In 2011i decided i wanted to be politician. And a leader in politics. And it was my first race. I ran and i lost, but it was the most elevated i had ever been, it was mentioned in russian media. And even an 18yearold girl they voted for the first time for me. Then police broke my arm because i decided to participate in protests, because there were a lot of corruptions in our elections. They broke my arm, he was a huge discussion about what is going on. With police violence. When i ran it again it was in 2014, i did not know that we had 16 million victims of Domestic Violence every year in russia. 16 million every year. And i collected all of my money just the help of grassroots fundraising because all of my efforts were highly impressed by authorities, i was followed by Law Enforcement and i got a lot of threats, we will kill your family and we will kill your kids, we know who you are, from many conservative progressive groups. Protected groups come protected by officials. But i decided i could when win because we needed women in politics. My main donors were women from all over russia and i hung funds raised this huge position Opposition Leader position in russia. And then after my electric campaign i said that we need to support more women, to to donate, to support them, to use technology to support women and encourage them and inspire them to be leaders. And when the women started i was very welcome. With my relatives in ukraine, i have witnessed this type of violence and i was labeled as a foreign agent, as antistate, and i am a civil defendant in five corrupt cases and i will have approximately 2535 years in prison. It starts with physical violence. And then kind of goes online. It becomes a sustained campaign online. And then it just keeps escalating and you have no choice but to leave, right. So this is obviously not something that all women politicians face. We see it across the board, as a womens rights lawyer, and you kind of symbolize how much more violent it gets online when you come from a marginalized community or you come from a group that people are trying to keep in its place. There is a transgender activist which has very dodgy rules for the space. What was your experience like and help debilitating was the Online Violence and how did it affect your work . Online violence has always been there. For me, it was so traumatizing because i come from a traumatizing transition, it was so traumatizing in india. You dont know whether you come out of it alive. And after that i was helping other women transition, and i get a flurry of messages like we are going to kill you, we are going to chop you up and throw you in the gutter, im sorry, there will be a lot of triggers in this my talk because that is how it is. So i was traumatized by these things, so much so that for a very long time i was anonymous. I used, even for press conferences, i used to wear a mask because i was so scared. I was so scared for 70 years. So many years. Until i learned to ignore them and i took off the mask one day. And now i am not really scared of them because i also know that most of them are not people but chat gbc. Gpt. Because it learn from people. Learned from people. Ok, you are a bought. But what it does is infect the community, which is way more dangerous. Every day there is disinformation against transgender people, calling them monsters and all that. It affects the community, and it affects society. Transgender people regret their transition. Scientifically there has been so Much Research done and people who go through transition, one of some of them have major regrets and some of them have minor regrets. But the vast majority of trans people will go through transition and find that there is so much gatekeeping done for trans people to Access Health care. You have to talk to a psychologist, you have to get you a sanity certificate and all of these things, and i will give you one example of a person i have been talking to, i have been talking to a lot of trans people to give them strength, i will give one example, this woman is trans and this in a private space in her room, she calls herself a trans male, she livestreamed herself she wear womens clothes, and she even talks to men in a female voice. Thats what they do. And to top it all off, she is a doctor. She knows everything about it. But still she thinks of the majority of trans people regret she fears that she will get her decision. But regret is not something just for her, i have never regretted my transition, because transition is not easy. You lose a lot. But you still want to do it because that is what you are. Transition is a regret, but Society Makes you regret. It will take there is no easy way to change her gender. To legally change your gender. To change all that you legally are, your name, your citizenship, your degrees, everything that you are. The only thing that you can do is do sex work on the street. I was there. I was just in the street one day sitting and i was thinking ok, what should i do, i have no money to eat. And i was contemplating begging for sex work and that saw a cow eating from the garbage because in india cows are holy. And so are trans people because we are holy and we can bless people. The cow is left to eat garbage on the street. And i as a trans person have been left to not earn anything for myself and to take from the garbage. And then the cow does not have any existence, it cannot prove its citizenship. I was sitting there like that cow in india, no name, no degrees, nothing. And i was there. And a friend of mine told me to go back to your previous self and go and get a job. I could not because that is not who i am. I want my transition but i regretted it because of society and disinformation that has made society fear. There is a Huge Campaign that is basically use enacted by ponds of political opposition and it seems like everybody around is transitioning, but the legal statistics of the actual statistics of strength of transgender of transgender peoples. 3 . And it somehow seems that we as transgender people are on a mission to attack every child and get into every house and make sure that every child wants to be trans. But that is not even with everything that has happened recently, the statistics point elsewhere. It is not something it is the environment that has been created for distrust. Explain this landscape to us, explain what is going on. Why is it going unchecked. We know that women in marginalized communities are kind of separated, and find the pressure so much and start to get off the leadership journey, the political journey, the citizenship journey that democracies will suffer and we know that. So if us a sense of what the landscape is and how and what is the first line of defense. I am honored to be here with these women, and its very interesting what happened, because as you are putting it it is Society Making them go through this. We worked on disinformation in my dissertation, and we worked to develop more resilience for women to combat disinformation and that is not the core of the problem. The court of the problem is not understanding to big issues, the first one is the lack of regulation in big tech, and social media, every time i talked to a regulation i talk about rule of law, usually they say speech speech and sanctions and all that, that is not the case. That is something that the big tech and social media platforms infected in our brain to prevent regulation. The other part is the impact of that information on democracy and that is what they do. Unfortunately they are affecting these limits on a personal level of what they are trying to do, portraying them as unfit for public life. And with that portrait of delegitimization or attacking you for being politically active what they are doing is trying to criminalize democracy. We now know that we are in a precarious position because there are less countries than ever that have a democracy. So that is very ghost basically because we have a ton of foreign influence and the best way to destabilize a government is affecting womens rights. And with that, while we can do and say well, these women are not fit for public life because they are transgender they wanted to sterilize every single child, guess what, they are changing the landscape of Domestic Violence, and they are actually affecting their interest in that country. And you might think that i am talking conspiracy theories, but this is reality. What china and russia, some examples like it talked about, are doing in our countries is incredible. And no one does anything because we talk about regulation, we get care, but when we look at social media platforms and how these are managed everywhere, there is an interest they are an industry like any other industry. So why are companies not turning around and doing anything. That is their problem and that is the real complexity of the issue, that what youre doing is saying you know what, my country, im from sheila, we had the competition but was hijacked bogus information. So when you look at these information campaigns, they are very much paid off to economic interests from other countries. Health rates, pension rights, water, they derailed an entire process as in 2019 and we are not going to start a second process where there is no regulation to go back and pursue prevent disinformation and that happens in latin america and it happens in asia and russia and a bunch of other places and its very difficult to see how we are going to move forward so we dont have a more do problem with in level and layered approach this. Thank you. This is your first term as a member of politics, and you are hearing women coming and talking about how it is too much and how the Online Violence they face is a price they are not ready to pay, and the voices got involved in this also because we started to see that more and more women were willing to step off the leadership journey because they did not want to kind of they did not know how to navigate the space. Lets talk solutions. Tell us about what you are planning with your African Department parliamentarian sisters. Thank you so much for having me. It is a great honor and pleasure to be here. Like you said, i think oftentimes when we are talking about online abuse or when we are talking about victims really do women people think of women in politics because it is assumed that women of power and women of influence and its actually to the point that even when you see a female parliamentarian being trolled online you will be shocked that nobody comes to the defense and nobly speaks for them or nobody calls it out, as opposed to what is happening to other groups of men. Why . Because society has conditioned it that once you get into politics you deserve all you get and you should have thick skin to deal with it. If i quickly talk about statistics, in tanzania we have 43 parliamentarian women. Less than 2 are active on twitter and last three4 on its degree. You can see the magnitude of what it is doing. It is making us selfcentered. The detrimental effect of that is that if we are not online what happens, our visibility is limited, our chance of getting reelected is limited, our chances of moving constituencies is limited, our chance of getting Political Parties parties to nominate us is difficult, but the worst of it all, so many organizations, you aim to increase the number of women in politics and increase the number of women in leadership but if a young girl, a woman, and aspirant is seeing a member of parliament being ridiculed and abused will they want to get into politics . No. Even the newcomers are being blocked. I am so grateful to be part of the fellowship because it has also truly empowered me and further kind of given me the confidence and the knowhow that this is my calling. I have experience may active online before being a parliamentarian and being a parliamentarian is two different worlds. I want to see more women in politics online because we are doing incredible work but it is not visible. One of the ways is legislation. We need to make sure that we go through legislative reform, particularly with legislations that mandate over politics. Most of these acts not recognized online abuse, for example tanzania recognizes genderbased violence, and there are certain types of offenses of genderbased violence they could get a candidate removed from the candidacy list. What what we are trying to do is picture that these laws also recognize online abuse. [applause] that is something i am grateful to you for, and how we have been trying to do that, but it is important to get our forces as Women Leaders to discuss these issues and exchange and navigate when our colleagues and people and peers we aspire to. The issue of online abuse is strong, but the issue of abuse of women in politics the three recognized and given special attention because of the effect that it has. We are kind of out of time, but im going to split that last question. So the two tech superstars, tell us what you think ai can do in this whole space, is there hope for it, can it be used for good, you and lena and you paulina, but, first of all what you are seeing is true, the normalization of genderbased violence is tremendous. Women themselves think that in politics i need to have a thick skin, or this is just part of the equation in politics. The issue of Artificial Intelligence opens a whole new category that starts with a lack of regulation, and the lack of recognition by Big Tech Companies and social media platforms that there is a huge issue that they are helping to disseminate and continue endlessly. What are one of the bay things we have to do is start with examples like the Digital Services act in europe, there are a lot of things that need to be corrected. But this is a starting point where governments are starting dialogue with platforms to see what can be done. Thats a vikram pandit. Second we need to learn and share knowledge. If we are able to understand the impact of Artificial Intelligence, we will be able to understand what we can do in order to control and prevent. The third part was transparency. We need platforms to be transparent about who is making decisions and how the decisions are made, otherwise we can do nothing about the issue of correcting this information and preventing genderbased violence. I am the founder of the Technology Firm and we have campaigned against this system. Now we have sorted this draw more that we are fighting again because we were sure that alec would cause great harm. We were sure that we needed to stall the use of ai machines to be able to create this total digital surveillance all over the world. But i think that we have the steps to do three steps to do. Spread knowledge about ai. Ai is not neutral because the user is a human being. Maybe this is the last century of human beings. But if you spread this knowledge and influence, if you dont know anything about ai you need to spread knowledge. The second step is about regulation. I am a lawyer and i was fighting for many laws to prevent the use of ai for terra regimes. But i was not successful, and i am not sure that regulation is the solution for that. The solution for that is how we use Digital Technology to protect our privacy and autonomy. The key is privacy and autonomy, how you use personal data and spread your personal data, if you spread it it is your responsibility and you need to know everything about that. Its not about regulation. We have a lot of cultural regulation and in my country we have a privacy law and when my privacy was violated by this kind of government i filed my lawsuit that went to the court of human rights. Its not about regulation because how can i prove that i protect my privacy and autonomy on my own. We need to unite all the women from digital dictatorship countries to share expertise and be vocal about that because now we are not so vocal and we try to protect ourselves and we dont know how to do that because we dont share information and we have a lot of influence from russia. This information and misinformation and digital threats and surveillance, and we can share that expertise, and we need to have these 12345 steps on how to prevent it. I think this will help us more than any regulation. I am for regulations, i was fighting for that, but it is not the solution. They forgiving us in agenda to work towards. I know we are terribly out of time, but one more question to you. We know that the European Union has made baby steps in this space, and you work in there. Tell us about how did it feel, did a load lift off you, did you feel safer, did you feel validated, recognized for who you are, and i think that is where the story is, at the end of the day. Which is a space that gives you the freedom to be. Tell us a little bit about that transition, and what it feels like to live in freedom. It feels like a transition from an animal to human. For me, it was that. Because in india, i was not a human. I was something to be feared, not a capri human not human. I felt accepted and i felt safe to voice my concerns and i found a community of people who can i can call friends. I have a lot of friends in india, who are all trans. I dont trust people in india, i am scared to interact with them. I always put on a mask in front of some people. But in the European Union, especially the netherlands, i found a community where i can be myself. That is the hope i have for india, that all the young people were fighting this battle some date you dont have to fear. We are going to trust you to keep that ethical space first. Yes, and i believe with the help of other voices we are going to be able to do that, i think it is important to realize that Artificial Intelligence works with the data that has been put in and there is a lot of gender bias in that data and that needs to be addressed as well. But regarding african parliamentarians we are going to Work Together to get more women online and women more physical visible. Thank you so much, i know we are over time, but thank you. Important and relevant topics. I know we have all seen those headlines about ai. And now we are going to hear from leaders working towards solutions to the Climate Crisis. This is an issue that is ever present and emergent and here to moderate this discussion, please join me in welcoming the op with women World Wildlife fund. Thank you. Ombudswoman at the World Wildlife fund. Thank you. Good day everybody, lovely to be here and welcome to our talk on women at the heart of planet solutions. The uns ipcc report released in april says that it is now or never to ask if we are to meet the 1. 5 degrees target to limit Global Warming. Im delighted to be joined to make by four remarkable women leading the charge on looking for planet solutions. We have the founder and cofounder of ecoways, the managing director of caribbean limited, and the executive director of the interamerican can commission on women, and a climate activist and founder of climate cardinals. Welcome, and lovely to be here with you today. Im going to be looking at Generating Solutions from a privacy perspective, developing green energy from the waves and what that means in Generating Green Energy and providing that green energy to the grid. Would you like to share with us how you got into this line of work and what, from your perspective are some of the primary challenges in encouraging the shift towards Green Energy Production . My story is quite unique, i lived in israel but i was not born there, i was born in ukraine in 1986. At after chernobyl exploded, the Largest Nuclear disaster in terms of cost and casualties, i was one of the babies that suffered negative effects. I actually had clinical death, and luckily my mother gave me mouthtomouth resuscitation and save my life until the ambulance came. It was a Second Chance in life, i dont remember any of it, i was a baby, but growing up, they said you got a Second Chance in life and you should do something with it. But there energy was not popular when i was little, so i went into politics, i became this politician, and this is how i would change the world, and there was dont line up of lining up to hire a young lady and then i ended up as a hebrew english translator which exposed me to the world and i came up with my own ideas in my own solution, and in 2011 i started my company with a business partner. In terms of the challenges, i usually say that my biggest challenge are the classic challenges, there is not a classic framework or legislation for Innovative Solution solutions. It takes time for the policy Readiness Level the get married we need to get. But here i would like to Say Something personal. In 2019, our Company Became the First Company to be listed on the nasdaq stock stock of its kind. And we were looking to hire up your company so we went for the Biggest Company in sweden, and sweden has a lot of quality between male and female. And we made a presentation and at the end i stayed in the room with one of the senior ladies in the company and you guesstimate you want real advice, you want to be really successful, and i go of course. Tell me. You have to step down from being the ceo and higher and aldermanic with white hair. Because a woman will never be perceived by the Financial Markets as an expert. But the men will. As you can see, i did not set down. Step down. But what i did learn is that many times women tell we get told that we are too weak, and that we should step down but we should not. If we do, our daughters will step down and their daughters will step down and then there is a very negative chain of events that is very difficult to stop. Follow your dreams because you can do it. Im going to turn to heather to share her personal journey and the sustainable in the Sustainable Development arena and whatever challenges you have may face. When i was 13 years old, i had i lived in what was in my mind a horror movie. I had a big house and lovely art, and great family. And then a hurricane came, and we get preparations and all that, and then the hurricane came with such force, and i was so horrified. I was horrified in the face of Mother Nature and natures spirit, and was wind and rain and just this howling that was horrific that i would never want to hear again. I have of course heard hundreds of times since, on that particular night in the middle of the night during hurricane gilbert, our roof caved in. We were standing up looking at, and our neighbors roof flew out. And we would like what just happened, and it was dark, the electricity was off, and we did not realize there roof was gone. And be heard screaming like are they ok, and while we were screaming, our own roof listed. It comes back police officer, the roof lifted above my head, and the wind was blowing and leaves scattered across the room, and it was howling and it was a complete horror for me. I was 13 years old and that memory stayed with me forever. The hurricane occurred in september, and we did not get to go back home until december. I went back to school it before christmas. In month of just being in the house. What stood out to meet the most that not what stood out to meet the most that might was that the house kept us alive, so i did not know what would happen if we lost the roof, if i would die. At that moment i was like my first thought was how i do this, how do i do this and how to do better, and that i went to architecture school, and then after studying buildings and understanding buildings exit how can i do better and i went to study urban design because it cant be just a building, how do we look at the cities, how do we look at the i we do everything, and so that moment really transformed my whole career and in terms of challenges, i would say even today i have had the pleasure of working not only with my own government in jamaica but in trinidad and projects all across the caribbean, we are really starved for resources. A single event can destroy not only the physical resources of the country, it can take lives and set a country back. Im going to use an example of dominica, it had hurricane maria. That single event decimated their gdp, removed all of their investments in roads and bridges and airports and everything was gone. Can you imagine, as a country, you find the resources to invest in these things and then one event, what event, we in the caribbean spent 60 of our lives and hurricane season, 50 of our lives where we are aware of the clear and present danger of a storm. And if one event and sometimes we have 20 or 30 events in a hurricane season, one event can just remove all of the work that is done. Dominica says that the single hurricane sets and set them back 20 years. How can you ever advance, how can you ever develop and put money into education and health and everything every year, if everything every year gets set all the way back. It is such a huge challenge. Thats why 1. 5 to stay alive was the call of the developing states back in 2016, i think it was. Between that, where we were on the global stage saying we must achieve 1. 5 to stay alive, and i remember feeling hope at that time, that the world finally hears with us and stays with us. And we still have not achieved those goals, and it is a big challenge, we must achieve these goals. At i said i was hardened back in 2016, but in the last few years we have not only looked at this as a slow burn but loss and damage, that means a lot to me as a professional because the losses every time somebody loses everything from a move to it building to a bridge, to an airport, all of these things set us back. That is why it is so important to do this for, and the 1. 5 remains, Climate Change is real to a lot of us, and hurricanes are not the only thing, i left jamaica where we were having a heat wave and a drought. Im just going to stick with hurricanes today. But yes, there are so many challenges and we have to keep working. And xfinity actually personalizing it and keeping it grounded in reality, you have personalized that as far as that. You have also touched on the role of governments because whether it is regulatory or reform or resilient urban development, we cant have these conversations around meeting the targets without the role of government, i think about your role in an Intergovernmental Agency and the work you are doing around mainstreaming womens voices, you want to share some reflections with us in that regard . I would like to say thank you for the vital voices because the alliance between women is very important and between those organizations is very important. For us it is very [no audio] about the Climate Change, and all of this happening about women is invisible and not considered. What happened with experience, what happened when we were talking about women with intersectionality, have it transforms and exacerbates wrists, indigenous women, what happened in the region, what happened with women migrants, women living in certain countries. For us, Climate Change affected every single aspect of our life, and if you are woman you are behind in the access to basic resources such as food security, highquality service, work access, educational access, land access. Women in rural areas build their life from that culture since the most women in countries own a very small proportion of land compared to men. It is understood that the mainstream experience and in Climate Change and the big challenge is how women make decisions, how women can put an agenda of women in the mainstream, how can change and additions change the vision and the focus that women make women agents to change. This is an important way for us to do with feminist women. So we are putting that care in the mainstream of all the situations and interpretations. We are putting that care and all the people, we care about the health, and we want to cure the land. This is important, and this is another perspective of how we can push the agenda of the transformation and how to put the needs of the women in the mainstream of that discussion. Thank you so much. Because i think we all know that the impacts of Global Warming, Climate Change are experienced by women disproportionately and Society Given cultural norms and so on. What drove you to establish the climate cardinals, and picking up on the idea of mainstream voice and womens voices in these challenges and finding solutions, can you share with us what drove you to get into the work that you do . The mission at vital voices is very special to me because i started this work when i was 12 years old, and 21 now, but when i was 12 years old i took a summer visit to my parents home country, and i was struck by how awful the air pollution was and later learned that thousands of people are being hospitalized everything that because of the air pollution and also that the middle east is on the front lines of a Climate Crisis. To pictures there are rising more than twice the global average, and i was really alarmed when i saw these things and i hope to engage in a conversation and i was even more shocked when i realized they had never heard about words like Global Warming and Climate Change and i found a study that said only 5 of iranians could explain the Greenhouse Gas if it. There was an extensive log of climate literature in iran. I worked with my mom after realizing that we needed to translate resources into farsi so we could teach them about what was happening in their community so that we could be empowered to be part of the solution. And this experience of working with my mom really inspired me to input work with various organizations until ultimately i started my own nonprofit, when i was a senior in high school, and we now, really because of other young women who i work with, have grown to over 9000 volunteers across 40 countries with an average age between of 16. We are translated over a Million Words of climate resources into other languages just because of your five volunteers. Youth led volunteers. That really speaks to the power and enthusiasm of young people and how desperately they want to be part of this solution to a problem that they did not cause. It is important to be here with all of you because i think it is really important for other young women to seek it is really hard to be something or see someone and think can i pay that person, can it be part of the solution, and my goal has always been to show young women there is no reason why they cannot be sitting out here talking to you all especially because so much of my journey was working with my friends and inspiring them, like my best friend, who works with me every single day at climate cardinals, you heard from helena, one of my best friends and im so excited by the work she is doing to protect the amazon at just 21. It affirms to that young people are currently the future, making change happen and it is so important to foster this intergenerational dialogue. We can go even further. [applause] thats fantastic, giving so much hope, and turn turning frustration and anger into action is remarkable. Keep up the excellent work. Because you recognize that access to information and making that information accessible was a solution to an enormous challenge and i want to give the rest of you the opportunity to share from your perspective, what are some of the highlights at the end of the tunnel that we can focus on and work towards with the targets we have put . I will start they giving three facts and what solution. Fact number one, if the Energy Sector where i work, 95 of the executives and Board Members are men, only 5 are women. Fact number two, 98 of the Global Funding is going to men. Only 2 goes to women. Fact number three, which might surprise you, companies with women on their boards or female founders perform much better than companies that do not have. The solution, give us more money, and give a sisi at the table, because we make sense. Any solutions from you, heather . Solutions have such a wide range i following what you said, one of the important things is to get funds to people who need it. But we also need to talk as a professional that solutions are not always the huge things and they are not always new things. One of the things i also do is advocate, lets look at what our ancestors do. You can see blocks to take you out of floodwater, we have filter filters for sunlight to make Living Spaces better. One of the things i like to talk about is the hurricane strap. Its a simple metal rod that is twisted. What happens is that you nailed one and to the wall or the beam and you nail the other and to your roof. And that little thing holds on your roof. I told the story of how i almost lost my roof, and that is a simple twisted bit of metal that we did not have in 1988, and those Little Things make a huge difference. We dont know have as many of those as we did then. It can be very very simple and inexpensive and we have to be open to all solutions. Are you finding it to easy to get those solutions adopted, and how do you make that happen . It is so awesome when you start and you find something simple like that, and it is now a building standard, and that is also part of the work where we introduce things into politics and policy but including learned knowledge. People will those built those houses, they did not have a code, but they made it work. There are many levels that you need to work on with solutions, but now even if it was not in the code Everybody Knows that it works. So we use it. There are many ways in which we can not only find a solution but disseminate it. Any final remarks from your perspective allie hunter, talking about enabling environment from a government perspective, in terms of mainstreaming gender voice in the conversation . We need to raise the voices of the women in everything they are involved in. We need to the ability of women to make decisions, the empathy and the articulation and the good negotiation, we need these abilities to transform the world. Nothing about us without us, this is the best point to understand what happened with Climate Change and why it doesnt need to continue. I would say what it so critical for women to be involved because 80 of people who are displaced are within, such as it so critical for the people being disproportionately impacted by the Climate Crisis to be part of the solution making, especially also when you consider that it is people of color as well who are being disproportionately impacted by the Climate Crisis. The more we can bring voices to the table like the voices of young people, people my age already experiencing the impacts of Climate Crisis at a rate three times higher than our grandparents, so having these voices at the table who understand the severity and urgency with which we need to tackle the Climate Crisis i think will really push progress forward. Right