‘Don't give up the fight,’ Meryl Streep tells women

If Emmeline Pankhurst were alive today her message to women would be simple: “Don’t give up the fight. It’s not over,” Meryl Streep said last night.

The actor, who plays Pankhurst in the film Suffragette, told a packed audience at the star-studded opening night of London’s first Women in the World event, that while women had come far since getting the vote, there was still plenty of work to do.

“We are coming up from the bottom, but it’s that upper echelon that we haven’t broken through,” she said, urging the audience to remember that “women’s issues are men’s problems”.

Suffragette’s director, Sarah Gavron, revealed that finding funding for the film was a challenge, adding that it was also difficult to find actors to fill the male roles. “We had trouble persuading men to be in it. Agents were calling us saying the male parts just aren’t big enough,” she said to laughter and cheers.

The first night of a two-day event which will feature the home secretary, Theresa May, and Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, as well as Nicole Kidman and Tor Pekai Yousafzai, mother of Malala, saw discussion of subjects as diverse as the refugee crisis, the brutality of Isis and shared parental leave.

Germany’s first female defence minister, Ursula von der Leyen, a doctor turned politician who introduced shared parental leave while labour minister and also found time to have seven children, explained that introducing a two-month “take it or leave it” period of parental leave for fathers was a gamechanger for working women in Germany, even if it created “an enormous shitstorm from these middle-aged men, especially those in politics”.

But she had succeeded, in part because of the help of forward-thinking male colleagues, she added. “If you fight for women’s rights, you need modern men as your allies.”

She also urged people not to see men doing childcare as “second-class mothers” but rather as “irreplaceable first-class fathers”.

Discussing the global refugee crisis that has seen an influx of 10,000 people a day into Germany, she said the country had a responsibility to have a “positive attitude towards protecting human rights” and to stand up for human dignity.

She added: “If you stand up for values you have to open the doors. It is not easy. Many people fear we will not make it but I am convinced we will make it.”

Queen Rania of Jordan, speaking eloquently about how the refugee crisis has hit her own country, told the packed audience that Jordan is currently hosting 1.4 million Syrian refugees – accounting for 20% of the population and consuming 25% of the country’s budget.

“Right now it feels the Arab world has gone through a series of earthquakes and we keep feeling the aftershocks day after day,” she said.

The Jordanian people had reacted with “passion, perseverance and quite a lot of compassion” but even with a funding drive to address the situation, the country and its NGOs were “reaching breaking point … Ultimately we can’t share what we don’t have and we don’t have much at this stage.”

Speaking about the rise of Isis, she called on moderates around the world not to succumb to the extremist group’s propaganda. “It is a very dangerous thing to think of Isis as Islamic, because there is nothing Islamic about them … We are singing to their tune,” she said.

“We need to see this is not a war between Muslims and non-Muslims but between moderates of all religions against extremism. Unfortunately they are dictating global perceptions … People are buying into that narrative and it is creating a huge chasm between Muslims and non-Muslims. [Isis] aim to weaken us and leave us more divided.”

She also urged politicians not to see refugees as numbers but as people, adding: “If anyone wants a world free of extremism it is [refugees]. A refugee is what you become when you run out of other choices. We need to remember those two things.”

There was powerful testimony at the event from Vian Dakheel Saeed, a Yazidi representative in the Iraqi parliament, who told the audience that 5,800 women and children had been kidnapped by Isis and many of them sold into sexual slavery.

While 2,100 had been freed there were 1,000 children between the ages of three to 10 currently being trained in Mosul by Isis, which was “teaching them how to fight – they are a new generation of terrorists”, she said.

Her sister Delan Dakeel Saeed, a doctor at the Rezgary teaching hospital in Erbil, spoke of the horrors that had been inflicted on Yazidi women and girls. She described the fate of girls who had been violently raped by up to six Isis men at a time. “I’ve seen a nine-year-old girl raped, and bleed to death in front of her mother,” she said.

After the audience was shown dramatic footage of Dakheel Saeed begging for help and breaking down in tears 14 months ago in the Iraqi parliament, she was asked what had changed.

She answered that she had written to Michelle Obama seven months previously and had had no response. “After 14 months the situation is the same. It has not changed,” she said. “I am here to say please help me. Please help my community.” The event continues on Friday.