Tokenism is not enough: Thank you Anna Burke for reminding us - Women's Agenda

Tokenism is not enough: Thank you Anna Burke for reminding us

Most women would love nothing more than a world where promotion was based on merit. In such a world women would gain at least half of all board positions, ministerial roles and panel positions on Q&A. There wouldn’t be a thought given to finding great women because in the search for the right people women would inevitably surface.

No one would be counting the number of women in Cabinet because there would be no question about the quality of men and women chosen versus those who didn’t make the cut. Around Board tables of the ASX200 companies there would be just as many women needing to retire after serving a full term as the men who had spent a couple of decades there. And there wouldn’t be any need to brief recruiters for a female director position because all eight spots on a board could easily be filled by women if merit was the decider.

Panel shows like Q&A would simply choose the best five people to discuss a subject rather than needing to scratch around for fresh faces to fill the two women’s spots each week. It means that some weeks we could be watching all men and some weeks all women but often a mix that just could be majority female. Imagine that. Meritocracy.

But that’s not how business, politics, the media or sports administration currently operate. We get excited when a major corporation chooses to add a woman to its board of nine – and we’re overjoyed when that number rises in time to be two. And while it’s certainly progress for boards to have moved from zero female directors to two, our enthusiasm has also provided those boards with the permission to go slow on reaching parity. There isn’t pressure for companies to achieve real equality, only to have some women at the table. As a minority in that situation our voices can still be drowned out. I have watched too many episodes of Q&A where I have wanted to throw something at the television in my bid to get the men to stop talking over the women. The same thing happens around boardroom tables and apparently during political party machinations.

In an interview on the ABC’s Lateline on Monday night the outgoing Speaker of the House Anna Burke expressed what it felt like to be a woman in the Labor party: “a couple of blokes sitting around the room, carving up the results…that’s what it feels like”. And this from the Labor party who had only recently been seen (in numbers) to be the ones who were getting it right on the female leadership pipeline. In so doing Burke highlighted the reason why we need to focus on changing the way we think about female progression. I don’t know about you but grabbing the leftover spoils has never been my style.

Whenever someone frames a position in parliament, on a board or on a panel as ‘the woman’s spot’ I am reminded that we still have so far to go. Yes it’s great that they are even thinking of women but in 2013 shouldn’t that be mandatory? Fifty years after women joined the workforce as a considered life path, is it really too much to expect that we could be capable of any role at any time, given experience and education requirements? Should we really be patting organisations on the back for throwing us a bone? Why are we still putting up with having hidden boxes to tick against our progression based on gender?

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