I used to only campaign, but conversations can be just as powerful as activism against misogyny

When I began political campaigning in 2017 – lobbying, running full-scale national media campaigns and working with politicians – I saw changing the law as the biggest thing I could possibly achieve. It was a David v Goliath story, and our institutions are taught to us as untouchables so, I know it was a gargantuan effort. I lived through it.

You see, it’s not that I don’t see lobbying and changing the law or changing global Instagram policy as ‘big’ work, it’s just that I believe that big work happens all the time in much less visible ways. I truly believe that the things we can’t measure have a giant effect, too.

For the last three years conversations and dialogue have become the meat of my work – instead of positioning myself as some sort of gatekeeper of solutions, I’ve been trying to offer my skills and knowledge and explore solutions – and ways of thinking about them – with others. Some of the conversations I’ve had changed my thinking and behaviour for the better. There have been moments when ideas that felt cloudy or complex slotted together for the first time, and made perfect sense.

More often, though, these conversations have allowed something to slowly come into view over a period of weeks or months, and though I might not have felt the satisfactory click! of the dots being connected, I’ve looked back and realised I can articulate something so much better than I could the year before, and that instincts have become sentences. Ideas I didn’t have the words for, I now do. I don’t know if there’s a way to possibly explain the power that conversations can have. I mean, how easy is it to recognise that one of the most powerful forms of cultural progress is the thing you do all day, every day? The thing you do without thinking?

When it comes to gender equality – the topic I focus on in my work – we are living in a deeply unequal society, where gender and racial hierarchies define systems, institutions and our culture, to put it plainly, in the words of Richie Reseda: “we have systemised white male insecurity as its worst”, and having worked in arguably, the institution that represents that truth the most, I came away from it with little hope. “If I’m in the place where the most change can be made, and it reminds me the most of the problem, what does that mean?” Is what I used to think to myself in bed at night during political campaigning.

The majority of the conversations I had in parliament were carefully considered chess games, not conversations. Optics were more important than integrity and I never felt like I was ever able to be truly honest because those I was in rooms with were playing a game I had to assimilate into in order to have a chance of winning. People sat in rooms, at tables and talked, smiled, nodded, asked questions, offered sympathy and made jokes, but most of the time – save for with a few politicians who seemed more genuine – it all felt remarkably inhuman.