Pierre

Welcome. I'm Charmaine Prince. I'm the host of Anything Gender podcast. This is our very first episode. And Anything Gender podcast is a podcast that is geared to address gender, gender stereotypes, gender biases, gender inequalities, gender rights. And so I'm creating a space so we can have this discussion. And this podcast is scheduled to be monthly, but I'm sure it will be biweekly in a short period, maybe in a month or two. But right now it's monthly. And I am honored to have my very first guest. And welcome, Pierre Boudoir. Pierre is the acting director of the Center for Sexuality, AIDS, and Gender at the University of Pretoria. He's also a clinical psychologist with a legacy in HIV work since the 1980s. Pierre unites his passion for sexuality, gender, and social justice to challenge stigma and drive transformation. Join us for a profound discussion on gender rights, diversity, and creating equitable spaces. As someone with their finger on the pulse of social change, Pierre challenges us to think more deeply about the roles we play within our communities and the influences we can have in shaping a more equitable future. Prepare to be enlightened and inspired as we delve into the subjects at the heart of transformation with a psychologist who has seen the landscape of gender rights evolve over decades and is still at the forefront of advocating for progress. Welcome. Welcome, Pierre. And thank you for being our very first guest. And I am honored. Did I leave out anything in that bio that you wanted to add? Not at all. And thank you for having me as your first guest. I'm the one who's honored to be here because it's not lost on me, Sharmin, that I'm a man and that I'm your first guest to be talking about gender. And in some quarters, that might be seen as provocative or challenging or even problematic because, I guess, as my sort of opening statement, if you like, who you are matters in transformation work. People see who you are and what you represent simply by your bodily self as it presents in the world. So in my case, my maleness, my whiteness, my age, all of those are important factors that, I suppose, not only have shaped my experience of the world, but people see that as well. I often say when you enter a room, particularly in the South African context, but perhaps in others, too, the first two things that are evident are your gender and your color or your race or ethnicity. And people, because it is in the nature of being here, that we will immediately respond to that physical presence with something that sometimes is unconscious, pre-conscious, subconscious, some kind of feeling. As kids, young people say today, I felt some kind of way about, you know, then they will see, oh, so Shaman has a man speaking on gender or in the South African context, a white man speaking on gender. I think that's interesting. I mean, I have things to offer, I have things to say, but I acknowledge that this means that people will see me in a particular way. And in some instances, I would also wish to think about, for example, in a workplace or organizational setting, whose voices dominate. I'm already going into the gender topic here, you know, whose voices dominate, whose voices are heard first in meetings or in decision-making or in spaces of power and representation. So, I mean, I think that's interesting to think about. I think about it a lot in terms of who do we listen to, whose voices are often heard first. Do I have a duty sometimes to step back and say, well, what other people think? You know, acknowledge that men's voices often, you know, are naturally, naturally the ones that come to the fore first. So, already I think I'm giving you a sense of where I'm coming from and how I position myself in gender work. Well, thank you for that, Pierre. And I choose you as my first guest for the following reasons. Your knowledge about gender has expanded my desire and you are an inspiration for me to delve deeper into the gender space and find my place there. So, I wouldn't have it anywhere, any other way, other than having you as my first guest. Secondly, I did not even think about the gender roles that we often hear the male's voice at first. But what for me, it was about information. It was about the impact that you had on me. The very first time I heard you in that change make, I was like, oh, whatever he's teaching, I need to be there. And so, I am honored to have you. I'm honored for you to share all your knowledge with me within the time space and the time frame that we have. And I know this will not be your first appearance and your only appearance on this podcast. So, thank you again. And thank you for starting the discussion the way that you did. But my first question for you, Pierre, what locates you geographically and historically? Thanks. And thanks for your kind words, Sharmin, about your experience of my early interventions when we first met. You know, I do love that work. It is an incredible privilege to be able to talk about gender to many participants across the African continent, because it is such a diverse continent and people bring many different stories and histories and traditions and cultures. But all of it comes into the workplace where all these mixes and mixtures happen, you know, and finding a common way of being in the workplace is an interesting challenge with all those influences coming together. And I've learned an incredible amount from that work as well, you know, to find ways to think about gender that connects to people's lives and stories and doesn't feel as if I'm coming as an outside expert to lecture to people. As you would recall, I think my approach and our approach at the centre is participatory learning, drawing deeply on the experiences and lives of participants. And that's really what is life-giving for me in the work. What locates me? Obviously, I'm South African. I'm not sure if that was obvious. Our university is in South Africa. I'm born in South Africa, which is an African country, but clearly I have white European ancestry. On my mother's side, Dutch and German background. My father's side, French Mauritian. So he was born in Mauritius, the island of Mauritius, but his parents and history goes back to mainland France. So, you know, already politically in South Africa, we are a country with a complicated history of colonialism, apartheid, which was a kind of form of institutionalised, legalised racism and oppression towards indigenous and black South Africans. So to be a white South African is to be already positioned in some ways in terms of a history of belonging to a group that is historically oppressive towards black people, towards indigenous South Africans. So I grew up in the height of the apartheid, separate development states. We had a white minority government and a very, very rigidly enforced oppressive system of racial separation. So I grew up with whiteness, in a white suburb, in white cities. In apartheid South Africa, I was born in 1959 and schooled into the 60s and 70s. That was the deep, dark years of apartheid South Africa. To grow up white meant to grow up with separateness and black South Africans were othered, discriminated against, legally and socially and many other ways. So your encounters with black people were in a kind of classic relationships of power, you know, with many black South Africans would be working in homes or gardens and domestic spaces. And we had laws that meant that black people couldn't stay in white cities overnight. They would have to leave and move into black areas at night times. And people lived according to their race, racial groups. We can unpack race if there is time today. So that, I think, because I grew up in a family where I had two older sisters who were politically involved and politically aware, I think already I was given some notion that the system was wrong and unacceptable and evil, frankly. And that was sort of early seeds in me of understanding that the separateness put into the system was morally unjustifiable. But I think already in me was sown this idea of we can't live in this kind of society. It's not a fair and just society. And then I think also, you know, I began to develop an understanding of my sexual orientation, which is gay, in the 1970s. And that was also an experience of othering for me. So I think in my early years, it was an interesting intertwining of a personal sense of othering but recognizing racial othering that were also happening in our society. There were laws, for example, in apartheid South Africa, there was one particular law, the Immorality Act, which outlawed sexual and romantic relations between people of different races, particularly to protect whiteness. But the same laws were sanctioned same-sex sexuality, particularly male-male sexuality. So it's interesting that already in my mind as a young person, notions of what is moral and immoral were already percolating in my head. I think from a very young age. And then I, in the early 1980s, HIV came to South Africa. And, you know, already there was a sense that this was also an injustice being done because globally there was this tremendous stigma aimed towards gay men, but also towards sex workers, towards people who use drugs. And then that quickly slipped into a kind of racist ideas that certainly from a heterosexual point of view, HIV was an African or black disease. So I would say all those strands came together to give me personally a sense that the world isn't fair, that systems of power operates to include and exclude people, and that for things to change, communities have to, in a sense, rise up and organize and do something about sex. Thank you so much for that, Pierre. You unpacked so much that we need to schedule a time to talk about race. And there are some questions that I have for you, but we wouldn't touch that now. But my follow up question, and you shared a little about that, is how do you position yourself in the work that you do? Let's share some of the ideas of privilege that you have experienced and enjoyed. Absolutely. I think a body of work that I draw on is intersectionality theory, which you would know about. I think feminist scholar Kimberly Crenshaw was one of the early thinkers in this area. And essentially, the idea is that certain identities in life have privilege or power, which is given to them not because there is a formal handing over, but it is how societies are wired to regard certain identities as somehow better or representative of a proper human being. Society calls them social power, for example, to men, because most societies are wired to be patriarchal, to run along lines of male dominance, male power, male centrality, with men generally holding positions of authority and power, politics, economics in the home, and many cultural and religious and other spheres. Something that Kimberly Crenshaw was saying is that, generally, people have privilege around gender, so men would have privilege of women. Privilege can come around race. Generally, white people have privilege over people of color, simply because they are white, or people who are able-bodied, or people who are, perhaps, middle class, or people who are educated. All of those are positions of privilege in society. But the interesting thing, I think, that Kimberly Crenshaw brought to the conversation was that when you occupy more than one identity category, in some instances you can have privilege and power, social power, in relation to one aspect of your identity. But in another, you may lack it. So there's a sort of intersecting illusion of different identity figures, or identity factors, which complexify the idea of privilege. So in my own case, for example, I have privilege around maleness, around being a man. Sometimes you might call that the patriarchal dividend, the kind of rewards and social cachet and social authority and position that comes from being a man in society. And I think the interesting thing about privilege is that you don't have to work for it. It just comes to you. Society thinks that men are natural leaders, for example, or natural bosses, or natural lots of things. And so you don't have to do anything to have it. But because I'm gay, then in some eyes, in some societies, some spaces, that is a sort of a second class citizenship, if you like, or a second class identity. So in some contexts, maleness and bisexuality would sit in a complex relationship with each other. In the South African context, and perhaps some others, perhaps the United States, for example, whiteness gives me certain privileges. And I'm not comfortable with having it, but I'm comfortable with acknowledging it. Because I think it's important that certainly white people and men and heterosexual people see that they have this kind of social power. Because once you see it, you can do something about dismantling those forms of power where you can. And certainly there have been millions of examples of how whiteness has brought me advantage in South Africa. I can remember, for example, this is going to sound narcissistic, perhaps. I remember winning a adversary for my final year at school to go to university based on being the top Catholic student in my province in South Africa. And over the years, I've come to realize that that adversary was only for white people. And if I, if it was open to all Catholics who are of all colors and races and backgrounds, I'm pretty convinced I would not have won that adversary. You know, and of course, you know, I was 17 at the time, so perhaps less woke to the injustice of that kind of inequality. And I used adversity to further myself and my studies. And yes, I worked hard and eventually became a psychologist. But I acknowledge the privilege of whiteness helped to carry me and make that easier, that passage easier for me. And I think gender, maleness is tremendous. Men have many privileges in society, ways that they don't have to prove themselves that women, say, for example, in the workplace absolutely have to do all the time. And, you know, an example that I use often, which I think is quite a, it's quite light-hearted, but I think it says so much, is if you're flying in an airplane and the pilot's voice comes on, and it's a man's voice, a male pilot, we don't think about his maleness. We think about his pilot-ness, if you like. Oh, this is a pilot. He's doing what pilots do. He's telling us about the weather and how long till takeoff and what is our flight path. But if that pilot's voice comes on and it's a woman, the first thing many people think about is her woman-ness before her pilot-ness. Because it's unusual for a woman to be a pilot, because the way privilege works is it naturalizes powerful positions to men. And so we start thinking about, oh, this is a woman pilot. I wonder where she studied to be a pilot. And is there a man in the cockpit with her? And is she having a good day? And is there another woman in the cockpit with her? And am I comfortable being flown by a woman? This is different for me. I mean, maybe not all of what people think is bad, but the fact that we notice her gender is, for me, a fascinating thing to think about. So I think, for me, privilege work is fascinating work. It's interesting. I don't feel defensive about it, because I don't think that it's productive. And you get people who say, well, I may have wife privilege, but I've worked hard for what I've got. Or a man might say, well, male privilege might exist, but I studied really hard at university or college to get where I am. I deserve to be here. It's not about that. It's about recognizing that we didn't all start in the same place in the first place. And I know in the United States, privilege and affirmative action is a hot conversation. And there have been steps to remove some of those affirmative action policies, which have created, I think, interesting debates in the United States. I told you I could talk too much. That's quite okay. That's quite okay. Thank you for unpacking intersectionality, because the term is used, you know, a lot of people are using the term now, and listeners may not understand or know what it means. So, thank you for unpacking that, and thank you for sharing your privilege. And because the first time I ever heard someone that is white acknowledge their privilege was Christy from the department, and I was blown away. After she was finished, I said, I have to offer you your flowers. And so, thank you for doing that, because Christy was the very first white person I've heard who acknowledged that they had white privilege, and here you are again. So, thank you for that. What inspired or motivated you to get into the work of gender? You know, multiple things, I would say. I mentioned earlier, I have two older sisters who were politically aware and feminist in their thinking. One of them, I think, has become less feminist with age. I'm a little bit critical of her. Hopefully, she won't be listening to this podcast. And the other one remained a steadfast feminist, and in fact, subsequently left South Africa for political reasons and settled in the UK. And I think just the example of older siblings, both women who had strong ideas about equality, women's equality to men. And, you know, feminism, the word feminism, feminist, has become something problematic for some people. It's bewildering to me. It's seen as an insult to some people to identify as feminist or seen as anti-men. And I have absolutely no agreement with that viewpoint. And for me, to be a feminist is, at its most simple, is I think somebody once said this revolutionary idea that women and men are equal. I don't necessarily mean the same, but certainly equal. And so that experience, I think, shaped me to see two strong women, leading independent lives and charting their own way in the world. But I would also say that grappling with my sexual orientation helped me to start to think about gender. Because certainly as a gay man, what happens, I think, is the way that masculinity works, the way that we sort of idealize certain kinds of masculinity in many societies and require of men to be heterosexual to occupy an acceptable masculinity. What happens is that gay men's masculinity is found to be questionable. So I think certainly in myself, I began the journey of thinking, well, what is gender? You know, what is the difference between gender and sex in terms of sex that you're born into in your body? And perhaps gender being the kinds of expectations that are placed on male bodies and female bodies in living out their lives. So really, I think, being on the receiving end of questioning about, well, what is my right to call myself a man? Or what is an acceptable masculinity? And by the same token, what is an acceptable femininity? I think already my interest was piqued in terms of thinking about what is gender? How does gender play out in people's lives? Why do we hold certain roles for men and hold certain roles for women? Why do we try and put people into gender boxes? And also to understand that there's a power system that operates underneath all of that, that regards men and gives men more power in society. And I think that probably the third strand was HIV work and understanding how, from a heterosexual HIV point of view, how women are vulnerable to contracting HIV, not just biologically, because that is an aspect of it, but also socially, if you like, the kind of social inequalities, the gender inequalities that persist in many societies. Giving men power over women, power, for example, to dictate whether women can work, and also how much power they have in the home, and in terms of sexual agency and decision-making, that took me on a whole journey of exploration and understanding to think about gender and gender inequality as being one of the key drivers of why women are more vulnerable to HIV when it comes to heterosexually acquired HIV. I think if you look at all those factors coming together, they've led me onto a road or a journey of consciousness about awareness, if you like, thinking about what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? Why does society set up in a particular way to disempower women? Why are societies wired that way? I think a lot of that really brought me to where I am today, which is that I consider myself a feminist, an advocate for equality of men and women, and I suppose perhaps starting more controversially, Sean, and this may be a topic for another discussion, is also to move into the space of thinking about people who don't fit into the boxes of gender neatly, so people who are transgender or maybe identify as gender diverse, non-binary in some way. I'm very interested in what those stories tell us about the gender order. Wow, thank you, thank you, thank you. You have unpacked a lot there, but one of the things that I would like you to focus on, because oftentimes, the regular person who hasn't attended a gender program does not know the difference between gender and sex. You touch on it a little bit, but I'd like you to expound a little more on the difference between gender and sex. Yeah, with pleasure. So for me, this is a critical sort of languaging to be thinking about. It really informs a lot of my own work. The sex is the biology, the biological. So everybody is born into a body that has chromosomes, genes, hormones, and reproductive organs, and internal and external genitalia and formations. In most people, that sex body is uncomplicatedly male or female, and those are the terms that we use. In a small percentage of people, that clarity of either male or female isn't always there, and they would belong to a category of people we would call intersex. The more technical term sometimes is called differences of sex development, and it's a phenomenon. So some people might only discover they're intersex later on in life. For example, they might discover, in the case of someone who's a woman, that there are undescended testes inside her, or some rarer cases, born without a womb or ovaries, and there are a whole lot of variations that are hormonal and genetic and chromosomal. Other differences are quite evident. Some babies may be born with mixed genitalia. I think what is interesting about intersex people is that they sometimes, based on the external appearance, surgeons and parents make a decision to fashion the body into either a male or female. And if you could think about it, that's a kind of crossroads moment for those surgeons and parents to decide, on the basis of all the evidence we have, is this a boy or is this a girl? In some instances, the decision that they take is the wrong one, and when that person grows up and into their puberty and has an awakening around their gender identity and or sexual orientation, it doesn't fit neatly into the category of male or female that they were assigned when they were born. So, I'm complexifying the term sex because I think sometimes we oversimplify it, and I'm anxious that this will make this conversation too complicated, but I do think it's interesting because nature isn't always neat, and we often take nature as our guide. But, well, nature has said that men and women must get together to make babies. Well, sometimes nature isn't so neat and tidy, and we would do well to ponder on that a little bit, about our certainties, about anything of our beings. But in general, we all have this body, and society expects of these bodies to form and act in particular ways, to do certain things, to act out certain roles, to present themselves in the world in a particular way, and that's what we would call gender, gender roles, gender expectations, gender norms, gender stereotypes, and we call those social. In other words, societies have decided this is how boys should behave and this is how girls should behave. My favorite saying, you may have heard it yourself, is nobody is born, nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to be a man or a woman. You are socialized and enculturated into sets of ideas and beliefs and practices, and that's gender, and I think what is interesting about our work is that it's that stuff that affects people's lives, because when you go into the workplace, or into a sporting arena, or into politics, or into a religious space, those spaces have many ideas about what those gendered bodies should do, how they should behave, and how they should conduct themselves, and how much they should put themselves forward, or hold themselves back, too loud, or not loud enough. All of that is gender. We all swim in that gender soup all the time. For a small percentage of people, the inner gender identity doesn't match the one that is expected of them, and that goes into the category of transgender people. So yes, for me, gender is this idea that we have decided as many societies, and these ideas are similar and different across societies, and even within societies, you know, that ideas around gender can differ, for example, in the Hispanic community, the African-American community, or the Asian community in the United States. There will be lots of commonalities, but there will be differences as well, and for me, what is fascinating is to get people to start thinking about their gendering in the world, and how much of that is natural, and how much of it we learnt. Wow, thank you. I'm sure that our listeners would be able to differentiate between the two, and you made it clear what's the difference between sex, and what's the difference between gender. I think a child would be able to articulate what it is, so thank you for doing that. And for a follow-up question, what theoretical lenses or framework do you bring to the gender workspace? So I think some of them I've touched on, or hinted at already. I think the ideas around feminism, I think, inform some of my own thinking, and as you would know, I'm sure be aware, there have been waves of feminism over the years, starting in its early formations around women getting votes, reproductive independence, although there's pushback on that even today, particularly in the United States, and then move towards intersectional feminism, and today, I think, the feminist space is quite a diverse set of ideas, including, interestingly, more recent feminist contestations around transgenderness, whether trans women are women, there have been a lot of debates about that, and whether the trans rights movement has eroded some of the women's rights. So some of those debates are interesting for me. They keep me fascinated. I think theory theory moves with the times, and should. It should be critical, it should be willing to let go of some things and take on new ideas. I think theory and work around privilege is important to me. Critical race theory is, I know that it's also got a bad press in the United States. It's, for me, a very fascinating and thought-provoking set of ideas. I would say work around gender work of people like Judith Butler's thinking, introducing the idea of gender as a formative is something that has been interesting for me to work with. A lot of the work around masculinity, there's an Australian sociologist, Raywin Cornell, who has done a lot of the early thinking around the idea of multiple masculinities coexisting with each other in society. I suppose multiple femininities would be also a set of ideas to think about. And then I think coming more into the workplace context, I know in the course that you did that we worked on together, the gendered work set of ideas or model is, for me, a very fascinating framework to work with because it acknowledges that workplaces are sites of power and exclusion or inclusion sometimes. And that if you want to bring change into a workplace, you can't just work with individual beliefs and practices and ideas, that you have to work with systems of power that operate in an organization, for example. And also that you have to work with what is called the deep structure inside an organization, which you might argue is the collective unconscious of a workplace. It's hidden behind the scenes working of a particular space. It's unspoken ethos that also affects how that workplace sees men and women and power in that particular space. So the gendered work framework has been very powerful for me personally to think about what change could look like inside an organization. Thank you. I would want to ask you to explain the gender, the framework, but I'm going to... Yeah. Could you just explain what is the gender framework? I could. I'll do my best to, and hopefully not do it an injustice. Essentially, the framework thinks about changes operating on two sort of, on the individual level and on the systemic level. And if you look at those two and you place them in a two-dimensional sketch on a page, you create the idea of four quadrants of change, possibilities of change. And quadrant one refers to the idea of individual change work. So there, that is work around unconscious bias, the beliefs you have about gender, the unconscious beliefs you have about men and women and how they should be inside a workplace. And then quadrant two refers to kinds of resources that are given to people to achieve power or advancement, equality in a workplace. And one example of that might be an organization might believe that it is pro-women, but it doesn't acknowledge that women might need particular kinds of career paths or resources to go on management courses or leadership courses, or just to generally resource the kind of work that might shift inequalities that pre-exist in many workplaces. I think in our work we distinguish between equality and equity. Equality says we treat people equally. Equity says we see that they come with different starting points because of forms of systematic exclusion. And so you might make ones to find ways to hasten and accelerate the advancement of one category of person because of that historical inequality. And so quadrant two is about resources. And quadrant three looks at policy work. Has there been sufficient changes in policy to give effect to the intentions to bring gender equality in the workplace? Those could be promotion policies, advancement policies, hiring policies, work-life balance policies, maternity leave, parental leave. But I think in a particular interest of mine is sexual harassment policies as well. Are those policies properly developed, funded, enacted, monitored, evaluated? And then quadrant four is one of the more complicated quadrants to think about in the workplace, which is the infrastructure quadrant. And as I suggested earlier, that is the sort of collective unconscious of an organization. And it's the kinds of things that might not be obvious to you on first entering into or being a part of a workplace. But that sort of comes to you as you think about and observe and experience the space. How do people talk to each other? How do men and women talk to each other? And how are meetings run? How are decisions made? Who holds the power? Who has whose advancement is accelerated by somebody else? Who gets the best offices? Who gets the best tasks inside of the space? Whose ideas are second-guess, gas-lit? You know, that sort of more ephemeral stuff that is a qualitative nature. You may not easily be able to label it, but you start to feel it. And I think one of the things that privilege has taught me over the years is that when you belong to a marginalized, less privileged group, you feel how power works. It's almost a visceral thing. So that white person, in the same relation to race, might say, but I don't see that this workplace feels exclusionary towards black people. But when you are a black person, subtle ways, the microaggressions, the hidden ways, you feel it. You feel it in your bones, in your viscera. And that's some way where I think deep structure is involved. Thank you so much for explaining that. And I think that was one of the most impactful aspects of the Changemaker program, understanding the gender framework and being exposed to the understanding, the theory, and the impact of deep structure, because I've been there and never had the terminology or the understanding of how to articulate it until the class. So thank you. In closing, would you like to add anything else? You know, I think perhaps the one perspective I could bring in, and I'd also like to ask you a question in return, is, you know, without casting any shade on you, Shaman, we're both slightly older persons. And, you know, I think one of the important things to bring into this gender conversation is to think about gender over a person's life course, that it isn't static. And how one experiences one's sex and one's gender expectations through life can shift the journey. And one of the interesting things about aging is you can experience the twin forces of respect and marginalization that can be seen as somehow less valuable, less important, less luck on the cutting edge of things. Because you're older, it's the way societies work. But in many communities, older people are also regarded with certain kind of deference or reverence in their carriers of wisdom. And it's true to both of those things. But I think what has been an incredible privilege, I'm using that word again, for me, is to be able to reflect on one's gender journey over life and to realize that it has shifted. It isn't static. And I would encourage listeners to this podcast to think about gender through the lens of time. You know, that we've thought about gender generationally, last generation, our grandparents, our great grandparents, has shifted. And the shifts aren't always in a positive direction, as we're seeing globally some of the pushback towards some of the early wins around gender equality. So we need to be vigilant. You know, we cannot be guaranteed that change will inevitably in a positive or mean positive direction, but it can, those changes can be taken away. American society is an example of losing rights around abortion, for example. And now it's left to the states to make those laws and some devastating consequences for some women. So that's one thought I have. And I suppose my other question, maybe not to unfairly shine a light on you, but this experience of setting up this gender podcast, I love the title. What did you say? Everything gender? Anything. Anything gender. I love that because it creates such an openness. Do you, where do you, this first conversation, where has it left you? Do you feel like you want to take some things and podcast series in a particular direction, or is it too soon to say? It's not too soon to say because as I'm listening to you, gender in the workplace is not something that is talked about. I can say for here in America, and especially being someone who spent 20 years in the nonprofit space where that is dominated by women, we don't talk about our gender roles. We don't talk about the gender stereotypes. We don't talk about our biases, conscious or unconscious. We don't pay attention to the deep structure. Thus, that's why the framework, I held on to the framework so dearly because it spoke to me. And I would like to create a space where we unpack those things. Understanding the role of I am from a single parent home, so I saw my mother as the father and the mother. So there was nothing, I never knew my place as a woman until I migrated to the US, right? Where I understood, okay, women, you have roles. This idea or this thought of you can do anything. You can because at age 33 when I came to the US, I went into the US Army just a year before the cutoff age. So I can tell you the impact of ageism. I didn't have a term to use it at that time. I can tell you the impact of gender bias that I have experienced. And I didn't stay. I spent one year and came out. So I never knew that women, you need to know your place. That's what we would say, Diana, that women need to know their places. And so helping to unpack those things and helping women to give them a space where they can learn more about themselves has become a passion for me after that Changemaker program. So I hope I answered your question. I mean, it's given me a million other questions I want to answer. I think one of the other thoughts that I have is, you know, in the nonprofit state, I may be wrong, but in many contexts, they are dominated by women, which I don't think is a coincidence, because we're socialized into men having positions of lifeline positions, positions of power and authority, particularly in profit-making corporate contexts. And sometimes the nonprofit world can be an extension of how we think about women as being in the domestic sphere, you know, doing charity work and good works. What can happen in some nonprofits is that even the ones that are really progressive and transformed and maybe women-run, they can create a model of how women can lead and run and be successful. But at the end of the day, the world, gender is relational. Those into a world which is constructed for the benefit of men often, so the struggle continues. And so it's holding that idea that even if one is transformed in one space, there's work to be done outside of that space, too. Yes. And you said something and a thought came to me. Despite the nonprofit, maybe most of them or some of them might be women-led, the theory, the belief systems, the policies are rooted or their foundations are in patriarchy. Yeah. Right? So you have all these women, but they're leading from the lens and the theory of men. And there's so much for us to unpack there as we speak, right? I am thinking about the, yes, it's they're women, but it becomes a hierarchy. And it's still patriarchal in some ways. And in the course, I think we often talked about the idea of women doing the work of patriarchy as well. And not because they want their own disempowerment, but because they have been marinated in a patriarchal system. It is a template we are given of how societies and organizations should run, particularly hierarchical ways. So, yeah, I think those are powerful questions to ask and reflect on. Yes. Yes. And one other thing before we wrap up that I'm interested in is inviting men into the conversation about gender-based violence, and forming allyship with men so that we all can be a part of the awareness and the prevention campaign against GBV. Absolutely. I mean, we could have another whole podcast about this topic, but you will find other fabulous speakers. So thank you so much, Pierre. And let's say our listeners want to get in contact with you. How can they do so? Probably the best is to email. I'm not sure whether you have a way to give them my email address. That is easier than me spelling it because my name is so complicated. But I'm happy if you do. I will add it to the show notes. Perfect. So thank you, Pierre. Thank you, listeners. This has been the very first episode of Anything Podcast, and you can listen to the podcast anywhere on any podcast platform, wherever you listen, Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon. Remember to share, remember to subscribe, and remember to download, and don't forget to give a review. I am Charmaine Prince. I'm your host, and thank you for joining us, and see you next time.