,
about men and boys
raising their hands to be counted.
Initially, this seemed kind of--kind of, uh,
counterintuitive.
Surely, you can't change a world
by asking men to raise their hand.
But we knew that this was a very complex issue,
with different social and cultural nuances.
So the simple activation provided an entry point
for men to join the movement.
And through that, it inspired action
that we had not even anticipated.
For instance, one man in Africa
started a husband school.
He literally went around his village,
handpicking the men that were abusive to their wives,
and committed to turn them into better husbands and fathers.
In the Netherlands, a young man,
recognizing that there continues to be a disparity
in terms of funding for women and girls programming,
organized a bike-a-thon
and rode from his country of Netherlands
across two continents and all the way to South Africa
to raise funds for gender equality.
In some cases, these were simple activations,
such as men stepping up to share parental
and home--uh, household, uh, responsibilities.
The men were finding solutions
that were personal to them in their lives
and in their own communities.
Their equality stories became thought-starters
for other men and would inspire them
to take further action.
Which brings me to the third component
about how to create a social movement.
Responsive listening.
Traditionally, organizations try to use people
to move their organization forward
and often forget that people need to see the value
and the direct benefit to them.
Successful social movements
look at how they can use the organization
to move the entire community forward.
With HeForShe, we knew that our role
would need to be that of facilitators.
And to be a good facilitator,
we needed to be good listeners.
So therefore, responsive listening became
and has remained a core component of the movement,
allowing key findings to help us inform the strategy
without losing focus of our vision.
One such key finding
came just two weeks after the launch of HeForShe
in the form of a letter from a young man
here in the US.
He shared with us a very powerful story
about his upbringing,
about being raised by a single mother in the Bronx,
about the struggle that he faced to provide
for him--for his mother and his five siblings,
which led him to a life of crime.
One evening during a robbery,
he accidentally shot the homeowner.
And as the woman lied on the ground,
taking her last breath,
he stood there and he felt absolutely nothing.
Because as a man he wasn't allowed
to show any emotion.
He wasn't allowed to feel anything
because as a young boy, his mother had told him
that boys don't cry.
And on the streets,
his friend had told him to man up.
And so the young boy ended up in prison.
And then one afternoon,
whilst watching television
he saw Emma Watson deliver a speech at the UN
about the HeForShe initiative.
And all of a sudden, something incredible happened.
He was filled with emotion.
And for the first time in his adult life,
he broke down and cried.
In his letter, he included
an image of a bird flying out of a cage,
a metaphor of how the speech had liberated him.
And he wrote,
"While I remain consumed with loneliness
in my tiny prison cell,
I feel free."
[mouse clicking]
His letter shifted our realization
that HeForShe was not just about
breaking barriers for women.
It was about freeing all of us,
giving us the freedom to be who we truly are,
to be strong and emotional,
to be vulnerable and real.
By late 2015, there were more than 250
HeForShe student clubs
that had emerged on college campuses,
powered by the passion of the millennials
to change the world.
And so we took our responsive listening
on the--on the road,
visiting college campuses in the UK and France.
It was there that student activists
would remind us that gender is no longer
neatly divided into two categories.
That the gender binary of male or female
is an outdated idea that no longer reflects
how millennials feel about themselves
or those that they love.
The students were seeing very clearly for the first time
that inequality has a direct impact on all of us,
no matter how we identify or express our gender.
And so now HeForShe's not just about men,
it's a radically inclusive movement
that allows everyone to not only express this belief
but also to act on it in meaningful ways.
And that's really one of the most challenging aspects
of a social movement,
how to translate the momentum of activism
into tangible social change.
We know that not all social movements
result into change and impact.
But the successful ones have one thing in common.
They are impact driven.
The last component focuses on measurable results
with key milestones to track towards progress.
The Gay Rights Movement, for instance,
has focused on the key issue of same-sex marriage
as a measurable milestone of progress.
The Civil Rights Movement and the Women Rights Movement
both made voting rights an essential milestone
in tracking towards progress.
HeForShe is focusing on generating and creating impact
at both the local, national level
and at both individual and institutional level.
We have created partnerships
with heads of states, with corporations,
with universities,
to really move the needle
on this issue of gender inequality.
The commitments that we have seen
in a handful of examples from our IMPACT Champions,
uh, have been really remarkable.
For instance,
the government of Sweden and Iceland
have all committed to ensure equal pay
for all of their citizens by 2022.
In fact, in Iceland,
they will start auditing every company
from the big corporation
to the small company that employs three people
and then ensure certification towards equal pay
such that by 2022, companies working in Iceland
will need to give their employees equal pay.
In another example out of Africa,
Malawi has committed to end child marriage,
which is a big issue on the continent.
And last year,
we saw 330 child marriages being annulled
and 175 girls were sent back to school.
On the corporate side,
PwC, another HeForShe IMPACT Champion
as we call them, also committed to ensure
that there is parity at the board level across PwC.
And in the past six months,
they've gone from having 20% of women
to 45% of women.
Twitter, another IMPACT Champion of ours,
also recently announced
a gender-neutral parental leave policy,
giving all parents 20 weeks of paid leave.
Let me talk about the universities,
two very quick examples.
University of Waterloo, which is
Canada's leading engineering school,
has committed to close the gap on STEM.
And last year--
and they will do this for the next five years--
they introduced the first-ever HeForShe scholarships,
awarding six female students to study STEM,
um, at--at-- on their campus.
Uh, and of course here
at the University of-- of Stony Brook,
which is a leading public university in the US,
they've also committed
through their Masculinity Center,
which is the only one in the US,
to help us deconstruct and redefine
the issues of masculinity.
So as I end this talk
about how to create a movement,
I would like to turn back
to your kind of movement
and borrow a quote from somebody who taught the world
a little bit about that.
Johannes Kepler is quoted as saying,
"Truth is the daughter of time,
and I feel no shame in being her midwife."
Through Kepler as a midwife,
time has taught us that the planet orbits the Sun
in an eclipse and not a circle.
Through the midwifing of so many other
social movements before HeForShe,
including the Women Rights Movement,
time has taught us about the power of individuals
to create change and move humanity forward.
So as you, the bright minds here at NASA,
continue to unlock some of the secrets
and truth of our universe,
may we work together
to midwife another great truth,
the fundamental equality of women and men.
Thank you.
[applause]
- A few questions? Will you do a few?
- Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes.
- Okay, so if you have some questions,
we have a little bit of time.
And we'll have mics, I believe,
that will be ready-- uh, there they are--
uh, if you have a question, just raise your hand
and we'll get those started.
Okay? Yes?
[squeaking]
Hello.
- Oh, maybe you can just hear me better this way.
Um, thank you so much for that talk.
That was really beautiful.
Um, I'm really happy to hear about this movement.
I had never heard of it before
so it's really great to bring it to Ames.
Um, one thing that I've been wondering about
in terms of social movements in general:
how do you invite other people
who might s--who might feel ostracized
or like they're part of the problem?
How do you invite them and make them feel comfortable
and--and willing to contribute to the solution?
- One at--one at a time? - Yes.
- Well--well, thank you for your--for your question.
It's exactly the foundation of HeForShe, in fact.
And to give you a quick background,
um, this was not an easy initiative to launch.
Um, initially there was a lot of pushback,
which, you know, I can respect
and understand where it was coming from
because traditionally, the issue of gender equality,
uh, has often been associated with women.
And it's been a movement for women, led by women.
Um, and it's also been interesting because
sometimes guys don't even know
that they have a gender. [laughs]
Because it's, you know, you say "gender"
and, "Oh, that's about women.
It's got nothing to do with us."
Um, and so...
[laughter]
So, um, so we--
so we realized that we needed to find a way
that we could bring everybody together
and really create, uh, a solidarity movement.
So HeForShe was that way of--
of bringing together men and women,
and in fact all genders for that matter,
to all rally around, which we think it's--
it's an important societal issue.
It has nothing to do with women.
It is really about social progress
and it's about human rights as well.
- Okay. Another question in the back.
- Hi, um, uh,
at what point do you equate inequality to inequity?
- Um, a very important question
and something that we get often
because yes, there is the inequity,
which is a really big issue.
But given the global mandate of the UN,
uh, we are working in every single country in the world.
And I think before we can even get to inequities,
there are some very basic fundamental rights
that are still not there.
So with everything else that's going on,
with limited resources,
the biggest focus is to address the issue of inequality.
But of course in-- inequity is something that,
you know, we also look at,
but maybe not at the scale,
um, that we're able to--to do the inequality piece first.
- Okay.
Yes, here?
- Yeah, I have two questions.
The first question has to do with an organization
called "Vital Voices."
I suspect you're familiar with them?
- Correct.
- Um, there are lots of movements like yours.
Is there an attempt in the United Nations
to bring these movements together?
- Yes, so,
I had an interview, actually, last week.
And, um, a journalist asked me a question
which seemed quite obvious to me,
but obviously was not that obvious.
And he said, "It's fascinating that you
have called HeForShe 'a people's movement.'
Why isn't it a UN movement?
I would think you'd want to leverage the UN brand."
And we said, "Actually, it is a people's movement
because people create movements."
And so certainly, one of the things
we're trying to do with HeForShe is that,
how do we almost remove the UN from the process
and really make sure that it's about partnerships?
And hence the-- the IMPACT Champions
that I spoke to you about.
It's looking at how can we not duplicate efforts,
but again use our convening power as the UN
to provide a platform that we can amplify other voices.
So, indeed, we are working with, uh, so many partners.
And--and--it--an important one
to point out is MenEngage,
which is the largest coalition of men organizations
working on issues of gender equality.
But you--you raised a fantastic point
and it's something that we're very conscious of.
And this is why this is not a UN movement,
it's a people's movement.
- So my follow-up question is, um,
if you consider Maslow's pyramid of needs,
you're sort of up at the very top
of Maslow's pyramid, looking at self-actualization
and--and belonging and social structures.
But all the evidence in the world now
suggests that the foundation of that pyramid,
which is physiological needs
like food, water, energy, shelter,
are all being really threatened
by changes in climate
and--and resource limitations.
Are you working on this whole pyramid
or how does this system sort of fit together?
- An important background for you, um,
which is missing from my speech
is that HeForShe is an accelerator.
It's an accelerator for UN Women's work,
UN Women being the Global Entity on Gender Equality.
It's an accelerator for the SDGs,
which is the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Um, and within the--
the two arms that I mentioned to you,
the mandate of UN Women is really focused
on the bottom, as you mentioned.
Uh, we are in 90 country offices.
Uh, and where we don't have an office,
we work with our sister agencies
like UNICEF and UNESCO and UNDP.
But the basic work of UN Women
is to make sure that we are focusing
on the basic needs: education, health care.
We focus on issues of women economic empowerment.
We focus on issues of political participation and leadership.
And the HeForShe, as an accelerator,
is looking at, how can we have--
as--as I mentioned to you before--
a pe--something that's more external facing
so that we can almost address this thing
from the bottom-up and top-down approach?
- Other questions?
Yeah. - Hi.
I'm from the Women's Influence Network,
so we're very glad that you're here
and we're very happy.
Um, and so we'll dive into this
probably more later at our 12:30 event,
but, um, we were wondering-- we were hoping to bring
this movement to NASA,
so could you kind of talk about how we can
help be IMPACT Champions
and bring this into the NASA fold?
- So this morning I had the honor to meet
with your management, and I know that we have a meeting
this afternoon to further explore.
We are very keen, as the UN,
to make sure this is not a one-off engagement.
Um, we look up to NASA as a pioneer
of innovation and really taking us--
making us see the impossible.
And so we would very much love for this
to be a continued partnership
that we can both learn from each other.
- There was another question.
- Hi, yes, um...
along the lines of that, now that we have partnerships
that can, uh, make things, uh,
move with more momentum, but as you start
with, uh, a new social change,
how do you deal with, uh, resistance
or people who are not thinking it's--
it's the next obvious step towards
social progress? [laughs]
- Yes, so this is,
I think, the biggest thing that, um,
we realized with HeForShe
was to be able to demonstrate impact and results.
Um, as I mentioned to you, the initial response
was not positive,
um, because you had people saying,
"Men don't really care about this issue.
Why are you even engaging them?"
You hear people that say, "Well, men are the problem,
then why are you even engaging them?"
And I think one of the things that we nee--we--
we realized immediately was,
"Okay, well, if we're gonna do this,
we need to be able to have measurable change
and--and measurable impact."
So the partnership that I mentioned to you
it's actually a partnership called--
uh, it's a pilot, uh, called IMPACT 10x10x10,
where we have a partnership
with ten heads of states, ten global CEOs,
and ten university presidents that have all come up
with some really game-changing commitments
in championing gender equality, not in the sense
of "Here's what we're doing to advance it,"
but rather, "Here's--here's what
we're gonna do to actually get to the finishing line."
And through this partnership, it's measurable.
Um, so Iceland, as I mentioned as an example,
there it's measurable.
The commitments are public,
there's annual reporting and checking of progress.
And I think when people started to see,
you know, girls in Malawi going back to school,
when people started to see, you know,
the opportunity to have equal pay or parental leave,
I think that helped people to realize
that this wasn't just an awareness thing,
but we actually want to, you know,
we want to change the world.
Uh, and we're doing something about that.
- Yes, right here?
- So when we start talking about impact,
and when we put numbers on it,
like we want half of, uh, people on the board to be women,
how do we combat the concept
that maybe some of them are unqualified?
- Yes, it--it's always a very tricky, um, question
because even at-- at UN Women level,
not HeForShe but as the Global Entity,
one of the things we often face
is quotas or no quotas, right?
Because you also don't want tokenism either, you know?
And I don't think women want that either.
You know, we don't want to be appointed out of tokenism.
We want to be appointed because of our qualifications.
So it's--it's always a very interesting, uh,
and delicate matter to manage.
In some cases, we actually have to enforce quotas
because nothing is gonna happen otherwise.
Um, and then on the issue--
the--the framing of UN Women is not
that we just want women there,
but we want qualified women. We want parity.
We don't--it's not a zero-sum game either.
We don't want more women than we want men.
We want to create diverse teams
of qualified individuals, right?
Um, to be able to, um, to progress.
- May I say?
And just sort of to add onto that,
it's interesting as part of the conversation, right?
No one asked if the men on the board are qualified.
- That's right.
[laughter and applause]
- That's a good point. - Just saying.
- [laughs]
- We have time for a couple more questions.
- Yes?
- Um, hi, my name is Kate Napier.
That was a fantastic talk.
Um, I was wondering if the HeForShe movement
has addressed the ways in which
all major world religions, um,
contribute to the oppression of women, um, through exclusion
in leadership positions and oftentimes teachings
that women should be submissive to men?
- Yes, so currently, actually,
in the Middle East, our country office
um, secured funds from one of the member states.
And they're carrying out a huge exercise
on understanding the issue of religion and gender.
But the important thing to point out
is that we want to do this in an inclusive manner.
Um, it's--it's really to try and do this
in an amical, versus antagonistic, manner.
So we are working as part of HeForShe
with religious leaders, uh, at community level,
uh, to help sensitize
but also to learn from them what some of the challenges are,
so that we can do this in a proactive manner.
You know, we can't-- and this is why I often say
you know, we don't own the HeForShe movement,
uh, because we would never know
how to communicate to a community
in--in a certain cultural context.
So it's really important, the partnership thing
is really key that it's about empowering
the local communities, religious leaders,
the men in those communities,
and, of course, the women in those communities
to all sit down and come up with--
with solutions that are relevant to their,
uh, to their situation.
- So I have a question.
So I'll actually move into the light.
So one of the things that, um,
you see it's always easier
to suggest or push change
in other locations.
It's usually in your family
that it's a little harder to do, right?
You could always teach, assign, direct,
fund, to do.
But in your family because you're doing it every day,
it's hard to see and hard to change.
How is this movement impacting the way
the UN does its job?
And do you see any movement
within the UN?
- Yes, so also with the HeForShe,
um, I was telling the group that I met with earlier
that with this IMPACT 10x10x10 initiative,
one of the-- in addition to those entities
coming up with a game-changing commitment
uh, they also agreed to transparency
around reporting in its annual reporting.
And I remember, you know, getting the--
some of the global CEOs
and these are some of the biggest companies
from McKinsey to Vodafone to Twitter to, um,
Barclays, et cetera.
Um, and there was people said, "Well, it's just--
they're never gonna release their data."
McKinsey had never released their data up until now.
Uh, and we managed to get them this year in Davos,
one year later after implementing HeForShe,
uh, they reported their-- their data on--
on the--sort of the parity within the company.
And with that push,
this also gave us a leverage to then
go to the Secretary General and say,
"If we are asking our partners to release their data,
we also have to release their data."
And yes, we did release our data.
Um, and it's still-- it's, again,
it's not as great as it should be,
but again, I think transparency
is--is the starting point.
You can't fix something unless you know
how big the problem is.
So with HeForShe, just in the past year,
we've been able to get the UN to also release their data.
- That's awesome.
Okay, I think we have time for a couple more questions.
Yes? - So regarding the question
you had...
- Thanks.
- So regarding the question you had--
or the statement you made about quotas or non-quotas.
Doesn't the imposition of a quota
sort of foster a spirit of inequality?
Uh, obviously you have to do something,
uh, to make things equal,
but doesn't imposing a quota, um, sort of foster
this idea that, um,
these people need to be stood up for
and--and that sort of thing and then
make people that are, uh, being supported by the quota
feel unequal?
- The Executive Director of UN Women has a favorite saying.
She says, you know, "Certainly a woman can
break the glass ceiling, but wouldn't it be nice
if someone just removed it so I don't have to hurt my hands?"
Um, I think it's the same thing with the issue of quotas,
unfortunately, that, you know,
in some cases you have to have the qu--
I mean, we wish we didn't need the quotas,
but sometimes you have to have the quotas.
Especially around, uh, political participation.
- Thank you.
- Okay. - Yes?
- Hi, I'm Erika Rodriguez, also part
of the WIN organization here at Ames.
Thank you for a wonderful talk.
I had two questions.
You had mentioned earlier in your presentation that it--
the HeForShe campaign exceeded your expectations.
And now that you've seen this huge movement,
where do you see it in one year?
In five years?
And the second question is, is there feedback?
Do you go back to these countries
who have started this movement
and see if they're really continuing,
um, the change that they--
they said they were going to start?
- Yes, so--so now, um,
the HeForShe, having started as this awareness
one-year initiative now becoming
a core component of the accelerator
of the SDGs and UN Women,
uh, we are obviously, you know, tracking progress
until the finishing line.
Within the IMPACT 10x10x10,
uh, we've even gotten even ambitious.
So the commitments that I mentioned to you,
whether it be around equal pay.
Um, so we have two companies that are addressing--
in addition to the two countries--
addressing issues of equal pay.
We have an end point of 2020.
We almost want to frontload the--the activity
so that we don't wait until 2030 to realize
that we are still quite far from where we need to go.
So there is the annual reporting,
annual tracking.
Uh, we meet with these IMPACT Champions,
the heads of states, the CEOs,
and the university presidents on an annual basis.
And in fact, uh, September 20th,
which is the second anniversary of HeForShe,
it's gonna be at the General Assembly at the UN.
And we're launching the, uh, heads of states' reports
as well as the university reports.
So there is, like, clear, measurable,
trackable progress happening with that--with that group.
Um, and then in terms of, um-- what was your second part?
Did I answer the second part?
- Yeah, you did, and then... - Yeah.
- Where do you personally see it going
in a year? Five years from now?
- Well, if I can boldly say this,
we want to end gender inequality.
And--and really, I mean, we are not stopping
until that's done.
Um, but again, the more we can frontload
the--the work, the better it's going to be for everyone.
Yeah. - Okay.
I think we have time for one more at least, Jacob?
Okay. Yes?
- Hello, my name's Alejandra,
and I wanted to thank you very much
for coming today at NASA Ames.
Um, and I wanted to know
if you could give advice--
there's a lot of interns here--
um, on how to advocate for the HeForShe campaign
and gender equality, um, globally.
So what advice would you give us?
Really quickly.
- So the--the first, as a reminder again,
I firmly believe and we firmly believe
that people create movements.
And so it's gonna take all of us.
Um, and it-- it can be as daunting
as it should be because sometimes
you sort of feel, "Where do I even start?"
And so we are trying to really make this
as bite-size as possible.
I think the first thing is go to the HeForShe-dot-org website.
Um, read some material.
Within that website, we're sort of giving you
some thought-starters and ideas
on what you can do to support gender equality.
We've also identified sort of key priority issues
that, you know, we think we need more work
to be done on those areas.
And also giving you ideas on how you can be part of this.
But again, some of these things are very simple,
and Jacob already spoke about this.
It all begins in the home, right?
Um, and we all have a responsibility.
And I often am baffled when men, you know--
when women say,
"Whoa, these men are just horrible men."
And I think, "Well, they didn't
just, like, emerge from a jungle somewhere."
You know? [laughter]
- Just spring up.
- Just, like, raised by, like, animals or something.
I mean, we--you know,
mothers also have a responsibility.
You know, we are raising those sons.
We are raising those daughters.
And I think just having that awareness in the home.
Um, I mean, I remember-- you know,
I'm from Africa, so gender disparity
has always been part and parcel of my upbringing.
But I even know now, living in the US, and I go out
to my friend's house. - Mm-hmm.
- And, you know, they're supposed to be
much more enlightened than perhaps I thought I was
living in Africa, but you still have mothers saying,
well, you know, "Don't play with your brother's toys."
And the brother has trucks.
You know, "Here's your doll for you."
Um, and really sort of creating this--
this sort of inequality right--right off.
Or--[stammering]
the boys should stay out of the kitchen.
Let the girl cook.
So--so I think really starting from that,
and--and as young people, we obviously want your energy.
There's more than 250 HeForShe clubs.
Going back to your school, start a club.
Educate your-- your, uh, fellow students.
And sign up to the HeForShe movement.
We still need more people.
- Thank you very much. - Okay.
- And I'm just gonna piggyback onto that...
- Yes? - All of you Ames people
out there, all of you interns,
all of you folk who are here today,
you got some homework, right?
Go check out the website.
Find out how to join.
Start the conversation. - Mm-hmm.
- You have to start it here. - Yes.
- I totally agree with you.
I have grandsons and granddaughters
and you would not believe the conversations we've had
around the color pink. - Yes.
- They're only four, but they're very vocal
about who should wear it and who shouldn't.
And we're slowly but surely changing their minds.
You can imagine.
I'll bring you pictures
of my grandsons in pink shirts
and my granddaughters in blue boxers, like--
But we definitely want to start
by having the conversation.
And don't stop when the conversation gets uncomfortable.
- Yeah.
- Right?
Right? - Yes.
- Push through. - Yes.
- Have the conversation. - Yeah.
- We are grateful. Thank you so much
for coming today. - Well, thank you for having me.
- And we invite you back. - Absolutely.
- Right?
So, please, let's give her a wonderful, warm thank you.
[applause]
- Thank you, Karen. - Mm-hmm.
Miss Elizabeth Nyamayaro.
Thank you.
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