Today is International Women’s Day--one day out of the year that celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women. It is also a day that marks a call to action in regards to gender disparity in places where the problem is obvious, and others where it is less so.
Australia falls into the latter category.
As a society, Australia has worked towards offering equal opportunity to women in the workplace and the statistics appear to reflect significant progress. However, its advancement towards eradicating gender disparity maintains a glacial pace.
Looking at the stats
According to the Australian Government, women account for 46.2% of the local workforce. The majority are part-time workers, followed by casual employees. A third are employed full-time.
There's also been a recent push to implement a target of 30% female directors on ASX 200 boards by the end of 2018. However, only 53 companies have reached that target thus far. Furthermore, the Australian Institute of Company Directors says that while women have accounted for 42% of all new appointments up until January 2017, Australia still has 22 ASX 200 boards without any female directors.
The inequality is further entrenched when one considers the percentage of female representation in ASX 300 and All Ordinaries boards: 25.3%.
Women, as of 2014, took home on average $283.20 AUD less than their male counterparts each week. That means the average Australian woman has to work an extra 66 days a year to earn the same pay as the average man.
At the work place, 22% of women aged between 18-64 experienced sexual harassment, one in five mothers were made redundant from their positions, and one in two have experienced discrimination.
When they leave the office, one in three Australian women aged 15 years and over experience physical violence and nearly one in five has experienced sexual assault.
In other words, women in Australia are over-represented in lower-paying part-time jobs and under-represented in executive positions. At the workplace, they are at risk of experiencing harassment and discrimination. And when they leave the office, there is also a high chance of them being subjected to violence or sexual assault.
These statistics have impacted Australia's global gender disparity rank. Looking at the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2016, Australia falls short at 46 out of 144, just behind the United States.
Haunted by the past
Experts warn that Australia’s paltry gender equality record is due to a culture of oppression that has long been embedded into the country’s societal cloth--a culture that has devalued the role of women and their role in society.
“The reality is that while we live and work in the year of 2017, we still have attitudes and work place practices that are a direct result of the attitudes and practices of the fifties and sixties,” Avril Henry, internationally-renowned keynote speaker, author and provocateur, says.
Henry, who will be speaking at the Australian Institute of Management’s nationwide Great Debate today, is referring to the culture that once inhibited the role of women in the workforce.
For example, right up until 1966, a married woman had to give up her career because she had a new job--being a wife and mother. Women were also not integrated into the military until the late seventies.
More shockingly is a choice that would have certainly hindered work travel. That is, a married woman’s passport application had to be authorized by her husband up until 1983.
This attitude is one that Henry has experienced herself, having worked up the ranks of finance, IT, Human Resources, before founding her consultancy practice in 2003.
“I started my career in investment banking and finance and [gender inequality] wasn’t really on my radar until I realized that, throughout most of my career, I was often the only woman,” she says. “At the banks, I was the first woman in Australia to ever be appointed a manager’s position.”
Henry suggests this attitude, spawned from years of prohibiting rights through both legislation and societal norms, is further exacerbated through the appropriation of language, that is used to address and represent women.
The power of words
It’s the focus on clothing that women in power chose to wear, the questioning of their marital and parental status, their haircuts and their homeliness that detracts from the issues at hand.
“It creates an illusion that women aren’t capable,” Henry says. “I see this language all the time when a woman comes in to power--they’re referred to as ‘mother of triplets,’ their shoes and jackets are mentioned. Why aren’t we concerned about the parental status of men or what shoes they wear?”
“We’re making it so that it’s a man’s world in terms of jobs, power and language because we are using language inappropriately.”
Henry claims that, to make a difference, Australia needs to stamp out language that perpetuates the illusion that women are submissive.
“If we can change the language, we change the conversation. We can start changing policies, practices and attitudes,” she says. “When we do that we not only liberate women but liberate men, who are then able to pursue other interests and hands-on parenting.”
Change can happen
Henry is also currently the senior advisor to the Australian Army on gender and diversity. It is here that she has experienced ground-breaking progression in terms of breaking down the language barrier between genders.
“We reviewed the processes of promotion, altered the conversation to be more inclusive, and, for the first time ever, women who took time off to raise a child were still considered for a promotion while on maternity leave, we now have black ops pilots that are women, they are being sent to Afghanistan” she says.
“This all happened in a place where masculinity once played a huge role in how affairs were conducted," Henry says. "I understand that change takes time but our society is moving at a glacial pace.” (It took five years for the above reforms to take into effect.)
Henry feels that once urgency is placed on language appropriation, Australian women might finally achieve equal representation among the three power pillars of society--the government, multinational corporations and the church--which are currently dominated by men.
“Let’s stop focusing on the victim and start focusing on the problem,” Henry says.
