photo © Stine Heilman
“Once we break old gender norms, men will also be able to better live their full lives.”
—KATJA IVERSEN, president and CEO, Women Deliver
We bonded over Pippi Longstocking, the fictional red-haired and freckled nine-year-old girl from the 1950s children’s book series. I, as a child in New York City, and Katja, some four thousand miles away in Denmark, both identified with her and admired her independence (she lived on her own with only a pet monkey and horse as companions) and her heroic ability to handle all challenges she encountered, including protecting other children from bullies. “She is the ‘strongest girl in the world,’” Katja said to me with a wide smile, recalling Pippi’s repeated self-proclamation throughout the four-book series, which has been translated into 40 languages, has sold 165 million copies worldwide, and has also been made into a television series and a film.
It was January 2019 when Katja and I met at Women Deliver’s headquarters in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. I requested an interview with her as a potential honoree for Women’s eNews’s 21 Leaders for the 21st Century 2019 awards. Under Katja’s leadership as president and CEO since 2014, Women Deliver had grown from a staff of eleven to sixty. As I stepped into the company’s office space on the ninth floor of a historic building in SoHo, I was greeted by a wide open and brightly lit space, devoid of any dividing walls between desks, creating a feeling of complete openness and community. Only a few private meeting rooms encased in glass walls were interspersed, each named after a city where important international gender agreements had been made—or where the big triennial Women Deliver conference had been held. My interview with Katja took place in the Beijing room, which I mentioned to Katja was quite apropos, since in 1995 the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women had been held in that city, and that was also where then First Lady Hillary Clinton proclaimed, “Women’s rights are human rights.”
Katja greeted me with a welcoming handshake, and handed me a pin carrying the Women Deliver’s logo, a bright yellow arrow pointing upward and toward you. Its tagline read: “Invest in Girls and Women,” and as Katja said, “It points to yourself first, because that is where all change starts.”
It became quite clear early on in our interview that Katja would serve as an ideal 21 Leader honoree. She spoke of how gender equality is a “net positive for everybody,” and how women’s economic empowerment enhances families, communities, and nations. “Gender equality is not just a women’s problem. It is a societal issue, and a win-win. If we really want to create an equal world, men have to be involved as well,” Katja said. She spoke in a gentle yet confident tone. Her red-framed eyeglasses accentuated her blue eyes, while complementing her blond, shoulder-length hair. There was a gentleness in the way she presented herself, yet she also exuded a calm and steady strength.
Katja then told me that one of the effective ways to establish universal gender norms was by enhancing fathers’ connections to their babies. “When paternity leave is considered necessary rather than just a perk, and when childcare—and care work in general—becomes a joint responsibility, traditional gender norms will be broken, and we can move toward a more equal world, where women—and men—can live their full potential.” She reiterated this message when she accepted her award that May at the Women’s eNews annual awards gala. Everyone stood in applause, men as well as women.
I first learned of Women Deliver’s work three years earlier when I attended its 2016 summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Held once every three years, it is the largest conference on gender equality in the world. I was fascinated by the breadth and depth of the topics and issues covered, as well as the speakers participating, from Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to Her Majesty Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, to songwriter and performer Annie Lennox of the British pop music band The Eurythmics. Over six thousand people representing 169 countries, including ministers, parliamentarians, and government representatives from over fifty countries attended, and it was Katja at the helm, opening and closing the summit with bookended speeches that were as disruptive as they were defining. In her reflections of the summit soon afterward, she wrote on the organization’s website:
“The summit provides time and space for us to come together and find commonalities. The international community will never achieve the Sustainable Development Goals or significant progress for girls and women unless we work collaboratively across sectors and issues. Sliced and diced, we are less powerful, our voices weaker.”
Just a few weeks after Katja received her award, the next Women Deliver summit was being held, this time in Vancouver, Canada. I attended, and again, the summit did not disappoint in its scope of speakers or number of attendees, which had now reached over eight thousand. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose the summit to announce that the government of Canada would raise its funding to CAD$1.4 billion annually for ten years to support women’s and girls’ health around the world, which was historically the largest commitment to sexual and reproductive health and rights; President Uhuru Kenyatta of the Republic of Kenya committed to ending female genital mutilation by 2022; and The Global Parliamentary Alliance on Health, Rights, and Development was created, the first ever global platform for parliamentarians to advocate for better health care, expand human rights, and meet the Sustainable Development Goals, both in their home countries and abroad.
Yet, I was most enthralled by two plenary speakers. Neither of them held any titles of political leadership, but their stories were equally heroic, if not more so.
Esenam Nyador made a name for herself as “Miss Taxi,” one of the few female taxi drivers in Accra, Ghana, who refused to take no for an answer when she applied to trucking companies for a job as a driver. “When they refused to hire me because I am a woman, they started a war,” she said, speaking on stage to over one hundred attendees in the summit’s exhibit hall. “I set out from that moment to pump more women into the industry, and I won’t stop until there are more women participating in the transport sector,” she continued. Wearing blue jeans and a red shirt emblazoned with the words, WE ARE MISS TAXI, Esenam spoke about the business she started, Miss Taxi, for female taxi drivers, as well as the Women Move the City campaign, which trains women to drive city buses. “I want to use my power to give all women the possibility of flying with their talents, grinding gender norms into powder,” she said, her smile shining brightly.
Later that day, Nasreen Sheikh, who’d grown up in southern Nepal, stood on one of the other exhibit hall’s stages and introduced herself to a crowd of over one hundred at a plenary session. “From the moment of my birth in a southern Nepal border village, I was taught that my existence was unremarkable. Growing up, I witnessed so many atrocities against women that, by age nine or ten, my life seemed destined for the same oppressive path. I worked fifteen hours a day in a Nepali sweatshop as a child laborer, receiving less than two dollars per grueling shift, and only if I completed the hundreds of garments demanded of me. I ate, slept, and toiled in my prison-cell sized sweatshop workstation, too afraid to even look out the window. By age twenty-one, my family had arranged a marriage for me. But through the help of a kind stranger who taught me to read and seize my destiny, I escaped the sweatshop and the forced marriage.”
Nasreen would go on to establish a nonprofit organization called Local Women’s Handicrafts (LWH), a fair-trade sewing collective based in Kathmandu, Nepal. LWH empowers and educates disadvantaged women by providing a paid training program in design, sewing, weaving, embroidery, knitting, jewelry making, and pattern work. To date, LWH has trained hundreds of Nepali women, many of whom escaped forced and abusive marriages, and all of whom are determined to escape poverty. Following her speech, I walked over to her and told her that I would be publishing an article about her in Women’s eNews. After thanking me, she said, “Please also make sure to look at the label on each piece of clothing before you buy it, to make sure it wasn’t made overseas in a sweat shop.” I promised her I would.
It was not surprising that Katja led such a dynamic organization dedicated to empowering women and girls all over the world, particularly when you consider that, in addition to Pippi Longstocking, she’s been inspired by Nelson Mandela as well as her own grandmother.
Three months after the summit, I met with Katja again, this time at her headquarters. She told me about her grandmother first. “It’s all my grandmother’s fault,” she said with a smile, referring to why she chose this as her career. “She was born extremely poor in rural Denmark in 1915,” she added. “Her mom was frail and died early, so she had to take care of her four siblings from the age of nothing.” She worked as a maid to put her brother through college, and did the same years later for her husband, who became a teacher. But when it was her turn to go to college, it was considered inappropriate for a teacher’s wife to work, so she had two children instead.
“And she saved my life when I was born,” Katja said, taking a moment’s pause to look down at her hands, which were clasped together. “I was born five weeks early, at home with only the midwife, who left an hour later. I was too small to even cry, let alone feed at my mother’s breast on my own, so Grandma stepped in, stayed for a month, and made sure we were both okay.” As Katja grew older, her grandmother reminded her of the importance of never being financially dependent on a man. “She always told me, ‘You’re going to get an education, you are going to make your own money, and you’re not going to get pregnant before you’re ready,’” Katja recalled. “She also lent me money to purchase my first computer—and cried tears of joy when I got the education she never had herself.”
Nelson Mandela, whom Katja met a couple of times later in her career, taught Katja to keep fighting for what she believes in, but without bitterness. “He always preached love and collaboration as an ally for gender equality, and for lifting up young people,” she told me. “Now, when I speak with people from his cabinet, they tell me that when they doubted they could live up to his expectations and do great things, he not only told them they could do it, but he was also right behind them, supporting them. We need more men and leaders like that.”
For Katja, these “teachers” showed her that creating change was possible, but also, that “when you are strong, you have to be kind,” as Pippi Longstocking puts it. “They also serve as a reminder that sometimes we have to slow down and ask ourselves if all of our talking and good intentions are actually leading somewhere—to action and concrete results,” she cautioned. On that empowered note, Katja rose from her chair, as our meeting was coming to an end, but she made a point to tell me one last thing before we parted ways. “We work hard to change the world, but also have to have a little fun with good partners while we do it.”