The Current - What Taylor Swift shows us about the fight for women’s rights

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Journalist Elizabeth Renzetti says the fight for women's rights is far from over, from persistent wage inequality to a global backlash over reproductive rights. She tells us about her new book What She Said: Conversations About Equality — and why she thinks the pop star Taylor Swift represents the strange dichotomy that so many young women are trapped in today.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Elizabeth Renzetti was a columnist for The Globe and Mail for more than a decade. Her focus was on women and girls, their struggles and the battles to change systems set against them. When she filed her final regular column in June 2022, this was her parting message. I know you'll continue the fight and so will I. She kept to her promise, continuing to write and advocate for gender equity. Elizabeth Renzetti's new book is called

What She Said, Conversations About Equality, and she is in our Toronto studio. Hello. Hi, Rebecca. You start this book with a kind of text exchange with a friend, a kind of funny one. Describe it for us. Yeah, the interesting thing is this friend is a good feminist, and I was heading out to go to the Women's March in 2022, and she texted me, and she was like, what are you up to? And I said, just putting on my boots to go to the Women's March. And she said, oh, are we still doing that?

And I thought, wow, if even this friend of mine, a good feminist, thinks that we don't have to do it anymore, what does everybody else think? And so was it that she was complacent? She thought we had gotten, we've won the battle? Yeah, exactly. This idea that the playing field is now level for not just men and women, for people of all genders, non-binary and trans people as well. And that we've achieved some kind of feminist utopia, which as I think we know, and which I talk about in the book, is not the case at all. And you spend the rest of the book laying out all of the ways in which women still have things to gain. Although we are moving the right direction, there are many areas in which you highlight where there are still problems. And you learn a lot about women's work.

You do a whole section on care work, and you learn a lot about that through your mother. Tell me a little bit about what you learned through watching your mom. My mom, Mildred, was just awesome. She was a nurse. She was a carer in both her professional life and in her personal life. She had four children and eight grandchildren who she loved dearly. She was also in an abusive relationship, and that, I think, colored her life. And through her, I learned both that caring can be a beautiful, incredibly rewarding thing, which I think all of us will agree that it is, but also so supremely devalued in the eyes of kind of the economic system that we live in, which there's a crisis in caregiving right now. And caregiving is a hugely gendered profession.

And also it's hugely gendered in the sort of non-professional areas of caring, which a lot of women do just in their day-to-day lives. We learned much more about that during the pandemic. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I talked to some of the people in my book, our nurses and personal support workers who saw the most terrible things during the pandemic. So nurses have traditionally kind of been silenced

because it is a profession made up more than 90% of women. As one nurse in the book said to me, we're expected to be nuns silent in the hospital, like even to this day. And what happened during the pandemic is that nurses really became outspoken and they started speaking up, not just for their patients and for the healthcare system,

but also for themselves and for better working conditions and for more autonomy for themselves. And I think that was a hugely sort of powerful movement for them. But also we're seeing because, you know, these gendered professions are so undervalued, nurses leaving the profession in huge numbers. We talked a little bit about complacency. numbers. We talked a little bit about complacency. I'm curious if you, having talked and written about this topic for as long as you have, you can get a bit of an eye roll, I'm guessing, when you are still talking about it and some will believe that things have been solved. For instance, my sister messaged me the other day because she was so upset after talking to my dad, sorry dad,

he'll be listening, but that he didn't believe that there was like a gender pay gap, that it's all fair now and there is no such thing as a pay gap between the genders. And so, I mean, is there still a belief that there is from all sides, not just feminists, but from all sides that there is still work to be done? And if not everyone's buying in, how do we move further along? Yeah, that is also very interesting and you will hear this a lot. I will say in response to that, you can measure the pay gap in a variety of different ways. Claudia Golden won the Nobel Prize in economics a couple of years ago for her work in this field. The Ontario Pay Equity Office, which is hardly a Marxist institution, puts the pay gap right now at 13%. Other people put it higher. The OECD measures differently and puts it higher.

So, yes, we do have this sort of idea that, you know, oh, come on, everything is fine now. And to that, I respond, have you looked at the way that women's rights are being rolled back around the world? Have you looked at what's happening in other countries in the world, including what's happening in America, where women have lost, in many parts of America, have not only lost the right to bodily autonomy and to choose their own reproductive destiny, but are in fact dying in some places. example of how inequitable things still are. And you can look in Canada, it's not just pay gaps, there's gaps everywhere. The Globe and Mail did a great series a couple years ago called The Power Gap. So you just have to look at the tops of everything, the leadership.

How many women premiers do we have in this country? How many women leaders of federal political parties? How many women CEOs? CEOs, it's about five or 6%. So you really can't tell me that we have achieved parity when we're looking at numbers like that. How do you have these conversations? You know, we just came off of Thanksgiving dinner. I'm wondering if you have people in your life who don't believe your life's work or you have to defend it to them. Yes, I now have the hide of like a very, very old, tough rhinoceros. So things just kind of bounce off me when I get the side eye or the eye roll or things like that. What is really heartening to me is how many people, women, but also men have, since the book has been out, have come up to me and said things

like, oh, I thought this, but I didn't know how to articulate it, or I wasn't sure how to bring it up. And the way I do it, the way I try to do it is through having kind of civil conversations that are funny. We can recognize each other's humanity while also recognizing that we live in an invisible fortress. That's what patriarchy is. We can't see it with our eyes, but we experience it every day. And it's not about individual men or individual women. It's about this system that has been in place for millennia to further and support the rights of one gender over another. And in fact, you talk about a little bit in the book, but you're married to Doug Saunders, who is a columnist with the Globe and Mail and found out actually your husband's salary was more when you were both working at the Globe and Mail. But what

was your reaction when you learned that, wow, it's even happening to me in this real way? Yes, we were in London. Doug was the European Bureau chief. So he got kind of a bonus for being a foreign correspondent. And I got paid pretty much the same salary as I did when we were in Toronto. we were in Toronto. And Claudia Golden talks about this in her Nobel winning research, which is that when you have a partnership of two people, and she sort of looks mainly at heterosexual couples with children, one partner is available to do what she calls the greedy work that the employer wants. So that is taking clients out for dinner or being available on weekends

or being available to fly around the world on a minute's notice. And the other person has to pick up the burden of care, and that's whether that's children or your aging parents or other people you might care for. And in the long run, what happens is that one partner slowly sees their income erode. They might have to take time out of paid work. And then their pension shrinks. And in the end, you have one partner who has accrued a lot more income than the other partner. And because of the

way we structure our world in the Western world, the value, the burden of caregiving still falls to women. And so they are the ones who kind of pay the penalty of the greedy work that employers demand. And that's kind of where Doug and I found ourselves. But I have to say, because he is the best husband and father imaginable, as I always say, he's probably a better parent than I am. When he's around, he's around 120%. And I think that's the case for a lot of men. They really do want to be more involved. They want to be more hands-on. But we live in a very kind of exploitative economic system that tries to extract as much juice out of every worker as it possibly can. So they're struggling with that too. Did you resent that, that he got to do the greedy work as

Claudia Golden calls it? There were days I was sitting with my children crying on a park bench, I will not lie, you know, because at that time I was in a city where I didn't really know anybody at that point. And I did kind of feel, I know lots of new mothers feel this too, that I was bereft and I didn't know what I was supposed to do. And was I being a good mother and what had happened to the career I built for myself? And I went down to part time. And that feeling eventually went away. And I didn't resent him. I resented the situation that we were in. if we're talking about a heterosexual relationship. But some will argue, you know, family first, that the women are gifted with this beautiful opportunity to be those primary caregivers, to raise children,

and that sort of is an equitable trade-off, some might argue. Oh, 100%. Either partner should be allowed to remain at home as the primary caregiver if they choose. I would like to see a world where men took more parental leave, for example, so that employers don't discriminate against women of childbearing age, where men kind of found joy and fulfillment in the home. I mean, I did. What I just said was that I had felt resentment about it, and I did. But there's nothing more important in my life than my kids

and the work I did to raise them. Nothing has given me more joy. Nothing has given me more satisfaction. So 100%, if you choose that that is going to be your realm and your purpose in life, I think you should be able to do that. The problem arises when the expectation comes that one person is going to do that work. I mean, I talked to a friend the other day about how when our kids were little, you know, we were organizing birthday parties, there was never a dad on those lists of the phone tree of who you were going to call about, you know, what you needed to do for the birthday party. Hopefully that's changed a little bit. I mean, from my perspective and my own personal experience, I think it has and those that I know.

But again, these are sort of people who have the means to have both parents involved. And you talk a little bit about the experiences of women who may be lower on the socioeconomic ladder, women with disabilities, women of color, marginalized women. There are lots of different experiences. What have you discovered and how well of a job we're doing in ensuring that everyone is raised to the next level? That was such an important thing for me, and it's a central theme in the book. In all of the areas I looked at, women who have been traditionally marginalized do worse than white women. So we're talking about able-bodied white women, I should say. So we're talking about racialized women, women with disabilities, you know, queer women, trans women, all these groups have worse outcomes than white women. And, you know, I always think of that

old Solomon Burke song, none of us are free till all of us are free. It is absolutely the most fundamental work ahead of us is to ensure that we bring into the center of the discussion and that we empower all of the people who have traditionally been pushed to the sides because otherwise we're not going to have equity, we're not going to have fairness. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons,

but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. You probably heard Donald Trump, I think it was over the weekend or maybe last week, he said, would you rather a white president or a black woman for president? And he kind of laughed. Of course, you want the white man.

What did you make when you heard him say that? Well, I went to Florida in 2016 to do some reporting on the presidential election. Then we all thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the first woman president of the United States. Ha, ha, ha. We know how that turned out. And I interviewed some female Trump supporters. And I said to them, you know, so this man that you admire has been credibly accused of sexual abuse by at least two dozen women. What do you say to that? And they said, Oh, no, no, no. Donald would never do that. He has Melania at home. And look how beautiful she is. And I was just gobsmacked, I have to say, because internalized misogyny is a very, very powerful force, and if we could harness it, we would not need fossil fuels.

So this election coming up, as many people have noted, is probably going to be the most gendered election ever, not just in the way that the electorate is splitting, but in how J.D. Vance and Trump have really set their stake on being kind of alpha males, literally at the expense of women's lives and bodies, because it was Trump's appointment of Supreme Court justices that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned. And now we see the consequence, the terrible consequences of that throughout the United States.

And by the way, the anti-choice movement is global. It's international. It will be emboldened by its success in America. So we can't afford to be complacent here in Canada either. You sort of end the book on somebody, something else that's global, and that's Taylor Swift. And she runs counter to a lot of what Donald Trump says, of course. Just walk us through what Taylor Swift represents to you. of creativity and independence and ambition. And on the other hand, she is still a woman who lives in a patriarchal culture. So she is the victim of deep fake pornography, and she is a survivor

of sexual violence. And she has talked about how she sometimes has a poor body image, and she has talked about how difficult it is to overcome her conditioning to be, quote unquote, a good girl. So in that way, she really mirrors, I think, back to the young women who love her and follow her. She mirrors their lives back to them. They are kind of trapped in this strange dichotomy of having great freedom on one hand, and yet still being held back by these invisible forces. To me, she's really quite fascinating. I think people, and you describe this in the book, that people sort of fear her. How much is fear playing into what she represents? When you have the former President of the United States writing, I hate Taylor Swift in all capital letters. I think we know how afraid people

are of her and of her power, right? When she endorsed Kamala Harris, she signed her endorsement Childless Cat Lady, which was, of course, the J.D. Vance insult to women who don't have children. I think they're terrified of her because she represents this world in which women do have true autonomy and true freedom and true liberation. And for some men, not all men, in fact, not the majority of men, that's terrifying. Your book runs through a number of areas and has these conversations that you hope people read with an open mind and listen to the ways people talk about where we still need to make strides. You talk about body autonomy. You talk about sexual assault and how women are still suffering.

Have we moved the ground at all in that regard? The one area of the book that I think is the most important and the place we still have so much progress to make is in the realm of violence. and the place we still have so much progress to make is in the realm of violence. So whether it's sexual violence or intimate partner violence, domestic violence, we have no idea how huge the problem even is because it's covered in stigma, it's covered in shame and silence. We know that during the pandemic, rates of domestic violence and intimate partner violence skyrocketed around the world. And yet, we do so little to actually counter that. We invest so little in prevention, and we don't

even really understand the scope of the problem. And there are solutions out there. Every time a terrible act of violence happens, a report is written about what we could do better. And yet we fail. Those reports gather dust on shelves. And all the advocates and researchers who spend their lives working on this kind of end up shaking their hands. Like, we know what to do. Why can we not invest more in preventing violence and helping women and children who are going through it. Did Me Too, did that move the needle at all?

I think it moved the needle in terms of a backlash. I mean, I think that is why we're now seeing the backlash to women's rights that we have in the past, let's say, six or seven years. And there's good research to show that young men are becoming more conservative in many ways and kind of more afraid of feminism. And that could be attributed to the gains, which were not even that great, of the Me Too movement. Now, I think Me Too was fantastic. And women found their voices and laws were changed in various places. But we were also seeing this backlash to those gains. You really first learned about women being subject to violence early in life.

Yes. So my mom herself had been in an abusive marriage and then fled it. And then we ended up living in St. Jamestown in downtown Toronto. And we would hear these horrible noises from upstairs, you know, like screaming and the sounds of somebody, what sounded like somebody being dragged across the floor. And finally, my mom called the police and the police went upstairs and talked to the people there. And then they came down to tell us what had happened. And what the police said was that, you know, there was no abuse happening upstairs. The woman was just crying because she had had a fight with her mother.

When the police said that to my mother, I saw my mother's face just shut down because she knew that that wasn't what was happening upstairs. And she knew that nobody was going to rescue this woman probably, and as no one had rescued her, because these things happen under this terrible cone of silence and shame in which the victims are made to feel shame when it's not their shame to carry. So that was a really pivotal moment in my upbringing. moment in my upbringing. It's hard to suggest to someone who's been through an assault such as that to go to police because the rate at which people get convictions in these cases is almost,

you know, non-existent. So, I mean, it sounds as though we've not made many strides since you first heard those noises in the upstairs apartment. I think there are good strides being made. We now recognize, for example, that domestic violence takes many, many, many different forms and can be psychological or sexual or financial or technology assisted. So I think we have made strides. But on this idea of, you know, why didn't she speak up? You only have to look at the way the criminal justice system re-traumatizes people who go through it. Women who testify, women who do speak up, who do try to do these things. And especially, it's terrible for racialized women, it's terrible for women from lower economic status to be put through this very dehumanizing and often degrading process. So when people say, why don't women speak up?

It's because when they do speak up, they often are penalized for it and made to feel lesser and more dehumanized. So I completely understand why some women don't come forward. And it's not the individual women who have to change. It is the system that has to change. Before I let you go, you said it was your feminist friend who said, are we really still doing this, going to women's marches and still talking about the gains we still need to make? say at the dinner table and he doesn't buy all of the complaints and the concerns and everything we've just talked about. What is the best way to approach that conversation to bring them in so they are at least hearing what you're saying? I try to do it and I do this in the book with humor. The book is actually, although the subject matter is very tough, it's also quite funny, I think. So I do recommend, and I'm not saying, you know,

you have to be like, oh, but if you can have a kind of open hearted, civil conversation with people, it's invaluable. But the other thing I would say is that so many women still censor themselves. Even on the sort of the talks I've done so far on this book tour, the number of women have said to me, you know, I don't know how to speak up. And when I do speak up at work, I'm called obnoxious and whiny. We have to understand that it's a conversation that we do need to have, and that we need to listen. And it would help if men could recognize, first of all, that we do exist in this invisible fortress that has benefited them for years. But again, to have the conversations with some humor and empathy and compassion all around is very useful.

Elizabeth Renzetti, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you, Rebecca. Elizabeth Renzetti is an author and journalist. Her new book is called What She Said, Conversations About Equality. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.