International Women’s Day 2023 special

Garreth Hanley:
This is In the Black, a leadership, strategy and business podcast, brought to you by CPA Australia.

Jackie Blondell:
Did you know that Australia ranks just 43 out of 146 UN nations on the Global Gender Gap Index? This means on gender equality issues, we lag behind many, many countries including challenged nations such as Rwanda and Zimbabwe. Today we examine just why, in our chat with UN Women Australia's board president, Georgie Williams. Welcome to In the Black's special 2023 International Women's Day podcast, and welcome, Georgie.

Georgina Williams:
Thanks very much. Lovely to be here.

Jackie Blondell:
Now, this year's UN International Women's Day theme is Cracking the code. Innovation for a gender equal future. Why has this theme been chosen and how do we go about cracking the code?

Georgina Williams:
This theme's actually very relevant to us as we move into the decade of the twenties because it's such a technological change that we're all experiencing, and people are experiencing that change differently, both here in Australia and around the globe. It's created opportunities for some, and it's taken opportunities away from others. And I think we're putting a spotlight on that specifically through the gender lens. So it might interest you to know that there are 250 million fewer women online globally than men. There are close to 400 million women less than men that have smartphones globally. So even just in reaching the technological age, we're already admitting some and not admitting some.

Jackie Blondell:
Can I just ask Georgie? I mean, I might sound very ignorant, but why is that?

Georgina Williams:
So there's a range of reasons. Economic empowerment is one, but just access generally is another, and the ability to use the technology is the third. So it's the range of having the ability to access it, having the money to access it, and having the skills globally. And that's just not been shared equally. So that's one way that we know that we're getting an unusual lens on the tech side of things. Another way is, for instance, women's startups last year received globally 2.3% of venture capital funding, 2.3. That's extraordinary.

Jackie Blondell:
I'd love to say I'm shocked, but I'm not sure about that.

Georgina Williams:
Oh, do you know, I was. I expected it to be less, but 2.3%, that's next to nothing. So some of these lenses are really important to shine on in terms of the barriers that technology itself is putting up. And only one in every four roles in STEM is still held by women. So that's also another lens. But there are also opportunities that are thrown up through technology. We've heard a lot lately, I think, about our artificial intelligence. We've heard about ChatGPT, we've heard how it can be used to cheat especially. But these tools are really fascinating because they help us quantify the kinds of online biases that exist.

So these data sets are built on billions of points of data across the internet. So in some of my other boards and my work, I was working with Deakin University and Deakin University asked one of these artificial intelligence forms to give us an image of an academic, and they drew a middle-aged, balding white man with glasses and wearing a jacket. Now that image was built off billions of points of data across the internet. So automatically, we're getting this fundamental, underlying bias exposed to us through AI. So there's lots of opportunities that the internet is also throwing up to us through tech. So in terms of cracking the code, it becomes one of the tools that we can use to help identify those hidden biases.

Jackie Blondell:
So one step is identifying the biases. How then do we carry this theme forward to smashing the biases and making a better, more gender equal society?

Georgina Williams:
Well, I think there's a few ways that we're already looking at that, and I think our political leaders are taking a really good look at economic empowerment at the moment, and March is when they're going to report back on the Women's Economic Empowerment Taskforce. So we'll have some really interesting data back that they've used, all of their data points that they've collected, technologically and otherwise, to start to think about women's economic empowerment, which is the number one thing that we can do in Australia to crack the code. And there are some biases underlying in there. In terms of cracking the code, it's how we think about some of those underlying biases as well. I would love to expand on essential services and what we've learned on that during the pandemic. It's been extraordinary, but there are some underlying biases in there that I think we can expose as well.

Jackie Blondell:
Okay. I'll look forward to hearing more on that. Can we just look at how Australia is tracking on gender issues compared to its UN counterparts?

Georgina Williams:
Yeah, absolutely. So there are 146 nations in the United Nations. We rank 43rd, and we know that from the Global Gender Gap Index that's published every year from the World Economic Forum. Now they only use four measures. They use health, they use education, they use economic empowerment, and they use political empowerment. So they're four good solid measures of equality that you would need to be displaying as a society, and they're very sensible. So we rank 43rd out of 146.

Jackie Blondell:
That seems astonishingly poor.

Georgina Williams:
Yeah, it is. New Zealand ranks number four.

Jackie Blondell:
Okay. That's embarrassing.

Georgina Williams:
Yeah, it can be done. And a number of other developing countries are above us, but there's also other countries that rank above us include the Philippines, Namibia, Peru and Rwanda, countries with extraordinarily complex challenges domestically and internationally that they're facing. But they've understood on those four measures how to come to a a gender equal balance within their country so they can deploy all of the intellectual capital they have, not just some of it.

Jackie Blondell:
So what is being done or what isn't being done rather, to allow us to arrive at that number.

Georgina Williams:
So that's a lovely segue into the point I wanted to make earlier on economic empowerment. So if I use that specifically in Australia, what the pandemic taught us were that there are essential services that we have and we can use health and education as those two measures to exhibit those. Financial services and accounting is supply and demand. We use general market economics to dictate wages and conditions. That can't happen in essential industries because governments have to underwrite them and deliver them. And so health and education, the wages are set.

How much would you honestly pay a nurse to look after your closest loved one in the last week of their life? You'd pay a lot more than you will pay because of the heavily regulated nature of those industries. If we look at some other heavily regulated industries like the armed forces, which are also essential, they have had tax breaks put in place. If we looked at doctors in the public service, we've got really innovative solutions to move doctors in and around the public service, but we haven't done that yet in education and health. And so if we were looking at it without a gender lens, that might be what we look at next. And the blockage for education and health is not around moving into that particular industry. It's staying there. It's around childcare. So there are blockages that we just as a country need to start to understand. We haven't been looking at them from the right lens.

Jackie Blondell:
So I guess a movement on childcare would be welcome in that respect.

Georgina Williams:
Absolutely. And if we restricted it to nursing and teachers as a start, that wouldn't blow our budget up. So there are ways that we can absolutely empower certain industries to be much more fully participative and also look after our inflation and our budget as well.

Jackie Blondell:
So how did you become involved in working with UN Women and what's the work that you get involved in yourself there?

Georgina Williams:
Yep. So I've been working with UN Women now for probably the last five to six years. I sit on a range of boards, and prior to that I've been in financial services, but working really on a range of issues and speaking on a range of issues and advocating on a range of issues for probably the past 20 years in relation to women's economic empowerment and women and financial services and literacy. So that led me towards the UN and when a role was offered to me on the board, I jumped at it. So it became a fantastic opportunity to join the board and more recently chair the board. And we as a board, we certainly do fundraising, and we're seeing a lot this week in Turkey and Syria.

We're on the ground in Turkey and Syria, so we certainly provide that humanitarian aid and we raise money in Australia for that. We advocate and work with the government, both state and federal governments around policies. We work with the United Nations in New York to talk about our local conditions, our regional conditions, and we also work very heavily in the region with DFAT as well. So a range of different opportunities and certainly interesting and an opportunity really to lend a hand in a variety of ways.

Jackie Blondell:
We hope you're enjoying In the Black. If you're interested in the latest news, analysis, policy updates and business insights, you should check out CPA Australia's With Interest podcast. Join us as we dive into the news and delve into the business issues of the day. Each week we talk to thought leaders from across the accounting, finance, strategy, economic and business spectrum, and you get their expert opinions. Now, back to In the Black. You've spent 25 years working in banking and superannuation, including roles with Australian Super, the Bank of Melbourne and NAB. These are all traditionally male dominated sectors where there's still systemic barriers impacting women. How do you compare your experience starting out to young women working in the sector today?

Georgina Williams:
This is a really tricky question because the one thing I think I've learned on the way through is that everybody's experience is just so slightly different. I have found that at times, whether I had a male or female mentor, those opportunities were priceless, and they really help you move forward, but they also help you more broadly understand the opportunities that are in front of you and choose better. Everyone has their own personal anecdotes. I remember mine when I was first pregnant and been told, I think they meant it kindly, but you would've got that role. But unfortunately, you're pregnant. Everybody's had those moments in their career and I think they're not as common, but they still happen. And so I think there's a role still for all of us to try and move those kind of biases away. But systemically across financial services, there just still aren't enough women in senior leadership roles for all of those biases to go away. So we've all got to work a little bit harder to put women up into roles where they have balance sheet responsibility.

Jackie Blondell:
Absolutely. And amongst your board roles are roles on audit committees and banks. How do you see the gender mix working on those boards and other boards that are similar?

Georgina Williams:
So I work on a small bank board, and our board is actually predominantly women, which is-

Jackie Blondell:
Oh my goodness.

Georgina Williams:
Yeah, very unusual. But it definitely affects the conversations in the room, and it does make you a lot more confident to put your points of view forward. I find we are absolutely able to tackle issues that otherwise you may be nervous about raising when there are a cohort of people. It's not just you in the room. There's a cohort of others that look and feel a little bit like they might have similar issues, and I've heard from other board members, they feel the same. So I think it does make a difference. I very deliberately sought out audit role positions. I think it's really important because risk is something that can be very narrow if you don't have a broad point of view at the table, and so I've sought those out deliberately.

Jackie Blondell:
Absolutely, because sometimes if it's just the same group of people, their definition of risk is the same.

Georgina Williams:
That's right.

Jackie Blondell:
The more you broaden it, the broader risk perspective becomes.

Georgina Williams:
I honestly believe that the Financial Services Royal Commission raised to us a whole lot of risks that just weren't being seen, but I think they potentially weren't being seen because of the diversity of points of view. And if you're on an audit committee and you're just looking at financial audit, then I think that you're missing a trick.

Jackie Blondell:
Absolutely. Especially today when we've got all these other influences, environmental, social and governance.

Georgina Williams:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jackie Blondell:
UN Women's running events on 3rd March for International Women's Day, and you're focusing on Me Too speakers. What continuing effect is this movement having to bring about gender equality?

Georgina Williams:
Yeah, I think the Me Too was just a fascinating movement, wasn't it? Me Too actually started in 2008 with Tarana Burke, who is coming along to speak. I think we're beaming her in, but the movement really took off when Alyssa Milano, who's also going to have a message for us at lunch, tweeted. So it was the first time really that the technological space had been used globally en masse as a gender empowerment tool. Social media-wise, it's often used in a completely different way around on our young girls. It was like reseizing that social space globally. So it's a really important moment, I think, to recognise, but I think the confidence that Me Too gave women across the globe to talk about something that was ridiculously common.

In fact, post Me Too, Facebook in the US used their data to work out that one in every two people on their platform in the US knew someone through Me Too, that had been personally affected by some kind of violence or sexual assault. That's extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. So the power of those movements to surface those issues, provide confidence to people that have been victims before, I think is essential. And talking about how those tech platforms have been used as a tool and encouraging their use. We're seeing women in Iran at the moment fighting for their rights desperately. And what we're seeing is that the only thing that we can do to support the women in Iran really at the moment is to make sure they know we see and hear them. So again, it's an incredibly social movement, and I think using those social platforms for gender empowerment is fantastic.

Jackie Blondell:
For good, not evil.

Georgina Williams:
Exactly. Absolutely.

Jackie Blondell:
Because ventilating issues is the best way to bringing the bad things to light and combating them with the good.

Georgina Williams:
And similar to having, like I said, two or three other members at the board table that make you confident to put your point of view. If on social media someone sees you, hears you, understands you, reflects your point, tells you, go, you keep going, you're fine. That's the encouragement to say, yeah, actually I'm not alone. I can make this happen.

Jackie Blondell:
Well, lovely. Bearing in mind that Me Too has been going since around 2008, if we look at the gender pay gap today in 2023, and I'm looking specifically in professional services because that includes accounting and it's still around 25%. What can organisations and professional bodies do to help close that gap, given that we've got a high awareness of women's issues and the gender pay gap, but it doesn't seem to be closing anytime soon.

Georgina Williams:
No, it's a really, really stubborn issue, the pay gap. In Parliament, just this last month, they have passed the 10 recommendations from the 2021 Review of Workplace Gender Equality, which is aimed squarely at the gender pay gap. And I think that's really important because the publicity around the pay gap on a firm by firm basis is certainly going to give a number of firms a nudge and is probably the next push in that direction. So going forward, it's going to be a firm's responsibility to know what their pay gap is, to record what their pay gap is, and when they're asked, to provide that to their professional bodies, and it will be a lot more public firm by firm, I think once your pay reviews have been done, taking a look across the top and imagining they were public is a really important first step for every single firm.

And what if they were public, but you couldn't justify them? Even the boards that I'm on have said, ah, yes, but there's this reason or there's this reason, and there's five reasons why those roles are slightly different. But if you couldn't provide the verbal dialogue around it, is it still on the surface? Does it pass the pub test? And I think that's the very first thing. I think that'll close the pay gap quite a bit just to start with. And from there, then it really is about getting women up into those leadership roles. And a number of the bigger firms have really gone hard at this. It's tougher once you get to the smaller firms, but equally important.

Jackie Blondell:
Yeah. Okay. We'll look forward to seeing how that pans out. Now UN Women's focus is to achieve gender equality by 2030, which is just seven short years away. How as a community can we focus on achieving that goal?

Georgina Williams:
Yeah, look, it's just protracted, right? So the gender gap results that I gave you a little while ago, project that at current rates, if we don't do something differently, that gap will close in 132 years in Australia.

Jackie Blondell:
That's shocking.

Georgina Williams:
It's shocking. Around the Pacific, I think it closes in 190 years. So that's just crazy. And so reframing some of the issues as I spoke to before and focusing on women's economic empowerment as a driver for some of those other issues, is fundamentally the way that we can close the gap quickly. When we know that New Zealand is ranked number four, we know we can close it in Australia. It's just a matter of getting onto those underlying issues and hitting one or two off in a way that we can tackle. So women's economic empowerment is number one, essential services is absolutely the biggest bang for our buck in that area.

There's no doubt just given the large cohort of women that work in that area, it's fundamentally important that we do that. But the knock on effect is that once women are at scale, economically empowered, an economically empowered women is less likely to be mistreated, to have poor health outcomes. And we know that their intellectual capital globally, is worth close to a trillion dollars that we're missing every year. So there are a whole lot of other benefits that we get on the side. So if we can economically empower them, we can speed up on the health issues and the education issues as well.

Jackie Blondell:
Now, I'm not sure why it's not an obvious answer to this question, but I'm going to ask you anyway. Do you think that men have a role in bringing about gender equality at work? And should we be championing their participation in International Women's Day?

Georgina Williams:
Yeah, absolutely. On both items, absolutely. So economic equality is about bringing every part of the intellectual capital that we have in Australia to the table. It doesn't matter whether you're a woman or a man, we all need to bring everybody to the table. And it's not about a woman versus men kind of conversation either. It's about making sure that we are using all of the resources that we have at our disposal in the best way that we possibly can, and that we're putting people in their most confident position to give their best. And that just makes sense, right? So there are lots of ways that men can get involved in International Women's Day.

I think the idea of men shining a light on this is just fundamentally fantastic. I know we have lunches. Our lunches, obviously you're mentioning this year, are staring Tarana Burke and Alyssa Milano. A few years ago, it was probably 5% of men at those lunches. Now we're getting probably 35 to 40% men at those lunches because they're really important topics. They're interesting. It's not about men being excluded from International Women's Day. It's about celebrating the contribution that gender equality and women can make.

Jackie Blondell:
Thanks so much for joining us, Georgie. In The Black is a weekly podcast. If you like what you've heard today, don't forget to subscribe to In The Black on your favourite podcast app, and check the show notes to discover more about International Women's Day and events near you.

Garreth Hanley:
If you've enjoyed this episode, help others discover In the Black by leaving us a review and sharing this episode with colleagues, clients or anyone else interested in leadership, strategy and business. To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode. We hope you can join us again next time for another episode of In The Black.