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MS THOMAS: As promised, we’re just going to steal a little bit of lunch time to have a chat again to Wendy and answer some of the wonderful questions that you’ve been sending in.
Can I ask you all first though to please thank our caterers and all the wait staff and everyone for a great job on lunch, very nice.
Wendy, do you want to take this area and I’ll use this microphone. Let me try and summarise some of the questions that have come in for Wendy.
I think one of the themes that has been running through a lot of the questions, and I think whether it’s gender privilege or other kinds of privilege, how can one deal with a deficit of privilege, if I could put it that way, in terms of moving up through the ranks what role does privilege play, can you overcome it, how can you overcome it, that kind of stuff?
MS TANCRED: Privilege and career success I think is quite an interesting topic. I don’t know if anyone has ever done any formal on it. I don’t come from a privileged background at all myself. I grew up on large cattle properties in Western Queensland. It was two hours to the nearest town. My brother, sister and I never went to primary school or anything like that, went to boarding school.
I came to Brisbane to go to university and I think that was when I was first aware of other people, at least thinking they were more privileged than me and it was more predominant in the females actually.
I was working at AMP at the time and a lot of my peers were males who had come through the GPS private school system in Brisbane and their girlfriends were, can I swear, really quite ordinary behaviour let me put it that way, otherwise known as beginning with “b” and then an “i”. Because I hadn’t grown up in their mind in their privileged backgrounds they literally would turn and walk away and not talk to me. I didn’t quite grasp that concept.
So, I think the concept of privilege – I am told Melbourne is the same as Brisbane. It’s an old boys school tie network. I haven’t had any experience from working here and I have just basically ignored it in my career.
I will admit my husband is one of those guys that went to the private schools and in some circles I’m actually still introduced as Harry Tancred’s wife, not Wendy Tancred, and that irks the hell out of me and my husband actually although secretly he probably enjoys it.
Certainly when I started my career in finance there was certainly a
“you’ve got the job if you went to the same school as the person who was recruiting you.” It was absolutely the way it went. These days in my exposure to that I still think, rightly or wrongly, people end up on boards because they went to the same school even back that far ago as fellow directors around the table. Do I like it, no. Is it reality, yes. How do I deal with it, just kind of ignore it really.
MS THOMAS: Following on from that and I guess when we’re talking about privilege I mean the example you’ve given is what I would consider class privilege but there might be ethnicity privilege, there’s gender privilege, there’s a whole range of other things.
The question is in this case how do you specifically pull men up who are asserting privilege and how do you do that without alienating them?
MS TANCRED: Who asked that question? I don’t know I think is probably the answer. If we’re asserting a privilege from a sexual harassment type perspective which is probably the worst form of asserting privilege to be honest I find that quite easy to deal with. I’ve actually found that a fairly easy conversation to have with someone who’s doing inappropriate things from that lens. Once you’ve got the facts it’s a pretty clear-cut conversation and they won’t be working for me tomorrow. Beyond that I don’t know if I can answer.
MS THOMAS: From the other side of that though let’s say in terms of – I mean sexual harassment just being one example – I mean in your case you’re the boss but what if you’re not the boss and you’re coming from a position of privilege where they’re both male and in a position of power, did you experience that as you were coming up?
MS TANCRED: I did, not a huge amount but I certainly did and again I think I did what Hollywood has done until now and that is sort of sweep it under the carpet and pretend it didn’t happen which is not the right way to deal with it obviously.
At the time when I was in any of those situations I was much younger, much more inexperienced and probably simply not game enough to say anything which is not the right answer.
MS THOMAS: There are less structures in place at that point as well to be able to report I assume.
I love this question, to change tack completely, do you think it’s more important to work for a smart boss or one who supports work-life balance? So to extend it, is it more important to have a boss who’s great at their job, you know, and who knows what they’re talking about in what they’re doing or one who is a good person to work for?
MS TANCRED: I’d actually go for one who’s a good person to work for as long as they’re also good at achieving the business outcomes. You don’t necessarily need to have a smart boss and bosses don’t necessarily need to be technically smart, they need to be street smart and people smart. So, smart in terms of bringing the team along with them, developing the team, working out how to get the best out of the team, that sort of smart is really important.
The techo-academically smart people who’ve got there because of their intellectual smarts I personally rate emotional intelligence above that form of intelligence when you’re a senior leader. There are some people who are more experts on leadership in the room than me but I think emotional intelligence is much more important than intellectual intelligence when you’re in those senior roles.
MS THOMAS: That’s interesting. Picking up on that, I was having a conversation with the table over here from our Department of Justice, the table over here and they were lovely. We were talking about that idea of following someone else’s idea of success and going through say, for example, will I go up and I will eventually become a manager, what if I’m not a good manager, what if I don’t want to be a manager, what if I don’t have the skills to be a manager, do you see that happening?
MS TANCRED: I see it all the time. People think that’s what I do and in hierarchical organisations there’s a tendency to okay, if I’ve been in this role for this long then I’m going to get that role for that long and then that role for that long and eventually I’ll be a manager of something and that’s what I espoused to be. I’d hazard a guess there’s quite a few people who just don’t enjoy it when they get there but they put up with it because it pays the bills and they’re not quite game enough to admit that they were actually wrong.
I think that’s another thing I’ve learnt, probably more recently, is it’s okay to say, “I was wrong.” Back to my poor old husband, he should be in the room today. I never sound wrong to him or the kids but I think in those situations sometimes what you wish for is not actually what you want when you get there.
MS THOMAS: Absolutely true. Perhaps you want to work three days a week and watch Game of Thrones.
MS TANCRED: Game of Thrones.
MS THOMAS: On that note Wendy I think we might leave it at that but thank you. You’ve not only been generous in speaking this morning but also coming back and having our little mini Q&A, so please again everyone please join me in thanking Wendy Tancred for being so generous.
MS TANCRED: Thank you everyone. Enjoy the rest of the day.
MS THOMAS: Thank you. I’ll switch back over into official MC mode. I see Kate Jenkins is indeed here. Unfortunately, Kate I don’t have your introduction notes. Just hold that thought everyone. You know, it’s going to be most embarrassing, I’ll be puffed now. Here you are. I mean I know who you are. I just wanted to get your official introduction right.
Kate Jenkins has been Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner since 2016. She’s the Convenor of the Male Champions of Change Group, sits on the board of the Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Carlton Football Club. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, two children and three stepchildren.
We are absolutely delighted to have her here today so please summon all your sugary energy from your lovely dessert and that beautiful lunch that we just had, put your hands together. You can whoop, you can holler, you can do whatever you want and welcome to the stage Kate Jenkins.
MS JENKINS: Thank you very much. What a great big group. It’s fantastic to be here. Thank you.
I’ll start also by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay my respects to their elders past and present. Particularly near the river I think the Aboriginal people had such a strong connection to this land so it’s nice to be here.
The topic I was given was called Controlling Your Own Destiny Strategies for Every Woman. I’ve renamed it How Gendered Expectations are Very Expensive for Women.
At the outset I just want to say a couple of things about me accepting this request to speak. I do get lots of invitations to speak and I will tell you publicly that I generally don’t accept invitations to speak at Women in Leadership Conferences.
I’ll tell you why I don’t accept them because there is something about women in leadership conferences that I have attended and have loved for many years which suggests that it is within the control of women to change their destiny and that the system or the attitudes that exist around them are not the barriers.
I have a fundamental belief that the barriers for women’s success are not women, so teaching you how to get around those barriers is important but my energy is often put elsewhere to change some of those systems.
Some of you will know Catherine Fox has written a great book called “Stop Fixing Women”. She really talks about what are the systemic changes we need.
The second reason is that there are so many wonderful speakers and you’ve got a number of them today who will speak on this topic and in Victoria there is a plethora of them. Christine Nixon and Amanda Sinclair have just written their books. There’s a lot of great speakers.
The third is usually because I am hoping that I’m looking at an audience that’s pretty on board with what I’m advocating. A lot of my work is about talking to people who disagree, are resistant to change, don’t think they have a role to play in it.
Those are the reasons, not to be negative, that I often don’t accept these requests.
I have accepted this request because fundamentally I do believe that investing in the development of women does make a difference and that I have been the beneficiary of a lot of great programs that have really helped me learn better to negotiate the workplace.
I also believe that changing the system is a work in progress, so understanding how to work both within it and around it is important right now for advancing gender equality.
Probably most importantly I said yes because the person who requested me to speak here today was the man who runs the entire Victorian Public Service and I am asking him very stridently to work on the systems to ensure women can advance. This is part of his efforts and how could I say no when I’m putting those demands on him.
Today I’m going to experiment with a different way of talking about what you can do in your career using a framework based on the evidence of how the systems and attitudes have historically influenced women’s career paths.
When I started my role as Sex Discrimination Commissioner I identified three priorities that need to change in Australia. Many of you will know that Australia is a leader in education of women and girls. Primary school, tertiary, secondary school, we are leading and in fact on the World Economic Forum rankings we’re number one for education.
Where we really fall down badly is in essence related significantly to the workplace. The key priorities for me have been, number one to advance women’s economic security, two, to look at getting more women into leadership roles and having women have more of a say over what happens to them but also to our community and, thirdly, to prevent violence against women and girls.
Today I’m going to focus on that point about economic security because the reality is, notwithstanding many people’s belief that we can’t have a pay gap, women retire with half of the retirement savings of men and they are two and a half times more likely to live in poverty, but that is not the women who have been challenged just through their life, these are everyday women that are facing homelessness and real challenges at the end of their life. This is something that affects all women and not just award wage women.
If I give you a sense of how we have that position still in a developed country like ours, I’m going to tell you a bit of a story about how that poverty or how that economic insecurity accumulates over a lifetime and, as you listen to this, I want you to reflect on how these factors may have affected you and some of them they will have been good and some of them might have been adverse to you.
It is not a task to get you completely depressed but it is just to demonstrate how these gendered expectations through your entire life that will have affected everyone of us, men and women, ultimately lead to what I said a very expensive outcome to women.