Prime Minister, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I’m delighted to be here today to share my thoughts with you about how we can harness the potential of women to benefit Australia’s economic future.

When I was thinking about what I was going to say today, I felt both excited and challenged. Excited because of some of the successes and the changes I am witnessing out there in the business world… which drive my passion and continually re-energise me. I am also excited because I was recently reappointed as Director of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency. After two years of re-modelling the agency and renegotiating our relationship with business, I’m delighted that Australian employers now see the Agency as ‘adding value’ to their business bottom-line. Let me give you some examples of the significant shifts we are seeing in corporate attitudes:

• At Esso… we improved retention rate for female engineers to 80%, in line with the women’s male peers;
• And then, at Westpac… iniatives such as paid maternity leave etc. resulted in savings of SIX MILLION DOLLARS to the bank’s bottom-line, with retention rates jumping from 50 to 90%;
• At Packard Hewlett, it is also encouraging to note that the CEO recently thanked his senior HR advisor on-stage at a national forum for transforming the culture within his organisation from “unconsciously incompetent”. By doing so, the CEO showed a commitment to his diverse work population!
• At the legal firm Blake Dawson Waldron with its 1,683 employees nationwide, the typical ‘workaholic’ culture has also been dramatically transformed with the CEO and senior management committing to a wide range of work/life iniatives. These include part-time work for employees at all levels, and does NOT preclude employees from being promoted or getting ahead. The law firm now has FIVE senior partners, for example, who work part-time, one of them a male;
• And now Alcoa’s CEO has personally invited EOWA to consult with him as to how his company can better manage diversity as he says he is not satisfied with his company’s current pace of change.

Like many business leaders here and overseas, he is aware of the growing body of research regarding women and business success. A recent US study informs us, for example, that when women sit on boards, those companies tend to enjoy greater profits; (Big Business is beginning to realise that women are good for bottom-line!)

Haven’t things changed! We are now seeing more and more Australian business recognise the economic imperative of capturing the contribution of their female talent (as well as their men).

While I am excited, I am also challenged because as I criss-cross the countryside to talk with employers about better managing the diversity of their workforce I meet a broad cross-section of women in organisations, young women at schools, and many talented women in business who want to make a contribution, and who want to make a positive difference. And as I meet these women I wonder why it is that Australia still has the lowest percentage of women in management in the industrialised world.

As a mother of two little girls under 10, I want to see my daughters enjoy the same opportunities as the boys in their classroom. I feel incredibly privileged that I am in a position where I can do more about equity for my children, I can play my part to make the future more equitable for ALL children. Social analysts have estimated that it will take 177 years before we realise equal representation fro women in management – well I’d like to think that I can do something today that will bring my daughter the same opportunities as a man for the same work… and that this will occur... preferably… in my lifetime!

It is my experience at EOWA that change often comes about when leaders not only listen to their head, they listen to their heart.

• Anecdote 1: At BP, for example, it was only when a Plant Manager’s daughter came home complaining of the difficulties in finding a job with adequate child-care, that the company decided to make changes. Within weeks of the Plant Manager raising the issue of childcare with senior management, BP had introduced childcare facilities to its workplace;
• Anecdote 2: At Alcoa, senior management has also signalled a significant attitudinal shift by promoting via an internal company video the testimony of one Plant Engineer who said he never believed women could run plants for the company until he saw for himself the success that THREE women plant managers reaped in Alcoa’s Asian operations – the message in the corporate video from a male in senior management was: women can do it – because I have seen it with my own eyes! And needless to say, such a message is empowering to ALL female employees in the company!

In spite of many women making in-roads into traditional male domains however, the questions remain:
1) Why are young women NOT entering well-paying, in-demand professions such as IT and engineering?
2) Why aren’t there more women in key operational roles in business?
3) And… why aren’t there more women in politics?
4) Is there something wrong with women?

Let’s look at what we know:
There are several reasons (according to data provided by the Office for the Status of Women) why women don’t enter politics and these are worth (briefly) revisiting:
1. History – we were the first country in the world to give women the vote, but it took us another 71 years before we gave a female Parliamentarian a Federal portfolio (Annabelle Ranking, 1966);
2. Work/Life Issues – To illustrate how barriers to women’s participation are created, I’d like to read here a verbatim from an OSW document, Every Woman’s Guide to Getting into Politics: What am I letting myself in for?

“The world of Australian politics as it currently exists has not been designed to be friendly to women. Politics has been made, by and large, by men and for men. The way of interacting is male. The language is male. The agenda setting is male. The power structures are male. The building of relationships is male. The sitting hours reflect men’s timetables rather than women’s.”

3. Lack of mentors/Experience – As Kerry Chikarovski puts it, “A common problem with women is not recognising that the skills they have qualify them for anything. This is the concrete ceiling they build over themselves.”
4. The Long Hours – What about women’s caring responsibilities? And even leaving aside the effect on women, it has also been argued that the usage of time in Parliaments leaves a lot to be desired, and it is hard to dispute this.
5. The Boys’ Club – As women have entered new fields, they have not necessarily attained decision-making power. Many commentators have observed a ‘compression’ factor where women are concentrated in big numbers at lower levels of seniority, even in occupations and industries where numerically they dominate, such as the retail and service sectors.

These findings mirror to a great degree what surveys have found when analysing why women do not advance in business (Catalyst):
1. Male stereotyping and preconceptions
2. Exclusion from informal networks
3. Inhospitable corporate culture
4. Lack of significant general management or line experience
5. Women not in the pipeline long enough – How long have women been in the political pipeline?

What we know is that business (and Govt too) has not fully addressed the issues of:

• Career Development for Women – Di Grady, a board director of Lend Lease, Woolworth’s, Wattyl and Aust. Inst. Of Management, puts it this way: “Women are not being given career-making opportunities in their first, second or third positions. They’re not staffed on the big projects, they’re not put on the most important teams, they’re not put on really critical bid teams, nor are they assigned the most critical clients. As a result, they don’t have an opportunity to make a name for themselves early enough in their career”.
• Flexibility and Work/Life Issues
• And of course, there’s Pay Equity (84% of male salaries)

These are all things that women need in order that they can FULLY contribute!
So how do we fix things? How do we change this picture?
To bring about change, let us consider now the work of Australian economist Professor Amanda Sinclair. Professor Sinclair set about to research “what was wrong with women/why women were not reaching senior management” and after talking nationwide with 120 CEOS, found that the issue was NOT women, it was corporate culture. Here are the 4 stages she identified for culture change:

Let’s look at Amanda Sinclair and her model:

Stage 1: Denial - “No problem”. These employers do not believe that the absence of women from senior management is a problem.
Stage 2: ‘The problem is Women’. Women’s differences are seen as the problem and these organisations believe that the solution lies in women learning to adapt.
Stage 3: Incremental Adjustment. The organisation recognises something is wrong when senior women keep leaving, but they go out and recruit more women without changing anything inside the organisation.
Stage 4: Commitment to a New Culture. The exclusion of women is recognised as a symptom of deeper cultural problems and senior executives take personal action for change.

So what do we need to do in order to fix things?
1st KEY to success is DIALOGUE and CONSULTATION

• To set up for success, ask why do you need change, ask what needs change;
• For example… IBM realised that there was money to be made from ‘niche’ market such as the female market, the gay market, and so on. To capture these markets, they decided to hold a Global Diversity conference so that they could tap the needs, aspirations and ideas from their diverse workforce. After listening to the input of employees, senior executives were made accountable for specific strategies arising from the diversity conference input;
• It is also important to create a ‘safe’ environment – where people are unafraid to raise issues and management is prepared to truly hear;
• Deloitte’s example – illustrates what one CEO can do/drive personally

>>>>> women partners went from 5% to 14%, highest in ‘the Big 5’;
Take out: Know your issues! (And you can only know your issues if you seek to understand)
2nd KEY to success is LEADERSHIP AND ACTION

• Get the CEO behind it - & identify the Business Case
• Find the champions – everyone must explain I one sentence why we are implementing diversity
• People, Policies & Processes
• Resources (inc. people, time and dollars)
• Be an Employer of Choice

And the take home message? Walk the talk

3rd KEY is … IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT WOMEN

• Diversity the new paradigm – ‘expand the vision!’
• Economic, social prosperity
• For example, at Deliotte’s – only 1 out of 8 wanted to be a partner
• What impacts on women, impacts on men, and all society

We want to provide an INCLUSIVE society where both men and women can enjoy the balance of work and life, neither at the expense of the other!

It’s not easy! (I know from my 2 years at EOWA). But with tenacity and courage --- the riches are worthwhile.
1. Women need to support women
2. Men and women need to work together
3. As women, we must do our bit

COURAGE AND BLOODY-MINDEDNESS
In her book, Approaching the Corporate Heart, leadership strategist Margot Cairnes talks about the need for each of us in leadership to be ‘heroic’. To be heroic, she says, we have to be more than warriors, we have to be warriors with heart!

We must dare to be brave, to confront our fears, to face our personal demons, and listen – really listen – to the feedback we are given.

Just as business leaders are – to my delight – realising, recognising and even embracing the contribution that women can make to their business bottom-line, so we too may wish to heed the lessons we have learned in business.

1) To consult and truly listen;
2) To put our money where our mouth is and ‘walk the talk’
3) To remember that progress for women means … progress for us all.

Finally, as women we cannot afford to be complacent! It is up to us to take responsibility as catalysts of change. To quote a very feisty woman, Sarah Henderson: “All the strength you need is within you. Don’t wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel. Stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself!”

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