Julia Gillard: the sexism Clinton will face

Gillard tells Atlantic about sexism Hillary Clinton can expect as leader



^{Former Labor prime ministers Julia Gillard and Paul Keating listening to Bill Shorten when he launched the ALP election campaign in June. Picture: Britta Campion}

• The Australian
• 12:35PM August 19, 2016

Julia Gillard has outlined what Hillary Clinton can expect as America’s first female president, criticising Australia’s culture for expecting women to accept sexist attacks as normal.

In an interview with US magazine The Atlantic, the former Labor prime minister also criticised the ABC for “bizarrely” commissioning a sitcom, At Home With Julia, that parodied her home life.

However she optimistically predicted that her trailblazing would make things easier for female leaders in future as “the amplitude of this style of reaction goes down every time”.


^{Hillary Clinton in New York yesterday. Picture: AP}

Ms Gillard said society was more tolerant of sexism than racism, arguing that Tony Abbott, who was photographed at a rally in 2011 standing in front of “ditch the witch” placards, would have been hounded from politics had the signs read “sack the black”.

“If an indigenous Australian prime minister had complained about that, I don’t think people would say, ‘Oh, he is just playing the victim.’ But that is what gets said about women who complain about sexism,” she told the magazine.
“There is an added kind of layer that women leaders are just supposed to take it on the chin and not complain about it.”

Ms Gillard said she initially expected the sexism to peak early in her prime ministership and taper off. However, she said, “the sort of gendered stuff actually grew over time”.

Ms Gillard suspected her gender was at play when the ABC launched At Home With Julia, which depicted the prime minister and her partner Tim Mathieson having sex in her office beneath an Australian flag.

“They chose bizarrely, in my view, to finance a comedy where an impersonator played me,” Ms Gillard said, noting that this was something not done for any other prime minister before or since.

Ms Gillard said it was “100 per cent legitimate” to criticise a leader’s decisions, but “as soon as the gendered bit starts raising its head, men and women of good will should be saying: ‘No. Stop that.’”

“We do need to go through that so we can hit a time where it’s so normal for a woman to be president — or for an African American or a Hispanic or a Native American to be president — in the United States that people don’t really comment on it.”

Tony Abbott as opposition leader accused Ms Gillard of “playing the gender card” to deflect criticisms of her questionable stewardship of the Australian government.

As prime minister in 2014, Mr Abbott claimed Liberal backbenchers’ attacks on his chief-of-staff Peta Credlin were motivated by sexism.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nat...r/news-story/01aa79335e5dbaddf4f044d8aab03cbd