White? Privileged? Not us, says CEW as it shakes up structures

Forty years after it was set up to disrupt the corporate boys’ club, advocacy group Chief Executive Women is going through its own shake-up to improve its image and leadership structure.

New Chief Executive Women president Helen Conway, left, and CEO Lisa Annese. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

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Forty years after it was set up to disrupt the corporate boys’ club, advocacy group Chief Executive Women “has a bit of an image problem” according to its new president.

Helen Conway, a company director and former CEO of the Workforce Gender Equality Agency, told The Australian: “There are a lot of people who take the view that we’re a group of white, privileged women who are just here for ourselves, we’re exclusively protecting our own patch, and we’ve already got access to power, and we’re just looking after ourselves.

“That’s an unfair interpretation, but that tells me that we need to communicate a lot better about what we do.”

She said the job of increasing the access for women at work was not yet “done”, given the recent backlash against DEI policies.

“(The backlash) is a problem and you have to maintain active engagement in advocacy, because you quickly lose wins if you’re not,” she said. “If you’re not moving forward … you’ll be going backwards.”

She said the backlash was very uninformed and driven by “extraordinary bias and misinformation”.

Ms Conway said: “I don’t think the impact is huge here. I do see it in organisations that are headquartered in US businesses but I think you’ve always got to guard against rollback.”

Ms Conway, who takes over from the former Mirvac boss, Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, is the first president to be appointed by the board - as part of a shake-up of not-for-profit set up by a group of 15 women in 1985.

Under its new constitution, the organisation’s governance has been improved and its CEO will now have more power - a shift that brings CEW into line with conventional corporate practice.

Ms Conway said: “Without putting too fine a point on it, the governance wasn’t best practice. When you’re 40 years on, you’ve got to work out, are we contemporary? Are we relevant? How do we make sure that we are sustainable and impactful into the future? Every organisation goes through these inflection points.”

New Chief Executive Women president Helen Conway and CEO Lisa Annese. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz, who set the ball rolling on change when she began in November 2022, said: “We’ve modernised the governance of CEW, which we needed to do to evolve into the future and we changed the way the board was elected.”

She said she was pleased that during her time at CEW “we shifted the dialogue away from, this is about men versus women, to this is about diversity”.

“Gender equality is good for everybody and (the issue of women in the workplace) can’t be framed as men versus women, or women taking things away from men, or what you hear sometimes, is men saying, ‘well, I can’t get promoted because I’m not a woman’.

“That’s a really unhelpful position to be in, because we need to be looking for who is the right person for a particular job in a particular role. Of course, that has to be on merit, but we’re very narrow in how we define merit.”

CEW has more members than ever - some 1400 top tier female CEOs and board members – but it’s cutting its cloth to fit the times, with staff working from home or out of a couple of hired offices in a co-shared hub in the Sydney CBD.

Ms Conway, a lawyer, has worked as a senior executive in the insurance, transport, energy, retail and construction industries and now sits on a number of boards. She has a close connection with CEW and decades ago was an early recipient of a CEW scholarship to study management.

She said the organisation had a great legacy but it was time to leverage a talented membership base for a range of projects.

“This really is all about being more ambitious, being more active and more engaging with the members, and seeing how we can activate the membership base,” she said.

The shift of power will give Lisa Annese, who has been CEO for six months, a bigger public role in an organisation whose image has been defined by presidents like Ms Lloyd-Hurwitz and Sam Mostyn, now the Governor-General. Other presidents who carved out a strong role in recent times are Diane Smith-Gander, Sue Morphet and Kathryn Fagg and the impressive backlist is a who’s who of Australian business, and includes Barbara Cail, Imelda Roche, Ita Buttrose, Wendy McCarthy, Jillian Broadbent and Catherine Livingstone.

Former Mirvac boss and former CEW president Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz.

Ms Annese, who was previously the CEO of Diversity Council Australia, said the decision to hire co-shared office saved resources and allowed more agile arrangements for staff who needed to mix work and family.

She said CEW would continue to press for universal access to early childhood education despite the current debate about safety in the sector.

“I don’t think because there are concerns and issues that are playing out in the media now that the principle of universal early childhood education is necessarily problematic,” she said. “Obviously we want a safe sector. But that doesn’t mean that the concept of early childhood education and care is in itself, is problematic.”

Ms Conway who is chair of KU Children’s Services, a not-for-profit care provider, said there was a clear problem with sector regulators not being sufficiently resourced.

“We absolutely must have a more coherent national system. In a federated system, you’ve got some federal entities, you’ve got some state entities,” she said. “So the system will set standards for quality and good early childhood education and care and safety, but you need regulators then to enforce it. There are regulators, but they’re not well resourced. So every time there’s a problem, you’ll have another inquiry. We have something like six inquiries at the moment, where all the recommendations sit on the desk. These are good pieces of work, with really good recommendations, but we need coherency. I don’t think regulators are properly resourced. There are childcare centres that haven’t met expectations for years, and they’re still operating.”

She said it was a knee-jerk reaction to ban men from childcare: “We don’t want them to go. Children need male role models, they need female role models. That’s a knee-jerk reaction, and frankly, paints men as a block. I think we need to step back and think more fundamentally than that.”