Can we please send the glass ceiling to the scrapyard?
What do Sam Kerr, Margot Robbie and Michelle Jablko have in common? They’re proof that change is happening.
This is a story about three Australian women and how they changed it up for all of us last year.
First, there’s the blonde, multimillionaire Hollywood star, arguably every straight man’s sexual fantasy. Then there’s the global footballer in baggy shorts and a ponytail. Finally there’s the investment banker with a wide smile in regulation corporate jackets.
Margot Robbie, Samantha Kerr and Michelle Jablko are very different people who share the power to shift the conversation about women across Australian society. They are not doing it in a vacuum.
Robbie is the front person in the Barbie movie that draws on a huge body of talent to explode conventional ideas about how to talk about gender.
Kerr is only one of several Matildas who turned women’s soccer into the must-watch, must-play code across the country.
Jablko, appointed in August last year as chief executive of toll operator Transurban Group, stands on the shoulders of decades of women fighting for equality at work.
Yet all three have created tipping points, where the unusual is rendered mainstream; where the outliers are slap-bang in the centre of the debate; and where we almost forget what the fuss was about.
In an accident of timing, Barbie and the Matildas converged for a knockout punch to old thinking about women and girls and their place in society – as well as on the football field.
The “Barbie monologue” from actor America Ferrera of Ugly Betty fame, seems to say it all: “It is literally impossible to be a woman … You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people …”
Jablko’s appointment came in late August after those of several other women last year – Michele Bullock at the Reserve Bank of Australia; Vanessa Hudson at Qantas; and Leah Weckert at Coles Group. This was the icing on the cake, proof that the world was really changing; that some sort of barrier had been breached.
Suddenly, the calculation that it will take 100 years to get equal numbers of men and women running Australia’s top companies has been revised: at this rate, it will take only 50. That’s laughably long, but the real message is that if we keep doing the maths, we will get there much faster.
It feels like real change.
Women have had huge success in the past 20 years in winning positions as director and chair on company boards, but the road to real operational, strategic and leadership power as chief executives has been much slower.
So, has the battle for women’s equality been won in corporate Australia?
Does Jablko, whose rapid rise at Transurban comes after taking some ambitious and strategic career risks, prove those glass ceilings are for the scrapyard? Do Bullock and Weckert and Shemara Wikramanayake (Macquarie Group) and Meg O’Neill (Woodside Energy) show we’re gender blind when it comes to corporate appointments?
Yes and no, say four women who talk from experience of working at the top of business and advocating for women at work.
All four have led, or are leading, Chief Executive Women, an organisation launched almost 40 years ago to celebrate a handful of female CEOs but that has broadened its approach to lobby for women across the workplace.
Its former and current leaders judge the normalisation of women and power by the statistics, but also by the cultural shifts so obvious this year as Australians flocked to Barbie and the soccer.
Diane Smith-Gander, who headed CEW in 2015-16, says: “It is very clear women are on a more even playing field now and that a woman as leader is becoming far more normalised. A really big indicator is that women are getting easy (CEO) jobs from time to time now, not just the really hard jobs.”
Sue Morphet, president from 2019 to 2020, says the shift is “fabulous”; Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz who is the current president, says “the tide is turning”; and Kathryn Fagg (2017-18) says we’re seeing significant change in the top, publicly listed companies.
But all suggest it’s too early to stash the banners away, arguing that with more visibility comes the risk, for example, that boards will believe the fight is over and, as Morphet says, decide “we’ve done the woman question, let’s revert to type”.
Lloyd-Hurwitz says: “It’s certainly not time to relax, it’s time to accelerate. We can’t back off now, we need to press on so that we don’t reach gender equality in CEO-land in 50 years but rather in 10 years.”
Lately she has looked at progress through the Barbie-Matildas lens.
“Barbie is a real talking point,” she says. “People love it or hate it, but it raises the issue around gender in a very entertaining format. And the Matildas absolutely changed the game; who would have imagined 20 years ago that Australia would be completely enthralled?”
And no, fandom does not translate to more women leading ASX Top 100 companies: “I’m just saying that it’s a mindset, it’s normalised female sport at an elite level, and it just normalises gender equity. There’s not a direct causal link clearly between the Matildas and CEOs but I think it is part of the shift in how people see gender in this country.”
Will this shift towards seeing candidates, rather than female candidates stick? What would success for women in these big powerful sectors of the economy look like?
Lloyd-Hurwitz cautions there are still only 26 women among the ASX top 300 chief executives and says we need more women in the pipeline: “If 82 per cent of pipeline roles are held by men, gender equity at the CEO level is numerically very problematic.
“Our focus at CEW for the next couple of years is on growing that pipeline and ensuring we have women ready to be appointed on merit as CEO.”
But the pipeline itself is a problem because the danger zone for women is not in their 40s or 50s where they have, by and large, sorted the home front, but in their 20s and 30s (the pipeline years) when they can be knocked out of the race by their domestic responsibilities.
Says Lloyd-Hurwitz: “Australia has the highest level of tertiary education in its female cohort of any OECD country and when we enter the workforce we’re roughly 50-50. And then around the middle level there’s a very difficult transition for women and it’s largely to do with the family rearing years. That’s where the interventions have to be made.
“That’s why CEW calls for things like the superannuation guarantee on paid parental leave; why we call for universal access to quality childhood education. It’s why we need to normalise parental leave for men and women, and not leave it to being predominantly a women’s issue.”
Smith-Gander has few illusions about how far we have come. For her, success means getting rid of the gender pay gap.
“The real change will happen when … the work that women do is valued as much as the work that men do,” she says. “The pay gap is the holy grail, it is the indicator of how we value work, and it’s the measuring stick.
“People say, oh no, there’s equal pay for equal work. Of course there is; we won that battle a long time ago. But when you add up all of the pay that women get and all the pay that men get, and adjust it for part time and all the rest of it … men are in the jobs that are valued more, and so they take home more of the pay. It’s as simple as that.
“We have the most gender-segregated workforce in Australia of any developed nation and it goes all the way back to all of the incentives and disincentives that have been layered on to the notion of family by successive governments, the most difficult one being, ‘one for Mum, one for Dad and one for the country’. (But) a woman with three children? It’s very unlikely she’s going to be able to have a career job. We have institutionalised and normalised Dad as the breadwinner, and Mum as the paid house help.”
‘The pay gap is the Holy Grail, it is the indicator of how we value work, and it’s the measuring stick’
Morphet is delighted by the increasing numbers of women at the top but worries that unless those women hire other women to create a critical mass and cultural change, boards will revert to hiring male chief executives “because so many people are more comfortable there, because we haven’t had enough time to become gender blind”. It’s an unconscious bias, of course: “We’ve had a woman. That’s cool. We can tick that box now.”
Morphet is not suggesting a woman be appointed every time. Rather it’s the pipeline effect again – ensuring there are men and women when a chief executive is selected.
Morphet has her own measure of success: “It will be when, as soon as a pregnancy is announced, families and businesses talk about the time that men are taking off work to care for children, not just the time women will be taking off.”
One of the mantras in these debates in recent years has been the need for women to prove themselves in line jobs with profit and loss responsibilities if they want to break through as chief executives.
It has been strongly argued in the literature and in practice by advocates inside and outside companies that if women are to go toe to toe with men, it’s useless getting to the top in HR or marketing or in the legal department. Rather, they need to get themselves into operational roles at the core of their companies.
It’s proven true – up to a point – but the definition of a line job is now up for grabs.
Several of the women recently appointed as chief executives in publicly listed companies have moved from chief financial officer jobs into the top spot rather than from divisional management jobs.
This is true for Weckert, who was CFO before being appointed chief executive, although she also spent time with profit and loss responsibilities at the Coles Express division and is regarded as knowing the business from top to bottom. But Jablko, for example, joined Transurban as CFO in early 2021, having previously been CFO at ANZ Bank, and has leapt into the top job.
Fagg argues the line from CFO to CEO is “a much more straightforward career path for women. Over 50 per cent of commercial students in our universities have been women since the early ’90s. So we’ve had about 30 years of that pipeline building.”
She says if we want the gains of recent years to stick, smart organisations should focus on areas where there are already more women and make sure they provide them with development opportunities.
Fagg says the “beauty of the CFO role is that you’re often almost 2IC to the CEO anyway, you have a very broad overview of what is happening in the organisation, you have a lot of exposure to the board so you get used to working with the board. And the other (advantage), which is just huge for listed companies, is that you’re well known to the investment market, you’re out doing road shows with the CEO. So the market knows the CFOs well, and will have perspectives on the CFO.”
Lloyd-Hurwitz, who last year called time after a decade as chief executive at Mirvac, says even the CFO argument is overstated.
“I think we have too narrow a definition of what a pipeline role is,” she says. “Traditionally it was seen that you have to be the CFO or in charge of a revenue generating part of the business.
“But there are women more highly represented in other areas of the pipeline – thinking sustainability, HR, compliance, risk, all of those things that companies actually need to function and which we dismiss too easily.”
She says there’s no reason a talented woman who comes through a different path should not be an effective chief executive.
“The role of the CEO is to set strategy, to hire the right people, to create culture,” she says. “The CEO is not the chief deal-doer or the chief revenue raiser, the CEO is the leader of an organisation and I think there are many more pathways that we should be considering for women to be able to get to that position.
“When I reflect on my 10 years as a CEO, what was it that I was doing? I was building culture and I was studying strategy, I was looking after the people, and I was thinking about risk, and I was thinking about talent. I wasn’t doing the deals. I’m not an accountant, I don’t have an economics background.
“I did go and get an MBA at one point in my career and that did teach me to read the balance sheets, but that’s something you can absolutely learn. That’s not rocket science.”
To Lloyd-Hurwitz, success will be achieved when gender equity is taken for granted across business and organisations, when it’s truly 40:40:20 in terms of appointments.
Morphett, who had years of divisional responsibility before serving as chief executive of Pacific Brands from 2007 to 2012, believes getting women into line management jobs is a game changer. “Companies need to move all talented people, not just talented women, around so that they get that broad experience so they are able to take on senior leadership roles,” she says.
Smith-Gander, who held senior executive roles at Westpac but has had a longer career as a board director and chairwoman, says we still have a long way to go in getting women into chief executive roles.
“We can’t just rest on our laurels and say well, we’re on this upward trajectory, because we know that whenever there is a blip in confidence we’ll see it disproportionately impact women,” she says. “We just have to keep the pressure on to truly break through.”
Fagg, who has also had a high-profile career on boards after senior executive jobs, including at BlueScope Steel and Linfox, says: “You can’t put quotas around executive appointments. By far the most compelling thing is actually organisations seeing it’s happening, so it just becomes normal.”
She’s not looking for a 50-50 split in chief executive ranks and says that’s unlikely given the choices women and men make about family: “To me if we get to critical mass, over 30 per cent, I’d be saying, this is looking pretty good.”
‘A woman with three children? It’s very unlikely she’s going to be able to have a career job’
