INTRODUCTION
Good afternoon Minister, distinguished guests, ladies & gentlemen.

Being originally a Victorian, I’m always happy to return to my favourite city, and I’m particularly delighted to have the opportunity to take part in today’s gathering and to share with you some insights drawn from Australia’s first ever women in leadership Census.

Given the amount of media interest and public debate the Census generated, I’m sure many of you are familiar with it, but let me begin by quickly refreshing you on the details.

EOWA produced the Census in partnership with the prestigious, US-based non-profit research organisation Catalyst. Catalyst has been conducting similar Censuses on the US business scene for 15 years. The Australian Census is the first to be done outside the US and Canada, and is being used as a model across the globe.

Our methodology was approved by the ABS and the research was overseen by Dr Graeme Russell, of Macquarie University, which was a key collaborator. Expertise Australia was another collaborator, becoming involved via the Australian Council of Business Women. We were also delighted to receive financial support from the Office for the Status of Women and from ANZ.

The Census results were released last October and, as I mentioned, generated a great deal of media attention and debate within the business community.

This was just the result we were hoping for. The rationale for conducting the Census is “what gets measured gets done”. In other words, once you’ve scoped out the real size of the problem, demonstrated with irrefutable data, it can no longer be ignored. That’s certainly been the US experience, and we believe that it will be so here, too.

At EOWA we have found that while assisting HR people to drive effective change is very important, the real key is to engage an organisation’s leader. And the data the Census provided did just that.

Results
The Census was actually split into two separate components: the Census of Women Executive Managers and the Census of Women Board Directors. In each case, we measured the numbers of women in key positions in the Top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.

As we had anticipated, neither Census provided what you might call uplifting results.

Australian women hold just 8.4% of executive management positions and 8.2% of board directorships. More than half of all the companies included in the Census—companies which account for around 89% of market capitalisation—have no women executive managers at all.

These figures put us 10 to 15 years behind the US—back where it was when Catalyst first started conducting its Censuses there. To give you an indication of the gap between the way business is done here and there, the situation in the US now is that women occupy 15.7% of executive management positions and 12.4% of board positions.

Running more than a decade behind a major international business competitor is something that engages the attention of CEOs very quickly. And it was this headline that also grabbed the majority of media interest.

The other element of the story that really got people talking was the further breakdown we provided of where the true power lies: the distinction between line roles, with their profit-and-loss accountability, and staff roles.

When you take this distinction into account the situation is even worse for women, who hold just 5% of those key line roles. Those positions provide the feeder pool for the CEOs and topmost executives of the future, and the revelation that women only account for one in 20 of those positions shows that the gender imbalance in Australian business is not something that “time will fix”, as we so often used to hear.

The lack of women in line roles is key, because we know that this problem starts right down the bottom of the organisation. It’s the first job, the second job and the third job that a woman holds that determine her ultimate career progress and success. So it’s a problem we need to be addressing today with talented young women who are just starting out.

Identifying the reality now is the starting point. The 2002 Census did just that, and the 2003 Census, which will be released at the end of September will further the process.

We have already seen the debate shift from “have we got a problem?” to “how do we fix it?” There are a multitude of specific solutions that provide the answer to that question, but the big picture answer is this: We go beyond just tolerating the 44% of the workforce who are women and realign our business culture to provide inclusive workplaces which aren’t toxic to women but instead enable them to fully contribute to the best of their ability.

Thank you.

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