Cafe Society: Learning to speak in confidence

Helping other women find their voices is part of Natasha Cica’s fairness mission

Natasha Cica says it si important to have real diversity at the table but the calibre of the people and their performance needs to count. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

WHEN Dr Natasha Cica came home to base her change consultancy here 12 years ago, it was tougher to make her way without judgment than she anticipated.

In other places she had lived and worked, including Sydney, Canberra and London, Natasha’s direct style of communicating and her vigorous collaborative approach to problem-solving did not raise eyebrows.

“I was stunned by the cultural resistance in Tasmania to professional women who operated in the style I was used to,” she tells me at Room For A Pony bar/cafe in North Hobart.

The businesswoman, lawyer, academic, author and former chief executive of Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art sees just a fraction of that resistance today, having recently returned to live in Hobart once more.

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We are here before International Women’s Day (tomorrow) to talk about the changing landscape for career women in Tasmania over the past decade, her role in empowering women and her outlook on gender equality.

“When I came back to live the first time I would get really excited by some fabulous woman of any age or profession who’d arrived here with great ideas. And then she would be gone in two or three years because she got so much pushback,” she says.

Natasha, who was raised in the state and had the odd experience of attending Hutchins boys’ school in college as the only girl in her year, when it was briefly co-ed, doesn’t see that same pushback much today.

“There are more women who are great problem solvers and direct communicators who have found a place here.

“[Many of them] are women who have always been here and have found their voice in a really confident way.

“There is also a really interesting and critical mass of women from other places who have built businesses or found position and voice here.

“And those two groups of women are joining up.”

She sees this confluence as an entirely positive phenomenon, but only part of a bigger vision for a more progressive Tasmania.

“It’s important to have real diversity at the table and the calibre of the people and their performance needs to count,” she says.

“There’s no point having token people if they aren’t going to deliver on merit.”

The onus is on recruiters and employers to find the right talent because what is certain, she says, is that it is there and it comes in different packages.

“By not drawing on the breadth or depth of Tasmania’s talent pool we are selling ourselves short.”

Organisations struggling to find the right women or individuals of different backgrounds to lead are not looking hard enough, she says.

Perfect Pitch is an occasional workshop series Natasha co-runs with speech therapist and 2017 Tasmanian of the Year Rosalie Martin to help professional women find their voices.

“If you go back to that period when I was watching these fabulous women come or rise and then leave, I thought I could articulate a negative narrative in response to that failure to use the talent available or I could do something to change it.

“The most practical thing I could think of was to work with Rosie to set up Perfect Pitch. I thought there was no point getting more women around a table or in the Parliament unless they could speak with confidence when they were there.

“And what I noticed here was an almost crippling lack of confidence in speaking among very many competent women.

“These were women who aced their jobs and were really good speaking one on one, but when it came to speaking to larger groups, they expressed extreme anxiety to me.”

Another project aim bearing fruit is a flourishing network comprising not just program participants but the more established and visible Perfect Pitch special guests.

“Women are not necessarily very good at helping other women advance professionally ... What we like to model is something quite different,” says Natasha.

Natasha remembers a Tasmania “run by men with moustaches” not so long ago.

In the past decade, we’ve clocked up many female firsts, including Lara Giddings as premier, Elise Archer as Speaker and Professor Kate Warner as Governor.

As well, we are the first state to achieve equal gender representation in Parliament.

“That sends really positive messages to girls and boys about what women can do and how men can share public space and power with them,” says Natasha.