My happy memories of growing up as a teenage boy included loud dinners at home as the 3rd eldest of ten children.
Now, before you think of The Brady Bunch and normal gender distributions like five boys and five girls, you need to recalibrate the image to only my brother and I sandwiched between eight sisters and Mum and Dad at either end.
We sat at an egg-shaped table grabbing whatever sound bites we could before being howled down, overcome with laughter or fiercely debated against. Parliament House question time looked pale by comparison.
On top of that, Dad, who was an imposing successful entrepreneur and employed third generation families brought to Australia from Italy by his Grandfather at the turn of the century, took on the role of speaker or chair of the house. And God forbid if you showed any gender, race or cultural bias!
Mum was the host of a national weekly ABC television show, Mary Rossi’s Women’s World. So often the topic around the table was about Mum’s guests who had just released another book or led the world as a thought leader in some way.
Or, as often happened, these famous male and female guests were invited home to dinner with us and we learnt very quickly true leadership.
But for years, being surrounded by so many women, I thought gender inequality meant men were outweighed and needed support!
Then, as we traveled more (Mum went onto lead a travel business with some of my sisters), I saw the inequities towards women around the world.
Also, through my second eldest sister, Cathy Harris, who was one of the first women to graduate from the University of New South Wales with a marketing degree, then run a start up, have 5 boys and later head up the Affirmative Action Agency (now the Workplace Gender Equality Agency) to address the gender inequality in corporate Australia, I came to realise my bias was inverse to what was actually going on in the outside world.
My early career as a founding director of trading at Macquarie Bank was blind-sided by the overwhelming male majority. I hosted a reunion last year for traders from that period from the money markets, we had 50 men arrive, and only two women.
As my daughter grew into a young women and began to face some of these biases and prejudices, I knew I needed to try and equalise numbers to create diversity, not just by empowering women, which I do as an executive coach, but by talking more with men on this.
My daughter took a graduate position with global strategy consultants, McKinsey & Company, and her first role was to write a report for Male Champions of Change based on her interviews with the leaders from Australia’s organisations.
Also, my wife who heads an insurance broking business, another male dominated sector, would come home complaining how her industry either overlooked or pandered to women with politically correct but inauthentic niceties.
Through discussions with Cathy, my wife, my daughter and others, I have come to understand the blind spots and resultant inequalities when we are privileged by belonging to a majority.
I have also come to realise, through discussions with Michael Kimmel over Skype in the lead-up to him coming to Australia next month, that I can and will do more to promote these discussions with men, to remember who we are as men, and the influence we can have over addressing gender equality in the workplace.
To be in the same room with Michael on 20 May, and to be able to share stories with other impactful leaders on how best to tackle these big issues, is inspiring and exciting.
Tim Rossi is one of 25 male facilitators at Gathering Men: Talking tough with Dr Michael Kimmel on Friday, 20 May. Michael is one of the world’s leading experts on men and masculinities, and is in Sydney from 20-26 May to share his work with business leaders and diversity champions.