Image Credit : Your Creative Agency
Project Overview
Madam Speaker is Australia’s first digital archive of women’s speeches, challenging historical gender biases in public discourse. Created through a partnership between Your Creative and the Victorian Women’s Trust, it curates over 200 speeches from diverse women leaders. The platform disrupts male-dominated public records by amplifying women's voices across politics, media, and culture. Beyond an archive, it’s a movement aimed at reshaping societal perceptions of authority, paving the way for inclusive representation in leadership narratives.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Eileen Li, Lead Designer
Melanie Buddhipala, Lead UX Designer
Elle O'Donnell, Creative Strategic
Project Brief
Madam Speaker emerged from a pressing cultural need: to correct the gender imbalance in recorded public speeches. Historically, speeches by men have dominated Australia’s public record, shaping perceptions of leadership and authority. Madam Speakers digital archive reclaims space for women’s voices, ensuring their words and ideas are accessible and celebrated. More than a collection, it’s a cultural movement aimed at transforming how society perceives leadership, allowing women across Australia to add to the collection.
Project Need
Public speech archives have long privileged male voices, reinforcing narrow definitions of leadership and authority. Madam Speaker addresses this disparity by collecting and preserving speeches by Australian women from all walks of life. It ensures these voices are no longer overlooked but recognized as integral to the country’s history and cultural identity. By actively expanding its collection, the archive helps reshape societal norms around gender, power, and influence.
User Experience
Madam Speaker offers an intuitive and immersive experience by blending storytelling, activism, and communication design into a dynamic digital archive. Built as a ReactJS web application, it meets top accessibility standards while ensuring instant loading, even in areas with low internet connectivity.
The platform’s user interface encourages deep engagement through seamless navigation, curated speech categories, and personalised search features. Its open-source foundation empowers public contribution, allowing individuals to submit speeches while maintaining data integrity through built-in review protocols. Each submission undergoes a validation process ensuring historical accuracy and relevance, strengthening the archive’s credibility.
This thoughtful integration of design and technology transforms Madam Speaker into more than a repository—it becomes a living archive for advocacy and education, enabling voices from Australia’s past and present to shape public understanding and inspire future generations.
Project Marketing
Madam Speaker’s marketing strategy has been entirely pro bono, driven by a shared passion for amplifying women’s voices. Since its launch, over 2,000 users across Australia have accessed the archive, using its speeches for education, advocacy, and inspiration. The project’s community-driven outreach includes partnerships with schools, universities, and advocacy groups. Looking ahead, the team is ambitiously working toward curating 800 new speeches by 2025, ensuring the platform continues to grow as a vital public resource for historical and cultural research.
Project Privacy
Privacy and data protection are foundational to Madam Speaker. The platform ensures contributors' data is securely managed while promoting transparency. Speeches are curated with explicit permissions, safeguarding intellectual property rights. As the platform scales, its privacy protocols will continue to adapt, maintaining the trust of contributors and users alike.
Digital - Education
EdTech focuses on how education is changing through technology, changing the way we learn and process knowledge. What will stand out here is those that enhance the learning experience and make a lasting impression.
More Details