Last Friday at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women in Philadelphia Hillary Clinton announced her latest initiative to improve the lives of women and children. The scheme called No Ceilings is about empowerment and will focus on the progress of women in participation in the economy and society.
Clinton informed the 7000-strong audience that in the US many women were now the primary breadwinner for their family and the lack of equal opportunity for well-paying jobs was the reason they couldn’t lift themselves out of the poverty cycle.
The number of Australian women who are the main breadwinners in the household has also risen during the past 10 years. Recent statistics revealed 25% percent of women are the highest earners in their household. For higher income earners, the figure is 17% and for middle-income earners it’s 25%. The figure jumps to 27% for lower income earners.
The enforced glass ceiling confronted by women with the greatest opportunity has also resulted in the floor falling out from under those women with the least. If we can get rid of the ceiling we will have a fighting chance of securing a decent floor for them.
A 10-year study of some of Australia’s most marginalised people conducted between 2001 and 2010 found that the most disadvantaged members of our community were more likely to be women, particularly indigenous women. Researchers at the University of Canberra followed the lives of 900 people and after a decade only 60 per cent had been able to lift themselves out of abject poverty. Those who were able to find full-time work were more likely to get the rest of their lives in order.
During the early days of my career as a women’s magazine editor I was often asked to speak to girls and young women from challenged backgrounds who had virtually given up before they had even started. I spoke to desperate year 10 girls with home lives that would make you cry, bright year 12 girls whose parents had taught them that they needed a man to lift them out of poverty, and hopeful undergraduate women from less-privileged backgrounds who were about to learn the hard way that before they ever hit their head on a ceiling they would need to find a way through doors that had been slammed shut to them.
A few days after I addressed a group of year 11 girls from a state school in a particularly economically challenged part of Sydney, the principal phoned to tell me that one of the girls had started articulating a career goal. It was clearly a big deal because at that particular school it was apparently rare. That one girl, I was to learn, would later inspire a small group of others.
Clinton’s project will look at data and patterns of progress made by women since the 1995 United Nations conference on women in China to identify the gaps. “We need to help our girls see that they are capable of doing anything and stand behind our women as they break through the doors that are still closed,” she said.
When we set about smashing glass ceilings the knock-on effect is that we are then better positioned to open the doors that enable less fortunate women to get off the floor.