Julie Bishop should be glad she’s not PM
WHEN women are allowed into a leadership role, it’s often to clean up a mess, and is usually an impossible task. Julie Bishop had a lucky escape, writes Alana Schetzer.
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AS Canberra pulls itself out of the ashes of another leadership spill, and yet another period of instability, an unlikely winner has emerged.
Julie Bishop — deputy leader of the Liberal Party for 11 years, respected foreign affairs minister and political survivor — is a phoenix. She’ll rise, while the biggest agitators for the change in leader will have trouble escaping the fallout from this mess in the years to come.
It may not look that way at the moment.
Bishop, who stood as candidate for the prime ministership and was ruthlessly betrayed by her own party, scoring just 11 votes, has very much been let down by the party she has faithfully served.
However, had Bishop won the vote, she would have inherited a poisoned chalice. Because all too often, when a woman ascends to the top job during a time of crisis — for a government or company — she isn’t smashing the “glass ceiling”, but descending off the “glass cliff”.
The glass cliff an international phenomena; a woman is given the opportunity to be in charge because there’s a deadlock or disaster. It was first written about by academics in the UK in 2005. In the US, a study published in 2013 looked at 15 years of data that tracked the patterns of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and revealed that women, as well as people of colour, were often only given the opportunity to lead when their companies were performing weakly or in crisis.
We’ve seen this happen here too. Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, became PM after it became obvious that then leader, Kevin Rudd, had lost the confidence of his ministers.
Coming in during such a noxious period, Gillard was doomed from the start, barely winning the 2010 election and being rolled, ironically, by Rudd in 2013.
The “glass cliff” essentially wastes women’s talents and abilities, by only giving them leadership during times when they are least likely to be able to succeed. And when these women don’t succeed in performing a miracle on a highly fractured corporation or government, it’s cited as evidence that females are simply not suited to leadership.
There are many other instances. In the UK, Theresa May took over from Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016 after the disastrous Brexit vote. She’s now struggling to keep her government united as she navigates the pitfalls of Britain’s increasingly complex Brexit plans.
In the US, multi-billion dollar corporation Yahoo! was trailing market leader Google, so they hired Marissa Mayer as their high-profile saviour in 2012, but taking on the digital behemoth virtually impossible task. Mayer left Yahoo! after its sale in 2017. Also in the US, Mary Barra was promoted to boss of General Motors just before it was hit with a massive recall scandal in 2014.
In the Australian state of Victoria, Joan Kirner became its first woman premier only when her predecessor, John Cain had left the state in complete financial disarray.
And Tracey Gaudry, who became the Hawthorn’s CEO — the first woman in such a position at an AFL club — in 2017, “stepped down” after just five months. She cited “personal circumstances” but also reportedly faced “negative feedback” from senior club officials.
If Bishop had won Liberal Party leadership, and thus became Australia’s 30th prime minister — and our sixth in 11 years — she was very likely to face similar challenges, ones that are unfortunately and unfairly aimed at women.
There has been unquestionable volatility overshadowing Australian national politics since 2007, when the revolving doors of leaders began. At the heart of the all the leadership spills were not issues of policy or the economy, but personality; Turnbull was deemed not popular enough to lead his government to victory in the next election. He was cast aside into the dustbin of all recent former PMs, but it leaves the new leader with almost impossible ground to make up.
In many ways, Bishop would have made a terrific candidate for the role: she has survived numerous leadership challenges to remain, until last Friday, the deputy leader of the Liberal Party since 2007, making her one of the few constants in the rapids of Australian politics.
Her no-nonsense approach has been rewarded with consistently strong personal polling, which has shown her to be the most popular Liberal member in federal Parliament. In December 2017, she again led the numbers, but downplayed any ideas of being PM herself one day.
Bishop has done a commendable role in the tough portfolio of foreign affairs, especially during increasingly heightened international tensions; from the elevation of Trump to US president, the balancing act of keeping China buying our commodities while standing firm on any of their expansionist tendencies. She also was uncompromising about need for justice for the victims of MH17 in 2014, where 38 Australians were killed when the plane was shot down over Ukraine.
Bishop’s professionalism, authority and experience shouldn’t be wasted in this current climate of political chaos, despite the fact that she’s not our leader. She was simply unlikely to be given the support that a prime minister requires, but would have been cited as an example of women’s poor suitability for leadership if she had failed. That’s what it means to fall off the “glass cliff”.
Because, as we’ve seen with Gillard, May, Mayer, and countless others, when one women fails to perform the miracle needed to put back together a role filled with poison, it will not only undo her previous achievements, but condemn all women to the too-hard pile, once again.
Alana Schetzer is a freelance writer.