Editor’s letter: from the desk of The Weekly’s Kim Doherty
Flicking through our new Treasures from the Archives special edition this week, one quote in particular caught my attention. “It’s a man’s job, but I think we can do it just as well,” a newly employed female breadcarter told The Weekly back in 1942.
That was the year my mum was born, when Australian women in wartime were finding themselves thrust not just into the workplace, delivering bread by horse and cart, but taking their first controversial steps into leadership in a man’s world. Things have come a long way.
Fast-forward two generations and, in the early years of my daughter’s life, we’re seeing amazing women step into incredible jobs. By the end of this year, we may well have women in charge of not just the United Kingdom, the European Union’s biggest nation, Germany, and the International Monetary Fund, but the United States and the United Nations, too.
It was in that spirit that we interviewed Helen Clark (page 30), formerly Prime Minister of New Zealand, who is on the short-list to be the next Secretary-General of the UN. It doesn’t get much closer to leading the free world than that.
Over a cup of tea in New York, she offered
The Weekly some diplomatic optimism about a woman sitting in that chair for the first time. “I think women will be excited if that happens,” she said. “It will prove that no position is barred.”
Yep, to paraphrase our own Prime Minister, it’s an exciting time to be a woman – or is it? Amid all this positivity, it’s easy to forget that while our daughters might legitimately dream of presiding over nations or leading the way to world peace, they’re still not inheriting a world that offers them the same opportunities as their brothers. In 2016 in Australia, women are still paid 17.3 per cent less than men for doing the same job, retire with about half the amount of savings, only 17 per cent of our CEOs are women and there’s only six women in our new federal Cabinet of 23. We may be leaving our daughters with even more to do than our mothers left us. Fortunately, that challenge couldn’t be in better hands.
This month, I met with the judges of The Australian Women’s Weekly Qantas Women of the Future scholarship, Julie Bishop, Lucy Turnbull, Olivia Wirth, Lisa Wilkinson, Chloe Shorten, and Jesinta Campbell (page 113) to consider the finalists. It was an honour to sit with such inspiring judges and even more encouraging to learn about the entrants. Young women who have, in their 20s, achieved what many of us wouldn’t even consider attempting in a lifetime.
Given that the voting for the People’s Choice Winner is still open (yes, you can still vote at www.aww.com.au/WOTF), I hesitate to name any of the entrants individually, but I look forward to sharing the winners with you in our October issue.
For now, let’s celebrate the strides we have made, acknowledge the challenges still ahead and rest assured that, from what I’ve seen this month of the next generation of Aussie women, we’re in wonderful hands.