Martin Parkinson

Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

MCC SINCE 2012

There was a penny-dropping moment for Martin Parkinson when he was running Treasury in 2011 and puzzling over the lack of women making it through the ranks. “I came to the revelation that we were tackling things ad hoc and hadn’t understood what the root causes were.”

Not long after – and with Treasury launching the Progressing Women Initiative (PWI) – he joined the MCC.

“It was a relief to find I had a group of peers and I could say, ‘I’m trying this but it’s not working,’” he says. “It was fantastic when Liz [Elizabeth Broderick] reached out to me and I found there was a whole community of like-minded organisations struggling with the same set of challenges. I could see the benefits of working with others and trying things in multiple places. It gave us the opportunity to learn what would work and what would fail fast.”

Treasury, he adds, is a good example of how quickly you can make a shift. “We were back behind most of the others. But being a bunch of problem-solvers, once we made the commitment we were able to move rapidly.”

This is one area where plagiarism is a virtue and not a sin, he says, with good ideas being routinely shared. Some of the direct impact of the MCC has included introducing a 50/50 “If not, why not?” target as part of PWI, along with adopting an All Roles Flex approach. Discussions about merit at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet had an impact on work done by the group.

Even though all of the MCC organisations have made progress in five years, Parkinson says many have acknowledged it’s not as fast as they’d like. At a recent meeting, he says, an MCC asked if anyone had docked the salary of a senior executive for failing to meet a gender target in the same way they would if they’d failed to achieve a financial target. Most agreed they hadn’t – and that it would be a sign of change.

Nevertheless, Parkinson is optimistic. “The real challenge is to change the culture,” he says. “One of the things I’ve found really interesting is we started on a journey about gender and it has become normal to talk about gender equality and easier to talk about diversity generally – it’s grown organically out of that process.”

The strength of the MCC framework is that it works in many different contexts. “We now have a gender equality strategy for the whole public [service] sector and a secretaries’ equality and diversity committee, which will draw on the work of the MCC. The model has [received] a massive amount of attention at the UN and the World Assembly for Women.”