OKAY LADIES, LET’S GET IN FORMATION
There was a time when women were pitted against each other in the workplace, and we believed that the best man (or woman) would get the job. But after the election of a certain president, and the #Metoo feminist awakening, one thing is clear: women need t
Why the sisterhood in your workplace matters.
“FEMINIST? IT’S NOT A TERM I FIND PARTICULARLY USEFUL THESE DAYS. I’M A FEMALE POLITICIAN, I’M A FEMALE FOREIGN MINISTER… GET OVER IT.”
The year was 2014, and this was a sound bite from Julie Bishop, then the highestranking female member of parliament. At the time, Bishop’s statement caused a stir – after all, there’s no denying that Bishop has been the beneficiary of feminism – but just four years later, it seems less outrageous than simply… outdated.
In less than an Olympic cycle, women in government – and everywhere, really – have gone from “it’s not part of my lexicon” (which Bishop went on to say in the same speech in 2014) to “I’m proud to call myself a feminist,” as fellow Liberal Kelly O’dwyer said at an International Women’s Day event earlier this year. “As a nation,” the Minister for Women said, “we must demand a life for women where they don’t just survive, they thrive.” It’s probably a sentiment Bishop herself would agree with, even if she might not say it out loud. But that’s the thing: the time for silence and “things will all work out” is over. It’s time to speak up.
Welcome to feminism’s fifth wave, where women are each other’s lifeguards, spotters, paramedics, champions and teammates everywhere – especially at work. While there’s
always been a certain poignancy in Madeleine Albright’s famous quote, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” her words have never seemed more prescient. Because decades after we joined the mainstream, male-dominated workforce, decades after we joined the ranks of politics, sports, arts, fashion, media, medicine and law, decades after legislation was introduced to protect us at work, we women have finally figured out a great secret of adulthood – that the workplace is not a meritocracy, and that to get ahead, we’re going to have to fight the system together.
Cue thousands of headlines about getting more women into leadership positions, millions of #girlboss hashtags and memes proclaiming that “real queens fix each other’s crowns”, and most recently, former PM Julia Gillard being named the inaugural chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. On her appointment, Gillard said that her main emotion when it comes to women in power these days is frustration. “Aren’t we there yet, aren’t we better than this already?”
If we had to pinpoint a time when this new wave of women supporting women began in earnest, we could probably guess pretty accurately: November 9, 2016, when women everywhere realised with stunning, devastating clarity that it didn’t matter how capable you were, how hard you had worked, what sacrifices you had made, how qualified you were – when you are a woman, your gender is an automatic liability. Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign communications director, sums up the feeling of rejection perfectly: “We had lived our lives playing by a certain set of rules,” she writes in her new book, Dear Madam President: An Open Letter To The Women Who Will Run The World, “and they had failed us.” Could it be, she wonders, that women are only meant to go so far in the world? Is the glass ceiling there for a reason? “No, that can’t be. Women haven’t plateaued; it is the rules we were playing by that are outdated.” A year after, this sounds even more powerful, with #Metoo and #Timesup. Suddenly it’s imperative to heed Beyoncé’s words, and get in formation.
KELLY O’DWYER MINISTER FOR WOMEN “I’m proud to call myself a feminist. As a nation, we must demand a life for women where they don’t just survive, they thrive”
JENNIFER PALMIERI HILLARY CLINTON’S CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR ”We had lived our lives playing by a certain set of rules and they had failed us. No, that can’t be. Women haven’t plateaued; it is the rules we were playing by that are outdated”
OLIVIA RUELLO CEO OF MENTORING AND NETWORKING GROUP BUSINESS CHICKS “Workplaces are moving away from a command and control style of leadership to a more humanistic point of view. We used to value domination and strength in leaders – now we look for empathy and connection”
“There used to be two types of women in the workplace,” says Olivia Ruello, CEO of mentoring and networking group Business Chicks. “The bitch in the corner office, and the lovely lady who worked in HR.” Ruello is joking, but she has a point: for a long time, women were relegated to stereotypes in the workplace, even if they may have been of our own making to some extent. “I’ve certainly seen a generational shift in my career,” she continues. “There used to be women who refused to speak about or acknowledge their gender.”
It’s something Deanne Weir knows all about. The former senior exec at Foxtel and current chair of the Sydney Film Festival explains the “Queen Bee” phenomenon: “Women who [were] in leading positions often had to fight tooth and nail to get there, or to hide their feminism under the table to avoid scaring the horses.” For women in male-dominated industries, it was often better to not identify with their own gender and to ignore it – and other women – altogether. As Marianne Cooper wrote in The Atlantic, the Queen Bee thinks that “gender should be irrelevant at work”, but is also concerned that “their career path may be stunted if they are primarily seen as just a woman and therefore not a good fit for leadership”. The Queen Bee combats inherent sexism, in other words, with more sexism. Suddenly, Julie Bishop makes a lot more sense.
But it’s clear this model – every woman for herself – isn’t working. The stats are very clear: even though a 2016 Mckinsey study showed that both men and women described themselves as equally ambitious, women just aren’t making it to leadership positions at the same rate as men. In Australia, women make up 46.9 per cent of all employees, but only 13.7 per cent of chair positions, 24.9 per cent of directorships, 16.5 per cent of CEOS and 29.7 per cent of key management personnel. There are systemic issues at play, like the fact that women are more likely to take time out to have children and come back to work part-time. “But it’s getting harder and harder to defend these so-called ‘barriers’ because the workforce is just so geared toward men, when that’s not an accurate reflection of the actual workforce, which is nearly 50 per cent women,” says Ruello. At Business Chicks, which was founded by mum-of-five Emma Isaacs and is staffed almost entirely by women, everyone has the opportunity to work flexibly. “People work from wherever they need to,” she says. Ruello works part-time (she has a oneyear-old), which is something of an oddity for a CEO. “70 per cent of part-time workers are women but only six per cent of CEOS work part-time,” she says. “You do the maths.”
While not every business can allow employees to telecommute – someone still has to man the floor at Sephora and give us our flu shots at the GP’S – Ariane Barker, CEO of Scale Investors, a female-focused investor network, says the real work starts with acknowledging that these barriers to leadership exist. “I am in a lot of meetings where men say, ‘Right, we’ll pick this up at the conference call at 7pm. And you hear one woman say, ‘Oh, I’m putting my baby to bed then,’ and none of the men say, ‘No problem, we’ll move it back an hour.’ They say, ‘Alright, we’ll send you an email later.’ What’s the harm in saying, ‘What time works for everyone?’”
Professor Julie Cogin, head of the business school at the University of Queensland, believes true equality is acknowledging that not
PROFESSOR JULIE COGIN HEAD OF THE BUSINESS SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND “As a female leader, you’re under such intense scrutiny. A man who’s a terrible communicator is just a terrible communicator. A woman who is a bad boss is bad because she’s a woman”
everyone has the same opportunities. “There’s so much unconscious bias in the workplace,” says Cogin. “As a female leader, you’re under such intense scrutiny. A man who’s a terrible communicator is just a terrible communicator. A woman who is a bad boss is bad because she’s a woman.”
While there’s not so much overt discrimination these days, what’s really holding women back is what former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick called “gender asbestos”: deeply ingrained biases that relegate women to supporting roles. It’s something Jessica Bennett noticed when she began working as an editor at Tumblr: her female friends and colleagues were constantly talking about cultural barriers and biases at work, which all boiled down to sexism. One friend was asked to make coffee for her male colleagues, another had her film idea picked up, only for it to be handed to a man to produce. Bennett herself was hired at Tumblr at the same time as a man, and was told they’d have the same job title – “co-editor”. When he started, a few weeks after Bennett, she noticed he’d taken it upon himself to give himself a promotion to “editor-in-chief”. The result? “People looked at him, not me, in meetings.”
Bennett’s response? Founding a “feminist fight club” – a group of women who’d get together regularly to hash out their issues at work, and figure out ways to solve them. It spawned a book of the same name, and similar fight clubs all over the world. It’s something anyone can do, says Ruello. “I used to work at a major bank and I’d have women coming to me with issues. They tended to be the same issues, so in the end I said, ‘We’re going down to the café once a month to talk about this stuff.’” At the first meeting, four women showed up. By the time Ruello left, the meetings were in the hundreds. “The beauty of these ‘circles’ is that literally anyone can start one. Go to the coffee shop and just talk,” says Ruello.
ARIANE BARKER CEO OF SCALE INVESTORS “Some organisations benefit from leaders who plough through and do things their own way, without collaboration, but I think their days are numbered. Those traditionally feminine characteristics of empathy, vulnerability and communication are now seen as real qualities in leaders, and assets”
ELLEN POMPEO ACTRESS AND PRODUCER, GREY’S ANATOMY “In Shonda finding her power and becoming more comfortable [with it], she has empowered me. She got to a place where she was generous with her power. That [allowed me to be] the highest-paid woman on television, a producer on the show, a co-executive producer on the spinoff – it’s unprecedented”
More and more, women are banding together, demanding change and getting shit done. “After the US election, #metoo and #heforshe, we’ve seen the incredible power women have when we band together,” says Cogin. “It’s really exciting.” She’s right: google searches for “inclusion rider” spiked after Best Actress winner Frances Mcdormand mentioned the need for them in her Oscars speech this year. (If you haven’t googled it: it’s a clause in a contract that stipulates diversity among employees.) Mcdormand implored casting directors and producers to invite women into their offices to tell their stories – a stupendously feminist act. Elsewhere in Hollywood, Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo credits negotiating her $20 million payday to the faith in her from her mentor, Grey’s executive producer Shonda Rhimes. “In Shonda finding her power and becoming more comfortable [with it], she has empowered me. She got to a place where she was generous with her power. That [allowed me to be] the highestpaid woman on television, a producer on the show, a co-executive producer on the spinoff – it’s unprecedented.” Octavia Spencer told a similar story about her co-star, Jessica Chastain, in an upcoming film. “I told [Jessica] my story, and we talked numbers, and she was quiet, and she said she had no idea that that’s what it was like for women of colour. She said, ‘Octavia, we’re gonna get you paid on this film.’ Fast forward to last week, we’re making five times what we asked for. Now, I wanna go to what the men are making!” Indeed, that’s exactly what Chastain has suggested the next step is. “I realised that I could tie [Octavia’s] deal to mine to bring up her quote. Men should start doing this with their co-stars.”
Because while it’s incredible that our culture has shifted to a place where female solidarity is revered rather than reviled, where women supporting other women is the rule and not the exception, the truth is that we need men to step up, too. “It’s not just about women leading the way,” says Ruello. “That’s part of it, but it’s about normalising flexible work for men, too, and making it OK for them to be seen as caregivers, the way women are.” She points to the numbers on paternity leave – just one in three eligible men access the federal paid paternity leave scheme – adding, “Our culture has normalised these strict gender rules. We all need to work to break them down.” Lucy Lloyd, CEO of Mentorloop, agrees. “Mentoring is a way we can break down these gender barriers,” she says. “The way that mentoring traditionally works is that an older staff member will see something in themselves in a junior staffer, and reach out to mentor them. This is problematic because it perpetuates the same kinds of people being promoted. What we need to do is cut across the stream – older women need to mentor young men, we need people of different backgrounds mentoring each other and so on.”
This idea of strengthening the entire workforce by supporting women is part of a new style of leadership – one that is, ironically enough, characterised by traditionally female traits. “Workplaces are moving away from a command and control style of leadership to a more humanistic point of view,” says Ruello. “We used to value domination and strength in leaders – now we look for empathy and connection.” Barker, who works in the
male-dominated venture capital world, agrees. “Some organisations benefit from leaders who plough through and do things their own way, without collaboration, but I think their days are numbered. Those traditionally feminine characteristics of empathy, vulnerability and communication are now seen as real qualities in leaders, and assets.” It works, too – in a recent “Women And The Future Of Work” report from the University of Sydney, 80 per cent of the female respondents said that feeling respected by their manager was the most important part of their job, above security and even income. Like Cogin says, real diversity is acknowledging that men and women are different, and that's a good thing. “Women are highly collaborative, we engage differently. We might come to the same decision as the man sitting next to us, but our process is different.”
Christine Holgate, the new CEO at Australia Post, is typical of this new style of command. Known for her “soft heart” (and for putting her mobile number at the bottom of shareholder memos, a practice she says helps people feel connected to her), Holgate's friend, surgeon Charlie Teo, describes her as the antidote to callous corporate Australia. “With Christine, it's not so much altruism as kindness.”
When Jennifer Palmieri worked at the White House, her office was nicknamed “the crying room”. She says it was because “people were always welcome to come and cry in my office when they needed to let some of the stress out”. That's what it all comes down to, really: feeling less alone. Because while it's easy to say we should all lean in, the reality is that it can be really hard to sit down at the table when you're surrounded by men. It's not that women can't go it alone – hell, we've done that for years – it's acknowledging that we'll make a lot more progress if we work together. Once more, it's Madeleine Albright's words that ring the truest: “I think there has to be the sense that once you have climbed the ladder of success, that you don't push it away from the building – you are only strengthened if there are more women.”
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT FORMER UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other”