There’s no resting when it comes to progressing the proportion of women in power. Blink and you may miss the point where we take a u-turn.
And after plenty of high-profile women declared 2012 a seminal year for women — including former Queensland premier Anna Bligh at the Sydney Writers’ Festival last weekend — 2013 is shaping up to record a significant shift back in the opposite direction.
Progress made for women in many measurable areas of government and business has gone backwards in the first half of 2013. On current future predictions, including a Labor election wipeout, we can expect it to continue in reverse.
Firstly, it must be noted that progress for women in leadership can always quickly come undone given the representation of women in such positions is so small in the first place. Women make up just 3% of CEOs of the 200 largest listed companies on the ASX. Should just one resign and we’re back down to 2.5%.
The same goes for the appointment of female directors to the boards of ASX200 companies. Women currently make up 15.7% of such board positions according to the latest figures from AICD (as of 7 May). That’s a record, but don’t get too excited.
Of new board appointments in 2013 to date, only 16% have been female. In 2012 that figure for the entire year was 22%. In 2011, it was 28%. After much celebration of incremental progress at the big end of town, we’re actually going backwards.
Sure, we’re still ahead of the pathetic 5% of female board appointments reported for such companies in 2009, but the lack of continued progress shows that even a decent amount of change for women over the course of a ‘good year’ can never be taken for granted.
Meanwhile, we can expect fewer women in Federal Parliament come September this year, with the Coalition expected to sweep to victory with a solid majority of the seats.
As Anne Summers outlines in her new book, The Misogyny Factor, women’s representation in parliaments around the country is going backwards. Women currently make up 37.3% of Labor’s parliamentary representation and just 20.75% of the Coalition’s. There are just two women in the Coalition’s Shadow Cabinet, Julie Bishop and Sophie Mirabella. Should an Abbott Government be in power this September, expect to see far few female leaders in the media.
That also means that by the end of 2013 we’ll be unable to continue that all too common line, “but we have a female prime minister!” Indeed, given the current pipeline of women and the fact Labor could be out of government for some time, we’re unlikely to utter such words again for a very long time to come.
Summers also notes that by this time next year, Australia could have just one female political leader: ACT’s Chief Minister Katy Gallagher.
Meanwhile, in other areas once heavily celebrated for gender diversity, progress has also taken a hit.
Take the Victorian Public Service, which has just undergone a restructure that’s reshaped it’s gender balance at the top. At the beginning of 2012, the state boasted the highest proportion of female departmental heads (four of 11 amounting to 36%), according to a recent report in The Age. In May 2013, the state has just one such head — Gill Callister who heads up the Department of Human Services.
It’s been a disappointing turn for Elizabeth Proust, Victoria’s first government department head. More than 25 years since her appointment, she warned a CEDA leadership forum last Friday how the Victorian Public Service example demonstrates there’s no resting when it comes to progress on women in power.
As Lea Corbett wrote last month, when she joined Victoria’s Premier’s Department in 1996 her boss was a woman, as was her boss’s boss and her boss’ boss’ boss. It was right to feel optimistic that the fact Victoria’s public service was made up of more than 50% women was being reflected at the leadership level too. How quickly things can change.
We may ask what went wrong, but we could be better off wondering what went right to enable the small windows of progress that were made in the first place.
Clearly, there’s no resting on the issue. No amount of celebrating the gains made for women in power can temper the fact that gains can quickly be taken away.
What do you think? Are quotas necessary? Check out Anne Summers’ piece today questioning why the ‘q word’ has become such a dirty word.