It is my first time as an HSC parent. Like most first-timers, I’ve let myself become obsessed with creating the perfect conditions for my daughter for the next three weeks. To be there with her every need when she wants me and keep a low profile when she doesn’t. I’m assured that by HSC child #3, I’ll be a lot more ‘whatever’. Sorry Will.
In the midst of my trauma – yes, my trauma – an opportunity to write a piece for today’s 10thanniversary of International Day of the Girl broadened my horizons beyond my progeny’s final maths exam. I started thinking about the creativity, tenacity and resilience this generation of girls are about to bring to the world. But how do I feel about my daughter and the class of 2022 heading into a workforce where the epidemic of sexual harassment still prevails, the horror of domestic violence is still escalating and where Australian women still do not get equal pay? Realities not yet really on their radar.
A chance encounter at the Chief Executive Women Summit and an invitation to lunch broadened my horizons still further as I found myself in a challenging and transformational discussion with the incredible Wendy McCarthy AO, arguably Australia’s leading women’s rights activist and advocate. ‘Don’t be too polite girls’ is more than just the title of her autobiography. To borrow a term from my own marketing background, it’s her brand.
Lunch was a masterclass in consciousness-raising. Although Wendy enveloped me and my story in a familial warmth, it was the floodlights she focussed on phrases in meetings I had let pass unchallenged, career advice I had received and not questioned and my voice that I had not used often enough that left me pensive and charged.
I’ve always thought of myself as a dependable player on team gender equality. But with charm, precision and wisdom, Wendy challenged my inactions. Underlying the need for constant and sometimes exhausting vigilance to break the cycle in every way, in every conversation, every day. It was humbling and inspiring in equal measure. Every girl should have lunch with Wendy.
Her words gained further gravity when she announced we were dining on the second anniversary of the death of fellow women’s rights campaigner and her long-time friend, Susan Ryan AO. As the sole woman around a Labor cabinet table, Susan relentlessly drove legislation that made sexual harassment illegal – a world first that many are not aware of and no Australian should ever forget.
Wendy’s style of encouragement and agitation I had not encountered before, but have found myself using since. Her invocation of Susan Ryan’s maxim for change ‘Just keep going’ brought to mind Jim Collins’s flywheel analogy from his seminal business book ‘Good to Great’. Collins likens systemic change to a giant, multi-tonne flywheel. It takes a monumental effort to overcome inertia and start moving, but once going, every push, large or small, adds to its momentum until the flywheel becomes unstoppable and change inevitable.
In the last year it has been the voices of our young women like Grace Tame and Chanel Contos that have bravely chosen to give the flywheel huge public shoves.
So too has technology and measurement. The voices of women, their opinions, experiences, talents and critically their absences are now captured, analysed and able to be amplified. The data is hard to ignore. A constant stream of published reports is holding leaders to account, and what gets measured gets improved.
Every time a young woman references the reporting by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency in an interview, (as I’m proud to say my daughter has) we gain more; every time we ask why there’s a graduate gender pay gap for 15 out of 19 professions; every time another girl uses her voice and speaks up, ‘unstoppable’ gets closer.
A girl’s right to an education is the universal message of today. According to the UN, one in four girls aged 15-19 globally are still not in education, employment or training. Yet, Australian girls, in spite of an education, face the reality that the under-use of educated women in the workforce is tolerated as one of the largest productivity leakages in the Australian economy. That women carry the load of unpaid work, and in leadership ranks that some will aspire to, it could take 100 years to achieve gender balance in CEO roles. Shame on us.
But ‘girls are coming out of the woods’, Tishani Doshi so beautifully writes in her poem of the same name. ‘Clearing the ground to scatter their stories. They’re coming, they’re coming.’ In Afghanistan, Iran – in fact everywhere – there is an uprising of girls’ voices, showing they are the changemakers driving progress, refusing to accept the unconscionable burdens that society has perpetuated against girls and women, smashing stereotypes and breaking boundaries.
So today on International Day of the Girl, let’s do more than just flood social media with photos of our daughters and grand-daughters. Let’s do more than drive awareness, let’s commit to action. Show our girls that there is a generation of great women and good men pushing alongside them, investing in their agency, leadership and potential. The UN Women campaign asks ‘When will she be right?’ We must demand it and then hold ourselves to account. At every opportunity, ask what would Wendy do?
Equality is our final frontier. We need to maintain the momentum so that it remains within sight – all of us can shove that giant flywheel for our daughters, for girls, for equality.
But right now, on the eve of the first HSC exam, mine needs new pens from Officeworks.