Six reasons to watch Q&A’s first all-female panel tonight - Women's Agenda

Six reasons to watch Q&A’s first all-female panel tonight

Tonight, ABC’s Q&A will celebrate forty years of International Women’s Day by featuring the first all-female panel in its seven-year history.

The show has previously featured an all-women guest line up but in these instances the panel was moderated by host Tony Jones. Tonight, the ABC’s chief political writer Annabel Crabb will host the show, which is to be broadcast as part of the All About Women festival.  

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, feminist commentator Germaine Greer, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay, Best & Less CEO Holly Kramer and Youth Without Borders founder Yassmin Abdel-Magied will share the stage to discuss International Women’s Day.  

Here are six compelling reasons to considering tuning in tonight.

  1. Annabel Crabb: She is a celebrated journalist, author and commentator known for injecting her inimitable wit into political news and current affairs. A former lawyer, Crabb decided to enter journalism in 1997 when she took a cadetship at The Advertiser and she has worked as a political reporter ever since. From The Advertiser she moved to TheAge and then The Sydney Morning Herald before joining the ABC in 2009. She published a column yesterdayexplaining why she is a feminist: “I am a feminist because it bothers me that a woman gets killed by her male partner every single week, and somehow that doesn’t qualify as a tools-down national crisis even though if a man got killed by a shark every week we’d probably arrange to have the ocean drained,” she wrote.
  2. Julie Bishop:Our foreign minister, deputy leader of the Liberal Party and the only woman appointed to Abbott’s original ministry, Crabb describes Bishop’s career as a “service to women” despite the fact that Bishop does not consider herself a feminist.Another lawyer by training, Bishop was the managing partner of a large commercial law firm before entering federal parliament in 1998. After her election to the Perth seat of Curtin in that year, she has securely held it ever since. Bishop was promoted to the front bench under the Howard government in 2003, and entered cabinet in 2008. She was appointment deputy leader during the coalition’s years in opposition and was appointed foreign minister upon the government’s election in 2013. “She was sworn in as the only female minister in a cabinet with 18 blokes and turned out to be better at it than any of them. That’s what I call service to women, whatever she chooses to call it,” Crabb wroteabout Bishop on Saturday.
  3. Germaine Greer:One of Australia’s most famous feminists, Germaine Greer was catapulted to prominence in 1970 with her book The Female Eunuch. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, her Masters at the University of Sydney and her doctorate at Cambridge. Greer is now an emeritus professor in English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick and has published a series of books on women’s liberation and gender issues and well as works of literary criticism. Liberation – not equality – is the objective she wants for women. “I’m a liberation feminist, not an equality feminist,” Greer said yesterday.  “Equality is a profoundly conservative aim and it won’t achieve anything.” 
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  6. Roxane Gay: She is the funny, revered and hugely popular author of the recently published selection of essays, Bad Feminist. “If I am , indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions,” she writes to introduce the collection of works that deal with the variety of ways in which one can consider him or herself a feminist. As well as being an author, she is an editor, commentator and Professor of English at Purdue University. Her books include Bad Feminist, An Untamed State, Ayiti and Hunger. She advocates fiercely for inclusivity in feminism: “We have to take all women with us when we smash the system,” she told an All About Womensession yesterday.
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  8. Yassmin Abdel-Magied: Abdel-Magied is the founder of Youth Without Borders, an organisation she conceived and began at age 16, focused on encouraging young people to became involved in implementing positive social change. She moved to Australia from Sudan at the age of two and graduated with first class honours in mechanical engineering from the University of Queensland. On top of running her own NGO, Abdel-Magied is a fly-in-fly-out worker on gas and oil rigs. She also writes her own blog, Redefining the Narrative. She was awarded Australian Muslim of the Year in 2007, Young Queenslander of the Year in 2010 and was the winner of the Young Leader category in the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence list in 2012. This year she was Queensland’s Young Australian of the year.
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  10. Holly Kramer: Holly Kramer is the CEO of Australia-wide retail brand Best & Less. She is also a member of a number of corporate boards, including Southern Phone, the Alannah and Madeleine Foundation and Macquarie University’s Faculty of business and economics, and a member of Chief Executive Women. She has previously served as general manager, workware and homeware at Pacific Brands and has held senior executive roles at Telstra and marketing roles at Ford.   Kramer is committed to promoting gender equality in the retail and fashion industries: “We think fashion has always been about being exclusive: it favours the young, the thin and the rich. So it hasn’t been as accessible to women as it should be,” she said in late 2014.

 

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