NZ gender battles still on – Clark
SHE became our first elected woman prime minister using little more than her leadership skills and public goodwill. But when it comes to the corporate world, her views come as something of a surprise: Helen Clark is a supporter of boardroom gender quotas.
Just why it’s a surprise is hard to define, perhaps because Clark has always appeared to be quite a selfmade woman.
But speaking from New York where she now works, she says even the political system in New Zealand needed some assistance to encourage more female MPs into the fold.
MMP brought that ‘‘step change’’, she says.
‘‘If proportional representation hadn’t come in, I think there would have been tremendous pressure for quotas in New Zealand.’’
Clark believes the corporate world hasn’t changed enough either. She mentions Norway, which used quotas in politics and boardrooms to give women a stronger voice.
‘‘My general approach would be to say if nothing else is working, go to quotas, go to special measures.
‘‘It’s not that the women aren’t there, they are there. But there’s some sort of structural constraint that’s not bringing them through.’’
Clark’s election is still regarded a watershed moment for female career aspirations in New Zealand. Ask her how she feels about that and there’s a warm, familiar chuckle in return.
‘‘The truth is, it did,’’ she says without a trace of hubris.
She was elected in 1999, the same year Dame Sian Elias became chief justice and Theresa Gattung was appointed chief executive of Telecom.
National’s Jenny Shipley had become the country’s first female prime minister two years earlier after challenging Jim Bolger’s leadership.
But no woman had ever taken their party to victory in a general election.
And Clark admits that when she set out down that track in 1993, the prospect ‘‘seemed pretty bleak for a long time’’.
She had supposed that being an effective minister was enough to get her to the top, but found that dealing with people’s perceptions of leadership was ‘‘a much bigger step than perhaps I realised’’.
Overcoming that hurdle, she won public support and served three terms. She now thinks New Zealanders are used to the idea of a female prime minister and will evaluate candidates on merit.
‘‘That’s the milestone, that young women can look at it and think that could be me, just as they can look at Sian Elias as a young lawyer starting out and think that could be me . . . Role models are incredibly important.’’
These days Clark is the head of the United Nations Development Programme, the third-highest role at the UN.
She was recently reappointed for a second four-year term and soon after was ranked the 21st most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine.
In many ways her job seems a natural progression of issues she championed back in New Zealand: averting poverty and helping economies develop ‘‘while not wrecking the planet’’.
And gender equity is still a big part of her job. ‘‘A country can never call itself developed if it leaves women behind as second-class citizens.’’
She agrees the weight of the world’s problems can be daunting. The UNDP works in Haiti, Afghanistan, Somalia and many other fragile countries. She sees people in ‘‘the most profound poverty’’.
‘‘But then you’ll always be picked up by something positive that’s happened, and I think in development, there’s always something you can do.
‘‘As long as you can see progress, you’re motivated to get up every morning and have another go at it.’’
Occasionally her world comes full circle. In 2007, Clark and her fellow MPs watched horrified when Buddhist monks were shot by Myanmar troops.
There was no chance then of a New Zealand PM visiting a country with such human-rights abuses.
But last month she was able to visit with the UNDP. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is on the campaign trail and the media is ‘‘remarkably free’’.
‘‘This is a new landscape. A lot of reform processes have been launched but capacity is low,’’ she said.
And so for UNDP it opens up so many opportunities . . . It’s a very exciting time.’’
It’s a huge job, and Clark travels a lot. When asked what her coping strategy is, she chuckles again: ‘‘Sleep’s important, health’s important . . . You just have to take a breather when you can.’’
She gets back to New Zealand twice a year: Christmas and August. And she phones home a lot. ‘‘I’m in daily contact with Peter [Davis, her husband who heads up the sociology department at Auckland University] and with my father.’’
Looking around at the women she rubs shoulders with, Clark says she can confidently say New Zealand is ‘‘pretty much up there’’ on gender issues. But she warns it can regress. ‘‘One of the messages is that young women shouldn’t regard these battles as permanently won. You’ve got to keep fighting them.
‘‘If young women think that things like publicly supported early childhood education, and paid parental leave and statutory holidays, [if] they think these things aren’t important, they lose them.’’
She also wonders how our next wave of female corporate role models is doing.
‘‘Theresa Gattung kind of stands out because she was almost unique. We need more women coming through. How many women are there at the top of the big power companies? Would Fonterra ever have a woman chief executive?
‘‘We’ve got to start asking some of those questions.’’