Senator the Hon Helen Coonan
Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts
Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate
Advancing Women
Address to the Women Lawyers’ Association of NSW
Sydney
27 June 2006
Thank you and good afternoon.
It’s fantastic to see so many new young faces here today. I am very pleased to support an organisation that I have been associated with for more than 30 years and that has in very many ways nurtured and supported me in the early part of my career.
I feel particularly privileged to be a Cabinet Minister and the first woman to be part of a Government leadership team. 2006 is a watershed year for this Government as it marks our decade in office. There are some other political, yet female specific milestones that we should mention.
Ten years ago Senator Margaret Reid became the first female President of the Senate. There are 3 women in Cabinet now. And to date there have only been 10 women represented in the Federal Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet – seven from my side of politics and three from Labor.
Around the world it is estimated are there are now around 11 women serving as Presidents or Prime Ministers.
Some 104 years ago Ada Evans, heroine that she is, became the first woman in Australia to graduate from Law School at Sydney University. New South Wales did not at that time have in place legislation that would enable her to be admitted to practice, however.
So, it was not until 1921 that Ada Evans became the first woman lawyer to be admitted to practice in New South Wales. Ms Evans was the first in a succession of trailblazing women in the legal profession in Australia. Flos Greig, Dame Roma Mitchell, Joan Rosanove, Mary Gaudron, Susan Crennan, Margaret Beasley, Jane Matthews and Annabelle Bennett are a few of the illustrious names that have followed her.
However, whilst the achievements of these women are significant, the challenges for women in the law continue. I believe that appropriate representation for women in public life will only be achieved when the appointment of a woman to any high profile office, legal or otherwise, is no longer considered to be something out of the ordinary.
The challenges women face
Today I would like to touch on the challenges we, as women, face as leaders and potential leaders – particularly in the law. In law, women continue to find it hard going, and perhaps harder going than their male counterparts in terms of access to career opportunities.
One of the great exponents on this topic, the then Justice Mary Gaudron delivered a rousing speech in 1997 at the launch of Australian Women Lawyers in which she examined issues of gender equality in the law.
Her thesis in that address was very straightforward. Women are different to men. Women lawyers have for too long sought to copy male work patterns in the legal profession. Women have suffered as they are unable to access the male bastions of patronage in the legal profession. Has it really changed? Her solution was equally simple to understand. In new age terms, women need to “own” their difference from male lawyers.
Women and adversity
Each of us here has encountered or is aware of personal adversity relating to gender in our individual careers. It might be said that in some work environments it takes more effort for women to reach their leadership goals than their male counterparts.
The legal profession is often cited as falling into this category.
Long hours are among the many often unreasonable expectations placed on all young lawyers. These hours exhaust junior lawyers, and make it extraordinarily difficult to maintain rewarding family and social lives.
But as we progress throughout our careers, women in the law are often presented with additional gender specific challenges – society demands that women make choices.
That choice usually revolves around how to have children and maintain a relationship at the same time as seeking career advancement. The real issue is that very few male counterparts face such a stark choice, which leaves them more able to negotiate the greasy career pole of the legal profession.
Workplace compromises are not common enough in the legal profession. The traditional long hours expected by firms (and many clients) are more easily accommodated by young male lawyers without family responsibilities. I’ll never forget taking a box of files to hospital when I had my son.
For women, a career break is often frowned upon, if not fatal to a career. It often comes at the cost of maintaining a client base or partnership equity. Family friendly work hours in many law firms are still a myth.
Last time I addressed you, I spoke of the glass ceiling, and its close relatives – the corporate “gluey chair” – where a female lawyer is considered to be so good at her job that she simply can’t be moved on. And the “double brick wall” where the only career advancement offered to women is sideways experience.
I am afraid these impediments to women progressing in the law still persist today.
In discussing the particular demands placed on women in the law, I am reminded of Susan Crennan’s appointment to the High Court in 2005 – a marvellous achievement for a very talented lawyer. Might I say that it was a real pleasure to support her appointment.
Justice Crennan was once quoted as saying that: ‘the problem with being a female barrister is that you don’t have a wife’. ‘The wives of barristers do a terrific job,” she said. “If they’ve got six kids and the husband wants to work three nights a week and one day on the weekend, well, there’s someone minding the children”.
I think that many of us can relate to that sentiment. A supportive partner and flexible home life is critical to success in any demanding profession, and in life in general! One is simply not always able to collect the kids from school, pick up the drycleaning, have dinner ready by 7 and still prepare that affidavit by morning!
Women's particular attributes
Combining work and family, absent a “wife” is an extremely difficult balancing act for women – particularly in a profession such as law.
However I am often asked whether women’s ability to balance, or “multi-task”, makes them particularly suited to leadership positions in these particularly demanding times.
We know that best practice leadership styles have changed and are continuing to change to adapt to a creative, faster and more interactive working environment.
Increasingly, leaders are becoming more collaborative, more consultative, less adversarial, perhaps less dictatorial. The days of Chainsaw Al Dunlap’s ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ style of management are well and truly a thing of the past.
But does this new business landscape favour what are commonly perceived as the typical, nurturing, consensus-building skills of women? Maureen Dowd describes it well – to be a gamma, not an alpha!
I think that women often play the role of “gamma” leader quite well, and it is a leadership style which seems to come more easily to women than men. But I also think there are dangers in perpetuating the stereotype of skills specific to women.
As Mary Gaudron said on another occasion:
“While women are obviously different to men, the skills of lawyering and persuasion are not found in the Y chromosome”.
It is hard to disagree.
I believe that the challenge for women in the legal profession is to distinguish themselves from their male counterparts – as not simply “men who wear skirts” as Justice Kirby memorably put it but to acknowledge “differentness” from male counterparts.
I believe that men and women have the capacity to often achieve the same or similar outcomes, but the conclusion is often reached by very different methodologies.
Less “head kicking” and “table thumping” from us, but perhaps more of the rational problem solving methods, such as persuasion and conciliation.
Leadership
With increasing numbers of women seeking a career in the law they are increasingly being recognised as leaders in their chosen fields, with opportunities to influence and shape important issues of the day.
It is beyond argument that both men and women can make good leaders. But importantly, both men and women can be ineffective leaders. Leadership is about vision and direction. It is not about sniffing the breeze and following others.
Sometimes leadership is as much about perception as action – something we saw during the television coverage of the Beaconsfield Mine Rescue. Mr Shorten practically attained the status of the next Labor Prime Minister simply by being there and talking to the press.
Diversity
However, in focusing attention on women and their “differentness” from men, I think there is still a danger that must be avoided.
And that is to assume that women (as a group) are all the same. Women are not all the same! We are not all nurturing. We are not all kind and loving. We are competitive. We can be adversarial.
We can be poor communicators and we can be poor judges of character. But we can also be brilliant, articulate, dynamic, daring and different.
Women exhibit the same diversity of talent, flaws, brilliance and potential as men. It is a vital and unassailable truth, and we should never allow our contributions to be devalued. We shouldn't allow women to be packaged. To be simplified or stereotyped.
But in trying to understand the advancement of women - or, at times, the lack of advancement of women, there is always a temptation to make the story a simple one.
There is a tendency to point to some easily explicable reason or set of characteristics that apply to the particular group. Some of the material on modern management is following this course. It suggests that because all women are collaborative, caring and good communicators they will make good leaders in the modern environment. They will readily fit into the current business paradigm. They are well suited to modern organisational leadership needs.
But to treat all women as having the same key attributes is too simple. To assume that women, as a collective group, all have similar attributes, goals, the same expectations, the same abilities, is part of the problem.
My central point is that the age-old assumptions and stereotypes about who women are and what they can offer have limited women as a collective group from achieving their potential in environments outside women's traditional roles.
We have succeeded in moving away from the assumption that all women want only to be married, to be home-makers, to play a supporting role, to wear an apron. There is nothing inherently wrong with that if that is what women seek. What is wrong is when the model is assumed to apply to all women. Or, of course, all men.
But stereotypes will continue to challenge us. David Morgan, Westpac CEO, was recently quoted as saying:
“Many women will still tell you that even when they reach the top of their professions, to stand along the corridors of power was to risk being handed a sheet of paper by some passing male and asked to photocopy it.”
I think we should all be pleased that in Australia today, women can realistically aspire to be astronauts. They can travel the world, they can have families, they can be doctors and lawyers and firefighters. They can be stand-up comediennes. They can be politicians. Women can be any of these things and also be partners, mothers and wives.
If it ever was, it is certainly no longer true that one size fits all, or that assumptions can be made about what women want, what they need, what they expect or what they can do.
Conclusion
Leadership is clearly gender non-specific. Or, at least, it should be. If we are not afraid to celebrate our difference as women, whilst at the same time rejecting stereotypes that might limit our potential, we will create an environment that will eventually enable women to occupy many more positions of leadership and influence.
I would like to conclude with an anecdote which you may have heard me recount before – its one of the hazards of being involved with an association for 10 years – you tend to repeat stories sometimes!
When Dame Roma Mitchell, one of the great South Australians, was appointed to the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice, Sir Mellis Napier, who was in his eighties, seems to have been taken by surprise.
His immediate reaction was that all members of the court must be addressed and referred to without distinction, and that Roma would be known as “Mr Justice Mitchell”. History doesn’t reveal her response on this occasion but it does reveal her sense of humour when challenged about her marital status.
During an interview in her early years of the Supreme Court, Roma Mitchell was asked by a brash journalist “you are not married?” “I am not”. “And you do not drive a car?” “I do not”.
Undeterred by the terse nature of the replies, the journalist pressed on: “The Chief Justice, Dr Bray, is also unmarried. Is there any chance that the two of you might get together?”
“No”, Roma replied, “that would be no good at all. He doesn’t drive a car either.”
An anecdote told by Mary Gaudron during her time on the High Court is also illustrative of the difficulties faced by women in the law today.
In 1989 she was travelling to Western Australia with her judicial colleagues in an Air Force plane. She recalls that:
“There was a certain camaraderie in the plane until, by way of general conversation, I informed my colleagues that I would be speaking to a gathering of women lawyers in Perth.
It might have been better if I'd started dancing the Can-Can. It was clearly inappropriate for me to attend, much less speak at such a gathering; there was no need for women to have separate professional organisations; there was no discrimination in the legal profession; in any event, I was being discriminatory by attending and, by way of final judgment on the ignominy of what I was about to do, "not even Lionel would have done such a thing".