Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has taken up three new roles at Harvard University, where she will study and speak on leadership, governance and online extremism.
Ardern announced in an Instagram post on Wednesday morning that she was “incredibly humbled” to be joining the university on joint fellowships at the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, based at Harvard Law School. She will focus on the study of online extremism at the law school, and on building leadership and governance skills at the Kennedy School.
The fellowships will begin in the autumn, and will take Ardern overseas for the period of the New Zealand election in October. Ardern said that “While I’ll be gone for a semester (helpfully the one that falls during the NZ general election!) I’ll be coming back at the end of the fellowships. After all, New Zealand is home!”
Ardern has visited Harvard before: last year, she given an honorary doctorate of law and earned a standing ovation when speaking at Harvard’s commencement on gun control and democracy.
The former prime minister will continue her work on the Christchurch Call – an inter-governmental and tech company pledge she developed after the Christchurch terror attacks to prevent extremist and terrorist content being spread online.
Her time at Harvard will include “time spent studying ways to improve content standards and platform accountability for extremist content online, and examine artificial intelligence governance and algorithmic harms,” the University said in a statement. She will also continue her work on the board of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, which awards five £1m prizes each year for work providing solutions to major environmental problems.
Prof Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Klein Centre, said it was “rare and precious for a head of state to be able to immerse deeply in a complex and fast-moving digital policy issue both during and after their service,” and that “Ardern’s hard-won expertise – including her ability to bring diverse people and institutions together – will be invaluable as we all search for workable solutions to some of the deepest online problems.”
Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf said in a statement that Ardern “showed the world strong and empathetic political leadership”. “She earned respect far beyond the shores of her country, and she will bring important insights for our students and will generate vital conversations about the public policy choices facing leaders at all levels.”
Ardern’s formal titles will be 2023 Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow, Hauser Leader in the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, and Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow, at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, based at Harvard Law School.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Chris Hipkins was confirmed on Sunday as New Zealand’s next prime minister as he received unanimous support from Labour Party lawmakers to succeed Jacinda Ardern.
Hipkins, 44, will be officially sworn in to his new role on Wednesday.
“We will deliver a very solid government that is focused on the bread-and-butter issues that matter to New Zealanders and that are relevant to the times that we are in now,” Hipkins told reporters in Wellington, the Associated Press reported.
Hipkins served as New Zealand’s COVID-19 response manager during the coronavirus pandemic.
Ardern on Thursday said she would resign as prime minister, in a shock announcement. She also confirmed that New Zealand’s national elections will take place on October 14.
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#Zealand #leader #Chris #Hipkins #confirmed #succeed #Jacinda #Ardern
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
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‘Can women have it all?’
It was inevitable that someone was going to ask that most cliched of questions and, voilà, they did. Shortly after Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation as New Zealand prime minister this week, the BBC tweeted out a story about Ardern balancing motherhood with politics, with a headline asking if women can really have it all. After being accused of “staggering sexism”, the BBC deleted the headline and apologised.
Having it all. Please, someone, ban that stupid phrase already. It is 2023! I’m pretty sure we’ve spent at least a decade talking about the fact that nobody ever asks whether working dads can have it all. When Boris Johnson had two new kids during his tenure as prime minister of Britain there wasn’t a lot of handwringing about how he’d balance life with a newborn, and the responsibilities of being a father of seven with his job. When Elon Musk became a dad for the umpteenth time the BBC didn’t ask how he was going to balance fatherhood with colonizing Mars. Or, if they did, I must have missed that article.
Forget “having it all”, Ardern showed us all a powerful new model of leadership. Our current model of leadership (which, shameless plug, I’ve written an entire book called Strong Female Lead about) often treats empathy as a weakness. Ardern showed us all that kindness and compassion aren’t weaknesses, they’re strengths. Our current model of leadership prioritizes confidence over competence and tends to reward arrogance. Ardern, meanwhile, has spoken about the importance of self-doubt. “Some of the people I admire the most have that self-consciousness and that slight gnawing lack of confidence,” the politician said in a 2020 interview. When impostor syndrome creeps in, she explained, she thinks about how to use it constructively. “Does [that self-doubt] mean I need to do a bit more prep, do I need to think more about my decision making?” Wouldn’t it be nice if more politicians went through that exercise?!
For a long time, women have been told to “lean in” to a patriarchal model of leadership. They’ve been told that, in order to be successful, they have to mold themselves into the image of a leader dictated by men. Ardern didn’t do that. She led on her own terms. And, perhaps, most powerfully, she stopped leading on her own terms. “I know what this job takes,” Ardern said when she announced her resignation. “And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice.”
We tend to equate leadership with being the loudest voice in the room. But true leadership means knowing when it’s time to pass the mic. True leadership means knowing when it’s time to step back. Unfortunately most lawmakers, particularly in the US, seem desperate to hold on to power for as long as humanly possible even if it’s not for the greater good. I mean, do you know how old the average senator in the US is? 64.3 years old. That’s over 20 years older than Ardern. Joe Biden, the oldest president in American history, is 80 and is expected to run again in the 2024 election. Senator Chuck Grassley is 89 as is Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. There have been a lot of concerns about Feinstein’s cognitive health and yet she still refuses to say whether she’s going to run for another term or not. Does it really serve her constituents for her to have another term, or does it serve it her ego?
I’m not saying that there should be an age limit in politics, by the way. Experience is important. But there’s a real problem when the same people cling to power for decades and refuse to make room for new blood. Ardern, 42, says she no longer has enough in the tank to do her job justice. I’ve got to wonder what on earth some long-serving politicians in the US have in their tanks. I’ve got a feeling it may be narcissism.
Is Milf Manor the queasiest new dating show on TV?
Betteridge’s law states that: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But having read this Guardian piece on a horrifying new reality show called MILF Manor I think I’ve found the exception to that law.
The Taliban bought a ‘verified’ check mark on Twitter
It now appears to have been removed after some understandable outrage.
Sierra Leone passes landmark law on women’s rights
Under the new Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Act 30% of public and private jobs must be reserved for women. The law also requires some employers to give at least 14-weeks of maternity leave.
The ‘virgin speculum’: proof that medicine is still rife with outrageous myths about women
Out of the 16 million women in the UK who were eligible for a cervical screening test in 2022, only 11.2 million took one. That’s the lowest level in a decade. As Jenny Halpern Prince writes in the Guardian, women might feel more comfortable taking the test if it were updated a little bit. As it is, the speculum that is used for the examination is called a “virgin speculum”. Prince is calling for it to be renamed the “extra-small speculum” or for its medical name, the Pederson speculum, to be used. “The term virgin speculum should be removed from use by medical device advertisers and the medical profession (it is currently taught in medical schools),” writes Prince. That does seem a little bit like a no-brainer.
The Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) is having a #MeToo moment
Top athletes have accused the WFI’s president and several coaches of sexual misconduct. This goes beyond wrestling because the WFI president, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, is also a lawmaker for the ruling Bharatiya Janata party.
The week in passwordarchy
Netflix has been threatening to crack down on password sharing for a while and now it looks like it’s finally happening. During its recent earnings report the streaming service announced that it will enforce password-sharing rules “more broadly” in the next few months. Not sure this is a great idea, Netflix. You’re going to find yourself quite literally cancelled.
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#Jacinda #Ardern #proved #true #leader #step #politicians #Arwa #Mahdawi
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Jacinda Ardern has no gas left in the tank to continue as the prime minister of New Zealand. Her resignation speech was the sort of rare and dignified moment that we have come to expect from her, as a woman who presented the world with the kind of leadership that uniquely lent on her emotional intelligence. I’ll miss her tone and grace. She leaves a legacy she can be proud of.
I have been thinking about what burned the fuel that she relied on to govern.
Firstly I have no doubt that she felt the constant guilt that pretty much every woman in the world feels the moment they evacuate their womb of a child. Even the Mary Poppins-style perfect, Instagram-polished mothers of the world fret that something they do will harm their child in some way. I asked my husband, who has always been our son’s primary carer, if he ever felt guilty for missing a school play or staying late at work. He looked at me baffled; the concept was lost on him. He just thinks, “I had to go to work,” and that’s the beginning and end of that moral maze for him. For me, there is a constant torture and self-loathing about how my choices might affect them. No matter how I try to push away the societal grooming, it is always there. For Ardern there will have been column inches aplenty to keep the torture prickling her skin.
This is not to say that most working women don’t just push through this: they do so every single day in every single workforce in the country. It just burns up fuel, fuel that others don’t need to spend. It is tiring and saps our bandwidth.
The pressure pushed on to working women is tiring enough without it being amped up by being a public woman – and the worst of all offences, to some, a political woman. The thing that burns my fuel to the point of a flashing emergency light and a blaring alarm is the abuse and threat of violence that has become par for the course for political women. Jacinda Ardern will have suffered this mercilessly. Today, colleagues and admirers discussed the extent to which that constant threat of abuse contributed to her burnout.
Those threats came from many sources, too: people who hate progressive women and believe they are damning masculinity; anti-vaxxers outraged by her tough Covid stance; those with a general loathing of all politicians.
Combine the two fuel burners and what you end up with is the terrible guilt, fear and shame that decisions you have made in your career, or your political stances (no matter how much you believe in them), put your children, loved ones and employees in danger.
Moments before I started writing this, I spoke to a woman who works for me who told me she wouldn’t be in work on a particular day because she had to give evidence in court after an incident in my office. She was not the target: it was me. When my children at school have to answer questions from their classmates about stances I have taken, or are told hateful and untrue things that have been published about me, or when they act hyper-vigilantly in public crowds, aware of the threat to us, my heart breaks and more fuel burns up.
No doubt this is something all men and women in political life experience. However, studies show that the level of violence – often sexualised violence – and the threat that female politicians face is incomparable. I am used to it. I wish I wasn’t; but I also wish I was a size 10. but I will also never get used to the effect it has on other people; it is so very tiring. It’s just something else I have to consider on top of worrying about policy and details, and fallout, and loyalties. It burns fuel.
What can we do about it? Like Jacinda, I believe the answer is being honest about the fact that politics is an emotional not a bureaucratic game. And constantly pushing for a more empathetic political environment, which will be brought about by having more female leaders and politicians, not fewer.
I am not so idealistic as to think politics is going to change its stripes in my time. But we must build the structures into our politics and our media that damn and criminalise the perpetrators of this abuse, and those who make massive profits from spreading it. We must create support structures female politicians and activists can lean on without being seen negatively or as weak.
Alas, even as I pen my suggestions for change, I know that it is women who will have to do the labour to achieve it, just like we always do. This work takes more fuel – fuel others don’t have to use up in the pursuit of a political life. No wonder Jacinda’s knackered.
Jess Phillips is Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley
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#Women #suffer #guilt #abuse #disapproval #Jacinda #Ardern #knackered #Jess #Phillips
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
As New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern announces she won’t contest the next election, we take a look back at some of the most memorable moments of her time in office.
Jacinda Ardern resigns as prime minister of New Zealand
Jacinda Ardern’s first term as New Zealand’s prime minister – in pictures
Continue reading…
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#world #fell #love #Jacinda #Ardern #video
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
