City Talks 2013 – What Creative Life do You Want for #Sydney? [#geekgirl]
Halla Tomasdottir: Embracing the #Beauty of Balance [#geekgirl]
Via TEDWomen, Halla Tomasdottir shares her thoughts regarding her approach to surviving Iceland’s financial crisis:
“…we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone. And I’m not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country. But I can surely tell you that in my country – like on Wall St and the city of London and elsewhere – men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector, and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems…Doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence. It is actually people that make money and lose money, not Excel spreadsheets…I am fed up with this tyranny of either/or choices in life – either it’s men, or it’s women. We need to start embracing the beauty of balance. So let’s move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there, and lets start thinking about doing good business. That’s how we change the world. That’s the only sustainable future.”
[Watch Halla’s entire talk below or go here.]
IQ2 live debate: #Feminism Has Failed #Melbourne #geekgirl
As Australia assesses the vote for its first female prime minister, Intelligence Squared tackles its most controversial debate yet: Has feminism failed?
After generations of effort, women still bear a disproportionate burden of domestic labour. Women are under-represented in the senior ranks of politics, business and the professions. If the minority government doesn’t hold, Julia Gillard’s prime ministership may be the shortest in our history. What role did her gender play at the ballot box? Statistics show women continue to be denied equal pay for equal work and young women are less likely to identify as feminists than their mothers. What does this say about feminism? Has it failed to mobilise and inspire? Or should feminists be celebrating a deeper victory in which a new generation of young men and women take equality for granted?
Intelligence Squared is a provocative and informative series of live debates on hot-button issues, offering a sometimes fiery, often controversial and always entertaining forum for healthy argument. The format is the traditional Oxford-style debate, with one side proposing and the other opposing a sharply framed motion. Three speakers argue on each side of the motion. After the formal rguments, the debate is thrown open to the floor for moderated questions. The live audience votes both before and after hearing the arguments, so each debate has a clear measure of how far people have actually been swayed.
Intelligence Squared in Melbourne is a project of the St James Ethics Centre and the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
More about the speakers: Virginia Haussegger is a journalist, author and social commentator. Her writing includes a seminal article on feminism and childlessness, and the book Wonder Woman: the myth of “having it all” She currently presents News on ABC TV, Canberra.
Gay Alcorn is a Walkley award-winning journalist who joined The Age in 1989. She was Washington correspondent from 1999-2002 and was appointed editor of The Sunday Age in 2008.
Stephen Mayne is a Walkley award-winning journalist, shareholder activist and founder of Crikey and the Mayne Report. He has also run as an independent in State and Federal elections.
Jennifer Byrne has 26 years experience in television, radio and print journalism and over this time, has interviewed many world leaders, international thinkers and writers. She is currently presenter of the First Tuesday Book Club on ABC TV.
Monica Dux is a Melbourne writer. She has published widely on women’s issues and co-authored the book The Great Feminist Denial. She is currently working on a book about modern motherhood.
Wendy McCarthy was a founding member and co-convenor of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972. She has been an educator, advocate and social commentator, and a company director for the past forty years.
Debate date: 22 September 2010 http://tinyurl.com/333mmfq
Kurt Vonnegut Explains Drama
I always knew Kurt Vonnegut produced incredibly awesome fiction: turns out he’s also a truly pragmatic behaviouralist/visionary [+ yup the two *can* go together]. Take, for instance, his reasoning on how the average joe [+ jane] may just form a slightly whackjob set of perceptions centred around interactions with others + associated notions of “drama”:
“People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories…because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think are lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”
Read more [with spiffo graphs] @ Derek Sivers’ blog.