On #IWD we spoke to A/Prof Jo Cavanagh, Prof Catherine Itsiopoulos, and Katherine Ellis about healthy ageing for women through diet, lifestyle, and community.
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[Grace Packer] This is a Just Gold podcast.
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[Grace Packer] Recorded on the lands of the peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, we pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
On International Women’s Day we spoke to A/Prof Jo Cavanagh, Prof Catherine Itsiopoulos and Katherine Ellis about healthy ageing for women through diet, lifestyle, and community.
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[Katherine Ellis] Tell us a little bit about your area of expertise and how you're seeing that affect women's lives and potentially making them invisible and the areas where we might be able to actually pull levers to make change.
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[Prof Catherine Itsiopoulos] And I’d like to talk about two different aspects and one is my professional background which is in health and biomedicine so my background is in clinical dietetics and I’ve moved into academia and my research is focused on health and well-being and it's landed with healthy aging and my work has looked at interventions of healthy diets like the Mediterranean diet and lifestyles to prevent chronic disease and achieve longevity and healthy aging and a lot of that data we've learned from Southern European migrants that have come to Australia and continue to have that longevity so my research has been a combination of finding out what is distinctive about migrants from Southern Europe and why have they retained their longevity although they've been here for 60 years and a lot of that is about diet quality of course and I would say that being a dietitian, but that social connectedness is absolutely key the so the clubs the eating together are very much part of the Mediterranean lifestyle why is this important for women. Younger women are protected from some chronic diseases particularly heart disease because of estrogen so that means that you hear about heart disease risk and men have got a much higher risk of mortality or death from heart disease compared to women but not postmenopausally. Women catch up really quickly postmenopausally but we don't focus on our health as women because we think well when we don't have as much chronic disease, but heart disease can be quite a silent problem in women because the symptoms of heart attack are different they're more silent so I guess one call-to-action is to really look after your health postmenopausally. You are at increased risk as compared to your younger years from heart disease so look after your health. Why? Because you need to stay strong and you need to be healthy to stay visible so that's the health and longevity story and part of it is to empower women in being able to care for yourself for family in terms of cooking and choice of foods and preparation of foods because what's happening and this is particularly in younger women or in younger people is the lack of knowledge of how to look after oneself how to cook and eat and everything is ordered online because we've lost those simple things that back in in the day we learnt and they were passed on so we go back to the role of women in many cultures and I’ve studied the Greek Mediterranean culture for many years and that transference of knowledge around nutrition and health comes from women, the older women so that's something you know, mother to daughter that I recommend that we continue. The other side of my experiences around academia and the inequity that we've seen through the years in education, in students but also in women in academia and women in leadership and that gender gap, is that gender inequity is narrowing because now more girls go to university than boys you know by a few percent so that's a great thing but there is diversity because in some areas like nutrition dietetics health nursing education we're up to the 70%, 80%, 90% girls and women whereas engineering 8%, 10% so we need more women in STEM and that would mean more women growing into careers in those areas in science in engineering in building and then more women leading in those areas so encouraging women in STEM is another huge initiative that I’m behind and also women in leadership and women from in promotion in academia because women tend to fall behind in research because we're carers we have our families we stay home we don't have the opportunities that men do to continue that career and particularly in getting the grants, in publishing the papers so supporting women in promotion and considering relative to opportunity is something that's critically important so another role that we have in academia is to support women for promotion and ensure we've got equity there.
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[Katherine Ellis] I’m actually seeing parallels, I worked in the corporate sector for 12 years before I moved into the non-profit sector and you know I saw situations where women were stepping out of the workforce to have babies and then quite often not having the confidence to come back quickly because they felt that their skills were out of date and so I think that schemes that companies can run about actually onboarding women back into the workplace and supporting them in that with tech skills and a really friendly ecosystem and flexible working and things like that I think probably across any sector is going to be valuable but what I also saw in the private sector were was that women… I called it a responsibility complex women had a responsibility complex so they would take on sort of the office admin and you know planning birthday parties and making sure that the I’s were dotted and the T’s were crossed before the presentation went out whereas quite often that when that was a very gender based thing quite often and the men they were focused on the deliverables, ‘what's going to make me get noticed?’ and I saw that actually have an impact on women's careers and I imagine it's quite similar to sort of putting your hand up in being bold and confident about getting a research grant or whether it's a promotion in the private sector.
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[Prof Catherine Itsiopoulos] Absolutely, and any promotion and I’ve supported many, many women through promotion. Women have to wait ‘til they tick every single box and more before they put the promotion application in and I remember a story of a woman and she was at a level B, entry-level academic for 20 years so we worked together and she was promoted in that year and she said ‘nobody believed in me until, you know, we had we had this engagement, this conversation. Nobody made me feel that I could do it’ and I thought well, you know, if it was a guy, you know, we would have applied many, many years ago.
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[Katherine Ellis] I think that's a, I call that sponsorship, but actually I’m not the only person who does, this sort of concept of sponsorship in leadership where leaders promote and support and sponsor the people they see themselves in and when all the leaders are white able-bodied men it's the white able-bodied men that usually get the opportunities and the promotion and I think that's another reason why we need more women in leadership but we also need men to be understanding that if they can spot young female talent in their organizations and actually sponsor them not just mentor mentoring is different but actually sponsoring them and putting them forward for projects or recommending them for promotion or even as you say believing in them and telling them to do it themselves it can be really powerful.
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[Kyriakos Gold] You can connect with us on social media @JustGoldWomen or on our website at justgold.net.
The Invisible Woman Project is a social partnership with the City of Melbourne and in this space we will be hosting consultations for women from across Victoria but in particular from our city so you can connect, you can share your stories, you can be on video if you want, or you can just make friends. As Jo mentioned before we've also got a partnership with the Good Things Foundation so The Invisible Woman Project will also offer some digital literacy skills program over the next few months so do connect with us about that and finally on our pages you can subscribe to our podcast and docu-series that's coming up over the next few months thank you for coming in tonight, thank you for joining us and let's Break the Bias together.
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[Grace Packer] Join us next episode as our guests discuss how strong social connections can ease invisibility for women as they age.
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[Kyriakos Gold] This was a Just Gold podcast. Find out more about our social enterprise at justgold.net.