INTRODUCTION
Good afternoon .

I’m delighted to be here this afternoon to share with you my thoughts on a subject very close to my heart – how we can deliver real EEO for women in Australian workplaces.

When I think about how far we have come I feel both energised and frustrated.

Energised because we are seeing more and more smart employers who understand that enabling women to fully contribute to the best of their ability goes beyond complying with legislation. It’s not about filling in forms and being seen to do the right thing. It’s about making the best use of the available talent, and reaping the real, bottom-line benefits from doing this.

It’s fascinating to look across various industry sectors—including education--and see those organisations that understand equal opportunity in this way doing far better than their competitors on a whole series of measures.

However I feel challenged because we still have a long way to go until women in the workplace feel included at all levels of the organisation – not just tolerated.

I know that many people think that women in the workplace are everywhere. When I am at senior executive functions and asked what I do – the response is often “haven’t we fixed that yet”. Yet when I ask how many women report to them, do they report to a woman, and how many women are in their peers these senior executives count slowly on one hand oh there’s….. Susan oh….. and yes Rebecca – and that’s it!.

One look at the statistics shows us the real situation in 2003 .

EEO IN AUSTRALIA TODAY
Although Australian working women make up 44% of the workforce, they hold a very small percentage of the crucial decision-making roles in the workplace.

Last year EOWA produced the first Census of Women in Leadership in Australia. For the first time we had the definitive picture on the representation of women in the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. This is very, very significant information, because these companies control more than 90% of the market capital. So what they do has a big impact on Australian business.

What the Census showed us was that women hold just 8.4 percent of the most senior executive positions. The picture is even worse when you break this down into the real power jobs. Women hold only five percent of the executive positions in the core business areas, which are the main feeder group for CEO and Board positions.

The representation of women on boards is no better. Here, too, women hold less than 9 percent of the available positions.
These figures put us back where the US was more than a decade ago, when the influential Catalyst organisation began its Women in Leadership Census there.

And it’s not just in leadership that we see a problem. Women throughout the workforce who are working full-time earn only 84c for every dollar earned by men working equivalent hours.

You can see that despite the fact that Equal Opportunity has been around as an issue for so long, and despite the fact that every Australian jurisdiction has embraced anti-discrimination legislation, change on the ground has been slow to come.

Time is clearly not going to fix it. The story of what is happening in EEO is really one of those occasions when the saying about seeing the glass as being half-empty or half-full springs to mind.

Or more accurately in terms of EEO in Australia - a quarter full, and three-quarters empty.

On the whole, 2002 was a good year for EOWA.

We found 93 employers who merited our Employer of Choice for Women citation. And a total of 212 employers demonstrated that they had done everything reasonably practical to address their EEO issues and so we were able to waive them from reporting for at least a year. And then there were the dozens of employers who were contenders for our Business Achievement Awards in which we recognise those who are leading the way in this area.

But as encouraging as these examples are, they come from a pool of almost 2700 reporting organisations.

So you can probably understand why I feel frustrated about the slow pace of change .

One of my main sources of concern is the number of organisations - after all these years, and all our efforts - who still pay lip-service to EEO.

In these 'compliance-only' organisations, EEO sits on the very surface of the organisation – like a fridge magnet - and when times get tough it falls off. It gets delegated to the HR department, where it is often delegated again to the most junior person in that Department or even to the payroll clerk.

Unlike the best employers, these organisations have yet to understand that EEO is best handled as a strategic business issue for the organisation.

Now you might be tempted to think that all of this is a problem only for business, and that being in education this information is not relevant to you.

I’m here to tell you that it is!

The assumptions about what women can and cannot do, their lack of access to the informal networks and lack of experience in core management roles in lower and middle management are resulting in fewer women in leadership positions in business, as well as in other workplaces, including schools.

Sister Judith Lawson, CEO of Santa Sabina commented on receiving the inaugural EOWA business achievement award for the best organisation with less than 500 people that “Creating a work environment that supports teachers and applauds their efforts is essential in a climate where teaching is often held in low esteem. Adapting sound EO and flexible work practices is more than just a wise move it is critical for the success of the education process”.

In Australia today we're often encouraged to talk as if there is little difference in the way women and men think about success and the ways in which they encounter it.

This idea has led many people to believe that the answer to employment equity is simply to get more women into the jobs men have always done.

Which can too often lock us into a sterile debate about numbers and trends - rather than looking more creatively at causes and solutions.

But nevertheless the numbers are interesting, because they demonstrate that we do need more creativity and some new ideas and commitment.

If the solution really was as easy as opening up men's jobs for women our national performance on employment equity would be a lot better then it is today.

Worse still, because the equity stats look better than they were 40 years ago, we're also expected to believe that the problems of discrimination are pretty much fixed and the differences between the experience of women in the workplace, and elsewhere, are minimal and not worth worrying about anymore.

Well, I have to say, that since I was here three years ago nothing in my experience as Director of EOWA has convinced me that either of these ideas is true.

Far from it. If anything, the progress we have made towards equity over the past generation has served to demonstrate that the issues affecting employment equity run very deep.

And when we look at the deep-seated nature of the problems we can see even more clearly that its an issue of immediate interest to men, as well as women, the organisations they work for, their families and their communities.

THE IMPORTANCE OF JOB RE-DESIGN
Much of my talk today will concern the role job re-design can play in addressing some of these persistent problems in a way that works for everyone and moves us closer to the goal of employment equity.

Most Australians relate success to the way in which they participate in their families, their communities and their workplaces.
We expect our involvement in all these spheres will allow us opportunities to develop our talents and interests, and to make a contribution that is both valuable and valued.

And you'd have to say that some men, at least, are finally catching on.

Over recent years, we have also seen more men re-assessing the issue of balance. Even if it is sometimes of the 'gee whiz father discovers importance of family life' variety.

More seriously, I think it's vitally important that when we talk about work and family balance we avoid adding to the popular belief that it's a women's issue.

More young men today than ever before are keen to play a greater role in parenting, and even the primary role in some cases.
Unfortunately, Australian companies have been even slower to provide decent paternity leave than they have been to provide maternity leave. Although, there are some notable exceptions like Westpac, Lend Lease and Alcoa.

For the most part, however, I think women are still more conscious that they need to be successful in all these main areas of life.
Its also fair to say, that work and life balance is one of the big issues in Australia today.

We've seen it in the current debate about maternity leave.

We also see it in discussions about many other issues. People generally are concerned that as a society we are not getting it right - the demands of work seem to be robbing us of time for our families, for our communities and for ourselves.

There's even a parallel in corporate strategy with more and more leading firms now looking at corporate social responsibility and the triple bottom line approaches because they recognise that the long-term sustainability and profitability of their enterprises depends on getting the balance right - and not just focusing on short-term shareholder value.

Balance is the catch-word, but in our workplaces we're still falling well-short of what needs to be done to make it a reality.

When asked what changes they would like in the workplace, most employees, both women and men, say: “greater flexibility”.

On the other hand, most senior managers support increased flexibility, but within limits.

Between those two perspectives lies the problem.

I think Australian organisations have taken a very narrow view about workplace flexibility. Not just EEO but in the approaches companies have tended to adopt across the board in human resources.

Most Australian workers have experienced management pushes for greater flexibility as a requirement for them to work longer hours and to work harder.

What employees mean by flexibility, however, is having control over how, when and where they do their work, and having a workgroup and an immediate manager who is supportive of this.

Unfortunately, the flexibility push for the most part has worked against work / life balance.

Today I want to argue for a broader and deeper approach to flexibility - one that results in a better balance .

A better approach to flexibility can, and does, deliver benefits for employers.

There is strong evidence that providing flexible work options are critical to the successful recruitment and retention of talented employees.

Employees express lower levels of loyalty to managers when they are perceived as being less supportive of flexibility.

Flexibility can also generate greater creativity and better customer service, among other things.

Perhaps the biggest flexibility problem we need to address over the next few years is the whole issue of job redesign to help people (and again, it’s not just women) achieve a better work / life balance.

It’s fair to say, in my view, that so far we have put a lot of effort into opening up men's jobs to competition from women. But we have not changed the way the work is designed to reflect the changing demographics and nature of our society.

I often talk about organisations as giraffe houses and women in these organisations as elephants. We have been very effective at widening the door of the giraffe house to let the elephant in but we have not changed the inside of the giraffe house so that the elephant can get through the internal doors and up the stairs.

Too many women are still finding that the jobs are designed for men and they are not easily adapted to meet the needs of women, who after all, usually still bear the primary load in the home and in the community more generally.

To make faster progress in achieving employment equity, we're going to have to speed up the process of re-designing jobs.

Few organisations currently have effective flexible work options at more senior levels of organisations. There are very few examples of part-time or job-share senior positions.

EOWA, as you might imagine, is very keen to play a role in helping organisations address flexibility issues, and I'll outline what we're doing later in this talk.

The good news is that at least some employers are already doing it - and making a great go of it. And I'll cover a few notable examples later in this presentation.

But first, a closer look at the picture on work and family balance overall in Australia today. Which is far from encouraging, I'd have to say.

WORK AND FAMILY BALANCE IN AUSTRALIA TODAY
Statistics on workers with family responsibilities show that one-third of all employed men and one-third of all employed women have dependent children under 15 years of age.

This means that when you look around your staff room or your office, one in every three of the people you there is likely to have the welfare of a child (or children) to consider.

Surveys of employees with dependents like this show that it frequently these responsibilities have a negative impact on their jobs or career.

Nearly one third of employed caregivers say that care-giving commitments caused repeated interruptions at work, resulted in their having to work fewer hours; 16% have taken less responsible jobs as a result, and 13% have refused promotion.

Another study which interviewed employees in several leading Australian corporations found that nearly three-quarters of people with dependent children said they would refuse a job or promotion if it decreased time available for family.

This appears to be a global trend, as a fairly recent Harvard Business Review article testifies. In one case reported in the review, six out of 8 ‘rising stars’ at an international consulting firm emphatically turned down the possibility of partnership in the firm because of what they perceived as a lack of work/life balance!

AUSTRALIAN ORGANISATIONS AREN’T DOING ENOUGH
As all of this indicates, Australian organisations are not providing enough flexibility to enable employees to balance competing work and family demands.

We still have a lot of inflexibility around start and finish times, which are fixed for over 70% of all working women and 60% of all working men.

Despite the fact that disaggregated bargaining is often cited as the panacea, only one in ten enterprise agreements contain family friendly measures.

Worse still, only 4% of enterprise agreements include paid personal leave, 3% include job sharing, 3% include paid parental leave and 9% include unpaid personal leave.

Unfortunately, women not returning from maternity leave or resigning because they are unable to combine work and family demands is expensive for organisations. [NB: NRMA estimates that it costs $48,000 to replace a manager, $29,000 to replace senior specialists and $12,000 to replace other staff.]

The point here is that maternity leave is just the start, caring for children is a long-term responsibility. Just giving women a few weeks off and then asking them to return to family unfriendly workplaces is not going to solve the problem.

Flexible work options do not necessarily result in improved employment outcomes for women. Indeed, limiting the offering of part-time work to particular areas of a business (eg. customer service) has severely limited career opportunities for women in many organisations.

Part-time work is also often cited as the solution to balancing work and family responsibilities. And it is for some workers, but it also often involves casualisation and irregular or unsuitable hours.

Too often part-time positions are created to suit business needs then marketed as 'good for mums'.

This is also another good reason for including fathers in the equation and emphasising that we need solutions that can meet the needs of all workers regardless of their gender or the type of work they do.

SOME GOOD EXAMPLES
While overall the Australian experience has been disappointing there are some great examples where organisations have made real efforts and real progress.

The ones I’d like to share with you today are from the education sector.

It is fair to say that the Catholic education sector can boast some significant firsts in the area of work and family issues.

As I already mentioned the winner of EOWA’s inaugural Business Achievement award in 2001 in the Leading Organisation for the Advancement of Women (less than 500 Employees) category was Santa Sabina College, based in Sydney.

And another great example is the Australian Catholic University, which was the first organisation in this country to offer one year’s paid maternity leave. A truly trail blazing effort.

And particularly relevant to the job redesign issue, the Forbes Catholic Education Office made it possible for a female Principal of one of its schools to job-share her position in order to spend more time with her two young children.

These examples illustrate the growing impetus in the Catholic education sector to create leading practice workplaces for women.

Creating family-friendly workplaces often requires a leap of managerial imagination… which is what a number of organisations are currently embarked on.

They are often 'works in progress', they have begun a journey and they are learning and adapting as they go. And they are all the more remarkable because of it.

Case Study – Santa Sabina College
For Santa Sabina College, creating staff-friendly policies that delivered measurable results was a huge learning experience. And with a predominately female staff of over 230 spread over three campuses, approaching the issue strategically wasn’t just desirable – it was essential.

For some time, the college had been aware that valuable people were not returning from maternity leave because there were limited part-time positions for secondary school teaching staff.

In 1998, a development team examined the possibility of job sharing for teachers. A lot of questions came up in the creation of that policy – such as who would take responsibility for parent/teacher night, who would write the reports, and how do you communicate about what happened during the day?

A program was trialled with great success. The student response and learning outcomes were great, with more women are coming back from maternity leave in job-share positions rather than resigning—and the parents were also happy.

Now, every year the school asks for expressions of interest for job sharing in the following year and asks staff – including those on maternity leave – if they require a place at the school’s childcare centre. As a result, there are now five teams in the job sharing program.

Case Study – Ravenswood School For Girls
Another school which we recognised with Employer of Choice for Women status, Ravenswood School for Girls, has used technology as a tool to provide a more flexible working environment for its predominantly female teachers.

This school, which has a staff of more than 200, introduced a remote access system that enables teachers to log into the school network when they are not at school. This improved communication and information flow to part-time and full-time teaching staff. It also improved the opportunity for flexible work practises.

The remote access enables teachers to access email and the internet from home during school holidays and when they aren’t in.

The school has also provided each teacher with a note-book computer, and increasingly staff can plug into their phone line at home and dial into the school system to check their e-mails. The majority of staff can now access minutes from meetings, formal communications, bulletins and professional development opportunities.

The school found that this is especially important for part-time staff. It also enables them to hold e-mail ‘meetings’ which provide more time for teachers. For example, they have a meeting at school and then ask the teachers to go away and think about the issue. Teachers can then communicate their follow-up ideas by email.

It has the added advantage of enabling part-time staff to contribute to the broader school functioning through participation on committees without necessarily being on site. These flexible working arrangements enable staff to better manage their work and personal commitments.

At the start of the year, the school also introduced the technology into the classroom, setting up the Ravenswood Learning Community. This curriculum organisational tool is a secure electronic interface for on-line learning and communication between teachers and students. It allows teachers to provide information to students, such as handouts, work-sheets or assignments, while they are working from home.

This technology can be particularly beneficial for students who may be away sick, or for senior students requiring flexible information delivery options. And if students misplace a handout or require another copy, or would like to check when an assignment is due, they can go on-line and download the information. The net effect is that it encourages students to be more independent and to take more responsibility for their learning.

Case Study - Forbes Catholic Education Office
The Forbes Catholic Education Office related the wonderful story to us that an opportunity was provided for a Principal of a school to enter into a job-share situation on a trial basis, after returning from maternity leave.
The main purpose of this situation was to enable this principal to be at home with her new baby (5 months at the start of the arrangement) and two young children, for 2 days per week. (The Principal position was split – 3 days and 2 days, for the duration of this arrangement).

The students were very receptive to the arrangement and adapted to the change very well, and the parents and the School Board also supported the arrangement.

The arrangement was a great success, that enabled the Principal to spend time at home with her family, as well as maintain her position in the school, and it also allowed the other teacher who participated in the job-share the opportunity to experience a position of responsibility and to develop further skills.

Case Study - Australian Catholic University - Paid Maternity Leave

The issue of parental leave became front page news as a result of the certification of the Australian Catholic University General Staff Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. This agreement gave:

• 12 weeks paid maternity leave with a further 40 weeks at 60% of current salary for employees who met the eligibility requirement of two years service.
• Up to 7 years leave (paid and unpaid) is available to the primary care giver.
• An extension of paternity leave from 10 to 15 days.
• Adoption leave is the same as paid maternity leave
• Foster parent leave is now also available: providing 6 weeks at half current salary for children under 5 years of age, and 3 weeks at half current salary for children over 5 years of age.

Case Study - Catholic Schools Office, Wagga Wagga – Mobile Feeding and Changing Station
The Catholic Schools Office at Wagga Wagga in NSW was a finalist in the Outstanding EEO Practice category of our BAAs last year thanks to its practical and creative way of addressing the problem of providing facilities for mothers returning after maternity leave.
The office operates across a large regional area and covers about 1000 employees. Because they are often in very small communities and are distant from head office, it has been difficult to provide certain kinds of resources to all schools.
One of the gaps that was identified was the provision of facilities for women who were wanting to feed their babies while at work. After some investigation, the Office found that due to the fact that the schools are generally small, with very little spare space, mothers often did not have anywhere to store expressed milk. As well, if babies were being brought in to the mother to be fed at work the feeding and nappy changes were often taking place in what they described as “unsavoury” conditions.

This was perceived to be a problem that needed to be addressed, because their staff is 80% women, and the lack of facilities was stopping women from returning to work after maternity leave.

So the Office’s EO committee came up with an inexpensive, flexible, creative solution. They put together what they called the “mobile feeding and changing station”. This is simply a bar fridge, a change table and a small bin. It is moved from school to school as needed, and can fit into even the smallest and most isolated of schools.

As the committee says, “not all initiatives in supporting staff need to be high tech or expensive”. And what a great example they have provided!

Case Study – Marist College, Canberra
My final case study comes from the Public report submitted to EOWA last year from Marist College Canberra, which is an independent Catholic primary school for boys aged 4-12, under the care of the Marist Brothers.

One member of the senior school staff, who had been on maternity leave in 2001, approached the school about the possibility of a job-sharing arrangement for 2002. As working part-time in the secondary school was not considered a viable option, as it is necessary to be on the premises every day, the school was very keen to trial this arrangement.

This particular job-sharing position included the teaching of a foreign language. The challenge was therefore to find a suitable candidate who was able to teach the language, was willing to work with the co-teacher, was adaptable to job-sharing and who was willing to share all responsibilities. The arrangement also had to be approved by the Head of Department.

The school succeeded in recruiting a candidate who herself had a young family and who met all of the criteria. The outcome is that both teachers are extremely happy, and the students appear to have no problems with the arrangement.

The teachers liaise and keep each other informed about lesson plans, student responses and any misdemeanours. Both also have a similar teaching style, they share the marking, and are committed to making the arrangement work.

As a result of this combined vision, teamwork, compatibility and flexibility of the people involved, the arrangement has been a great success — and has gained the full support of the Head of Department. As a result Marist College is exploring further opportunities for job-sharing arrangements, to enable both men and women to balance their family and personal commitments, on an ongoing basis.\7.

FLEXIBLE WORK BY DESIGN – NEW EOWA TOOL
Two factors are critical for achieving genuine workplace flexibility, and are common to every instance of best practice. These are:

• CEO commitment, and
• a supportive organisational culture.

EOWA can assist you, and in fact we have a specially designed tool “Flexible Work by Design” on our website to help employers find a way forward that works for them.

In the tool we help organisations address the elements that are required to develop genuine flexibility:
When work is conducted:

• flexibility in starting and finishing times;
• working a compressed week (eg. four ten-hour days);
• annualised hours;
• variations in weeks of work across the year (eg. part-year employment).

Where work is conducted including options such as:

• combining office and home-based work;
• home based work;
• working in a range of different locations.

How work is conducted:

• a key factor is the level of control a person has over the day-to-day decisions about structuring tasks, decisions and workplace demands.

• part-time work;

• job sharing.

Career options that include:

• career breaks;
• redesigning career pathways;
• redesigning management positions.

Together these elements help organisations address the key flexibility issues we regularly come across:

• making flexibility at senior levels possible
• Ensuring senior managers ‘walk the talk’

• Putting systems in place that enable to organisation to operate effectively, eg communications strategy

• Organisation culture that promotes people working flexibly

• Develop a workplace ‘etiquette’ - so everyone has responsibility, eg for not scheduling meetings outside core hours.

• Address problems as they arise – don’t give up on trying an arrangement if at first it doesn’t work as you’d like

• Learn as you go.

You’ll find this tool and a lot more information on all aspects of how you can practically advance women in the workplace on our website, which is at www.eowa.gov.au.

CONCLUSION
Sometime in the future, our jobs will not impose unbearable tensions and unmanageable demands on the rest of our lives.
Women, and men, will feel that they able to be successful simultaneously in their careers, their families and their communities.
When that happens, we will be much closer to the goal of employment equity than we are today.
I suspect the organisations we work for will also be very pleased to find that their workforces are more loyal, more creative and a lot less stressed than they are today.

Our experience with gender equity issues so far has taught us that our jobs were created and designed in a different era to meet the needs of a different social structure.

Re-designing our jobs to meet new realities, and to create new opportunities, is the next big task for us all.

Thank you

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