Yesterday morning, the Sydney Morning Herald released details of leaked documents damaging to Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, via a letter from the Liberal Party’s honorary federal treasurer Philip Higginson.
The letter discredits the Liberal federal director Brian Loughnane’s ability to be impartial in his duty, whilst also being married to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Peta Credlin. In his letter, Phil Higginson outlines his disappointment of, “How this party ever let a husband and wife team into those two key roles where collegiate competitive tension is mandatory and private consultations between colleagues to see that each side is served well is a complete mystery”. Higginson goes on to suggest that, “In corporate Australia the chairman of the board would never allow his EA [executive assistant] to be wife of the managing director, or the managing director would never allow his EA to be the wife of the chairman.”
Unfortunately Higginson’s comments reflect one of a range of reasons why government and corporate Australia has one of the lowest rates of female representation in leadership in OECD countries. That is, attitudes from male leaders who automatically assign women with the leading role of ‘the wife’.
Over the last four years, a research tool developed by social psychologists the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has been capturing how closely and quickly our brains can link or categorise various words and images.
These cognitive associations lead to the attitudes and stereotypes that affect our understanding, which can lead to subtle forms of discrimination. Stanford University researchers found that when participants followed the IAT instructions to sort images rapidly, the average person found it easier to pair words like “president”, “governor” and “executive” with male names and words like “secretary”, “assistant” and “aide” with female names.
The findings revealed that many had difficulty associating women with leadership attributes. This finding is also supported by a recent global McKinsey research report, Moving mind-sets on gender diversity, which revealed that only 43% of male senior managers strongly agree that women can lead as effectively as men.
Why is it that Australians have issues with associating women with positions of power and leadership?
The UK’s cabinet office has a clear view of the value of diverse leaders. Its policy states that to effectively support the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, we need to ensure that we are able to recruit the very best talent, skill and creative minds from the public, private and voluntary sectors. To do so, the Cabinet Office values the diversity of its entire staff and aims to provide a truly inclusive culture where talents can flourish. Within Cabinet Office, diversity means more than just gender, ethnicity or belief but the true diversity of thought, skills, background and experience. Only by reflecting the diversity of British society can we deliver quality public services.
Perhaps Australia’s Minister for Women could outline his strategies for supporting diversity and inclusion in government and corporate Australia. Tony? Are you still there?