No-one does gender equality quite like Victoria.
Last week, at a purple light infused Melbourne Town Hall event before the feminist faithful, while choirs of women sang Florence and the Machine’s Shake it Off, Minister for Women Natalie Hutchins, released Victoria’s latest Gender Equality Strategy.
Our Equal State, with 110 new actions and commitments, builds on the Foundational Reforms of Victoria’s first Strategy, Safe & Strong, which gave us the Nation’s only Gender Equality Act, a Gender Equality Commissioner, gender responsive budgeting and targets for the election of women in local government.
Once again, Victoria is setting the pace for transformation, by applying what we know works most in gender equity design – clear change plans with measurable targets.
Gender equity targets shape the strategy, with Victoria committing to the following by 2027:
- 70% of all new place names, roads and landmarks in Victoria will commemorate women. That’s right, you heard correctly, 70%. In the boldest move of the Plan, Geographic Names Victoria has committed to radically redressing the dire state of recognition of women’s achievements by using its place-naming power. Working in partnership with the #puthernameonit campaign, GNV has demonstrated what is possible when women’s advocacy and leadership in the form of Land Use Victoria Chief Executive Melissa Harris and #puthernameonit campaigner Kerry Irwin meets excellence in ally- leadership, in the form of Surveyor-General Craig Sandy, and colleague Rafe Benli.
Victoria is now the standard bearer for gender commemorative justice in Australia, having commissioned six new public art projects celebrating women, including disability rights advocate and comedian, Stella Young and Equal Pay champion, Zelda D’Aprano and supporting the fledgling Finding Her tour of significant sites for women across the State.
- 50% CEO’s and senior leaders in the public sector and a 50% reduction of the public sector gender pay gap. Gender Equality Commissioner, Dr Niki Vincent’s baseline audit of the State of Gender Equality in the Victorian Public Sector revealed a 15.6% gender pay gap in a woman-dominated workforce. Despite women making up 66% of Victorian public sector workers, the report also found they occupy only 46% of senior roles. The Commissioner and the Office of Women deserve high praise for securing this commitment to change. The strategies for getting there will need to be thoughtful, innovative and bold. Active mentoring and sponsorship will be required in key roles, with focus on ensuring cultural and other diversity in appointments, too.
- Quotas to redress gender imbalance in state select entry schools if existing strategies don’t work. This is a big one. Victoria has four select entry public schools. Two are co-ed. Two are single sex – Melbourne High and MacRobertson Girls High School. In a shocking discovery last year, it was found that 500 more boys than girls were being offered places in these prestigious learning institutions.
Australia prides itself on educating girls and boys and gender diverse children equally. It ranks at the top of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index in educational equity, so this blatant disadvantage needs an urgent fix. The Department of Education, which Natalie Hutchins is also Minister of, has now been empowered to establish dedicated positions for girls – presumably with funding implications – to correct the advantage young men have been experiencing for decades.
Equality is easy when you use the tools that work. And targets and quotas work.
Natalie Hutchins knows that. Before becoming Minister for Women, she was in the trenches with women like me, working to ensure the Australian Labor Party set a target of 50% women in preselected positions by 2025. After two decades of affirmative action target setting which has fundamentally changed the party and the parliament, the ALP is on track to meet its goal, with the total representation of labor members across the commonwealth sitting at 49.9% women. (The Commonwealth is at 52.9% and Victoria at 53.5%).
Natalie, along with her predecessors the late Fiona Richardson and Gabrielle Williams, is a member of EMILY’s List Australia member, a network of pro-choice, equal pay & early childhood education feminist Members of Parliament and supporters who have been the key driver of gender targets in the party.
The proven success of gendered targets has empowered Labor Women Ministers to apply the same techniques within legislative and policy settings. We won’t see the full benefit of this bold and strategic approach for a few more years yet.
The only downside with Our Equal State was the lack of an associated budget announcement. Most of the audience of gender equity and gendered violence advocates had been worded up before that there was no new money for the Strategy. While there were welcome reannouncements of the $25M in free public sanitary products at public venues for women, the fact is, women’s organisations and women voters are expecting way more than investments in period products. “Bucks for bleeding”, as one participant at the launch said to me “is the bare minimum of what we deserve.”
The last strategy received a paltry $5 million. In that year, it was the same amount allocated for the removal of roadside weeds as for addressing gender economic inequity, and half of what the National Centre for Golf received in that same year. It’s hard to believe this announcement could receive any less money. And yet, this is precisely what has happened.
I can’t imagine any other portfolio – certainly not roads, schools, multicultural affairs or sport – releasing a new policy to stakeholders without a cent of new investment to announce.
For some reason, the Victorian Treasury continues to put an artificial cap on spending on women. A host of funding initiatives including Working Women Centres, expansion of the women’s public art program and funding to double the number of men taking paid parental leave were left on the cutting room floor.
This is why commitment in Our Equal State to put gender responsive budgeting into legislation is also a gamechanger.
Gender responsive budgeting applies a gender lens to annual government investments, interrogating who is benefitting from the way public money is being spent. By their Victorian Government’s own Gender Budget Statement, women continue to receive less than
Currently the implementation of the government’s commitment to GRB is at its infancy. Capacity to undertake gender impact assessment of initiatives across the budget cycle is still limited, with the dedicated GRB unit within Treasury a token outfit having impact beyond its small and vulnerable status.
The Victorian gender equality movement had to fight hard for Treasury to stump up money for GRB, after it learned that the paltry women’s portfolio was being expected to fund gender responsive budgeting itself. The impacts of this advocacy are still in their early days.
Male economists, schooled in GDP design that ignores women’s unpaid work at home and believes women are unproductive units within a household, is struggling to catch up with women professionals, workers and taxpayer expectations (as well as global financial institutions who are calling on governments to do more to empower women and girls to promote growth.)
Victoria’s decision to commit gender responsive budgeting to law demonstrates that the current MP’s recognise how vulnerable GRB is to political change; how much of a signpost is needed to public sector economists to maintain commitment to it.
Our Equal State, like Safe and Strong before it, provides a template for what may be possible at a National level. Having committed to developing its own National Gender Equality Strategy, the Commonwealth will have the added advantage of Katy Gallagher being both Women’s Minister and Finance Minister. Victoria has never had a female Treasurer or a Finance Minister. Women’s Ministers have always had to rely on the good grace of male allies to shepherd dedicated and significant investments for women through.
It will be interesting to see what Victorian initiatives are picked up nationally and whether Gallagher can secure from the Commonwealth Treasury a greater slice of the fiscal pie for women.