You go, girls

THERE are many beautiful young girls around me at the moment - babysitters, daughters of friends, my own daughter.

THERE are many beautiful young girls around me at the moment - babysitters, daughters of friends, my own daughter.

I look at their vividness, their spark, and want to celebrate it. They seem so bursting with life, articulate and vibrant and bold, so ready to take on the world. Will they?

Author Edith Wharton more than a century ago wrote of "a curtain of niceness" that befalls young women. It's not necessarily a compliment. It implies a girl who loses her voice as life chips away at her.

There's an interesting paradox going on. Girls statistically are doing better than boys at school, have higher uptake rates at university, leap boldly onto the jobs ladder and damn well climb it, then for an awful lot of us - by our late 30s and 40s - it's all… petered out. Why?

I'm not going to point to motherhood as the entire reason. I think it also has to do with our voice, our confidence, our attitude towards ourselves. I've seen it again and again in newsrooms across Australia and in London. Women who were the workhorses - reliable, smart, hard-working, brilliant - but quiet about it. They never blew their trumpet; they thought someone would recognise how good they were and promote them... but more often than not it never happened. Meanwhile, the bolshy, testosterone-fuelled blokes demanded the glamour jobs - the editorships, the foreign postings - and got them.

Low self-esteem, self-loathing, doubt - they all fell us women. The blokes power on; drowning us out with their loudness. They pick themselves up after the knocks, see it as part of the battle of life. Women take it personally, care enormously, worry so much what people think; it's so easy to crush us.

Sian Westerman is a founding member of the UK's 30% Club, so-called because it wants a mimimum 30 per cent women on the boards of all Britain's FTSE-ranked companies. In terms of the older businesses, she says: "They need to not fall into the trap of thinking that the person who beats their chest the most loudly, the one who is pushing himself forward, is necessarily the best person for the job."

It's not all rosy in Australia, either. A new study has shown that women in the top echelons of our corporate world are about as rare as a rocking horse poo. The Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency has found, over the past 10 years, that more than half the senior executive teams of Australia's top 200 listed companies are female-free. Girls, where are you?

"Oh, can't do that. Oh, not good enough." Are we our own worst enemy? Actress Carey Mulligan said recently, "I go to work these days with kind of a 'male' attitude. It's not a feminist thing, it just makes me feel more confident. It's my way of feeling like I've got equal weight in the room."

Equal weight. Because so many of us don't have that attitude at work. Which is why the music world is so exciting at the moment. Look at Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Adele. There's no vulnerability. Mud doesn't stick. Like Madonna before them, they're not imprisoned by what people think of them - they just roar on. They're empowered, strong, loud; deliciously, cheekily feminine and comfortable in their own skin. It's a killer combination, and right now the chicks are infinitely more interesting - and successful - than their male counterparts in the music world.

Are they blazing the trail for those girls around us at the moment? I watch the gorgeous young women I know in wonder. The spark of them feels so shiny and lovely - I want to protect it, watch it flower. Will it? I hope so. Because what becomes a woman most? Confidence.
[e-mail]