‘Everything was falling apart and then I thought, I’m smart, maybe I can do something with my life’
Niki Vincent has met “lots of dumb males” but doesn’t believe most men are misogynist, and has loved a few, including her current partner, a former Playboy editor.
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She had just turned 12 when it happened. Her best friend had not shown up at her birthday party, so Niki Vincent knocked at her friend’s front door. Her friend’s father answered, to invite Vincent in to wait for her friend’s return.
Then he assaulted her.
Vincent, as Victoria’s first gender equality commissioner for the public sector, is an articulate speaker who defaults to laughter. An “over sharer”, as she puts it, of nature. Yet she fumbles for the words for these events of almost five decades ago.
The numbed disbelief. The court case, which she calls a “re-assault”, when a child was put in the witness box and answered graphic questions about appearance and size, in front of strangers and her parents.
It was wrong, she concludes, of experiences which triggered teenage rebellion and many therapy sessions as an adult. Now, as then, Vincent laments how the justice system treats sexual abuse victims.
“Most women aren’t going to put themselves through that, the harrowing nature of standing up in court and having every part of your life that you’ve had to that point pulled apart and examined,” she says. “What were you wearing? What relationships have you had previously?”
Vincent’s gender equality job brief covers more than 450,000 employees, including government departments, emergency service agencies, the courts and local councils.
For her, the weeks before International Women’s Day on March 8 are chaotic. Vincent does about 250 speeches a year, including 40 or more in the lead-up to the day itself. She feels that much has changed in the past decade, even if the big issues then remain the big issues now.
“You celebrate the work that has been done but you also highlight the work that needs to be done,” she says of the annual day. “But I do that every day, really.”
Vincent has powers to compel organisations to comply with gender equality targets, which takes in such vexed issues as gender pay gaps and workplace harassment.
Her role is a national first, a likely prototype for other state bodies. She has warned repeatedly that organisations which lag in such reforms will be exposed through transparency edicts of the legislation.
Yet implied threats conflict with the warmth of her personal approach. She laughs about dismissing the trolling she received on taking the job (no, she’s not a “dyke”).
She offers an example of when she herself applied unconscious bias to the potential detriment of a female employee.
And she confesses that a Harvard psychological measure exposed her own “mild” gender bias, in that she unconsciously associated caring with females and leadership with men.
A crusader, yes, Vincent shies from the warrior rhetoric, and outraged tone, sometimes associated with the extreme sides of the gender equality debate. Instead, as an academic of training, she sifts data to identify the evidence for change.
Yes, there is so much overdue work to be done, citing parts of the world far ahead of Australia, such as Scandinavia.
Yet she thinks most people are “decent”. Most men are not misogynists; indeed, she likes many men and has loved a few. Others can lay blame, if they wish, but Vincent is not on a mission to punish.
She does not patronise in explaining that many issues to be confronted are largely wrapped in ignorance.
Of course, Vincent throws around terms such as “gender lens” and “unconscious bias”. But she does not preach, instead engaging with a cheeriness which settles the self-described “dumb male” who is interviewing her.
“It’s OK,” she explains. “I’ve met lots of dumb males.” And she laughs.
Vincent’s longer career and life has been informed by adversity.
She has touchstone experiences in discrimination, as all women do. Such as the Year 10 science teacher who decreed that females should not learn science, whom she “credits” in part for her drive for a 97 per cent mark in university physics many years later.
At 15, from a poorer part of Adelaide, Vincent left home.
At 18, she married her boyfriend.
At 25, she was a mother of four.
At 30, she was a single mother of four.
At this time, in the space of about eight weeks, her husband left her for another woman. Half the house burned down. Vincent had a bad car accident. She contracted shingles.
The final indignity was when the dishwasher broke down and she announced to the kids that they would now be eating off paper plates.
“In all that chaos, I thought I’m not even going to go to my (uni) graduation, I just can’t do it,” she says. “Then I got this letter saying you are to receive the first University Medal that the University of Adelaide has ever awarded.”
She was compelled by events to redefine her identity as a wife and mother. “It really was a turning point for me,” she says. “People talk about sliding door moments. Everything was falling apart and then suddenly I thought: ‘I’m smart. Maybe I can do something with my life’.”
Vincent was belatedly introduced to who she would become.
She wasn’t a feminist, not outwardly, instead sheltering in the shadow of quiet dismay preferred by many women of the era.
“I had a very strong sense of what was fair and what wasn’t fair around gender but I was very much more embedded still within the stereotypes for women,” she says.
“I resisted around the fringes as opposed to being any part of that wholehearted feminism … like anything, you grow and you learn over time. The young women in my team have extraordinary knowledge. I certainly didn’t have it at their age.” She met one of her closest friends, Melissa Bailey, in the uni library at this time. Bailey recalls a “slightly inappropriately loud voice of a cheerful woman”. They discovered they both wanted the same academic job, and successfully applied to share the role.
“She hasn’t changed at all,” Bailey says. “She’s not easily swayed by the loudest voices because she herself is not driven by any sort of ideology.”
Vincent chats in an upstairs room of herinner city apartment, a destination or refuge for her nine grandchildren as well as her foster daughter, who is 18.
It’s her sanctuary after the scramble to set up her Victorian office. Appointed in September, 2020, organisations were to report their gender equality action plans by October, 2021.
Between lockdowns, and recruitment and remote communications, she describes a “messy” genesis, joking that you didn’t want “to look under the bonnet”.
Her partner Chuck Smeeton comes home. The couple met on Tinder in Adelaide in 2019. Both had been twice married. Within months, they were living together.
In their new abode, shoes come off inside. She potters to relax in the rooftop garden. The garage is Smeeton’s “man cave”.
Housework is shared, in a progression marked by Vincent’s spinal surgery last year; no longer does Smeeton seek guidance for what needs to be done.
Both partners are unusually candid about their intimacy. She’s the dynamo, he’s the needy one.
Smeeton, who makes guitars and bikes, and has been in a band for three decades, has two jobs: at Jigsaw, which places disabled workers, and as executive producer of Scinema, an international science film festival.
He’s had many jobs. One of them, in the 1990s, was as editor of Playboy magazine. If not ashamed of his past, Smeeton had dropped the role from his CV when the pair met for the first time in a cafe.
On this first date, with South Australia’s then equal opportunity commissioner, he rightly assumed that his stewardship of a magazine which published photos of naked women could be problematic. When he dropped the so-called “P” word, minutes into a relationship now of four years, he feared the inconvenient fact would cruel the love story before it began.
Vincent describes the time since as Smeeton’s “big journey”. On gender equality, he would become a poster boy case study. As he puts it, for his first 55 years, he had not seen what needed to be seen. Yet once he had, it could not be “unseen”.
A “feminist in training”, Smeeton is becoming a lay scholar, citing two seminal books, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez and The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart, as pillars for understanding.
“I found certain feminist writers, when I was on my journey of discovery and my continuing journey of discovery, I found them quite intimidating,” Smeeton says. “But now I think I understand things a little more, I just keep on saying: ‘You (women) should be angrier.’”
Softly-spoken and thoughtful, he doubles as Vincent’s most tangible weapon. As she says: “Chuck has been brilliant for me because he’s been an amazing example of how someone can change. He’s also been incredibly gracious in allowing me to use him as an example in that way. It’s been really helpful for me. When a man occasionally will say, ‘Well, what about men?’, or ‘Why are you anti-men?’ I can roll out my Chuck stories.”
She accepts that some people, including some women, will always resist, and that entrenched hate will not be overcome with conversation. She instead targets the so-called “movable middle”, those who sense that things may be unfair, but could use constructive exchanges to properly understand why.
“We all grew up in a patriarchal world, a world that was designed by men with men’s interests at the forefront,” she says.
“They were the people in power. It’s difficult for us to see this invisible kind of system we have created which seems normal for everyone, but it does disadvantage so many people.”
This leads to the notion of the “gender lens”,and its increasing international application to practices and policies.
When a gender lens was applied to the long accepted ways of a snowy north European region, the snow ploughing policy was found to be unfair.
In the mornings, the roads would be ploughed before the footpaths. Swap the order, and traffic was slower. But women, who were more likely to be walking at that time of day, had far fewer falls and injuries from slippery footpaths.
Or take the size of bricks, designed for men’s hands, and cement bags, sized for men’s shoulders. She says attracting women to construction might mean adjusting materials and tools, as well as cultural change.
The gender lens will be applied to every new policy, program or service of every Victorian public sector organisation which affects the public.
“Most people don’t necessarily have lenses through which they can view other people’s lives,” she says. “That’s the challenge, I think. For men, they’ve never been women, most of them, and so it is hard to put themselves in their position.”
She hopes that the gender pay gap could be markedly smaller within a decade. Cultural norms, such as the tendency for women to care for their children, cannot be instantly unpicked.
“Some of those are big kind of sociocultural issues, which will take time to change but we can get rid of all the unconscious bias bits of the equation which contribute,” she says.
Yet there is good news.
“I really hope that we have reached a tipping point,” Vincent says. “That was partly catalysed by the pandemic but also things like MeToo and the women’s marches, and (Sex Discrimination Commissioner) Kate Jenkins’ amazing work, and those incredibly brave women who spoke up about abuses that catalysed so much conversation and outrage and change.”
And there stands the story of revelation about the ex-Playboy editor, which is certain to be told again and again. As Smeeton says: “It was something I did, and I learned a lot from it, and I think its most powerful role now is that it is something that Niki can use to show that ‘even the Playboy editor can change’. If that helps, that helps.”
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