Banning men from the Walkley Awards is the least fair route to gender equality

Previous Walkley Award winners: “What a total backhander to every woman who may enter.”

The Walkley Awards are not something everyday folk would talk about over a backyard barbecue. I’d guess most Aussies wouldn’t be aware of Australia’s highest honours for journalism, but they are important to the industry and traditionally have recognised the best of the best among our fourth estate.

Not this year. This year, the pinnacle of the Walkleys, the award for Outstanding Contribution to Journalism, will exclude men. That’s right. No blokes allowed. A total man ban, no matter how good, how deserving. What a message to send to women. Guess what, gals, we can be the best too, but only if we wipe out half the competition.

The Walkey Foundation says the move is to redress past gender imbalance in award recipients. Whoever wins this year will know they’re sort of the best-ish. They’ll walk away with an award and a lingering knowledge that it wasn’t an open field. What an insult. What a total backhander to every woman who may enter.

I’m no contender here, so in that sense I have no horse in the race. I do have a strong runner in the broader (muddier) field that is the ongoing conversation on workplace gender equality.

This week, it was reported that men are missing out on promotions in top tier law firms because of aggressive gender targets that favour women. More women in, more men out was the message from at least one major firm. It also was reported that many men are having to resign as a consequence of these targets.

None of us should be surprised about this. It’s the latest iteration of a movement that uses the language of equality but is betrayed time and again by actions.

In April, the Queensland Labor Party confirmed that two of the 31 men in Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s government would lose their jobs to make way for women.

Let me put that simply. They plan to sack men only because they’re men, simply to employ women. If that’s not discrimination on the basis of gender, then I’m Dolly Parton and you’re about to hear a rocking version of 9 to 5.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.

I’m not the only person uncomfortable about this stuff. I have conversations about it frequently, but it’s a topic that must be discussed sotto voce, almost in code. God forbid a sane person could question the direction and impact of these policies. I’ve just clocked up 20 years in business and worked for 10 years in media before that. Let me tell you, there is nothing strategic about using a singular metric, be it personal, financial or operational, as a basis for any action.

And here’s where we collectively must be able to hold two ideas in tension and wrestle them out. It’s not that there aren’t areas of imbalance to address. It’s not that there haven’t been wrongs in the past. I spent the first decade of my career in broadcast media in the 1990s and early 2000s. Don’t talk to me about sexism and gender pay imbalance. I was asked to swallow that manure sandwich and I do not recommend it.

It’s about the how. It’s about the idea that cutting talented men out of the equation solely because they’re men is the answer, be it in law, journalism, teaching, whatever. And here’s the other factor that gets conveniently ignored when having these conversations. Where are the targets to get more men into traditionally female professions?

There is such a selective righteousness in this space and the word parity is thrown about as if it’s a paint-by-numbers proposition. Parity assumes that all industries, and all the people working in them, are the same, come from the same personal circumstances, want the same things or make the same choices.

Some women will choose their children and count the cost willingly. Some men do the same.

I can say this as an employer because I’ve lived it for two decades. It’s a dance and a delicate one. At various times I’ve had more women than men in my team and other times the opposite. Ebb and flow. There are subtleties and nuances that are deliberately ignored. Like, for example, some of the industries that attract the lowest pay are staffed predominantly by women. That’s not about gender, that’s about industry.

I am a fan of targets linked to clear KPIs, though. As explained to me by a very senior female lawyer, arguably at the top of her game here and globally, it allows for that crucial human element in building a team and business. Discernment. Factoring in personalities and nuance.

Quotas are lazy and, as we’re now seeing, punitive.

I’m old enough to remember when the conversation was about being “gender blind”. Seeing the whole person. Talent and capability. Same goes for race and ethnicity. I’m a 50-year-old woman, divorced, a practising Christian. I’m Italian on my dad’s side, German, Scottish and English on my mum’s. My perspective on life, my world view and experience have been formed by significantly more than the presence of my uterus.

The belief that hard, intransigent gender quotas will ultimately do anything other than damage is deluded, in my view. While there is a tonne of research that talks about the positive impact that more diverse teams have in a business, achieving true diversity requires thoughtful consideration, a view that is more broad than blinkered. It certainly requires more than the application of one metric.

My posture in relation to this vexed issue is that women and men are better together. Hard, immovable gender quotas bring division. They create resentment. And in the greatest of ironies, they are creating an environment where one-half of the equation feels gagged and unable to have a view. That’s not righting any wrongs, historic or current. That’s just flipping the coin on who is being disadvantaged. We need to address the imbalances that undoubtedly exist, together.