In the age of the 'manosphere', what's the future for feminism? With Jude Kelly of the WOW Festival

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Jude Kelly, CEO, The WOW Foundation: There's no doubt about it that the ‘manosphere’, as it's termed, is a growing and worrying situation. I think they are outriders, but there's too many of them to just let it go and not be worried.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week: women, men, feminism and misogyny.

Jude Kelly: So you have these battlegrounds now, I think, that are far more livid than they were 14 years ago.

Robin Pomeroy: Fourteen years ago was when Jude Kelly, a leading light in London’s cultural scene, founded the Women of the World Festival - that's now spread to events right around the world.

Jude Kelly: Straight away people said, oh, I'd love to do this in Baltimore. I'd love to do this Australia. Can we do this in Turkey? So it sort of went global almost immediately.

Robin Pomeroy: Anyone who is a woman and anyone who knows a woman is welcome at the WOW Festivals - that now happen in places as diverse as Karachi, Berlin and Istanbul.

Jude Kelly: Every single culture that I've been to across the entire world wants to talk about these things. They just find a way of talking about them in the right way.

Robin Pomeroy: Jude Kelly addresses head-on the threat - to men as well as women - of the rise of incels and online misogyny.

Jude Kelly: The identity of maleness deserves as much investigation and scrutiny and affection as the exploration of what women are nowadays.

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts where you will find our sister programmes, Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with a look at feminism, masculinity and what those terms even mean…

Jude Kelly: I think it's a very turbulent space.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Regular listeners to this podcast will be familiar with the World Economic Forum’s annual Gender Gap Report, which looks at the progress in opportunities for women around the world. The most recent one found that while things are progressing, at the current rate it would take until 2154 - that's the year 2154 - for men and women to be truly equal.

And consider this: according to UN figures, i​n 2022, around 48,800 women and girls were killed by their partners or other members of their family - that’s more than five women or girls killed every hour by someone in their own family.

55 % of all murders of women and girls are committed by family members - the figure for men is 12%.

So there are plenty of reasons to, at the very least, think about what is happening, and what can be done. This week’s guest is someone who does just that.

Jude Kelly is a theatre director who worked with the likes of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and rose to become the Artistic Director of London’s Southbank Centre - the sprawling brutalist theatre and art complex along the Thames in central London, where she created the Women of the World Festival to celebrate the achievements of women and girls and confront global gender injustice.

As you’ll hear in this interview, she has also curated festivals for men, focusing on the issue of male suicide. And she has interesting views on the rise of online misogyny and - although we don’t use the term - what some describe as toxic masculinity.

So what is the future of feminism? And why should men be involved in the discussion. Here’s Jude Kelly.

Jude Kelly: I'm Jude Kelly. I'm a theatre director and festival maker, and I created and run the Wow women of the world festivals. It's now charity, the Wow Foundation. And it creates festivals and occasions for celebration for girls and women across all five continents, in many, many countries of the world.

Robin Pomeroy: So the WOW Festival. What, what would you say is overarching aim is?

Jude Kelly: Well, it's to make sure that girls and women and boys and men celebrate everything that girls and women have achieved so far, make them understand that the job's not done yet, and look at strategies and ideas for what the future could be that would really release the potential of everybody who has been told in the past that actually because they're a girl or because they're a woman, there's things that they shouldn't do, couldn't do, mustn't do, oughtn't to do, etc..

And so it's a it's a vast panoply of women's stories and girls stories across all sectors of society that makes people realise just how amazing the things that women do are, but also makes them realise what a kind of travesty it is to still have roadblocks and obstacles and cultural norms that retain the idea that women can't quite do the same as men and can't quite have the same rights as men.

Robin Pomeroy: So what does a festival like that look like? Because I know if you go to a music festival where you're going to watch some bands or a comedy festival or a book festival, you know, you'll see authors reading parts of their books, Q&A. What happens at a festival like this?

Jude Kelly: Let me talk about festivals first of all, and why I chose the festival as a vehicle for this idea of celebrating girls and women.

And it's because although I'm a theatre director by trade, in opera and musicals and so on, art traditionally is something that has a sort of a beginning, a middle and an end in terms of time. Like you come at 7.30, you buy a ticket, you leave, and you're kind of captured into that space. Festivals are something which the whole of humanity have done, as far as we know, from the beginning of time. Everybody understands that a festival is something much more fluid, much more porous. You can arrive when you want, you can go when you want. There's going to be food, going to be drink. There's going to be maybe some romance. There's going to be new friendships built. And it gives you a sense that the choices are yours.

And in terms of that, as an idea for girls and women, that in itself is very important because often women are restricted in terms of time, space and public ability to kind of, you know, weave their way around spaces.

It is like a music festival, if you can imagine many stages, all of which are showing different kinds of things. So at music festivals it would be bands of all different sizes, different backgrounds, young, old, revered, etc. It's the same for the WOW Festivals.

They'll be big keynote speeches, there will be panels, they'll be pop up music, there'll be gymnastics, there'll be women talking about becoming the first police constable Sri Lanka, there'll be women talking about a history of dentistry for women, there'll be women talking about the issues to do with maternity rights, all kinds of subjects.

The girls and women who come and the boys and men, because many men attend, they might think they're coming to hear one thing that interests them particularly but they're going to bump into something else. And whether that's something as plaintive and difficult as looking at the violence that's enacted on women, acid attacks, for example, or whether it's something, you know, completely joyful, like hearing from the first Indian woman surfing champion about what was that like and what she's had to contend with. All of these stories make up a kind of sense that there's a vitality in the idea of human progress, and the vitality in this idea that, yes, we haven't got full rights yet, but that that be got. And let's get them.

Robin Pomeroy: And you started this because of your expertise. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing, about your life at the Southbank Centre and your life in theatre.

Jude Kelly: Well, I started being a theatre director when I was 21. Not because I come from a theatre background, I don't at all. But from a very young age, when I was little, I was just fascinated by stories, and I wanted the stories to be told, and I wanted the stories to be many and varied.

And so, you know, I had a life running theatres and putting on shows, etcetera, etcetera. When I came to the Southbank Centre, it's the largest cultural institution in Europe, to be honest, for a young girl from Liverpool to have grown to the ability to be in charge of that, it demonstrated that actually there was social progress, there was social mobility, you know, because I had, you know, girls' education, I had girls' rights that wouldn't have been afforded my mother or my grandmother I was able to kind of realise this dream.

But when I was at Southbank Centre when I looked around at all the stages and the galleries and all the things that I was overseeing, most of the cultural artefacts, most of the ideas, most of the stories that were being applauded and lionised were men's.

And, you know, I love men. They are a big part of my life, and I love the cultural histories that we've got. But I knew that women had made many things that had gone underground or been made invisible again, and also that women had been prevented from making many things. So I wanted to use the massive platform of the Southbank Centre to create a festival that celebrated all of these new stories, or uncovered stories that we hadn't heard of.

And I'll give you an example of that. You know, it's a global North story, but Mozart had an older sister who was apparently as good, if not better, than him. He acknowledged that, and they went on world tours together with the dad.

Robin Pomeroy: She was what, a violinist?

Jude Kelly: No, she was a pianist.

Robin Pomeroy: A pianist.

Jude Kelly: A brilliant pianist. But when she was 15, she was taken off the concert platform and married, and nobody ever heard of her. So it, you know, there's so many examples of women having done things which people just didn't know about, which made every woman feel like you're always, always auditioning to prove that you can.

So I did the festival for its very first year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, and it was such a kind of hit. It was a three day festival, so very big, you know, very varied, very, very joyful. Thousands of people came and so straight away people said, oh, I'd love to do this in Baltimore. I'd love to do this Australia. Can we do this in Turkey? So it sort of went global almost immediately.

And I called it Women Of the World because I wanted to be clear that there is no ownership of, you know, what's the right thing and the right way of being a woman. You know, we're all in this together, coming from different parts of our own histories, culturally and different moments in time when things can go forwards or backwards. So I, I didn't know how to turn it into a global movement, but it kind of organically started heading in that direction. And now it's in many places around the world and still growing.

Robin Pomeroy: Talking about things going backwards and forwards, you put it in a great context to say that just a generation ago or two generations ago for you, life would have been very different for your mother, for your grandmother.

Now, this has been, the WOW Festival, has been going for, what, 14 years? I wonder even in that time have you seen changes, either in the UK, where you founded this thing, or elsewhere in the world? And I wonder if things are tending to go forwards, or, as I just get the impression in some ways when it comes to attitudes towards women in certain countries, things have maybe gone backwards in that time.

Jude Kelly: Yes. I think, you know, if you start from the idea that the entire world operates, however benignly, from patriarchal beliefs, you know, those are inside, deeply inside all the big theologies, inside most of the kind of philosophical starting points, etc.. So if you have that as a starting point, which is that patriarchy is the norm, but it can be adjusted to give women more or less space within that framework, then what you've really got set up is the idea that women's rights are conditional on the male structures wanting to give them those rights, and that implies they can be given and they can be taken.

And this is not just about legal things. This is also about cultural attitudes, which arguably are the more deeply held influences in a society.

So obviously, you know, I'll just take the UK and most of Europe. My grandmother left school when she was 12 and she had 14 children. My mother left school at 15 and she had four children. I went to university and I have two children. I mean, it demonstrates that there's an idea that girls education began to count. Girls careers began to count. This is all very good. Birth control happened, you know, etc.. We'd already got the vote. So you want to think that progress is a linear activity where evidence demonstrates that it's worth women having more rights, let's just give them some more, let's just keep progressing.

But what we have seen in the last 14 years are two things. One is that the reclaiming of girls women's voices was quite strong leading up to, I suppose, a crescendo during the MeToo movement where people were saying, I'm not sure why we've ever put up with sexual harassment or violence against women. We've got to call it out and we've got to say, no more.

But that produced its own backlash in terms of people feeling, well, you know, do we want that level of calling out. Aren't there things we can just put up and shut up about? I mean, it's certainly produced a counter action. And then having fought very strongly for the idea that, you know, my body is my choice and a space that I can decide what I do is not just in terms of, you know, sexual encounter, but also in terms of, you know, the choice to have a children or terminate or not. That's been fought like mad in different places. And we've just seen the Roe v Wade decisions in America, meaning that some states, Alabama in particular, have taken away the right for women to choose, if they've conceived and they think it's impossible for them to give that child a good life.

At the same time, we've just had France put into its constitution for the very first time that a woman's right to choose is going to be constitutionally proven. It's going to be part of the legal framework of the country forever onwards.

So you have these battlegrounds now, I think, that are far more livid than they were 14 years ago. You've got the Taliban removing every possibility with 101 edicts last year alone on girls and women. And at the same time, you have Saudi Arabia in the last five years, women can drive. Women don't have to wear full covering. Women don't have to have guardianship anymore.

So I think it's a very turbulent space forwards and backwards, very contested areas.

But the same thing pulls me back all the time, which is that what is not contested is that it's still a male place to give or take the rights. And that's really worrying. You know, I want to, I am an optimist, and I do believe that progress will keep going because I think the world needs all of the women's skills. But when you have things like low birth rates in countries and they think, oh their economic life depends on more children, there's a lot of pressure put back on women to go back in the home, rethink the idea of being a housewife, I suppose, celebrate the mother of the family, have more children. And this automatically takes away choices that have been hard won.

So, you know, it's a complex map.

Robin Pomeroy: You mentioned men and boys come to the WOW Festival. I'm quite interested, as a man, speaking to you, as a feminist campaigner and organiser, where you see the role of men. Maybe I'll start by asking, in the last few years, we seem to have seen a rise of online misogyny. You think of kind of this ludicrous idea of these incels online. It might be that that's a very small minority, but because of the way social media is, it gets a lot of coverage and it's very it's a very vocal, I hope it's a minority, of just out and out misogyny.

Is that something you're concerned about? Because that probably didn't exist in that form 14 years ago. Is that something that you've noticed and that you want to engage or grapple with, or is it something we should kind of ignore?

Jude Kelly: Well, there's no doubt about it that the manosphere, as it's termed, is a growing and, worrying situation. There's been a recent poll that's demonstrated that 57% of men think that women's rights has gone far enough or too far. And those are not older men, they're younger men.

And the implication is that boys and men are feeling rattled and insecure and worried about their identity and their status, and they want to reclaim it.

Now, I do always feel that including men and boys in the discussion about equal rights is critical because, I mean, you know, we love men, we live with men, we're born of men. We have sons, we have nephews, etc., etc.. And not all the language of change can be about women. It's got to be about society as a whole. It's got to be about gender as a whole.

And actually, I think that one of the reasons that the biosphere is growing in misogyny is because not only are women much more confident about speaking about their rights and their needs but more men are also, maybe much more quietly, but also agreeing with them.

So it makes those men who are like pushing the misogyny back, I think they're outriders, but there's too many of them to just let it go and not be worried.

WOW welcomes everybody. I always say, if you know a woman or you are a woman, it's for you. And increasingly, I think that fathers who have daughters are wanting to make sure that their daughters have the same rights as their sons, and they want to make sure that the daughters aren't coming into a world where they're subject. not just to disadvantage and career choice or education or pay gaps or whatever. But also they don't want their girls to be harassed and sexually abused by other men.

So a lot of men are looking out for how they can contribute to a fairer world for everyone. But some men and some boys are finding it really threatening because they don't know, like, what is the new identity then? If girls can do as much as boys, are men still required to be the breadwinner? Are men still required to be the strong man? Are men still required to sort of, strut their stuff as, you know, studs, kind of thing?

And I think it needs men to talk to other men. It leads men to talk to boys and reassure them that actually, the idea of being a strong man doesn't require them to have to be a weightlifter. It doesn't require them to have to dominate a woman. Their status doesn't have to come from those things. But I do think it's got to be men that step forward and and talk to other men about this. It can't just be women trying to get men to come into their space. That's not going to work.

Robin Pomeroy: And you even had a festival, I love the acronyms: WOW for Women of the World. And you had a Being A Man Festival, which is BAM. So why did you create that? And what's the future of that if there is one?

Jude Kelly: Well, I started BAM a few years ago when I was at Southbank Centre as a response really, to male suicide and the crisis in male mental health. It wasn't intended to be a sort of Trojan horse, by which we could sort of persuade men that they ought to be feminists. It was actually a festival that says, look, maleness is wonderful, femaleness is wonderful. I mean, the whole intoxicating territory of gender, fluid or not, is fascinating. I mean, this is the stuff of us.

We are humans and we have gender. And what are the things that men particularly have had sort of put on them, that may be useful or not useful anymore.

I have a son and I have a grandson, and I was really alarmed by this idea that, men don't cry, that men can't feel things, that men have to disassociate rather than explore their inner landscape, etc.. Because the rise in male suicide, particularly with young men, it was, you know, it was an epidemic. And also the rise in intimate partner violence was suggesting to me as well that men had uncontrollable rages, that they hadn't been given any tools to navigate with.

So the festival was about all kinds of things in the way that WOW Festival is, you know, it was music, it was a sport, it was literature, it was all kinds of subjects, but it was essentially saying the identity of maleness deserves as much investigation and scrutiny and affection as the exploration of what women are nowadays.

So I stopped doing it for a while, not because it wasn't relevant. It's still relevant. But I left the Southbank Centre to turn WOW into an independent charity, and it's now the WOW Foundation, and it's been an independent charity for a few years. And obviously that's a time when you need all hands on deck to secure funding, etc.. I just didn't have enough bandwidth to carry on with a man's festival.

Well, we're going to go back to that space again. Probably WAM now, What's A Man. And we've got a lot of male partners and male organisations who are partners.

I tell you one other thing that has happened in the last 14 years, and this does relate to men as well as women. The aggression on social media is so great now. It's disproportionately aimed at women. But, you know, again, you're talking about women who have husbands, who have children, who have friends. We should all fear for the danger that we're asking women to be in, particularly when they're public figures. So the number of women withdrawing from being MPs or being heads off things, because, not just the pressure of work, but also the the pressure of social media aggression, and genuine fear, is real.

So I do think this is an area where if men believe in masculine values of standing up for women, then this is an area that they could really stand up and be counted on.

Robin Pomeroy: We live in a time when identity politics, whatever that means, is a big deal. And you can identify yourself as a feminist. And I think feminism has evolved over the years that that can mean a lot of different things in between, within societies and between societies. Who would have thought Barbie would be a feminist movie?, at least? Yes. Whereas for men, what is the identity of. We don't even have a word for, you know, a masculine word for a feminist. For some people, for some of the incels, the misogynists. It's like, this is a man. This is a hard guy with the cigar and the expensive car and a string of of of women . I think women have lots of positive role models, and I'm sure men do as well. But it's it's maybe not so obvious. Maybe that's part of the work you would do.

Jude Kelly: Yes. I mean, I think that, you know, women have had to tussle with the sort of the idea of, you know, the dumb blonde, the glamour puss, the sex symbol, the decorative extra, etc., which is often part of popular culture. They've had to struggle with that because it's very demeaning and it's it's in front of you all the time. And similarly, you know, men are presented all the time with stronger or lighter versions of the James Bond idea. You know, take no prisoners, woo women and dispose of them, or maybe they just get killed off. Whatever. Drive great cars and, you know, somehow, you know, be able to get into a fight at the drop of a hat.

And they're very confusing images. Not none of us really live like that. But the idea that you should aspire to live like that, I think a lot of men don't want to do that either.

I don't like the idea that young men go around feeling frightened of other young men. They're more likely to get killed by other men than they ever are likely to be killed by women.

But I think also we haven't encouraged men to talk about a new kind of masculinity without implying that somehow a weaker version of masculinity. So I just think men should do a lot more talking to each other. The the role models of men need to change, and it requires the courage of men who don't want to just emulate the hard man. It requires their courage to step forward and say, I'd like to talk about what my values are.

I tell you something really interesting. I watched a documentary about Aretha Franklin, and she, she's such an extraordinary performer, artist and, committed to civil rights as she was. And she said that she watched all these rappers in America with all of their misogyny, with all of their demeaning of women. And she called a meeting at her house for all of these male rappers, and it's Snoop Dogg being the kind of key guy she told him. She basically said to him, you be at my house 8:00 in the morning, bring all of these people. And they all came because, you know, it's Aretha Franklin. And she basically read them the riot Act.

She said to them, okay, am I a bitch? Do you want to call me a bitch? Do you want to call me a whore? And they were all like, oh, Miss Franklin, Miss Franklin...

Anyway, if you watch that documentary, Snoop Dogg goes away and says, I changed everything. From that moment on, I never thought about it, I didn't understand, I do now.

And you know, there are big changes that can happen inside these dark male spaces. But it shouldn't just be women calling it out. It's got to be men to.

Robin Pomeroy: What differences have you found in different cultures? Are there big differences that have struck you? Are there common themes that have struck you?

Jude Kelly: Well, there's more in common than not. I mean, just to talk about the bleak things, violence against women is absolutely endemic everywhere. You know, countries that pride themselves on having very high gender equity still have to announce daily figures of rape, daily figures of death by intimate partners or suicide because of domestic abuse. And that is rife. And it's almost one of these things where people think, well, you know, it just happens doesn't it, like there's nothing you can do about it, which I completely don't agree, there are things you can do about it. And I think this it comes from an idea that women finally ought to be controlled by a man and a man's rage when he can't do that, not all men, obviously, but it's it's it's deep inside that somehow you ought to be able to own, possess, control. And when you can't your whole kind of identity is challenged. And so for those men who feel those things, there seems to be no stopping.

And so that is common across the whole world. And nowhere in the world has there been sufficient education in society or condemnation in society, that this has sort of taken a hold.

There's nowhere in the world, not even Iceland or Sweden, that actually has really solved yet the idea of a sort of work justice inside the house. Although, you know, some places are much better than others, women still do more of the domestic labour and more of the emotional labour around keeping families together, extended families together, all of that sort of thing.

There's still a gender pay gap all over the world, some much more extreme than others, but it's all symptomatic.

And so in a way, any society you're in, I mean, if you take Pakistan, you know, in Karachi, a really modern, thriving, incredible city, you've got brilliant women graphic designers, you got women photographers, you got women filmmakers, etc. but then you've got the tribal cultures where women are still being child brides. And where their rights are severely curtailed. And that's not legal. It's cultural. But then you can go to parts of the UK and you know, girls will be in a relationship from when that, you know, 15 or 16, they'll get married immediately. They won't have any particular ambition that their partner will let them have. They have to fulfil the same story that that neighbourhood expects them to fulfil.

So, you know, I think that we think that we've made huge progress in certain parts of the world, which we have, but the things that hold people back - poor education, poor health, poor access to ideas and poor access to opportunities - they impact on women much more than they do on men. They impact on everybody, but more on women.

And I think solving childcare is also, again, for everybody. Because some countries have extended families that look after the children, some countriesm a lot more women can pay for childcare. But essentially nobody has solved the idea that we all bring children to the world. It isn't a woman's responsibility. It isn't a woman's job to sort that all out for everybody else. Societies need to decide it is the society's obligation to help make it possible for children be brought up without women having to take a backseat on their career, and a pay drop and a pension drop, and all the things that makes their future life more vulnerable.

Robin Pomeroy: Do you ever feel you have to tiptoe around cultural sensibilities?

Jude Kelly: Well, every WOW is basically created by women in those countries. So, you know, I don't run the WOW in Turkey. I don't run the WOW in Rio. They're run by women from those countries, and they create the content with other women from those countries.

So you're not imposing a kind of Western sensibility and in that respect, the cultural norms of those countries are questioned as much as it's safe to do so. You know, in some places it's not, easy to talk about LGBTQ+ rights. In other countries it's fine. But even those places where it's sort of in theory undiscussed, actually, people have their own codes, their own ways of making sure these things do get discussed.

So you trust the intuition and knowledge of the people on the ground. That's who is making the festival work. But more and more in all of these places, you know, we do these thinkings before we do festivals, we gather together hundreds of girls and women, boys and men say, here's a festival where you can discuss anything you want to discuss. Taboos can be discussed. Strange things, weird things, funny things. What is it you want to discuss?

And they will bring to the table absolutely everything. And some of them are difficult, sensitive subjects. But without discussing taboos, women are always living in a sense of shame. So, I mean, I just take infertility. Infertility is a really difficult personal and emotional subject. Trying to have a child if you want one or not wanting a child when your society wishes you to have one. These are hard things to discuss, but the more you discuss them, the more women feel as if they have language to make change happen on their own terms.

Or, you know, menopause, periods. And, you know, the really big one, which is, you know, sexual pleasure, the right to your bodies. Every single culture that I've been to across the entire world wants to talk about these things. They just find a way of talking about them in the right way, that allows people not to feel frightened that they're in the room. So safe space to talk about difficult things. That's the right way to approach things culturally.

Robin Pomeroy: Could you just tell us what your interaction has been with the World Economic Forum?

Jude Kelly: I was invited by the World Economic Forum to come to Davos as a cultural leader in residence and give a talk about, not just WOW, but about the incredible adventure of gender justice, for men and women, and what that would look like. And in particular, I was talking about fathers and the impact of fathers' approval on the idea of girls agency.

It was really exciting to come to Davos. I was amazed and astounded, actually, by the diversity of things that were on the agenda. I really enjoyed it enormously. And it's made me want to contribute as much as possible to other Davos moments and the World Economic Forum projects.

And that's really why I'm here today, at the headquarters in Geneva, because I've been giving a talk to colleagues here about the same sort of themes.

And as a theatre-maker and a storyteller. I can see that Davos has been shaping stories, making stories happen, convening new ideas and new relationships for for years and years and years. And it's an it's an important space to be part of as a cultural leader.

Robin Pomeroy: I'm a father of a daughter. What advice would you give to me?

Jude Kelly: Well, never underestimate that although her mum will be her friend and her champion, because you'd expect your mum to be, your father is, bearing in mind that you know the father's the first symbol, if you like, of the of the ruling class, if you like, the patriarchy, even if you don't want to think that is the case, I'm afraid it is. So if the father says, I really back you, I think you're terrific. You can do anything - the confidence that gives a girl security, the joy, is it's huge.

So be there. Turn up. Make sure that she knows that you're backing her and, you know, don't qualify her dreams. Don't be overprotective. Don't make her feel that you can do things that she can't really do. Because she might then, out of politeness, step away from you. You know, often girls try to look after their dad's feelings by, if you like, hiding some of their thoughts.

So I'd encourage you to feel that, you know, you can take it. Whatever she wants to say to you or about you. You know, that's a good sign for a man - you're strong enough to take advice from your daughter.

Robin Pomeroy: Jude Kelly is CEO of the WOW Foundation. Find out more at thewowfoundation.com.

And to learn about the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report - check out our website, and the many articles - and indeed Radio Davos podcast episodes - we have published on it. Links in the show notes.

Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts and please leave us a rating or review. And if you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised, please join the conversation on the World Economic Forum Podcast Club -- look for that on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was written and presented by me, Robin Pomeroy, with help from Joseph Fowler, my thanks to him. Studio production was by Taz Kelleher.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.