Transcriber: Leonardo Silva
Reviewer: Amanda Chu Hi, everyone. So, I was invited here today to talk about how and why
I started a company called Female Narratives. But if you told me five years ago that I was going to start
an all-female company, an all-female anything, I would have said you were crazy. Because the thing is,
I just never got along with girls. I went to an all-girls
inner-city state school, and I learnt hard, and I learnt fast the terrible and catty nature
of girls bullying girls. It wasn't fights; it was worse. It was girls masterminding ways to get waves of others girls
not to like you. It was talking about you
behind your back in such a way that you knew about it,
but the teacher didn't. It was a slow process of isolation. And so, I decided, as soon
as I could make the decision, that I would only be friends with boys, that I got along with boys better,
I understood boys better, that I was a boys girl. I would hang our with my older brother
and play sport with my father. I would strive, I would hustle,
and I would not be soft. But I learnt this example
from somebody else, also - from my mother. My mother is strong, tough,
assertive, hard-working. She taught me through her actions
rather than her words that in order to be
successful in this world, I was going to have to learn
to embrace my masculinity. And my mum is by no means the first woman in history
to have done this. I could give you hundreds
of thousands of examples of women who've done this. And I will give one: Athena. Athena is the goddess
of wisdom and of war, but in order to be so, she is perceived in a way
that is as masculine as possible. She is broad-shouldered
and wears full armour at a time when fighting
was exclusively male work. She's a virgin, with no children, and she has no mother, instead being born directly
from the head of Zeus, her father. Only under these
prerequisites and many more could she be the goddess of war. And so, I would be Athena. I would be my mother. I deep-dived into my masculine
like a defence mechanism. And I don't really even know
when this began. It could have begun
as early as when I looked like this, and kids in the playground
would ask me if I was a boy or a girl just because I had short hair. I've often asked my mother
why she cut my hair this short, and she said that it was easier
for her to maintain. But I've often wondered if she ever thought
if it was easier for me to live with, or perhaps if this was another way, another one of my mother's
subtle teachings through actions
rather than through words, that this would be the best way for me
to make it through in the world. My mother, since then and to this day,
still wears her hair short. And so I decided very quickly that my answer to the taunting kids
in the playground would be 'Boy.' When I was 15,
I was scouted by an agent, and I started modelling. This might come as a surprise,
based on this picture. But as soon as I could decide whether or not I wanted
to go to the hair salon with my mum, I stopped going altogether, and my hair grew, and grew and grew. And it may seem
like modelling was a departure from my very masculine narrative, but it wasn't. You see, modelling was a new space where girls could see
other girls as competition and what I knew to be true
about women could continue, this time, pitted against each other
on even more ludicrous things, like height, weight, and the number of inches that created
the circumference around our hips, the preference of now well-known
predatory photographers, the favouritism of agents and designers. In a world where I was being valued
purely on my outward appearance, it was actually behind my masculine shield
that I felt the safest, letting the slings and arrows of criticism
seemingly bounce off me as I strove to outwork others. As a side note, in all of these images
I've selected for you, I'm under the age of 18. In 2013, I graduated from university, and I moved to Los Angeles
to be with my agency there. I was really excited; it was the first time
I'd moved away from home. And when I arrived, they told me that I needed
to make an Instagram account. So I did. Two weeks later,
I was called in for a meeting. I showed up to their
big glass building in Beverly Hills. I sat on their long boardroom table
with all of my agents sat opposite me. There was a big screen between us, and they looked at the screen
and looked at me and said, 'What's this?' I looked at the screen
and looked at them and said, 'It's my Instagram account.' And on the big screen between us, projected was my live Instagram feed where for two weeks I had been
diligently documenting my friend's cat. Because, you see, I didn't understand the premise
of what they were telling me to do. And they said, 'No,
it needs to be pictures of you.' I said, 'But why?
That seems so self-indulgent. I don't just want
to post pictures of myself.' And they said, 'No, you have to do this, for work.' I was learning that if modelling
was a space of competition and comparison between women, Instagram was it on steroids. I have a friend who is a mum blogger, and she's told me that of the criticism
she receives for being a 'bad mum' or doing something 'wrong' as a parent, it has almost exclusively come
from other women. Why do we feel this need as women
to criticise one another? Why did I feel like my biggest barrier
to entry on so many things was in fact other women, that when I hung out with other women,
my insecurities got activated, and that Instagram
was a catalyst fueling this fire of open comparison and self-hatred? Like I said at the beginning,
I never got along with girls. And then, in the summer of 2016, I boarded a plane and I sat next to a girl
who was the complete opposite of me. She was outwardly feminine. She was kind and she was nurturing, and against all of my expectations, I liked her. I thought she was really cool, and I found myself
almost saying the words: 'Will you be my friend?' A month later, I went to Burning Man, and I went with all
the preconceived notions of it being a drug-fueled,
techno rave in the desert. But I drove there and back
in a U-Haul van, and I spent 12 days in Black Rock City,
building and talking to strangers, and the experience pushed me
way out of my comfort zone. Because I wasn't just
battling with the elements. I was battling with myself. I was meeting people in my camp who weren't interested
in the superficial me. They wanted to know
about what values lay on the inside, and they had the patience to slowly chip away
at my masculine exterior. And for really the first time,
I allowed myself to be vulnerable. When I came back from Burning Man,
I sent my parents an email, a long essay of an email telling them about the transformational
experience I had had, the things I had learnt,
the people I had met and how much I wanted them
to join me next year on this journey of transformation
and humanity and community. This was me opening up to my parents in a way that was
very out of character for me. And my mum replied, short and curt, her work signature embedded
in the bottom of the email, to say, 'Thanks. But no, thanks.' She spoke on behalf
of her husband, my dad, to let me know that Burning Man
should not expect them next year, or indeed, any other year, and that at the age of 60, she would have to make a hard pass
on the offer of transformation. 'OK, Athena.' I was frustrated. Of course I wanted my mum to join me, but I was also learning that her total disinterest
in transformation did not have to stop me
on the journey to my own. Over the course of the following year,
I met many more incredible people, many of them women, and towards the end of the year,
in a forest somewhere in Denmark, I met a mother, a mother whose name I can't remember, but whose story of loss
I will never forget. And she looked me
somewhere deep in my soul and started talking to me
about divine femininity. Now, it case it isn't obvious, I wasn't raised in a family
with any kind of religion, let alone spirituality. My parents were born
and raised socialists. They were working scientists. We never went to church,
unless it was as tourists. So, often when I'm confronted
with ideas about spirituality, I don't know what to say. I shut down and I stop listening. But I'd been doing
a lot of listening that year, perhaps more listening
than I'd ever done in my life. and what that woman told me was this. She said that if on the coin
which I had these beliefs about women and the war between us there was another side
which I hadn't been turning to look at, if on the one side was the notion that women had the power
to make me feel unwanted in a space - I knew this to be true, school and modelling and Instagram
had proven this to be true to me - she said that on the other
side of the coin was the notion that there was no one that could make me feel
as welcome in a space as women could. And when I really thought about this, when I thought about
the way women hold space, the way we allow friends and family
and strangers into our homes, the way grandmothers give hospitality, I knew this to be true. She described to me that divine femininity are the aspects of the self
associated with creation and sensuality, compassion and empathy, collaboration and intuition. She said to me that
as opposed to masculinity, which is a very tangible energy, a 'I will pick you up and put you down
somewhere safe' kind of energy, the sort of energy that you can't help
but turn around and say thank you for, femininity is much more ephemeral. It will pick you up
and carry you just as far, it will be the wind beneath your wings, but you won't really know
what's doing the carrying. You'll think you're the one
doing the carrying. Because it's altruistic,
it's selfless, it's maternal, and because of this, it often goes
unseen, unheard and unappreciated. How often do we turn around
and say thank you for femininity? Now, this was a lot
for someone like me to take in, right? My masculinity and I, we've wrestled
with this concept for a long time. And then I found myself in Israel, in Jerusalem, at the Western Wall, and at the Western Wall,
you're given the option to take a slip of paper,
write something on it and slot it into a crack in the wall. And like I said, I'm not very spiritual, so in these moments,
I don't really know what to do, but instinctively, I found myself
thinking of that mother, and writing this. It says, 'To the divine feminine. To the unseen, unheard,
unappreciated wonder of womankind. To the beautiful women of the world.' But who is this? And what have you done with Tijana? I was a boys girl, remember? And suddenly, I was finding myself
connecting to the women I was meeting, to women in general. This was crazy. But I came back to London
with this thought on my mind, and I called the girl
I had met on the plane, my new feminine female friend. I asked her what she was up to, if she wanted to get a coffee
and start a company, because I wanted girls, women, people to hear these stories
about women and femininity that I didn't feel
were being told loud enough, stories I wish I had heard
when I was younger, about support, not cattiness; about collaboration, not competition; about the power of femininity,
not the weakness of womanhood. Because yes, we should live in a world where masculinity and femininity
hold equal value - but they do not. So we would start a company
called Female Narratives, and we would tell these stories of women supporting each other
and collaborating with one another, and being successful by doing so. For me personally, it was an interesting shift
from the ego of modelling, from me feeling like I had to be
in constant competition with other women to being able to facilitate space for teams of women to co-create
and hold equally as important roles. Our company is now three years old, and we tell stories for brands
using real women. Not long ago, we hosted an event
on International Day of the Girl to a room full of mothers. The theme was space and getting girls interested
in STEM subjects. We had four incredible speakers, from astrophysicists
to senior investment bankers, and they surprised me
by talking less about science and more about their journeys as women. It was moving, and it was powerful. I received the microphone back
to conclude the evening, but I didn't feel like we were done. I asked the audience if they'd be OK
to hear just one more talk, and they nodded. I said, 'I don't know if this woman
will come up here today, because I honestly haven't asked her to. But she's my biggest inspiration for the way that she raised a family whilst pursuing a career in science
as a foreign woman in the UK, and is now a professor; a woman who handed in her PhD
nine months pregnant with her daughter, who used that PhD
to leave her war-torn country and start from scratch in a new one; a woman who, for so many years, when her young family had gone to bed, would go back to work,
marking papers and writing lectures, who cut her daughter's hair short because yes, it was easier
for her to maintain - my mother.' My mother was stood
in the back of the room, and she had no idea
that this was going to happen. But decades of teaching
meant that she was ready. She came on stage
and delivered a heartfelt speech, and received a standing
ovation from the room. On my journey, I was able
to find myself in a position where I could hold space for my mother, showing her that her work had not gone
unseen, unheard and unappreciated, to say thank you for her femininity - which I know is in there; it had just never really
been allowed space. Because, you see, her and her whole
generation of women had to be masculine in order to take and hold
positions of power. But I worry that our world
is becoming too masculine, and that it's having a detrimental effect
on our relationships with ourselves, with each other and with the environment. There's a great quote
by the classical historian Mary Beard, who taught me that stuff
I know about Athena, that says, 'If women are not perceived to be fully within
the structures of power, surely it is power we need to redefine rather than women.' If we can redefine power
to include more femininity, I believe this will have a knock-on effect
on both women and men. It will show men that they don't have to fit
these narrow confines of masculinity in order to be powerful. It will show women that they do not
have to act like masculine men in order to be powerful. And I believe that this redefinition
is slowly happening. Surveys are showing
that what we want from our CEOs, now more than ever, is humility, compassion and empathy. But this is not a war
between masculinity and femininity. This is not the binary choice
of my childhood between boy and girl in the playground. This is an integration because these character traits
of assertiveness and courage, of empathy and nurturing, are not dictated by our gender. I believe that we get taught them, and I am case in point of a woman
who was raised masculine, and stepping into my femininity is hard. I'm not saying
that any of this will be easy, but in order for us to evolve
and reach our full potential, men and women have to be encouraged
to express and explore both their femininity
and their masculinity, to see what magic can unfold when we allow all that we are
to shine through. The yin and the yang,
both sides of the coin, are two equal superpowers. I believe that a good place to start
is by telling more authentic stories and shifting the narratives
that we are told about how men and women should be. It starts with me telling you this story, and you telling yours. Thank you. (Applause)
