WLIA’s Founding Chair Carol Schwartz AM and WLIA Research Fellow Professor Cordelia Fine joined businessman David Gonski AC and Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Melbourne to discuss whether gender quotas in the workforce should be implemented.
Listen to the podcast here.
Transcript of the podcast:
Glyn Davis:
G’day. I’m Glyn Davis and this is The Policy Shop, a place where we think about policy choices.
Julia Gillard:
I invite you to imagine it, a prime minister, a man with a blue tie who goes on holidays to be replaced by a man in a blue tie. A treasurer who delivers a budget, wearing a blue tie, to be supported by a finance minister, another man in a blue tie. Women once again banished from the centre of Australia’s political life.
Jonathan Arnott:
You speak in favour of quotas. I am personally in favour of recruiting the best person for the job, whether they’re male, whether they’re female, whatever their ethnic origin. Those things do not matter to me. My concern here is this, if you end up with a quota system, what happens then with the person who does not know whether they’ve got their job because of their gender, or whether they’ve got their job because of a quota? Is that not the most demeaning thing of all to women?
Interviewer:
First of all, your Cabinet, you said, looks a lot like Canada. I understand one of the priorities for you was to have a cabinet that was gender balanced. Why was that so important to you?
Justin Trudeau:
Because it’s 2015.
Glyn Davis:
Over the last century in Australia women have come a fair way, from winning the right to vote, to the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act, to the enormous increase in women’s participation in the workforce and, more recently, the election of our first female prime minister. There has been measurable progress for women. We’ve also witnessed in recent years the feminist movement take on the world. Feminism has featured in houses of parliament, at the United Nations, on the red carpet, on stage, in our bookshelves, magazine covers, Twitter feeds, and on talk shows. According to Google Trends, people searched for information on the definition of feminism in 2014 at five times the rate they did just the year before.
As journalist Jessica Valenti wrote recently, feminists are everywhere these days. Yet despite all this progress there remains a glaring lack of women in our boardrooms, in our parliaments, in leadership and managerial positions. Women account for only 25 per cent of the ASX200 board members and a total of 13 of those boards have no women at all. In fact, according to a study conducted earlier in this year, there are fewer large Australian companies run by women than there are companies run by men named John, Peter, or David. In Australia women hold only 14 per cent of chair positions and 23 per cent of directorships.
The Federal Parliament is now just 32 per cent female and, according to one estimate, on current trends it will take another 200 years to achieve gender equality there. Joining us today in the studio to discuss this issue is Carol Schwartz. Carol is a leading business identity in Australia and a prominent gender diversity advocate. She’s a member of the Reserve Bank Australia board, a director of Stockland, and the founder of the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia. Carol, welcome to The Policy Shop.
Carol Schwartz:
Thank you, Glyn.
Glyn Davis:
Also in the studio today I’m pleased to be joined by Professor Cordelia Fine. Based in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Cordelia’s research, including her most recent book, Testosterone Rex: Myth of Sex, Science and Society, explore and break down myths around gender. Welcome, Cordelia.
Cordelia Fine:
Thank you, Glyn.
Glyn Davis:
On the line is business leader, company director, and leading philanthropist, David Gonski. David is chairman of the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Chancellor at the University of New South Wales, and has a broad range of involvement with government, education, and community sectors. Welcome, David.
David Gonski:
Thank you.
Glyn Davis:
Carol, if I can start with you, what do you think explains the lack of women in so many leadership roles in our society?
Carol Schwartz:
It’s actually the ecosystem in which we operate. I think that there are influences like unconscious bias, there are stereotypical roles that both men and women believe that men and women play in our society, and there are underlying belief systems that we need to tackle.
Glyn Davis:
Cordelia, in your most recent book you wrote about the many gender stereotypes, often supposedly based in biology, that pervade thinking about women and men. Do you think these stereotypes are important in explaining the under-representation of women?
Cordelia Fine:
I think they’re absolutely core to the many contributing factors that help to explain the under-representation of women. As Carol was alluding to, we have underlying beliefs about who’s suited to what kinds of roles and these sort of gender stereotypes about what men and women are like, and what they should be like, are at the basis of both conscious and unconscious forms of bias. They can influence perceptions of women’s versus men’s competence, of their commitment to the workplace, of their likeability, and how well they fit in particular roles.
I also think there’s the sort of – these structural issues which are also based around these gender stereotypes, because a lot of our organisations are still moulded around this 1950s model of the primary breadwinner and the homemaker. I think that’s an issue, not just for women trying to fit the fact that there are many dimensions to our lives around that old model, but also to men too, who would like to have a richer, more varied life.
Glyn Davis:
David, as you look through both the business and the community sectors in which you’re involved, how do you respond to this under-representation of women?
David Gonski:
Well, the first thing I’d say is I don’t disagree with what Carol and Cordelia have said. The facts as I look at them, for example, at the university I’m chancellor of I think that the representation of women has grown quite enormously over time. But on the other hand in banking and in business generally, whilst we’re taking in wonderful and talented young people who are female at the beginning of their careers, somewhere along the line they’re either leaving us, or alternatively not being encouraged to go further.
I think that, not only are the stereotypes that have been talked about things that we have to look at, but we also have to move in business in particular to a much better flexibility and a much better response, in my opinion, in how we track and indeed help a successful career to be worked out. This needs a lot more planning, a lot more thinking, and a lot more re-thinking, which probably comes back to the stereotypes.
Glyn Davis:
You’ve taken us onto some of the policy interventions that might make a difference here. I’d like to then introduce a question of gender quotas, which has been much debated. In Europe gender quotas are increasingly prevalent in lots of different organisations. In 2016, for example, Germany made gender quotas mandatory in business, so German companies need to fill at least 30 per cent of non-executive board seats with women. In doing so, Germany followed the footsteps of other European countries, including Norway, Italy, France and Sweden. Carol, should we be looking to similar interventions here?
Carol Schwartz:
Absolutely. I mean, the fact is that we’ve spoken very briefly about the systemic issues that we’re facing here and it seems to me, as somebody who’s been not only thinking about this for the last 30 years, but actually experiencing it as well, that not much has changed. I think that when you have a particular status quo you need to create paradigm shifts which actually are going to move the dial. Probably 30 years ago I didn’t even think about quotas. But having been talking about this, observing this, living this, experiencing it for 30 years, for me, the only answer is quotas.
Glyn Davis:
So, Cordelia, people often distinguish between gender quotas and gender targets. Can you take us through the difference and do you have a view?
Cordelia Fine:
Well, I suppose quotas are distinguished from targets in terms of being mandatory through, for example, regulation. But I think there’s probably an extent to which you have targets with teeth that are sometimes known within organisations where reaching those targets can be linked to remuneration and performance indicators. They can start to seem somewhat mandatory, so I suppose the line can be a little bit grey there.
Carol Schwartz:
I don’t care if it’s a T word or a Q word, as long as we get the paradigm shift that we need. Targets with teeth, very effective. Quotas, very effective. But there have to be consequences to creating policies. If you have a policy that has no consequences, then who’s going to follow it? So we definitely need policies that have consequences.
Glyn Davis:
David, your view on the use of gender quotas?
David Gonski:
I have a very strong view that I don’t believe that legislation should be telling private companies who to put on their boards, nor indeed how many of a particular type of person, or indeed what gender, geography, or indeed persuasion that person should be. Because I would be diametrically opposed to the concept of a quota that was for example put into the constitution. Having said that, I do understand the frustration that Carol has mentioned and in my view there is a job here for the shareholders in companies. So when, for example, the government says that in their own companies, that is, the various statutory organisations and so on that they run and so on, that they’re going to make sure that there’s 40 or 50 per cent women on that, they’re perfectly entitled to do that. Indeed, I think it’s a good thing for them to do, because they’re their organisations and it’s their choice.
In the case of private companies, I think this is a role for shareholders. The large shareholders and indeed shareholders generally, if they believe in this, should be requiring – in my opinion, targets are better, but if they want quotas, that’s fine. But not through government legislation. Because, in my opinion – and I know this has become quite debated – that is a slippery slope.
Carol Schwartz:
I don’t disagree with David. I think that shareholder activism around this issue is incredibly powerful. So, for example, the CEO of Australian Super, Ian Silk, has just said that he has written letters to those organisations that he would potentially like to invest in, but feels himself or his organisation unable to invest because they have no gender diversity on their boards. This is really powerful. At the end of the day, having that sort of financial consequence, having that type of institutional investor saying that they will not invest in your company because the implication being that they’re not a high-performing company because they don’t have that gender diversity on their board is incredibly powerful.
Glyn Davis:
Cordelia, much of the conversation around quotas goes to the question of merit and the sort of implicit assumption that quotas will compromise the merit principle. Does placing quotas on companies or on even public bodies run the risk of doing that, and how might we address that concern?
Cordelia Fine:
I think one thing to bear in mind when thinking about this concern about compromising merit is thinking about what you need for a perfect meritocracy. So you need to be very confident that your selection processes are completely unbiased by arbitrary or irrelevant factors, like what ethnicity someone is, or what sex they are. You have to be quite sure that the criteria that you’re using for selection are valid, that you have good ways of measuring them, and that they actually predict performance. So, for example, particular forms of prior experience may be over-used as a criterion for who’s suitable for a job.
Then in a sort of broader sense you have to have a confidence that people are actually being given equal opportunities to be considered in the first place, through ending up in the recruitment pool, having had the development opportunities and the particular experiences that they need to be considered on the table. I think what quotas do is they force a re-examination of to what extent those criteria are being fulfilled in particular selection processes. I think we have very good data to not be confident that all those criteria are necessarily in place. I think everyone should feel positive about looking closely at those criteria that you need for true meritocracy.
But it is actually an empirical question as to whether quotas would compromise merit and it’s hard to get good data on that. But certainly the reviews of the effects of electoral quotas have on the whole tended to point to the opposite, so that you tend to actually have very well qualified women coming who are replacing perhaps less qualified men. So, I mean, clearly data are never clear-cut, but I don’t think the evidence that we have at the moment is cause for concern.
Carol Schwartz:
I find this really frustrating, to think that quotas and merit are mutually exclusive concepts. I mean, the fact is that merit is determined by the group that’s dominant at any particular time. So the concept of merit being some generic, objective standard of what’s appropriate and what’s qualified is absolutely not correct. Jennifer Whelan has done some brilliant work on the myth of merit and I’d just suggest that everybody reads that, because the issues around merit are completely mythical.
Glyn Davis:
David, if we are interested in changing the dynamics in the workplace, we run a risk, don’t we, that if experience is the main criteria for appointment, then always we’ll say there aren’t enough experienced women and then always we won’t see a change. How do we address this?
David Gonski:
Well, the first thing I would say is I don’t actually buy the argument at all that there is not a good and potential candidate who’s female for pretty well any job that I can think of. Obviously there are extremes, et cetera. I think that when you look at the word experience, experience is not a black and white thing. Everybody has different experiences. Everybody has pluses and minuses. When you get an old fellow like me, they have the experience of many years in business, but a young person has the benefit of looking at the business and knowing and having experiences that are completely different to mine, because of time and indeed their freshness and energy and so on.
So I think really it is having an open mind that is important. I must say – and I’m particularly involved more at the level of directors, council members and so on, as distinct from management – that’s my job as chairman and so on – I have never had a situation where there wasn’t ample talent who were female to fill the slots and have a look. I really don’t see it a major problem.
Carol Schwartz:
Yeah, I absolutely agree with David. I mean, the fact is that, what does experience actually mean? I mean, you can have a set of criteria that are very traditional. But I think that particularly now on boards and in corporations that the leaders are actually looking to gather people around them who have got different types of experience, who can make a different type of contribution to the questions that they’re dealing with and to the strategy that their organisations are taking. So I think that women in particular are very well qualified, but maybe just not in traditional ways.
Glyn Davis:
I just want to go back to a point Cordelia made to follow up on that. You mentioned the potential difference in qualifications of those who were coming into political life. There’s an interesting argument from Rainbow Murray, who teaches politics at Queen Mary University in London, and she proposes that governments move away from implicit quotas for women, which frames women as outsiders and men as the norm, and toward explicit quotas for men on the principle that better qualified women will come into the pool that way. Should we think about merit slightly differently therefore?
Cordelia Fine:
You mean in terms of, here’s a maximum quota for the number of men that we have?
Glyn Davis:
Yes.
Cordelia Fine:
Yeah, I think that’s a sort of – it seems like a small but significant point and it really comes back to something that I have sort of struggled with in the diversity literature around this idea that we’ve got our status quo and then you have to prove to us how you can improve on that through increased productivity and profit and so on and so forth. I think flipping it around and not taking the status quo as something that we have to make an argument against, but maybe thinking in a slightly more fresh and neutral way about the situation can be quite helpful.
Glyn Davis:
So limiting male representation rather than creating a floor for female participation.
Cordelia Fine:
Yeah, I think that’s a very nice way of thinking about it.
Carol Schwartz:
I think this has actually been introduced into the thinking in Australia. When Penny Wong actually set up Board Links, which was all about getting parity onto government boards, a number of years ago she actually introduced a concept called 40/40/20. It was minimum 40 per cent men, minimum 40 per cent women, and 20 per cent flexibility around the appointments, which I think is the perfect solution. It doesn’t have to be 50/50 in every situation. I think that that is way too rigid. But I think if you talk about a quota for men of 40 per cent, a quota for women of 40 per cent, and then 20 per cent floating, I think that’s a perfect solution.
Glyn Davis:
So let’s talk about organisations and the effect of diversity inside organisations for a minute. David, I would like to ask you, given your extensive business experience, whether you’ve noticed a change in businesses when the diversity changes.
David Gonski:
Oh, there’s absolutely no doubt there is. I think that the concept of disrupting the norm – and, by the way, self-disruption is much better than being disrupted from outside – is usually a good thing. Bringing in people who have different ways of thinking, different upbringings, different ways of doing things, is almost always a good thing. Because if what you’re doing is good, it will survive. If what you’re doing is tentative and not very good, it will be changed. In my experience, bringing in females has done just that.
Cordelia Fine:
Just add to that, David, I would say that – I mean, in a democratic ideal we want citizens to have equal access to decision-making that shapes their lives. A sort of social justice argument for having more balanced representation of both sexes in these kind of senior decision-making roles, at least from – based on US data, both women and minorities are more compassionate, more other-minded and more egalitarian.
Although again it’s the sort of data that’s hard to fix on causes and effects, it does seem like when you have women and minorities in these senior decision-making positions the decision-making does tend to be a bit more broader and less shareholderist, as we might say. So taking greater account of the welfare of employees, communities, and the environment. We can have debates within the business community about whether that’s a good or bad thing, but I think from the outside as a citizen I suppose we would all want the kinds of decisions being made at those board levels to be more reflective of the concerns and interests and values of the community at large.
David Gonski:
If I can just chime in there, Cordelia, I understand that, but I don’t see boards of directors, and don’t want them to be, a house of representatives. We can talk about politics. It’s different to boards. In boards I think you’re there for the company as a whole. But I do agree with you in this sense that sameness is very dangerous. In my opinion, if you just surround yourself with people who agree with you or from the same walk of life, you tend to relax and keep going probably in the wrong direction. The fact that you are, I hope, constructively tested with somebody who thinks differently is a wonderful thing. I would think it’s one of the basic tenets of being able to get good decision-making.
Glyn Davis:
So it raises the question about why we don’t deliver on this, given furious agreement about why it’s in all of our interests. Carol, the studies support the point David made, that greater diversity clearly creates better economic outcomes. Yet according to ABS data the GDP foregone from gender inequality is an annual loss of perhaps $300 billion to the economy. How is it that we can know this rationally, but not act on it?
Carol Schwartz:
Mm. I know. It’s nuts, isn’t it? That’s why I think that David’s point around shareholder activism is really such a crucial one, because I don’t understand why anybody would invest in a company that doesn’t have a diverse board and diverse leadership for those very reasons.
Glyn Davis:
David, why is change so slow?
David Gonski:
We are being asked to change and often that change can hurt those who are actually doing it. I’ve always seen it, by the way, and I’ve spoken to Carol about this in the past. I definitely see this problem of gender diversity, particularly on boards, as being a male problem, not a female problem. I do know that a lot of my colleagues have complained that there is actually an active bias at the moment towards women. It is hurting them and obviously in the past we’ve been selecting these people for boards from 49 point something per cent of the population. I think it’s also quite a lot of females who’d be very good in these roles will need some encouragement to put their names forward, because basically in the past they didn’t know it was available and, second, they weren’t encouraged to do so.
Carol Schwartz:
The research shows that women who have leadership qualities that are seen as real strengths in men are seen in women as being unlikeable, aggressive, and not appropriate. So there’s a whole lot of reasons why women are not putting themselves forward or why, if they are putting themselves forward, why that’s seen as being inappropriate in a particular set of circumstances.
David Gonski:
Can I also just chime in there? I mean, I think that it goes even further than that. I mean, I’ve seen it so many times and I’m sure Carol and Cordelia have also seen it that way, that when you advertise a job or a position that’s, say, got six points that you want to achieve and they’re in the ad or they’re in the documents that are put out with the job spec, generally a male like myself, if I can do one of them, thinks I’m an ideal appointment. If a woman thinks she can’t do one of them, i.e. she can do the other five, she feels she shouldn’t put her name up. I think we have to change that and I think – as I said earlier, I think there’s a male role there, that we have to encourage women to put themselves forward and basically then make the decision based on them championing themselves as suitable.
Cordelia Fine:
I think just to comment on that, I do think we have to be a little bit careful about placing too much emphasis on women’s lack of confidence and lack of absence of putting themselves forward. This is something I’ve looked at a lot in my research around explanations for women being intrinsically less risk-taking and less competitive, for example, which is often put forward as an explanation for why women are less likely to end up in these high level, highly competitive, high status roles.
We do need to be careful to think about the general context in which women are making their assessments of the risks and the chances of success. So, for example, a study of more than 800 management consultants that are senior at a major consultancy firm by Michelle Ryan found that women were indeed on average less likely to take career risks and to make sacrifices to advance their careers. But when she looked more closely at that the sort of – which is typically interpreted as women being less desiring of leaning in, so to speak, but she found that this was because they perceived greater risks and fewer benefits from taking those risks and making those sacrifices.
When she looked more closely, this wasn’t because women were less ambitious than men, but they had lower expectations of success, they had fewer role models to look up to, they perceived themselves to have less support in their organisations, and they had less confidence that their organisations were a meritocracy. I think these are all factors that will feed into people’s decision-making.
If you’re a young lawyer and you look up and you see very few female partners, it’s very hard to have the same degree of confidence about your likely success as someone who’s male and looks up and sees mostly people who look like him.
So I absolutely agree with you, David, but I think we also need to make sure that we’re not just focusing on women’s confidence, but the kinds of things around them that would make them more confident about their likelihood of success.
Glyn Davis:
We’ve talked about business, but let’s move into a different sphere, politics. Carol, you’ve been a very enthusiastic supporter of Pathways to Politics, a program designed to encourage young women to go into politics, or to consider political careers, notwithstanding Cordelia’s list of all the reasons they might choose not to take that risk. According to the Vote Compass data, about half of Australian women support the idea of using quotas to increase the number of women in parliament, but a majority of men are opposed to the ideas.
Carol Schwartz:
I wonder why.
Glyn Davis:
How do we change the political system?
Carol Schwartz: Quotas. Definitely quotas. I mean, if you have a look at the Labor Party in EMILY’s list, which was actually introduced by Joan Kirner, I mean, they have got over 45 per cent of their pre-selection criteria has to be given to women. They have many more women in parliament than the Liberal Party do and the Liberal Party women are absolutely supportive of putting in place some sort of system, and whether you want to use the T word or the Q word, that’s going to allow them to get to more parity with men in the Liberal Party. I think that it’s so important for us as a society that we have close to 50/50 representation of both men and women in politics, sharing power and decision-making for us as a nation. I think that it’s really a huge loss to us when we don’t.
Glyn Davis:
Cordelia, a slightly different take on this, if I may. Would it make a difference to policy outcomes if the parliament was more closely representative of the population?
Cordelia Fine:
Yeah, I think tentatively the evidence suggests that, yes, it would have an impact on policy. So – and this is talking about if the government was sort of more generally representative of the general population, rather than just in terms of gender balance.
So it does seem to be the case that women legislators, for example, are more likely to vote for policies that support families, that support the poor, that are supportive of education and healthcare and so on. I think this does raise a sort of democratic or social justice issue of – to the extent to which the interests of the population are being represented by those in government.
Carol Schwartz:
The fact is that as men and women we’re all subject to unconscious bias. This gets back to Cordelia’s point before. If we’re not seeing women as role models, as decision-makers, as political leaders, then we can’t imagine what that might look like and it’s going to make it very, very difficult to change the status quo. This is why something like quotas, which actually does change the status quo and creates a new normal, actually really helps the movement along.
David Gonski:
It has to be achieved in another way. Quotas can come from the parties themselves, groups of electors can come together to push and practise that. As it is, that would just be the start of other people potentially saying, well, why aren’t we there, et cetera? Soon you lose, in my opinion, the essence of democracy, which is that we are entitled to vote, hopefully, the way we believe is right for the country.
Carol Schwartz:
I think that for me it’s not opening up a can of worms, because women are not a minority. We’re 50 per cent of the population and we should be represented in that way.
Glyn Davis:
Recent studies have shown that very few millennials, and in particular women, want to run for office because they’re put off by the media scrutiny, by the discrimination they expect to face, and they find politics a very hostile space for women. Are there things we can do to make politics a more attractive destination and to encourage more women to take risks?
Carol Schwartz:
I actually think that politics is a really hostile environment for anybody, men and women. So until we address that I think that it is what it is. I mean, our Pathways to Politics program, we actually talk about, if we had a critical mass of women in politics, would politics be played out differently? It is only by getting that critical mass of women in that I think that actually the behaviours could in fact change, so let’s head in that direction.
Glyn Davis:
As you think about the future, do you feel optimistic about the prospects for positive change in women’s representation across the board in positions of leadership? Carol.
Carol Schwartz:
I do. I feel very optimistic about it, because I know that my generation of women and, with the support of men like David, are absolutely going gangbusters that this change is going to happen and it’s going to happen very, very soon. I think that there is a groundswell and also when you have leaders like Justin Trudeau and Macron in France now, who are saying, well, this is now the 21st century, we do need a different type of leadership and we do need women standing shoulder to shoulder alongside us to create a much more powerful type of leadership, absolutely I’m confident that it will happen.
Glyn Davis: Cordelia.
Cordelia Fine:
Yes, I think I’m generally optimistic too. I mean, it’s easy to forget how recent all this is. It was only in 1984 that we had the Sex Discrimination Act. That’s not that long ago. It’s in all of our lifetimes. Now here we are talking about gender quotas and it’s a heated debate, but it’s a debate that we wouldn’t have dreamed of 40-odd years ago. So, although progress can seem slow, there have been some quite extraordinary changes just in quite a relatively short period of time.
I mean, when I look at the scientific literature, a hundred-odd years ago the neuroscientists were arguing about whether women’s nervous systems were suited – suitable to voting, and now we’re talking about women’s participation – equal participation – in politics, so it’s a big shift and I think we should hold on to that.
Glyn Davis:
David, are you optimistic?
David Gonski:
Yes, I am. I’d also say that the younger men coming behind, I think, have lived a slightly different life to what I did and I can certainly say the university I went to when I did law, women were in the minority doing law. Now, if you look at my university, and I’m pretty sure it’s probably the same at Melbourne University, the majority – a small majority, but a majority nevertheless – of people doing law are female. They will have worked with them, they will have taken it, I think, for granted that these people are worthy of being involved in all sorts of things. That’s where I take the optimism from, that both sides, male and female, will have a more open mind to the future.
Glyn Davis:
It’s been a great pleasure today to talk with Reserve Bank Australia board member, Carol Schwartz.
Carol Schwartz:
Thank you, Glyn.
Glyn Davis:
With Professor Cordelia Fine from the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Cordelia Fine:
Thank you.
Glyn Davis:
And to Chairman and Chancellor, David Gonski.
David Gonski:
Thank you.
Glyn Davis:
I’m Glyn Davis. Thank you all for listening to The Policy Shop.
Voiceover:
This episode of The Policy Shop was produced by Eoin Hahessy and Ruby Schwartz with research by Paul Gray. Audio engineering is by Gavin Nebauer. The Policy Shop is licensed under Creative Comments. Copyright the University of Melbourne, 2017.
