It’s Time To Get Excited Over The Program For All About Women 2017

Good news alert: Geena Davis is heading to Australia next year and she’s bunkering down in the Opera House with some of the most interesting and exciting women in the country! The program for All About Women 2017 just landed online.

The annual celebration of women, feminism and thought-provoking discussion will return to Sydney on March 5 (a few days ahead of International Womens Day) with headliners that include US writer and fat acceptance activist Lindy West, Pulitzer-prize winning journo (and author of One Child) Mei Fong, Worimi lawyer and member of the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council Josephine Cashman, and more.

There will be 22 events over the course of the day which range from talks and panels to comedy, theatre and music — new inclusions for the festival. Local comedian Zoë Coombs Marr will be performing her Barry Award-winning show Trigger Warning. Clementine Ford will be leading a cathartic journey through her hate mail. Women of Letters is returning for a second year, and The Checkout‘s Zoë Norton Lodge will be downsizing her storytelling night, Story Club, into a solo session. (Considering the quality of her debut book, it should be a good one!)

Though the day is a whole lot of fun, there are serious talks slated too. Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Lindy West and Van Badham will be drawing from their own experiences with name-calling and misogyny in a panel called ‘Nasty Women’; Josephine Cashman and Yiman/Bidjara descendant Marcia Langton will be addressing violence against Indigenous women; and Geena Davis is here for a session on gender diversity in the media.

Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2007 and has been commissioning studies on representation on screen ever since. She’s particularly focussed on the effect kids’ television has on young girls. Her research has found that stereotyped or limited roles for women can have a real effect on kids, and the opposite is true too.

In a study earlier this year, the organisation found that 70 percent of young girls doing archery were directly inspired by Katniss from The Hunger Games or Princess Merida from Brave. In one year, female participation in the sport shot up 105 percent!

Geena will be presenting cool facts like this at her talk ‘Women and Media’. To kill time until then, here she is doing cool archery stuff (did I mention she was nearly in the Olympics??) and shooting male dummys in the head.

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Check out the full All About Women program and buy tickets here. Multipacks are on sale this Friday and you can pick up session tickets from December 14.