Can a show be diverse and inclusive if it doesn’t have a single woman involved in it? The ABC says it can.
In February 2021 the ABC issued its first Commissioning for Diversity and Inclusion Guidelines for independent producers wanting to get their shows onto the ABC. The Guidelines are designed to ‘address under-representation’ (p2) and identify ‘five key areas of representation’ (p4) but – here’s the thing – women aren’t one of them!!
Spot the Difference
Notice any difference between Number 1 and the next 4? Numbers 2-5 actually are groups of people who are/have been under-represented on-screen and in production roles.
Goodbye Bechdel Test
So in theory a program could have 100% male cast, creatives, decision-makers, and crew, as long as 50% of them ‘identify’ as, say, ‘gender questioning’. Goodbye Bechdel Test (which asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man). Goodbye equality for women.
Broadcasting programs with 50% of the cast being males who ‘identify’ as something else might help get the ABC gold status with the gender-ideology fanatics at ACON (Australia’s Stonewall) but it won’t help Aunty achieve its avowed goal of ‘looking and sounding like contemporary Australia’. Wake up, ABC, and come back to the real community you’re supposed to be reflecting and representing, where 50.7% of us are WOMEN, and have been under-represented for yonks both on and off screen.
Category: Workforce Discrimination
Making history in the High Court – Law Society Journal
In appointing Justice Jayne Jagot to the High Court, the Albanese government has made history: for the first time, the court will have a majority of women on its bench.
We have come a long way. At the turn of the 20th century, women were not permitted to practise law in any Australian jurisdiction. And even when those formal barriers to admission were eventually removed, informal barriers meant the law remained a man’s world.
For more than 80 years after its establishment in 1903, the High Court of Australia remained the exclusive preserve of men. It was not until 1987 that Mary Gaudron became the first woman to serve on the court.
Women have been appointed to the High Court with some regularity over the past decade. Yet only seven women have been appointed of a total of 56 justices. The first woman to serve as Chief Justice of the High Court, Susan Kiefel, was sworn in in 2017.
Why do women judges matter?
In answering this, it is worth remembering the classic quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg in response to questions about when there will be “enough” women judges on the US Supreme Court. Ginsburg replied there would enough when there were nine (that is, all of them). Acknowledging that people were shocked by this response, Ginsburg famously countered, “There’s been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that”.
Australia is certainly not the first apex court to have a majority of women justices. For example, the Federal Court of Malaysia has a majority (8/14) of women. But compared with other Western democracies Australia has been progressive on this issue. In the UK, there is currently one woman on a bench of 12; in the US there are 4/9, New Zealand has 3/6 and Canada 4/9.
Source: Making history in the High Court – Law Society Journal
‘A fair crack at opportunities’: Funding target set to see more women undertaking health and medical research
Women will receive the same number of senior-level research Investigator Grants as men, under new targets set by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
The changes will begin in 2023, when a 50:50 funding target will be introduced to give more women in STEM the opportunity to undertake health and medical research at the senior level.
Between 2019 and 2021, male applicants to the Investigator Scheme received about 35 per cent more grants and 67 per cent more funding than female applicants, equating to a gap of about $95 million per year.
“We’ve known for a very long time that female researchers predominate at the earlier career levels of health and medical research, whether that’s the PhD, Post-Doc and early career levels, you will see in most institutes and universities, a majority of women undertaking that important research,” Health Minister Mark Butler said at a press conference on Wednesday.
“But for years and years now, from the mid-career level onwards, you see the presence of women start to steadily decline to the point where, at the very senior leadership level, women are vastly underrepresented and have been for many years, vastly underrepresented at the senior leadership levels.”
Banks with more female directors lend less to big polluters, new study finds
Banks with more women in their boardrooms lend less to big polluting companies, according to new research by the European Central Bank.
“Female corporate directors and women in general are more likely to care about long-term societal issues, including climate change.”
The study is a world first, regarding the influences of gender on boardroom banks’ capability to “green” the economy, leading to evidence that a greater female representation in the boardroom contributes to advancing the fight against climate change.
The study also found that the “green” effect of female board members is stronger in countries with more female climate-oriented politicians.
Exploring the potential influence of women in the boardroom on banks’ lending strategies is a critical step towards fighting climate change. The study noted several other previous studies which found that women were more community-minded, altruistic and caring than men.
Female directors have a stronger orientation toward corporate social responsibility (CSR), compared to male directors who tend to be more focused on economic performance.
Source: Banks with more female directors lend less to big polluters, new study finds
‘Motherhood penalty’: Women’s earnings halve in first 5 years of parenthood
New Treasury analysis shows that mum’s earnings falling by an average of 55 per cent in the first five years of parenthood.
The motherhood penalty occurs primarily because women take time out of the workforce or work fewer hours after having a child. However, the penalty was the same regardless of a woman’s breadwinner status before having children and remains persistent for at least a decade into parenthood.
“This is the case even for women who significantly out-earn their partner,” the analysis said.
As for becoming a father? The analysis found men’s earnings were “unaffected by entry into parenthood”.
Source: ‘Motherhood penalty’: Women’s earnings halve in first 5 years of parenthood
Trailblazing women paved the way for future women of law – The University of Sydney
Since Ada Evans became the first woman in Australia to graduate in law 120 years ago, many other trailblazing women at the University of Sydney have followed in her footsteps. In 2022, we celebrate all our women of law – from those who paved the way to the changemakers of the future.
Evans, born in England in 1872, was Australia’s first female law graduate. After completing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in 1895, Evans returned to the University four years later, at her mother’s urging, to study law. She was the first woman enrolled in the degree, and legend has it that her application was only successful because the then–Dean was away at the time and unable to thwart the attempt.
While Evans was the first woman to graduate with a law degree in Australia in 1902, she was not the first to practise the law; that honour went to Marie Byles. When Evans graduated, women were in fact not permitted to practise law. It was an injustice Evans worked for the next two decades to overcome.
Marie Byles was the recipient of Evans’s campaigning efforts. A rabble-rouser from the very beginning, Byles’s life was almost too bombastic to be believed. After winning a scholarship to the University, she graduated with a degree in arts in 1921, followed by law in 1924. She was the first woman admitted as a solicitor in New South Wales, a feat only managed due to the diligence and persistence of Evans.
When Byles established her own practice in 1929 – the first woman in New South Wales to do so – she quickly became known not just for her sharp legal mind, but for her nifty organisational skills, with a reputation for speedily processing matters. She also gained a reputation for taking on female clients, assisting them with divorce settlements at a time when divorce was still rare and stigmatised.
Largely forgotten to history, Ada Evans and Marie Byles have an influence and impact that they might find difficult to believe, over one hundred years after their lives converged through their connection to the University of Sydney’s Law School. For the generations of women who have come after them – consciously or not – they made the law possible, and penetrable.
Source: Trailblazing women paved the way for future women of law – The University of Sydney
Queensland police commissioner grilled over handling of complaints against senior officers, inquiry hears – ABC News
Key points:
- The commission has been told a male senior constable threatened to punch a female officer if she did not promote him
- Commissioner Katarina Carroll told the inquiry she “would have rather not” promote Chief Superintendent Ray Rohweder but felt “constrained”
- Female officers who made complaints about sexual harassment, the commission has been told, had dog food left on their desk
Steve Price and the men who feel threatened by a status quo shift in sport
Steve Price has doubled down on comments made in an opinion piece in which he described the AFLW as “substandard” and “not elite sport”.
Price’s sole MO in raising this issue was not to provide constructive feedback to the AFLW, but to tear down a league which is working fearlessly to grow. The AFLW has already shifted the status quo in sport and enabled young female athletes a new outlook on their lives and careers.
In just five years, the AFLW has hit some momentous milestones including record crowds and sellouts. Only two months ago, the season’s first round clash between traditional rivals Essendon and Hawthorn had to be moved to Marvel Stadium after tickets for a smaller venue sold out within a day.
In just five years the AFLW has spurred a huge increase in the number of women and girls playing the game. 7.3 million Australians now express interest in the women’s competition and there are 2,540 girls’ and women’s community football teams scattered around the nation.
In just five years, the AFLW has risen to become the single biggest employer of professional sports for women in Australia with 420 players. A pay rise of an average of 94 percent across all four payment tiers was secured this year, enabling some players to focus solely on football and not supplementary careers.
Source: Steve Price and the men who feel threatened by a status quo shift in sport
Julia Gillard’s unbridled support of women is not without its black marks
Terese Edwards missed Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech. She was at Parliament House on October 9, 2012, but she was outside, on the parliament’s lawns, protesting against changes to the single-parenting payment passed into law that day by Gillard’s Labor government.
Edwards, the chief executive of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children, says those changes plunged tens of thousands of single mothers into poverty, and their effects are still being felt a decade later.
October 9 marks the speech’s 10th anniversary.
“I wanted to clap and cheer and be part of that empowerment, but I couldn’t,” Edwards says.
“I was an inconvenient reality because I was saying: ‘This is not OK from our first female PM’.”
The Gillard government amendments, passed quietly into law that historic afternoon, pushed more than 80,000 single parents off the parenting payment and onto the lower Newstart payment, leaving some up to $110 a week worse off.
It saved $728 million over four years, and a 2020 Parliamentary Budget Office analysis found the Howard and Gillard changes combined had saved taxpayers $5 billion.
Parents on the single parenting payment were already required to look for work, and to accept part-time employment if their youngest child was six years or over.
“It had absolutely nothing to do with assisting or requiring those parents to take up part-time employment,” he says.
“It was an appalling policy. It was a cost-saving at the expense of families and children in the deepest poverty.”
The Poverty in Australia report 2018, conducted by ACOSS and the University of NSW, charted the impact of the policy, with the data showing a “sharp rise in poverty among households with sole parents who were unemployed, from 35 per cent in 2013 to 59 per cent in 2015”.
Anthony Albanese, Bill Shorten and Jenny Macklin, who was the community services minister when the cuts were made, later disowned the policy and said it should never have been implemented.
Source: Julia Gillard’s unbridled support of women is not without its black marks
Investors don’t take women in legal tech seriously – Lawyers Weekly
Speaking to Lawyers Weekly ahead of the inaugural Women in Law Forum 2022, chief executive and founder of Legally Yours and committee chair of the Women of Australian Legal Technology Association (WALTA) Karen Finch said that while she is optimistic about female representation in Australia’s legal tech industry, further action is required to provide women with more opportunities.
Indeed, a report by ALTA released last year revealed that 53 per cent of lawyers in Australia are women, yet they comprise only 21 per cent of legal tech founders.
The Diversity in Legal Tech – It’s Time for Action report also found that only 21 per cent of technology professionals are women, and 29 per cent of funded companies have at least one female founder.
The gender gap in funding is particularly stark, with only 19 per cent of legal tech companies with a female founder having raised funds, compared to 50 per cent of companies with a male-only founder.
“The funding is quite woeful. We’re hugely unrepresented. It just doesn’t make its way down to us for a number of reasons,” Ms Finch said.
“Some might say it’s because we don’t fit the mould of what a tech start-up founder should be. Others say we don’t have the right connections because a lot of us haven’t gone to the right schools or we haven’t hung out in the right networks to access that funding.”
Ms Finch called on funding providers (including venture capital, government grants, and private equity firms) to address this shortfall.
Women also face conscious and unconscious bias from investors who do not take their ideas, innovations, and solutions seriously, she observed.
Source: Investors don’t take women in legal tech seriously – Lawyers Weekly