#Choosetochallenge - International Women's Day 2021
We spoke to TAC Board member Julia Mason about what the IWD2021 theme #choosetochallenge means to her.
Julia Mason recalls once sitting in on a discussion regarding the need to appoint more female members to a particular corporate board (not the TAC!), and the prevailing belief of the male dominated board was that sufficiently qualified female board members were “simply too hard to find”.
It was one of the times when Julia, a director of some 16 years’ experience, remembers having to make the sometimes difficult decision to call out gender inequality. It also served as an important reminder, as a current TAC board member of four years, that when it came to women being truly equal in the workforce, there was still a long way to go.
"The more you talk about it, the more action there will be..."
“I remember the mindset in that room seemed to be that satisfactory female directors couldn’t be found and that high achieving women might be too busy to take on this extra role anyway because 'of course they had their family responsibilities'. So in the board room we had a discussion around how many children the potential women candidates had, the children’s ages, and how far they’d have to travel from home. Female candidates needed to be so much more accomplished than potential male directors that were named. Plus we considered lots of irrelevant facts about them. It really was quite different profiling.
“So I had to call that out and that’s hard to do.”
‘Choose to Challenge’ is the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD), officially celebrated on Monday. For Julia, who recently co-founded the gender strategy firm Equity JV, challenging inequality is a choice for everyone – not just women - and the potential benefits flow far beyond the workplace.
“I think calling out the challenge of gender equality is a great thing because the more you talk about it, the more action there will be. This is not just a question for females, female employees or directors, it’s really a question for all employees.
“It’s important for all employees to know they’re doing the right thing because as we know in the law, silence is complicity, silence is tolerance for whatever behavior is going on, so in speaking out not only are you providing a benefit for women coming after you, or for the outcome that you’re trying to contribute to, but you’re also making sure that people understand that it’s not on. You’re adding value,” she says.
“And it’s also important to note it’s very likely that others in your group or audience agree with you.”
Equity JV encourages potential investors in companies to consider the broader value and opportunity of gender equality.
With COVID-19 dominating financial decision-making and conversations, keeping the issues that are at the heart of IWD on the agenda is harder this year, but more important than ever, according to Julia, who also sits on the Board of Respect Victoria – the body established with the aim of stopping domestic violence by changing the norms, practices and structures that allow it to happen.
“I think what we’ve seen as a result of the pandemic is those issues that existed pre covid were in fact exacerbated and I feel that after covid, or the position that we’re at now, there are many more people aware of those inequalities.
“There were a lot of women that had to leave work and leave higher education because of what has happened, or suffered increased family violence, which has been characterised as a shadow pandemic of our age. And the knock-on effect is those women may not go back into the workforce quickly and they don’t provide future role models or don’t achieve higher levels of education so they have less of a capital or economic base to provide to their families.
“It really shows that embedded in everything is gender equality, so if we pay more attention to that, there’s so much opportunity to improve not just corporate performance but society overall,” Julia says.
“There’s a data point that I know off the top of my head because I use it quite a lot, and that is that if we increase our female workforce participation rate in Australia by 6 percent, which doesn’t sound like much, it actually adds a full percentage point to our GDP growth, or $25 billion in money terms.”
Julia sees helping the TAC reach its full potential as an equal opportunity employer as a key role of her time as a board director. Women make up around 75 per cent of our workforce, but there are other considerations in ensuring we are on the right track, she says.
“There’s gender parity at all levels of the organisation, there’s wage parity, good recruitment processes and workplace flexibility - and all of those processes I know we have. But for me the most crucial part is workplace culture and how our leaders, and that’s including the board, act and react, and the pillars upon which we build our strategy.
“I’m very encouraged by my experience as a board director and always take seriously my role in helping the TAC to excel in this regard, as I do also my role in acting as a role model and helping people, helping female employees in knowing that this is a thing – women on boards is a thing and it can be done, it is done, it’s not unusual, it’s not outside the mainstream and also that gender equality is also a mainstream issue.”