CART (2)Jessie Street Annual Luncheon
Sydney, NSW Australia
16/09/2013
Friends
It is a great honour to stand before you today to deliver a speech that honours the memory of Jessie Street, one of the greatest fighters for women this country has known.
We all know of course that she was a feminist as well as socialist – despite being married into the Establishment – that she campaigned all her life for women’s rights. In the 1960s she also became a major force in the 1967 referendum concerning justice for Australia’s indigenous population in the way they were referred to in the Constitution.
Jessie Street died in 1970 – just as the second wave women’s movement was getting underway. She may have felt optimistic that the rowdy new generation who called themselves “women’s liberationists” would continue her work. And of course we did.
Or we tried to.
But how have we fared?
I will begin my remarks today with a basic question:
Why, after forty years, have we not achieved equality in Australia?
You would think that forty years would be long enough to achieve what is, after all, a pretty modest goal.
Originally, we in the women’s movement wanted nothing short of liberation, which we saw as being the total transformation of relations between the sexes.
We made the pragmatic decision to settle for equality when the Whitlam government was elected, in December 1972, because that seemed achievable.
Easy even.
But despite the modest nature of what we wanted it has not happened.
Why not?
Surely we have had time.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme took only twenty-five years. The Overland Telegraph was built in just eighteen months. The National Broadband Network is supposed to take ten years.
Why is Australia able to accomplish these massive national engineering projects but is seemingly incapable of achieving what ought to be the comparatively easier task of social engineering?
Why is it that despite forty years of legislative and other measures designed to achieve equality
• women are still paid considerably less than men,
• women are still seen as having primary responsibility for raising children,
• women’s workforce participation rate lags behind men’s, and
• the top ranks of our major organisations are still, overwhelmingly, male?
Why haven’t our anti-discrimination laws eradicated this inequality?
The answer is that we did not factor in the entrenched resistance to equality that, we now have to confront, is an integral part of Australian society and culture.
We assumed that everyone thought that equality was a good idea, even a just and necessary one.
We were wrong.
We were wrong about something else as well.
We thought that if we were making progress that we were on our way to success.
So, as we pointed to barriers falling – be they first women High Court judges or first women premiers, first women jockeys or fighter pilots, footy referees or university vice-chancellors– we were confident that we were making progress.
It did not occur to us that progress did not lead inexorably towards success.
Often, in fact, we confused the two. Or saw them as synonymous.
We did not stop to ask ourselves what success might look like.
We now know that it is not just important, but actually mandatory, for us to define success. We need to know what it looks (and feels) like.
I argue in my book, The Misogyny Factor, that there are three indicators of success: inclusion, equality and respect.
Until women are included in all areas of our society, until we are treated equally and with respect once we are there, we will not have succeeded in what I call “The Equality Project”.
(I thought if we gave it a name, and project-managed it, with a budget and a completion date – the way engineers do – we might actually achieve it.)
Initially we had two principle objectives with The Equality Project.
We argued that women needed financial independence and they needed to be able to control their fertility.
Two simple, but profound, objectives.
Without these, women could not be in control of their lives, and could not make their way in the world. Without these, women would be dependent on others, usually a husband or a father.
These principles helped us lay out our policy agenda.
For women to achieve financial independence, they needed a good education, access to good jobs, childcare and equal pay.
Simple.
For women to control their fertility, they needed access to safe, affordable and reliable contraception backed up by safe, legal and affordable abortion.
Easy.
In recent years, I have concluded – sadly – that we now need to add a third principle: women need to be free from violence.
It has been necessary to add this because of the extensive and, it seems, increasing levels of violence against women.
It goes without saying that such violence is both physically and psychologically debilitating and of course prevents women from being fully active in the world at large.
I will look in some detail at where we are at with The Equality Project but first I want to summarise by saying that for all the progress we have made, we are not even close to achieving success.
Over the last few years some people liked to argue that the fact we had a female Prime Minister, female Governor-general and female speaker of the House of Representatives was evidence that we had achieved equality.
For instance, Bob Katter, the federal MP from far north Queensland, said early in 2012: “Our governor-general is a woman, our governor is a woman, our premier is a woman and our prime minister is a woman. I don’t think sexism is riding high in Australia; if anything it is probably the other way round”.
In fact, a month after he made these remarks, there was no longer a woman premier in Queensland.
And Queensland went – overnight – from having the highest number of women parliamentarians in the country to the lowest.
And, of course, just six weeks ago (on 26 June) in the space of a few dramatic hours in Canberra, Australia no longer had a female prime minister.
These two examples should in themselves be a cautionary tale against using a current statistic or situation as a measure of long-term success.
In fact, as I predict in the book, it is highly likely that by the middle of next year the only female political leader left in Australia will be Katy Gallagher, chief minister of the smallest seat of government in Australia, in the ACT.
In drawing a distinction between progress and success, I am relying on an idea first articulated by Hillary Clinton who, as US Secretary of State in September 2011, made an important speech (that went unreported in this country) laying out what needed to be done for women globally to achieve equality. The speech was to open the APEC Women and the Economy Summit, a gathering she hosted and which was, she noted, the largest gathering of foreign diplomats to assemble in San Francisco since the founding of the United Nations in 1945.
Jessie Street, of course, attended that meeting, as a member of the Australian delegation although, as she describes in her autobiography Truth or Repose the delegate’s allowance she received was only one-third of the amount received by the men. She soon had that sorted!
She was one of very few women there. According to Peter Sekuless’s biography of Street, “only one per cent of the delegates to the conference were women, no women had the opportunity to speak at plenary sessions, and there were no women in the policy-making sections of the conference”. An account of the meeting states: “among delegates the number of women was miniscule” [1]. But despite being few in number the women delegates succeeded in ensuring that sex discrimination was outlawed in the United Nations Charter and that women would be eligible to work in all jobs at the newly created United Nations.
Hillary Clinton’s speech dealt with the urgent need to completely unlock the economic potential of women in order to get the global economy moving again: ‘By increasing women’s participation in the economy and enhancing their efficiency and productivity’, she said, ‘we can bring about a dramatic impact on the competitiveness and growth of our economies.’[2]
She pointed out that in recent years there had already been a massive increase in women’s employment, especially in developed countries, and that this had had a significant impact on growth: ‘The Economist points out that the increase in the employment of women in developed countries during the past decade has added more to global growth than China has, and that’s a lot,’ Clinton said.
And in the United States, a McKinsey study found that women went from holding 37 per cent of all jobs to nearly 48 per cent over the past 40 years, and that in sheer value terms, these women have punched well above their weight. The productivity gains attributable to this modest increase in women’s overall share of the labor market accounts for approximately one-quarter of the current US GDP. That works out to more than three and a half trillion dollars, more than the GDP of Germany and more than half the GDPs of both China and Japan.
So, Clinton concluded, the promise is clear: ‘What then is the problem?’ And it is here that she made the comment that contains what I believe is a truly revolutionary insight, and one that that should change our thinking about the way we judge how we are faring in our quest for equality.
‘If women are already making such contributions to economic growth, why do we need a major realignment in our thinking, our markets, and our policies? Why do we need to issue a declaration from this summit?’ asked Hillary Clinton.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘because evidence of progress is not evidence of success…’
Evidence of progress is not evidence of success.
Clinton went on to make the following observation:
In the United States and in every country in APEC, millions of women are still sidelined, unable to find a meaningful place for themselves in the formal workforce. And some of those who get to enter the workforce are really confined by very clear signals to a lower rung on the job ladder, and there’s a web of legal and social restrictions that limit their potential. Or they are confronted with a glass ceiling that keeps them from the most senior positions.
In other words, even when women have progressed into the workforce, supposedly the arena where they will gain economic self-determination and hence control over most other areas of their lives, their ability to succeed is stymied by formal and informal forces that prevent their full participation. I believe these observations by Hillary Clinton are very relevant to the situation in Australia. They provide a useful and enlightening way of looking at how we have fared in the equality project. We have made a great deal of progress, yet success still eludes us. And, although she did not use the term, the misogyny factor, I do.
Let me explain.
If we try to measure our success in achieving these principles, and if we run the ruler of the criteria of inclusion, equality and respect across women’s lives in Australia today we find that we fall far short.
I have a detailed scorecard in the book. For now I will just give you a few key results:
Inclusion.
Women are still underrepresented, often grossly so, in all our major institutions.
Women are only 39 per cent of the senior executive of the Australian Public Service, and just 28 per cent of Federal Parliament.[3]
And these are institutions where we do really well!
If we look at the private sector, the numbers are simply appalling.
We are just 16.3 per cent of directors – yet the numbers of women being appointed to ASX200 boards is on a steep downward trajectory after a short burst of appointments in 2010 and 2011. That is now over.
Even fewer women are to be found in the senior executive ranks in major listed companies. It was about 9 per cent last time I checked.
There are still 47 companies on the ASX200 that do not have ANY women directors.
We are not included.
Equality
Nor, for the most part, are we treated equally.
For instance, we earn less, on average around 17.5 per cent less, than men.
And that figure has not improved in 30 years.
Some industries are far worse.
In late 2012 the National Australia Bank released the results of a gender pay equity audit that covered 10 per cent of the bank’s workforce and which discovered a 29 per cent pay differential between women and men doing the same jobs.
But, the bank said, this was an improvement.
In their previous audit four years earlier, the gap was 37 per cent.
Plus the 2012 results were better than the finance industry average gender pay gap of 31 per cent.
But the most startling statistical evidence of our inequality is the lifetime earnings of postgraduates.
A 25 year-old woman with postgraduate qualifications will earn $2.49 million over the course of her working life.
But the man who sat beside her in class will over the course of his lifetime earn $3.78 million. That is a difference of almost $1.3 million.
There is a penalty of at least one million dollars in being female in Australia today.
And what is even worse is that a man with just Year 12 qualifications will earn more than the woman with the postgraduate degree. He will accumulate $2.55 million to her $2.49 million.
Respect
Perhaps the key indicator of whether we have achieved success in The Equality Project is respect.
Often women who occupy important positions and who can therefore be said to be included and, at least when it comes to salary and similar entitlements, are treated equally with men. But are they accorded respect?
Let us look at the case of Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, who was, in my contention, bullied out of office on 26 June, 2013 after just three years and three days in the job.
There is ample evidence that Gillard was not treated with the respect due to a holder of the office of prime minister.
Just over a year ago, on 31 August 2012, I presented a lecture “Her Rights at Work” at the University of Newcastle that documented in forensic detail the sexual and others forms of vilification to which Gillard has been subjected.
I argued that in any other workplace, an employee treated the way Julia Gillard was would have a case under the Sex Discrimination Act and the Fair Work Act for discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying.
There has been ample additional documentation provided since then of the continuing and relentless campaign of denigration to which Julia Gillard was subjected.
The lack of respect shown to the prime minister was unprecedented.
The Opposition felt able to portray her as “a bitch” or “a witch”. The man who replaced Gillard was reported in the press to have constantly referred to her as “a bitch”.
The woman who is about to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives stood in front of a sign – at a rally outside Parliament House – that described Gillard as “Bob Brown’s bitch”.
Journalists openly mocked her.
Many on her own side of politics talked her down to such an extent that you wonder how she managed to get out of bed each morning.
This lack of respect became acceptable, even the norm.
It became a national sport to “diss” Julia Gillard: her clothes, her hair, her voice, her earlobes even – thank you Germaine Greer – her “arse”.
So was it any wonder that when the prime minister visited Afghanistan in March 2012 and spoke to the troops, thanking them for their service, they mostly ignored her, preferring instead to watch the footy on television?
(I could not help but notice that when Kevin Rudd visited the troops in Afghanistan just a week or so after he returned to the prime ministership, there was no television blaring in the background).
The lack of respect shown to Julia Gillard also extended to the other most senior women in the country.
In September 2012 the governor-general visited to Al Minhad air base near Dubai to lead the farewell ramp ceremony for five Australians who had been killed in Afghanistan. So why did the military schedule the ceremony for the middle of the day forcing Quentin Bryce to take the long walk along the tarmac behind the coffins in heat that was, according to a newspaper report, over 53 degrees?
And Anna Burke, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, when she got the job asked members to address her as ‘Speaker’ rather than ‘Madam Speaker’. ‘It’s about the position, not the gender of the person who occupies it,’ she said. She also joked that being referred to as ‘Madam’ made her feel as if she was running a brothel. If you watched Question Time in the last parliament you will have seen that government members, and the Independents, unfailingly addressed her as ‘Speaker’. The opposition, also without fail, and in direct and disrespectful defiance of her request, constantly addressed her as ‘Madam Speaker’.
But it was Julia Gillard who bore the brunt of the hostility that I have no hesitation in labeling Misogyny.
A couple of weeks ago, Tony Windsor, until recently the independent member for New England, said on the ABC’s Australian Story: “I have never seen male, female or dog treated in the fashion that she [Julia Gillard] was treated,” he said.
“A lot of it has been quite strategic, hasn’t been accidental, or a temper tantrum. It has been a strategic process of trying to destroy people.” [4]
It was, as we know, horribly successful.
Gillard’s authority was undermined, her legitimacy was called into question and her popularity plummeted.
Her unpopularity then became the rationale for getting rid of her.
How ironic, then, when just a few weeks ago when Kevin Rudd was questioned about the drop in his popularity since he called the election, he said: “If you were in the firing line for two weeks of wall-to-wall negative attacks on yourself, you know something, it would probably have an impact on what people thought about you.” [5]
Why are women in Australia, especially those in high-level job, being treated like this?
My answer is The Misogyny Factor.
I make the case in my book that it is the misogyny factor that explains why we have not succeeded with The Equality Project.
The Misogyny Factor is that set of attitudes and entrenched practices that are embedded in most of our major institutions (business, politics, the military, the media, the church, unions, academia, the law) that stand in the way of women being included, being treated equally and with respect.
The Misogyny Factor encompasses old-fashioned hatred of women, the traditional meaning of ‘misogyny’ but it is broader than that.
I am talking about systemic beliefs and behaviour, which are predicated on the view that women do not have the fundamental right to be part of society beyond the home. These views are held by some men and – sadly – some women too. They are not gendered views in the sense that they are held just by one sex. Men can and do oppose misogyny, and women can and do expound it – although it is true to say that the main beneficiaries of misogyny are men, and the victims are almost entirely women.
Often these attitudes are sugar-coated with diversionary discussions about motherhood and merit – the two major excuses for excluding women – but deep down they are just simply old-fashioned atavistic attitudes.
These people believe that, once they are mothers, women just do not belong in the world outside the home.
They also tend to have the conviction that all women ought to be mothers and, therefore, confined to the domestic sphere.
No need, therefore, for inclusion or equality. Just give them respect. So long as they stay in their place.
And what about sexism?
To my mind, sexism goes hand in hand with misogyny.
Sexism is the set of attitudes towards women that justifies their exclusion, their being treated as inferiors and their being denied respect.
Sexism, like racism, ascribes attributes to people on the basis of a single and immutable characteristic without regard to their individuality – and is then used as a basis for treating them differently.
If misogyny is the theory of women’s inferiority and unworthiness and, therefore, unsuitability to be equal players in our society, sexism is the everyday expression of it.
To put it another way, misogyny is the theory, sexism is the practice.
In conclusion, let me say that while my book delivers some hard judgements and sober conclusions about where women stand in Australia today, I am far from pessimistic.
I find a great deal of encouragement in the way women are, for the first time since the 1970s, fighting back.
Everywhere I go – and I have travelled extensively in the past few months, to many parts of this country – I find that women are angry and they are saying so.
And that was before they got rid of Julia Gillard.
Since then I find that, more than ever, women especially, want to talk, they want to rage, they want to grieve. They want to try to understand what happened and why.
Women are mourning the political death of Gillard.
But they – we – are also mourning, and raging at, the death of something else: our rights.
This is very personal and women know it.
We know that, in so many ways, Gillard was the proxy. She stood for all of us. And when she fell so did our chance to be included, to be treated equally and with respect.
I will probably be accused of overreacting here, of jumping the shark, of playing the gender card – of all those things that we are accused of when we simply stand up for our rights.
So be it.
What we need to do is to take to heart the words of Julia Gillard on the night of 26 June 2013:
I want to just say a few remarks about being the first woman to serve in this position. There’s been a lot of analysis about the so-called gender wars, me playing the so-called gender card because heaven’s knows, no-one noticed I was a woman until I raised it. But, against that background I do want to say about all of these issues the reaction to being the first female prime minister does not explain everything about my prime ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership. I have been a little bit bemused by those colleagues in the newspapers who have admitted that I have suffered more pressure as a result of my gender than other prime ministers in the past, but then concluded that it had zero affect on my political position or the political position of the Labor Party. It doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing, it explains some things, and it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey.
We must begin in a sophisticated way to think about those shades of grey.
We must start to understand why, despite all the progress we have made, success has eluded us.
We must, to use a different language, Destroy the Joint that treats us so badly. And we will start by understanding that it is the misogyny factor that is what we need to identify and combat.
On October 9 we will mark the anniversary of Julia Gillard’s celebrated Sexism and Misogyny speech to federal parliament.
It was the speech that defined her prime ministership, that electrified millions of people around the world and which, back here at home, gave all sorts of women the courage to stand up and say “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny – I will not”.
That speech provided the template for women shedding their victimhood and standing up to decry the way they have been treated.
With those words, Julia Gillard gave both an example and an inspiration to women everywhere who were tired of the putdowns, the exclusion, the shabby ‘jokes’, the discrimination, the unequal pay, the refusal of society to make work and family easier to manage and of husbands to share the load.
Who have decided the time has come for Australia to deliver on equality.
And who will make damned sure that it does.
Footnotes
[1] Torild Skard, “Getting our History Right: How Were the Equal Rights of Women and Men Included in the Charter of the United Nations?” Forum for Development Studies No 1 – 2008 p. 38 [2] http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/09/172605.htm [3] Since I delivered this speech, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced his new ministry which included only one woman in his 19 member Cabinet, only 4 of the eleven ministers are women and just one of twelve parliamentary secretaries; altogether only 14 per cent of his front bench is female, a lower percentage than John Howard’s last government in 2006. [4] Ben Cheshire, “Tony Windsor reveals he would have supported Malcolm Turnbull after 2010 election” Australian Story ABC website 26 August [5] Dennis Shanahan, “Returned Kevin Rudd failing character test with voters” The Australian 20 August 2013