Former PM Julia Gillard says airing of Liberal bullying claims against women is ‘progress’ toward equality

THE airing of bullying claims by Liberal MPs is a sign of progress towards equality, but only targets for female representation will deliver real change, former PM Julia Gillard says.

• Gichuhi threatens to name alleged Liberal bullies
• PM investigating Liberal ‘bullies’ claims
• Liberal minister calls for bullying action
• Party ‘culture’ key to anti-bullying: PM

THE airing of bullying claims by Liberal women MPs is a sign of progress towards equality, but only targets for female representation will deliver real change, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard says.

Prof Gillard has addressed a packed Bonython Hall at Adelaide University on the challenges of getting women into leadership roles.

“As we meet today, there is lively discussion happening about allegations of bullying and intimidation in the Liberal Party,” she said.

“The fact such matters are being raised at all, and taken seriously when they are, is progress.”

But Prof Gillard said “while conversation is good, action is better” and the “hard evidence” showed that targets work.

Urging the Liberals and other parties to follow Labor’s lead, she said in 1994 both Labor and Liberal federal caucuses had 14 per cent women.

Now Labor had 46 per cent while the Liberals had “inched forward” to 23 per cent. “It has been argued by Liberal Party figures that mentoring and networking for women are the most effective strategies and that there is no need for targets or quotas,” Prof Gillard said.

“I think the easiest answer to that is ‘scoreboard’.”

She said a long list of factors were at play in Liberal MPs voting for Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton instead of Julie Bishop in the leadership ballot, but “one item that should appear on it is votes touched by bias, conscious or unconscious, about gender”.

Prof Gillard, who heads the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, said she was intent on finding “new solutions” for achieving gender equality because “we know many corporations are trying to do the right thing but are finding it hard to see change”.

“The early evidence is telling us that many of the commonly employed strategies for gender

diversity in organisations are at best ineffective and, at worst, are counter-productive … “Initiatives such as unconscious bias and diversity training, while helping to raise awareness in the workplace, do not improve workplace equality.

“The evidence around mentorship and leadership development training for women is also mixed.”

Prof Gillard said strategies that do work included job selection criteria that focused less on experience — which favoured men because women leave the workforce to raise children — and more on skill sets and giving applicants tasks to complete, which tended to remove unconscious bias.

She said rather than “one high, hard glass ceiling”, women faced “the glass labyrinth, the myriad of points in a career where a woman’s experience can be profoundly different to a man’s”.

She was “very disturbed” that polls of young women found her experience as PM had made them less likely to want a career in politics.

Originally published as Former PM Julia Gillard says airing of Liberal bullying claims against women is ‘progress’ toward equality