What do you get when you have Natalie Portman, Ruby Tui, Dame Jacinda Ardern and FIFA’s Fatma Samoura in the same room? One hell of a conversation, that’s what…
As it turns out, the hottest ticket in town this week wasn’t to the thrilling semi-final match of the FIFA Women’s World Cup at Eden Park. See, this week, across town another powerhouse group of women got together to discuss equality, sport, the Barbie movie, resilience and a thousand other topics, in front of an audience who were hanging off their every word.
Equalize: The State of Play brought together Hollywood star and co-owner of Angel City FC (a women’s football club based in Los Angeles) Black Fern Ruby Tui, Dame Jacinda Ardern and FIFA Secretary-General Fatma Samoura, for one very memorable conversation.
And heck, did they have a lot to talk about.
Here’s some of our favourite gems from the discussions:
RUBY TUI: Cats, Role Models and Saving the World
Ruby Tui was first on the stage in a knockout red suit, and marvelled at how much fun the World Cup has been to watch in NZ, admitting that she’d been cheering on the Matilda’s since the Football Ferns were knocked out of the tournament.
She said watching the matches had been bringing back all those feelings of going out onto the pitch during the last Rugby World Cup. For her, that experience had been truly life-changing, thrusting Tui into stardom – not just here in NZ, but to an international audience. It’s something she says she’s found quite odd, and while there is now a lot of pressure to be a role model, it’s also a part of the job that she is grateful.
“You can say ‘fortunately’ or ‘unfortunately’ depending on how you see it, but I like to say fortunately, a by-product of our role [as a professional sportsperson] becomes being a role model,” she said. “And so, the decisions we make are a bit heavier. It’s funny sometimes, maybe it’s because I’m a Kiwi, but I’ll pick up a piece of rubbish and nek minnit it’s ‘Ruby Saves the Planet!’ But then if I do something bad – if I drop rubbish – it’s ‘Ruby Destroying Planet Earth!’ It gets a bit much.”
But, if the media attention – and attention out on the streets – is just what has to happen in order for Ruby to play rugby fulltime, she says she’s more than happy for it.
“I love it because I just love playing rugby – ask my manager, I’ll prioritise that I’ve got training, or I’ve got to feed the cat over anything. Those are my two things that I proritise.”
DAME JACINDA ARDERN: Regrets, resilience and keeping it simple
There may have been a Hollywood star in the house, but the biggest cheer of the night went up as the former PM walked on stage.
It was a slightly different scene walking to the Aotea Centre itself though, where a small group of anti-vaccine mandate protestors (yes, this is apparently still a thing people are doing) had gathered outside, knowing Jacinda would be in attendance.
That idea of having people often in opposition to you, your ideas and beliefs, came up fairly quickly in the discussion, as well as sexism in politics. Jacinda didn’t want to dwell on her own experiences, saying that hers was far different to what Helen Clark, Jenny Shipley and Marilyn Waring had to endure.
“I truly believe that all of us, whether we’re in politics or sport, someone before us laid a pathway that we are then blessed to stand on, and it gets easier for every next person,” she said. “I think the key is though, when we’re in those positions, when we’re blessed to be in those roles, let’s not pretend that we’re perfect. We’re not. We’re humans – we make mistakes. We get things wrong.
“In this day and age, I think we’ve come to a point where we dehumanize our leaders sometimes and we dehumanize our sports people and we expect them to be superhuman and super-resilient, but they’re just people. I think the more that we are willing to display that we’re just people, the more likely perhaps that people will be a bit more forgiving, or more likely that someone else might say, well, I’m human, maybe I can do it too. We’ll get greater diversity of leadership if we allow ourselves to just be our authentic selves.”
Reflecting on her time in politics, Jacinda said she only had a few regrets.
“One of the things I really regret – and this isn’t just about New Zealand, this is global – you don’t actually see the times when you work together, and politicians work together a lot,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be nice I we spent a little more time talking about the times we cooperate? But unfortunately, that doesn’t make a very interesting headline or story, so you don’t get to see it that often. I guess it would be the equivalent of every sporting match being a draw. It’s not a fight every day and it never felt like a fight for me, I got a lot of joy out of the job, I just didn’t get to talk about the joyful bits much.”
She said one of her favourite parts of the job had been visiting high schools and talking students because they were so grounded in what they wanted to see and what their expectations were. They weren’t cynical, she said, they’d say to her things like: “You’re in power – go do something! Fix it!”
“I liked that simplicity,” she said.
But it was also the little things she loved about her job like seeing a problem and knowing that you had it within your power to do something about that problem.
“But with that though, comes some pretty extreme emotions on both sides,” she said. “On the one hand people can feel very emotionally that you fixed something for them, on the other people can feel very deeply you ruined something for them. That’s just what comes with the job”.
NATALIE PORTMAN: Barbie, Equal Pay and Jacinda
Star Wars icon Natalie Portman hadn’t long sat down before someone in the audience screamed out, “I LOVE YOU!”. To which she quickly replied, “I love your Prime Minister – your former Prime Minister but forever PM”.
Natalie said she had loved her time in NZ – particularly the people here – and hoped to return again. And while it had been a “heartbreak” disappointment seeing the US team leave the tournament so early, she’d enjoyed cheering on different Angel City FC team members in other national teams, as well as just soaking up the excitement of the matches.
She admitted it’d been a strange turn of events finding herself involved in sports, as someone who was most certainly not sporty growing up, but that she sees a lot of similarities between the way actresses and sportswomen are treated.
“Thank God for Barbie!” she said. “Barbie is breaking these barriers and proving to everyone how popular female-centered filmmaking can be. But for years they’d say, ‘oh women don’t get paid as much as men because their movies don’t make as much’. And people say the same thing about sports – ‘oh women don’t get paid as much as men because people don’t watch them as much.’ BUT, if you don’t advertise them the same, if you don’t broadcast them the same, if you don’t market them the same, then how can you compare it?!?
“When you do invest as much in women’s sport as men’s, when you do invest as much in female-led films as men, then you come back and tell me that there’s a difference and justify that inequity!”
Natalie said one of the things that really brought her own unconscious biases around sport to the forefront, was her son.
She said her son, who is now 12, views women’s soccer no differently to men’s soccer.
“At the last World Cup he was eight,” she said. “And he was asking for a Megan Rapione shirt as much as he’d asked for a Lionel Messi shirt.”
It’s something Ruby talked about later with Natalie (after letting her try on her Olympic medal!), saying that what always chokes her up after a game is the little boys who want to meet her afterwards.
“When the stadium clears out at the end, it’s the little boys there who want the selfies and your autograph,” she said, saying she tries to play it cool on the outside, but on the inside, she’s sobbing. “I just imagine what they’ll be like, one day growing up to be All Blacks”.
FATMA SAMOURA: Expectations exceeded
The FIFA Secretary-General had high praise for Dame Jacinda Ardern for being a driving force in bringing the World Cup to New Zealand and Australia.
But she admitted that when it was decided we would host, she had her reservations. What would it mean having games on outside of prime-time across the rest of the world? In a place so far away from everything else? Getting broadcasters and sponsors onboard was already no easy task. Women’s World Cups were already running at a loss.
Instead, the opposite has happened. This has been the biggest tournament to date – it’s the first that FIFA has broken even on, which is putting very high hopes on the next tournament and the chances that the prize money may well end up matching the mens.
All in all, said Fatma “it has exceeded all my expectations”.
Which left her with a message to all New Zealanders, for being such wonderful hosts:
“Thank you for going to all the games, and really for having made this tournament one of the best – the most inclusive, the most colourful, the most spectacular, the most thrilling and most unexpected ones.”
