Christina Ryan

International Human Rights Activist

Christina’s leadership is grounded in feminist activism. As the third generation in an extended family of strong, influential women, she has been part of a movement which has brought about significant social change in Australia. Influenced at an early age spending time with her famous grandmother, Edna Ryan, Christina attributes consolidating her thinking about activism to the role played by her mother.

Acknowledged as a skilled networker, Christina’s disability leadership style is embedded in her feminism. When disability became part of her everyday life in her 30s, she developed a practical and theoretical understanding of intersectionality long before the term was a part of UN language or in more common usage.

As delegate to the UN, and in her understanding of human rights treaties, she has demonstrated to other women that UN mechanisms can be used to bring about change for all women world-wide.

Christina identified that while flexible thinking and enhanced problem solving skills are tools of trade for the disabled, employment rates are low and career development poor. In response, she set up the Disability Leadership Institute in 2016, to foster leadership and career development opportunities.

Christina acknowledges that as a committed feminist, with world-wide leadership credentials, one has to take responsibility to challenge what is unacceptable, and lead a collective effort to affect change.

My apprenticeship: Things my Grandmother (and the sisterhood) taught me

The less formal stuff in my education is what is important. I have a Year 12 Canberra education so I was very privileged there. I haven’t got a degree in anything, because I was unable to get support at University at the time I needed it and I haven’t been in a position to go back to study. I would have to give up everything I’m doing to go and study. Truthfully, it’s taken me this long in my life to get some financial security, I’m not going to throw it away. Fundamentally, I am a disabled person and there are limits to what I can do. So I have no post-secondary formal education. People just assume that I do have a tertiary education because of my background and because I’m fairly coherent and I seem to know a lot. The reality is I don’t! I do have a company directors’ diploma.

I come from a well-educated family; literate and very articulate from the word go. All of us can just stand up and speak. I’ve only just become aware that most people can’t do that. All of that is skill-based stuff.

My mother is Margaret Ryan. I have my two Aunts and then I have all my aunties - growing up in the women’s movement I have a lot of women aunties who are the elders of the women’s movement. I can call on any of them at any time.

Like Marian Sawer, Gail Radford, Sarah Dowse, Biff Ward, I’ve called on her in recent times, Suzanne Bellamy, who backs me to the hilt even when unwell. There’s a huge number, throughout the Canberra 70s women’s movement. I know them, I know their kids. I call them aunties, I can call on them, and I learned things from them. Sarah Dowse taught me how to use a Gestetner machine! Women who had no money, no particular resources, but they had small children and I was one of that myriad. They had the skills and learnings to get things done. And I learned from them.

One of the things I liked about growing up in the women’s movement was the lack of hierarchy. There were people I knew you could go to for knowledge about various things. Like where to go for an abortion, for instance. I don’t think the apprenticeship I have had is possible any more. It’s pretty much the only way we have done it - through ad hoc mentoring, and I take it very seriously. Our approach has always been - if something needs to be done you get out and do it.

I know a lot of young women who learned their feminism from books and women’s studies courses – possibly in courses established by my aunt! So there were people who learned out of books, but I learned it on the job from people who actually changed the world. These women who got the femocracy going, the women who got the stuff happening globally who changed things. That is not something you learn out of a book.

I learned a lot from my grandmother, Edna Ryan. I have the enormous privilege of growing up in one of the most active feminist families in the country. (I’m a bloody Ryan.) I’ve been an active feminist since I was 8 years old. I did that not because I was told to, but because I wanted to be. If you grow up in an activist movement, and the union movement is one of those, then you can make your own decisions. I grew up in the labour movement. I went to things because it meant something to me to be there. I have three sisters and two cousins. and not all of them were engaged the way I was. There are six of us. Not all of us were frontline activist, in fact I’m probably the only one who was consistently a frontline activist. All of us are activist in our own sphere in our own way.

My grandmother and I were very close. I would stay with her every holiday; I first went and stayed with her in 1969 when I was 5. She introduced me to theatre, to the Archibald prize; we had a very art based relationship. And she was right in the thick of the equal pay campaigns. She always had time for us, as long as you were happy to talk about equal pay. So by the time I got to work age, I knew a lot about equal pay.

Other things she taught me about how to be an effective activist and how to make change were, firstly, use their own figures against them. Get government data and use it against them. They can’t argue with their own statistics.

Secondly, focus on one thing. She would remind me: ‘you can’t do all of that, what are you focused on?’ If you scatter yourself across six big issues you won’t achieve anything. Understand how far you can spread yourself. As a disabled person that becomes an even tighter equation. I would have arguments at Advocacy for Inclusion (where I worked) because they are very committed. My staff would say that something was related to what they were doing, but I would insist that they focus on the priorities that had agreed upon. This is a lesson so valuable, it is to me the cardinal rule of effective activism.

The personal is political in my family but for some people it isn’t. I’ve had to learn after a long time, that not everyone is like me. Not everyone is analytical. They accept what goes on and that is just the world around them. That’s a bit brutal. And then there are those who think that what goes on is OK.

The majority of people simply accept the structure that they are inside. The patriarchy; it’s comfortable, it’s an old sock. I’ve come to realise that so much of the way I think, the way I process things, the ideas I have is so much at the front at the pointy bit of the ship, that most people can’t latch on to it, it’s what I grew up with. So I’ve had to start working at how do I bring people along with me, when they are starting so far back.

Because I’m a third-generation feminist activist. I also come from a long line of unionists and campaigners and I have a communist legacy too. I don’t have to justify what I do, whereas my immediate peers have always felt they have to justify why they are taking up a cause. With us, we would have to justify NOT doing something if we chose not to.

I have a sort of activism maturity. It must be a bit like that in the political dynasties. You grow up with a certain understanding of politics that you wouldn’t have otherwise. With us it is similar, you grow up learning how to do things and how to make them happen. The pleasure I’ve found in it has been to actually do that, and to do it well. The sense of responsibility to do something and to use what I know is very strong. I can make a difference here and therefore I should. It sounds arrogant - but if you can do something, why wouldn’t you?

Margaret Ryan

I should probably mention a few things about my mother. We are still very close to this day. She is one of my primary carers as you would call it. She is not a Ryan - although she has been one for a longer time than anyone else. She joined the women’s movement when I was eight and it’s because of her that I am a feminist. People think it’s because of my grandmother and my aunts - in some ways her involvement succeeded because of them. If she had been doing it on her own, I don’t think she would have been able to sustain it. Because my father, despite being in a family with all these women, was just a bit of a misogynist. My aunts got her involved in the local women’s movement so it became the family activity in the 1970s. The women were always including us girls. We were always going to things. And my father just had to deal with it.

Probably the most remarkable thing my mother did, and it changed the lives of all four of us, was when I was nine, she went back to TAFE. She learned how to be an architectural draftsperson. She came from a very poor family and left school when she was fifteen. Her mother left her father when my mother was ten years old. He was appallingly violent. So she escaped from him with four small children. My mother went back to school at the age of 40 to become a draftsperson. She got herself a traineeship with the public service in the third year of her four years at TAFE. And then she went back to work.

They were a 1950s couple, they were very trad, there was no expectation that my mother would ever go back to work. (As Edna said, women have always worked, only wealthy women didn’t work.)

Margaret went back to work, and she did this with four small children - my youngest sister was three. We all became responsible for different parts of the housework. My mother would make the sandwiches in the morning. I had vegemite sandwiches for 13 years of my life - she didn’t have lot of time to be imaginative. That was her commitment. We would plan and prep the meals and she would do the cooking. My sister would do the shopping and arrange for Margaret to pick it up on the way home.

My mother taught us that you follow your passion. She went into a male field and she was forty! Many of them are still friends of hers. They are some of the top architects in town and she went through tech with them.

She also taught us that thing about not accepting things. She is a self-described table thumper - someone who would say, this is unacceptable! She would accuse high flying corporates at functions of all sorts of things. That is who we had as my mother. And we still have her! She is still like this. She doesn’t accept anything.

My activism and leadership

I’ve been a very change making activist in the women with disabilities (WWD) space for twenty years, and very active in Women With Disabilities ACT (WWDACT). I’ve taken a leadership role in our community generally. Not just for women with disabilities but for women in general. I’ve often been the first woman with disability to do something. I was the first Australian woman who uses a wheelchair to run for parliament. I almost made it too, just got pipped at the post.

Being the person out the front is often exhausting, frequently mentally depleting, and can require reserves of courage that nobody should be asked to put forward. I guess I have been doing that for a while. My sisters in the movement look at me as a leader. I respect that enormously. I’m mindful of it and I take it very seriously.

I’ve been an activist since I was eight years old! And anyone who knows me and my family will not find that surprising. That’s just how it is. I wasn’t just taken along to stuff, I was there because I was there with intent!

My first issue was abortion activism, the right to choose. At the age of 8 I knew exactly what I was campaigning about. I knew why. A couple of years earlier I had watched my mother have an unwanted pregnancy - that really gave me a strong insight into women’s bodies and how they don’t have control over them. I’ve been at it ever since.

I was once asked by a head of a department why I did what I did. I responded with, well because it has to be done. And she said, ‘you don’t have a sense of giving back? ‘I thought - what? Giving back to whom? Who gave me something that I am giving back for? The charitable model of activism - half the people I’m working alongside in the community sector are doing this to get to heaven - and I thought well good on you, but I’m not! I’m not working with people like that in my organisation. Other people ask if my activism springs from a sense of obligation – because I was looked after as a marginalised person therefore I have an obligation to return something to society! Well - Fuck off - get out of it! I have no sense of having been looked after by the system. In fact, a lot of my activism has been because the system doesn’t look after people like me!

I didn’t develop my disability until I was about 30 so I had an awful lot of activist youth. Sure, I was a privileged middle-class kid. My father had a good job in Canberra and I didn’t have the same struggles that my parents had but I never had a sense that I had an obligation to society because it had looked after me. Absolutely not! And I actually find - I sort of think that if that is the reason you are doing something, it doesn’t actually mean something to you. The reason you change the world is because something is wrong and you need it to be addressed.

It is hard work, and we need to be more mindful of what activism is in that sense. It isn’t something people do for glory and fame. Sure, that happens periodically for a small number of people but it isn’t the reason you do it. You do it because you know it has to happen.

The United Nations experience

I was one of the first women with disabilities to use the mainstream spaces in the United Nations (UN). I took The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and feminism to the disability movement. Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) was engaged with CEDAW when it hadn’t been before. I also brought in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) (The Beijing process). I did CEDAW and it was quite confronting for the committee for me to show up. I was visibly disabled and changed everything. The Concluding Observations are full of disability stuff in a way that is truly mainstream.

What was more significant, however, was that I sent a bulletin back home every day I was there. I would type up a summary of what was going on, talk about the difficulties of being there as a disabled woman and what the experience was like. I discovered that it was going global, not just to WWDA and the members, but it was going to other networks. This bulletin suddenly made the UN an accessible space for women with disabilities. OK you had to have the money and the capacity to get there. That demystifying and opening up of the process was ground-breaking. It shifted things. I was conscious that other women needed to know how to do this. Explaining what it is like to be the only disabled person there.

At CSW, I was highly aware of the power of being in the room. So finally at CSW, there is now a disability caucus. When I was there, there was not. There was nothing.

I was in a building that was inaccessible to people in wheelchairs! There was no way I could get to the check in counter or to circulate in the breaks. Michelle Bachelard got up and spoke but I couldn’t be part of it - I couldn’t circulate. There was no caucusing for me. The only way they could get me out of the building after the hard time I had getting in was through the neighbouring Salvation Army hostel, via an enormous numbers of stairs.

Despite all this, what I did was illustrate to a bunch of women was that they could use these mechanisms to make a difference. So I think that if I’ve done nothing else to change the world, I could die tomorrow knowing I’ve done that. I made it possible for disabled women to use the UN. And that’s what being part of a movement is. There is always someone who is the first one. It’s about using your opportunities in ways that mean that you aren’t the only one for long. You have to be mindful of that. The privilege I had of growing up in the women’s movement and using each opportunity to its max means that I was able to exploit that opportunity to its max. I didn’t just go - I went and I talked about it live. I made sure people knew I was there and could feel part of what I was doing.

Gender and disability

As a girl, you get conditioned not to put yourself out there and not make an embarrassment of yourself. How can you be a feminist and not tackle things? And as a leader, you have to take responsibility and challenge unacceptable things.

Like language. There are a few words you don’t use in the presence of people with disabilities, particularly disability activists. One is the word ‘overcome’. That’s the big one. Apparently Stephen Hawking overcame his wheelchair when he died! What that implies is that there is something fundamentality wrong with disability. This makes us so angry! Because Hawking had a very privileged life. He had the top end, white privileged version of disability! He was very lucky! The biggest brain on the planet. It’s not like his disability ‘held him back’. That’s another one ‘Held Him Back’! He succeeded ‘despite’ the disability - oh please!

Anyway - we know the white men of privilege. The other end of that spectrum is women with very evident physical disabilities. So I turn up to meet people with my wheelchair, my large piece of hardware, as I call it. I have a better brain now than I had in my mid-twenties when I was upright, but suddenly, I’ve had the lobotomy, as we describe it in WWD circles. We all recognise it; the moment you’re sitting down, there goes 80% of your brain out the window. And here is the thing, here comes the infantilising, because we aren’t proper women. We don’t look right. We are not blonde and upright.

I went to all these ‘diversity’ conferences last year, and that’s who was there. That’s who runs the diversity industry. It’s largely women and they are the classic corporate, slightly underfed, wearing incredibly high heels, very well-tailored women. Now, I make no judgements on appearance - you can wear what you like, - I’m a feminist! However, they are all the same. There is no diversity in diversity. It’s the truth!

So I turn up at these things and I am confronting. Not only am I there as a disabled woman, but I’m fairly erudite. Our sisters with cognitive disability are severely marginalised, despite the fact that they are some of the most amazing feminists I know. The thought that I might be the person in the room who is the expert and might have the answer is actually quite shocking, even though, privately, all of them want an hour of my time. I’ve got stuff to say that they find useful.

Although sometimes they can’t cope with me. I met a man who claimed to have worked in the disability sector in the UK, but he was very uncomfortable with me. I suspect this is where intersectionality makes a difference. There are people in the disability community, and I know they won’t be concerned about me talking about them this way, but they are the white men of privilege. They are the ‘uprights’, and they are the ones who are mainly working in the corporate sphere. They are probably men who are blind or deaf or who have autism; they are at the palatable end of the space. They are people who can come into a room and unless people know, just about everyone else thinks they are ‘normal’. And this is ableist - because being ‘normal’ is the pinnacle of achievement apparently. Anyway, they are the people most likely to be seen in the corporate disability ranks. Not professional women like myself,

Women with disabilities are not supposed to be intelligent. We are certainly not supposed to be leaders. We are infantilised, treated like fifteen year olds forever but we aren’t treated as bimbos, because people with disabilities are not attractive. The minute you have a disability, you are ugly, no matter how stupendous we are.

People with disabilities are obliged to be grateful, particularly those who require a good bit of assistance. The Christian model of charity is especially responsible for this, and it is damaging, because it creates a power imbalance that is unhealthy. This is a really serious thing - if we look at the gender implications of that, we can see how it contributes to the infantilising of women with disabilities. It keeps us labelled as ‘you poor girls’.

There is probably similar marginalisation with Indigenous people. There is no way I can understand racism because I am not on the receiving end of it, but what I have talked to Aboriginal friends and colleagues about is our common experience of marginalisation. We share experiences of simply not being treated as credible or having expertise, or of being a person who needs to be in the room and a respected inclusion in the group. That is a common thread of communities on the margins, the experience of being “other”. We have a very similar issue about not being allowed to speak for ourselves on policy and decision-making terms, because most of these marginalised communities are not in the rooms where decision making is happening. We are not in the cabinet, we are not on the corporate boards and the bureaucracy. We are not there. We have to tap on the door to be asked in.

Part of what I am about now is not bothering to ask anymore. I want to create our own space of excellence where we operate, and through that the world will come to us.

The Disability Leadership Institute

In 2016 I set up and run the Disability Leadership Institute. It was a moment of clarity where - for 20 years in the movement, we have recognised that we are no good at succession planning. We didn’t have ways of raising our new people into senior people. We’ve never had the time or energy to do it. So we ended up with a handful of us who were increasingly mentoring large numbers of people in both long-term and ad hoc arrangements. We were doing it all with our own resources and lack of time. So we thought we had to do something about this - we have to get serious about this. The Institute is about professional development. It isn’t a charity – deliberately. The majority of people equate disability with charity and that has to stop. I set it up as a private company - so it is my neck on the line. And we have just been finalists in the Telstra Business Awards. It is an achievement, not just because those awards are very blokey, but because there are no people with disabilities in that space.

At the awards ceremony everyone, without fail, including the Telstra staff, assumed we were in the charity category. I said no - we are in the start-up category, we are in the emerging business category. We didn’t want to embed the assumption that disability is a charity issue.

Our staff members, everyone we deal with, are people with disabilities. We have connections all over the planet, because there is nothing being done for leadership in the disability sector. We would be well within the law to set ourselves up as a charity, but that isn’t where disability leadership should sit. (I will point out that the Institute of Company Directors is a charity, but it isn’t damaging for upright white men to take that status. For people with disabilities it is.)

I was asked why I wasn’t cobranding the training we are delivering with someone else. I was confronted by the question, and I couldn’t figure it out. A couple of things came to the fore. One of them is that the other party isn’t disabled, so it would take the ‘owned and run by’ status away from us, and that is very important to us, and our community. It would also be because that is what everyone expects. People will interpret that as ‘we can’t do it on our own, we have to hold someone’s hand’.

One of our members was asked by their supervisor if they wouldn’t rather do a ‘proper’ leadership course. None of them are as good as the one we are offering! It is serious, high level, global practice standard. We face appalling prejudice, and it is constant. That attitude is just one example. It’s like we are disabled, so we couldn’t possibly teach anyone anything worthwhile.

When I first set up the Institute one of the advisory group ‘bludgeoned’ me into applying for a Westpac Social Change Fellowship. Only ten are given out every year to deserving applicants and I got one. My project was to examine diversity structures. I had the rich understanding of the women’s movement and I thought I could use this knowledge and examine other structures to explore what can be used in the disability space. It would give me the networks and understanding to advance disability leadership. I also wanted to find out if there was anything going on in the way of disability leadership in other organisations that we could have a look at. The answer to that was a clear no!

In my very first week I did a round of chatting with corporates up in Sydney, talking with their diversity people and going to conferences. It had never actually occurred to them that you could put the words disability and leadership into the same sentence. And there were people who didn’t even want to meet me! ‘We aren’t doing disability at the moment, we’re still focusing on diversity on gender at the moment,’ they said. So I said, ‘That’s OK, I want to learn what you have been doing with gender, because I know it is a lot and I want to know how it has worked.’

Only had one company refused to meet me - they didn’t have time for this sort of stuff. And I had only one interview in a year of talking to huge numbers of people across numerous sectors who was so confronted by me that they struggled with holding down a conversation. I really had to work hard there in my - I needed to get the information I wanted to get out of him. We only did 20 minutes.

What I arrived at, by the end of the year, is that the world is populated by the well-meaning folk. Sometimes I call them that in a disparaging way. None of the people I met last year who couldn’t imagine disability and leadership in the same sentence hadn’t thought of it because they were malicious bastards. Every single one of them was part of the well-meaning folk. It just hadn’t occurred to them. Because it just wasn’t a thing.

I call it prejudice and it is prejudice, it doesn’t matter how conscious it is, people don’t even see they are doing it. They recognise they don’t have enough disability talent and sometimes they recognise the gender dimension to it. Sometimes. Nevertheless, they do not have faith that I know more about the issues than they do. There is something in that space. It is really interesting.

Do people with disabilities do leadership differently?

We know we can teach a lot about leadership to other programs; we passed that mark a long way back. We don’t just teach women, we teach men as well, and non-binary and transgender folk. And we have people across all those genders in the Institute. I’m pleased they feel comfortable being involved, it tells me something is working. During my fellowship space, I was talking to people in the Westpac Future Leaders project, people who are doing fantastic things.

They asked about the things we are doing, and I started delving deeper into the ‘do we do it differently?’ question. We went through a lot of this questioning in the women’s space. Do women do it differently? Will having women in the cabinet room really make a difference? And the answer is yes. Women do do it differently, even though they also do it the same. So it’s the same deal with disability. This is where understanding different diversity spaces has given me a real boost, I’ve had the real privilege of knowing multiples spaces.

Disability activism is particularly siloed - you can really get stuck in it. And a lot of my activist colleagues in the movement over the years have no other experience. So they’ve only operated in the disability silo. They haven’t operated in the Indigenous rights space, in the social justice space, the women’s movement space; despite the fact that we are the most intersectional community going! So I have the privilege of having the gender perspective - and it taught me a lot about activism that I was able to transfer across.

So when I started thinking about ‘well how do we do it differently?’ - that’s how I developed the basis for our program. There’s a huge amount of stuff where we do do it differently. We have levels of resilience you wouldn’t believe, because we have lived lives where that is simply an outcome of how we have operated. Those of us who are out there doing stuff, operating in the world regularly, taking responsibility and making change...well there are things I started to notice.

The outrageous levels of resilience, if we could bottle and sell it we’d be very wealthy. Mainstream leadership courses send people hiking in the wilderness. Well, I’m not going to be doing that! The purpose behind all that is to create an experience that confronts a person and triggers their resilience. So, this made me aware that the average person doesn’t have resilience, they have to grow it, whereas we have just got it sitting there! If we don’t have it, we don’t leave the house. So - the gold standard of leadership achievements - we have it coming out of our ears. And even when we have the wobbles, and have bad days, well we still have it.

Wait - there’s more! We are masters of problem solving and lateral thinking! To operate in a world that is actually not built for us to be in, we have to be incredible lateral thinkers to leave the house, to get out of bed. Everyone I know who is a disabled person, getting out there changing the world, running an organisation or leading a board or sitting on a board; it doesn’t matter what they are doing, they are using that problem solving and lateral thinking ability. There is no point in panicking, because if we panicked we would never get out of bed! We just need to figure out the answer. There are entire courses in problem solving; libraries are full of books about it. We just do it!

Then, there is inclusion. The mainstream world is running around chasing its own tail trying to figure out how to be inclusive. They didn’t bother asking us! We know! We are the masters of inclusion. Now before I did this, I was running an advocacy organisation. That’s the first disability specific paid employment I’ve ever had. What you find amongst my peers, the other CEOS and senior people, not just people working in disability organisations but people with disabilities working in all sorts of places is that they develop a particular art for making sure that every individual is able to be there. Because we just expect it to be the case. We are operating in an incredibly diverse community, and we want that community there so we make sure they can be.

The problem-solving ability comes in handy there. So, you’ve got to have the captioning, you’ve got to have the access, you’ve got to have the this, the that. You’ve got to convert PDF docs into accessible ones. It has just got to happen. No argument. We have to be in rooms and buildings that work. We have to be in spaces where we can hear. It’s just part of the thinking. It isn’t a big extra, it’s just part of how you operate. How is that difficult?

You just have to sit down and have a chat about what people need and how is it going to work? We all need a chair to sit on, and everyone’s needs are different. It is so obvious it is not funny.

So, we are about confronting that patriarchal structure of the survival of the fittest. Privileged white men are the fittest and we know that from feminism. Disabled people are way down here right at the bottom. Disabled people of colour, disabled women, we are further down. We are the largest minority group on the planet. We are the largest minority group in the country, and yet we are invisible in the public domain. This is what the Institute is all about changing. It really does help you to understand how much it is about structures and mechanisms of exclusion. It helps you to understand what the patriarchy looks like. And for every marginalised group that is out there changing the dynamic, it is changing it for all marginalised groups. Except for women. Because we are seeing increasingly, and what we said should not be the answer, is that the white women of privilege are the ones who are making the gains. It is still very unusual for women of oppressed minorities to be in the room.

So we need to be more visible in the room. By the time I got to the end of my fellowship year, one of the last things I did was go to the Male Champions of Change breakfast. I was the token ‘crip’ in the room, and I was right up the front, put on the top table! How did that happen? You get noticed. Being in the room, just simply being in the room is so important. Suddenly, you can’t be talking about people when they are there. We know this about when women were turning up in board rooms. It is the same dynamic. Being in the room, it changes everything. When there is only one of you, it is still confronting. When it gets to 30-40% it makes a difference. You start seeing the difference. Being in the room is so important.

Leadership and the collective

I’ve done a lot of my activism in the last 25 years, when I am the only person with a disability in the room - the token ‘crip’ - and that doesn’t mean it is about me. We can achieve big things for our community but it is always with our community, because you never do it alone - activism is not a lone activity.

I have done things that have changed aspects of the world singlehandedly, but that happened because I was part of a movement. I was there because I was there for WWDA, not for me. Even though what I did was me operating in that space, I was there as part of the group of two million women back home. I was making the most of my opportunities, and how they fit with my/our priorities. Movements are about the collective. If you have problems with that, you shouldn’t be doing it! That’s the most important thing I learned through my apprenticeship - seize your opportunities.

To suggest that disability is a negative, when in fact it has given us opportunities that we might never have had. I mean, I would never have represented my country at the United Nations if I hadn’t been a disabled woman. It’s as simple as that! Half the other things I have done I wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t be doing the work I am doing now if I wasn’t a disabled person. So it has actually given me opportunities!

It’s given me access to a fantastic community, global sisterhood is wonderful. I’ve chatted with people in San Francisco, Toronto, London, Edinburgh, India, and New Zealand. I talk with wonderful women individually and collectively, regularly. We have a recognition of a common experience of oppression and marginalisation, but there is more to it than that. We are doing really hard work on the frontline in our various locations. We unfailingly recognise that each other is amazing! I love that! I’m privileged to have the global sisterhood of women with disabilities, we back each other, in the main.

These stories highlight the importance of the collective in leadership. The more you do frontline activism the more you realise its importance. If it is all about you, then you are doing something wrong. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are getting out there and are visible in the public domain, you are changing the world just by being in it.

Activism in the digital age

#Metoo has seen reinvigoration of frontline activism. Social media makes it quick, cheap, easy and immediate. It’s the type of stuff we were doing in the 1970s.

The digital sphere has made disability activism easier - and it is a recognised space. I am globally active with people who cannot leave their house. You can do a lot of stuff now, literally, from bed. It’s a big difference, and it’s major. Innovation is the outcome of disability activism, due to our problem solving.

All my coaching at the Institute is done virtually. I’m not sitting in a room - I’m talking to people in regional Victoria. Using software that is very good for people who lip-read. It’s better than skype and a lot of the others. It’s pretty stable and the lip readers find it really good.

I’ve also got people who can’t talk - but the software has a chat box, so people can chat with me in the corner while I’m talking. So people who never had access to stuff are suddenly in the room. That is real inclusion. We are at the cutting edge of using technology, apps, software whatever, to make things possible. For many people - digital platforms have made inclusion possible - It’s how we talk. For highly marginalised women with disabilities, some in Africa, some in the Palestinian territories - we can interface with them, even if they are the only woman they know of in the physical space. We use our scarce energy quite wisely through the use of technology.

Then I was asked by the wonderful women at CREA.org - who do a lot of global training in activism, human rights activism, and who work in the disability and sexuality space, to deliver a module in their human rights activism course. And now we have people from 30 different countries doing a course on human rights activism. I did something based on my experience at the UN - especially the CEDAW stuff. Those sorts of opportunities to teach people how to use the frontline as a woman disability activist are fantastic.

Major challenges going forward

It is very hard to be a WWD in a managerial role, and WWD don’t end up in senior positions because it’s a really good way to get yourself bullied. We just aren’t wanted. It must have been like it was for women moving into non-traditional occupations. It concerns me that we are still talking about bullying of women.

I think we are still in the situation where white privileged men don’t get it. Anything they say is simply language, they don’t understand. It is the point we are still at with disability prejudice. Most are well meaning, but most don’t get it. They don’t see their own prejudice and how much they are creating an environment where exclusion is rampant, and where bullying is endemic. People with disabilities are bullied twice as much as other staff. It happens right under their noses.

People need to seriously ask themselves ‘why would a person with disabilities bother working for me?’ to understand how they might get more people with disabilities into their leadership teams. They have to ask the questions - why would they bother working for you? What have you got to offer?

Because at the moment, the more senior you get, the more likely you are to get bullied out of the job. What’s in it for them? It’s a very high-risk game for people with disabilities. Everyone means well, they genuinely do. Until their new boss is me. Most of the prejudice is overt. We are still seeing it in corporate Australia. We still have a problem including highly educated, upright white women. So it’s still a great challenge for women with disabilities.

The toll of an activist life

The arts are where I had first hoped to build my career, but it’s interesting, because there is no such thing as a career when you have a disability. There is no such thing as a structured career plan. You use your wits to do what you can achieve. It’s a very different dynamic, and that is how I have operated all my life. However I have had a good education, and been able to do some fantastic work.

A year ago I left my day job. I had medical advice that I would die if I didn’t. And I thought; ‘OK, activism can kill you’. I thought, ‘how many women in the movement have I seen drop dead in their mid-50s’? And the answer is, quite a lot! Helen Leonard for one, a Sydney woman, kind of a protégé of my grandmother. She set up the National Women’s Media Centre. She literally dropped dead the week before the election when I was running for the Assembly. She had a massive heart attack and dropped dead. So when my doctor said ‘this is going to kill you’, I believed them, because I’ve seen it. Being on the frontline is not just hard work. It is actually dangerous work. People don’t see that. They think we are just being annoying, hysterical, just having a go, regardless of what sort of activist we are, but particularly as women. And particularly if we talk intersectionality.

There’s no recognition that the work we are doing is not just physically and mentally demanding but is very dangerous. The number of people who die young in the disability movement is disproportionate. Sometimes that’s because of the nature of their disability, but sometimes it is because they push their bodies beyond the limits that they can go. That crosses over into the women’s movement. The women I know who have had to stop working and haven’t been able to work since – too many. I’ve known women who are still recovering after stopping, I know people who’ve dropped dead. And then there are those who stop and completely withdraw. I know people who have been prominent on the national scene, but just have to stop.

You do get that tall poppy stuff when people get attacked for a moment of public profile. The public profiles bring a lot of trolling and a level of intensity on your life. It brings a busy-ness that is almost unmanageable and can be physically damaging. And it can create ridicule and exclusion. Because you are in the room, and you are awkward and confronting, and saying stuff that people don’t want to hear. Or they feel ashamed because they know that you are right, but what you are saying is too hard for them.

Lessons from an activist life

One of the things I’ve learned is that when you have influence, you should use it but you have to know when. You have to be circumspect. It is far more powerful than waving your dick around. Women who have the keys to the doors of power have taught me how to use them. Don’t open the door and hit someone over the head with a piece of 4 by 2 - unless they need it!

Being able to influence the relevant minister is really important to me, but you need to do it carefully. There is a time to be brash and out there, and I still do that periodically. I will be blunt when needed - I’m good at it! The majority of the work is almost happening invisibly. And that can have just as much if not more impact over time. When people latch onto that stuff, you get outcomes that are more likely to stick.

I’m not placatory. I don’t do diplomatic bullshit well but my father was in the diplomatic space for years and so I’ve learned how to use it. You bring all these things, including things in your background to your activism. It also teaches you that people don’t see things the way you do, and that you don’t have to be right. All this has taught me how powerful collaboration can be. It’s particularly powerful to those of us who don’t have the ability to operate alone, so we have to collaborate.

I got my confidence much earlier than many others do - and that is a privilege of my upbringing, because I was exposed to these activist women early. Also, starting my activist career as an abortion activist required a fair bit of courage - you have to have courage to be an abortion activist. And then I was an endorsed Emily’s List candidate so I was a prochoice candidate. I am still paying for that in terms of maintaining my privacy for personal safety. For instance, the experience of registering a company while needing my personal details to remain silent has been difficult. ASIC had no mechanisms to do this, well they do now!

I think it is important to learn and understand just how much courage you can have. Nothing will stop me, get in my way and frighten me off. When I was at CSW and actively being shunned because they don’t do disability, I had to bring all the courage I had to bear, to deal with the negative comments - including from my own fellow delegates. That courage was built on the knowledge that I was there for a reason, I was there to represent two million women. I know not everyone can do this, but I can because I have the capacity and the resilience. It’s that sort of experience that makes you realise that I can do anything, I can do just about anything. That’s an astonishing thing to know about yourself. It’s hard to talk about those sorts of things as a woman and as a cripple.

You also need to know that being able to keep and grow a network is a huge skill, part of your tool kit, and I am acknowledged as a very high grade networker. I have massive networks across multiple spaces. There is also the importance of the effective network. You can know people and never use them. Or you can know people and know when to contact them to make a difference. One of the great pleasures of my current space is that I can connect people to each other. And this is producing outcomes. Putting two people in the same space can produce magic. Who to put with who is an important thing to know. And this is where the disability leadership comes in, and it is embedded in my feminism. It’s who I am. I’m a feminist at core right deep in my bones before I’m anything else. I have the tools, of course I should be using them.

My current thing, the thing I find most invigorating now is sharing my knowledge, building more leaders, particularly young women. That’s the thing that gives me the most satisfaction in life. I love it when someone I’ve identified takes off – absolutely. Some of the hardest times are when a staff member comes in after six years and says I’m leaving. They started out as someone who always apologises and has become a confident woman who is ready to start ripples in her own space. How can you not be thrilled? It’s just fantastic. I could do nothing but that!

I’ve got an entire disability community I’ve got to be doing that with. That’s OK, plenty of work there...

Christina Ryan was interviewed by Dr Nikki Henningham on 11 September 2018 for the Redefining Leadership project.