 Yeridu Marang, Maiyan Maranya, good day everyone. You and Du Paul Giroa, my name is Paul Giroa. Nado Maraibirangu Gujigangu Nyambri Nurembangodara. I was born here at the centre of my ancestral country at the Alcambra Hospital. God bless it. Anyone born in the Alcambra Hospital? How many? We must be in endangered species. So, Yilingalangbu, Giba Bangu, Wuga Bu, Migaibu, Diranil Bangu, Maiyan. Ladies and gentlemen, young men, young women, distinguished guests, the Honourable Julia Gillard, Nyari and Jamali, Nyambri, Gumao, Waugulu, Wallablao, Nunawa, Wuradri, Mujigang, Nyanangbu, Jayandu, my respects to Nyambri, Gumao, Waugulu, Wallablao, Nunawa, Wuradri, Elders, past and present. Nyari and Jamarabu, Mujigangu, Nurembangigu, Nini, Yeridu, my respects to all people and Elders from all parts of the country. Nyambri, Waugulu, Waulablao, Nunawa, Wuradri, Maiyan, Gaumbanya, Niniwaga, Nurembangodara, Nyambri, Nunawa, Wuradri people, welcome you all to country. Mambuwara, Naminigu, Wuragabinya, Wuradarago, Winnigalago, Baaligo, looking to see, listening to hear, learning to understand. Yinja Maugijo, Yinja Marabu, Yinja Mali. It's a powerful word on country. It means many different things. It's an ideology. It's a philosophy. It means to go slow, be patient, be kind, show respect, take responsibility, all those good nutrients. Yinja Marabu, Mugigiri, Biringa, Baugungu, Durandar. Respect can be found in the journey of the Baugung Mosque in the mountains. Yinja Marabu, Waulablao, Wangadabu, Muradrindabu, Bamayu, Gurungambira. Respect can be found in the grinding stones and the carved trees made long ago on country. Yinja Marabu, Baalabiradar, Biringa, Biringa, Wurugan, Yambu, Jolong. Respect can be found in the Canberra Creek, flowing through country. Murungwaginya, Yinja Marabu, Murungmuru, Wiringa, Biringa. A respectful way of life, cares for country. Waalungunmalal, Bala, Maramara, Gurai. Be brave, make change. Our welcome to countries are always made in the spirit of peace and a desire for harmony for all peoples of the modern ACT and surrounds. And our main aim as local custodians is to establish an atmosphere of mutual respect through the acknowledgement of our ancestors and the recognition of our rights to declare our special place in the pre and post history of the region. The name Canberra is derived from the name of our people and country, the Nyamburi, the Canberra, right here at the Ainu campus. Yinja Marabu, Wiringa, Marandu, Gorbo, Yandu, Gorbo, Geira Gorbo. Respect is taken responsibility for the now, the past, the present and the future. We wanna see our children grow up in a society that acknowledges respects and honours first nation people of this country. We've cared for mothers since the dawn of time and evidence of our statehood, our sovereignty, our ownership can be seen everywhere throughout the land. Our signature is in the land, not just our DNA and taking care of country is important to us all. The more we look after country, the land and waters, the more they look after us. Yinja Mara, Mara Mara, Nyanyinyagirama Marnya. Respect shapes us and lifts up the people. So it's wonderful to be here, Norya Goyamalang, Marambang Balang. It's wonderful, it's fabulous to be here, to be able to share some of our story and connection to country. We must remember under the concrete and the steel and the glass of our cities and our country towns, there's a rich, powerful, compelling first nation history, a 65,000 year old history, which is now a shared history that belongs to all of us. We all have a responsibility in looking after country. Nainmura, Nainmura, Burumbarbira, sharing, caring and looking after country, Nurumbangodara. So with that, reconciliation week means many different things to all of us. The restoration of friendly relations with us all. I'd like to acknowledge my mother, Dr. Annie Matilda House, because of her I can, because of the many matriarchs in our lives, my life, our life, all of our lives, because of our matriarchs we can. And I'd like to acknowledge my mother in particular, as the first indigenous Australian to be awarded an honorary doctorate here from the ANU in 2017, and honour all acknowledge, respect and honour all people from all parts of the country. That is the law of the land. So, go in Banya, Gurbari, welcome. Mandangua, Wuragawuri, thank you. Before I go, I just wanna play a quick welcome song on the Yiriki and the wonderful Michelle here, MC, who's gonna join me on the clapping sticks. Thank you so much for that fantastic welcome, Paul, and I hope I didn't ruin it too much by being completely out of time. But to have Paul welcome us in language is truly very special and such an honour, thank you. National reconciliation week, it is an important time for us all to reflect on our individual and collective contributions to Australia's reconciliation journey. Here at ANU, we have a range of events and activities to mark the week that you're all invited to, including our annual national reconciliation lecture. This year, the lecture will be presented by Proudwara Mangu and Larakia Woman and ANU alumna Andrea Kelly from the National Indigenous Australians Agency. To register and find out more, please head over to our ANU website. So, I'd like to start off today with a brief introduction to the Global Institute for Women's Leadership, or JUUL, as we like to call it. And I'd like to give a very short presentation on some of the mistakes that organisations tend to make when they're pursuing workplace gender equality. We'll then be joined on stage by JUUL's founder and chair for Honourable Julia Gillard, who will facilitate a panel discussion with our very special guests. So, a little bit about us and about JUUL. Julia Gillard founded the Global Institute for Women's Leadership in 2018 at King's College in London. And a number of years later, JUUL and ANU was established in 2020 as the first international outpost. We think of ourselves as the little sister JUUL. And we've got to focus on the Asia-Pacific region. So, what we try and do is address issues of gender equality and issues of workplace inequality, particularly, with a sort of three-pronged attack. We're ultimately a research institute. That's why we're based here at the Australian National University in terms of world-leading research. So, what we try to do is draw together existing knowledge that we know about, but also create new knowledge to make sure that we have a really strong evidence base for change. We engage in advocacy and engagement with the public and with organisations, with people that engage in policy and practice. And we bring together experts. So, we have some of the experts based in our institute. We have other experts within the ANU. But we also have a worldwide network of experts that we draw on to really make sure that we're making sure that the discourse stays on track, that we're talking about issues of gender equality. And we also really focus on practice. So, it's not just about talking and doing research, but it's about translating that research into practice. And that's really a lot of what we want to focus on today. So, making sure that the interventions and the policy and practice that we have in place are truly evidence-based. So, in terms of our research priorities and where we really want to focus going forwards at Juul, we want to look and make sure that we're doing things that result in systemic change. So, it's not about small tweaks here and there. It's not about fixing women, but it's about changing systems. It's about changing culture. It's about changing society so that we get big change across the board that's lasting change as well. We want to make sure that everything that we do is intersectional. A lot of the time, a lot of the time, a lot of the work that we do often focuses on particular groups of women and often those most privileged women. So, we want to recognize that women have very different experiences across the board and that there are intersecting experiences with class, with race, with disability, with sexuality. And we want to make sure we take those into account as well. And we really want to make sure that we test these evidence-based solutions and really take forward real and lasting change. So, one of the things I just wanted to really briefly talk about is based on some recent, a recent paper that I published in Nature magazine just a couple of months ago in April that looks at some of the common missteps that are made when we try and make change. And this is particularly, the paper looked particularly at what organizations might accidentally get wrong or inadvertently get wrong. One of the things that I think we often do is put an overemphasis on numbers, on quantity. Now, I think that's important. We need to know how many women there are in Parliament or how many female CEOs that we have. That's absolutely something that we need to know and we need to take account of. But it's not enough. We also need to know what the experiences are in those roles. If we've got female candidates in the election, for example, that we just had a couple of weeks ago, are they in winnable seats or not? When they are elected, are they given positions of power and influence in the ministry, for example? So it isn't just about looking at numbers. It's also about looking at the nature of those positions. It's not just about quantity, it's also about quality. So we need to go beyond just simply tallying the number of women around. I think the second thing that organizations inadvertently do is when looking at gender equality, they focus just on women. They often try and fix women. So they give leadership courses, for example, confidence training, negotiation training, as if it's a deficit in women that is the base of women's underrepresentation rather than systemic and built-in inequality. So we need to move away from that. We need to move away from fixing women to fixing systems. And the final one is something around over-optimism. I think there has been great change. We've absolutely seen things get better. We've seen improvements. But sometimes that optimism of change doesn't quite have the right balance. We need to celebrate our wins, but we also need to recognize where things stagnate and where things unfortunately go backwards. When we survey people, they often overestimate the number of women that are in a room, the number of women in leadership positions, and how well women are doing in society. And we need to find that right balance between celebrating wins, but also really fundamentally understanding persistence of inequality. There's some really interesting research that part of my team has been doing that shows that those people that fail to recognize gender inequality are the ones that say, oh, it's fine. We're much more equal than we ever were. Other ones that are most likely to perpetuate inequality as well. So these are all the things, these common missteps that are often made. But I don't wanna focus just on missteps. And actually some of the reason that we're here, the most of the reason that we're here today is focusing on not what people do wrong, but actually what people do right. The things that are going well. The things that are being done. The evidence base. The change that's actually happening. So one of the things that I really wanna do is introduce the panel. And instead of thinking about the things that aren't going well, really celebrate the things that are going really well instead of going badly. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our panel. So our chair of our panel is Julia Gillard, our founder who is going to facilitate the discussion today. We're going to be joined by a panel of four panelists. Welcome Julia. You can see how happy everyone is to have you here up on the stage. So in terms of introducing our panelists, I'd first like to introduce Dr. Nikki Vincent. Nikki is Victoria's inaugural commissioner for gender equality in the public sector. And is responsible for the implementation of Victoria's Gender Equality Act. Prior to this, Nikki served as the South Australian Commissioner for Equal Opportunity. Was the founder and CEO of the Leaders Institute of South Australia. Nikki is also an active foster parent and an ambassador for time for kids to respite foster care organization. Welcome Nikki. Also joining us today is Dr. Jane Gunn. Jane is the partner in charge of KPMG Australia's People and Change Practice. Jane's focus is on strategy, change management, leadership development, and human resources management. Jane has authored a number of papers on the impact of COVID-19 on ways of working and holds an ANU PhD in organizational behavior and strategy. Welcome Jane. And our third panelist today is Geraldine Chin Moody. Geraldine is a non-executive director of Future Supergroup, a super fund committed to sustainability by tackling inequality and climate change. Geraldine has held many senior executive and board roles across ASX listed companies and is on the board of the ANU Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership, as well as welcoming Australia and giving kind. Welcome. And our fourth panelist today is Mary Woodridge, the director of Workplace Gender Inequality. I'm sorry, I've worked with a gender equality agency. Welcome Mary. I know that you've just gotten off a flight and raced here and as I was introducing you I wasn't actually sure whether you were gonna walk out or not. So it's absolutely terrific to have you here. So that's your clap for your actually turning up. I'm gonna give you a little bit of information about Mary's wonderful history as well. Prior to taking on this role in May last year, Mary served in the Victorian Parliament from 2006 to 2020. During this time she held several ministerial portfolios, including the Minister for Women's Affairs, where she worked to implement the national plan to reduce violence against women and their children and the establishment of our watch. Mary also established the Victorian Commission for Children, worked in the private sector and was CEO of the Foundation for Young Australians. Welcome Mary. So with that fantastic panel, I'm gonna hand over to Julia. Thank you very much, Michelle. And a big hello to everybody. It's great to join you here in Canberra on what is a cold day, about a very important day. Now I want you to absolutely focus on the history here. You would know that we decided to hold this event after the election, so the date was known. And I just wanna suggest to you that because the date of this event was known, Prime Minister Albo decided to put the swearing in of a record number of women on the same day to mark this event. Anyway, that's, I think that's the way around, we should record the history anyway, if you can join me in that. Of course, everybody is talking about women and gender equality in the context of the election result and what it means for the incoming government. Our purpose today is to do something a bit different. We are going to do a deep dive around what making gender equality come to life means from various perspectives. And I'm just so delighted to be joined by such an eminent panel to do just that. So we are going to have a conversation and thank you very much for coming today to be involved in it. Even though Mary has just literally rushed off a plane, I'm going to start with her. We introduced the Gender Equality Act in 2012. Now people would be asking themselves, 10 years later, does legislating work? Has it changed things? What's the impact of the law being? Can you give us a view on that? Absolutely, and it's a pleasure to be here with you, Julia and everyone today in the panel. And first of all, full credit to your government for introducing the Workplace Gender Equality Act. So there's no doubt that it has an impact. It absolutely does. And I think there's a hierarchy or some levels of how legislative changes can have an impact in relation to it. And I think we have an act that requires reporting in relation to gender equality. And that has brought a focus to the issues within organizations, but also enables us, as we're here, to advocate from a fact-based and a data-based position. And there's the accountability in relation to there being consequences that companies that don't report have access to or are unable to participate in government tenders. So there's a consequence there as well which drives the over 95% compliance rate. But I think now 10 years on is actually an opportunity for further change because what we know, we think there's probably about 25 to 30% of companies that are quite engaged in taking action in relation to not only having the data but doing something with it. And we now need to work out how we take that to another level. And I think the next level is around transparency because we don't have the capacity to report gender pay gaps and any information related to remuneration in companies. We do it at an industry level but not at an individual company level. And the UK five years ago introduced gender pay gap reporting. And what their five-year evaluation is showing that it has reduced the gender pay gap. And over 50% of their companies are now taking action or have plans to take action in relation to gender equality and making a difference because of that transparency and because of that pressure from not only their own employees but more broadly. And so we believe we need that transparency in terms of the gender pay gap at a company level. And the third step though is requiring companies to not only have transparency but actually take some action because at the moment they're only required to report. So can we push that further to say, not only do you have to report but you actually have to have a plan, you have to take action and you have to be accountable to making progress. And that's a third step that we think, once again takes it up another level that is needed to get beyond that only 50% to really build in the hearts and minds of taking actions across countries, across companies. And we're really pleased, we have been funded in the last budget to do both that transparency and to work with companies to make commitments to drive action and be accountable for actually making progress not just reporting the numbers. Thank you for that perspective on how we could build on the act which is now 10 years old. I've had the opportunity to be in London doing work with the Global Institute for Women's Leadership there when the gender pay gap reporting has come out and there's no doubt that the fact that it identifies a company so you can literally see that, you know, a business called Smith and Jones has X gender pay gap is a motivator for change and there's been some research done by Jewel in the UK on the best legislative practices around the gender pay gap. But I'm gonna turn now to Nicky on this question of what makes good law and good regulation. You're from Victoria, which has introduced the Gender Equality Act in 2020 and that act was described as fairly revolutionary. Can you tell us what it does, who it applies to and perhaps some of the thoughts that could build on a federal reform agenda? Thank you for that, yes. It does the things that Mary was just talking about. It covers, it is the first kind of, first legislation of its kind in Australia. It covers 300 organisations in Victoria including the Victorian Public Service which is the second largest employer in Australia. So it covers all of the public service, the public service more broadly, all the nine universities in Victoria and all of local government. And what it does is have a positive duty to progress gender equality and there are several other obligations. Each organisation has to undertake a workplace gender audit across seven key indicators including things like the composition of the workforce and governing bodies and sexual harassment and pay equality or inequality as we normally find and so on. All of the things that we know need to be measured and need to change but it then has to report that data to me and then that data is all made public so anyone can search or will be able to search our database to see what each organisation looks like on those indicators and will also be able to track how they change over time and there's a responsibility for them to make reasonable and material progress in every two year period. They also have to take that data, consult with their workforce, their governing bodies and their union representatives and develop gender equality action plans to address any inequality they find and again they have to make progress on that in every two year period and report that progress to me. So all that data, all of those plans are made public and anyone can track how they're going and it also will mean there's some competition because no one will want to be the bottom of their sector and so forth so it does introduce not only transparency but some competitive elements to it as well. The other really important obligation is that they must undertake gender impact assessments on every new or up for review policy programme or service that they deliver that has a direct and significant public impact and when you think about the organisations the act covers the public sector, university, local government, a lot of what they do has a direct and significant impact on the public and so all of that will have a gender lens over from now on and they have to report on all of those gender impact assessments that they have done to me as well. And there are real teeth. So if they don't report to me on their audit, on their gender equality action plans, on their progress reports and their gender impact assessments not only will that be publicly transparent because there'll be a lack of those things that are on their websites and on our platform but I can also take action with them. We're really about focusing especially right now as we're bringing the legislation into effect on helping organisations get over the line and we'll keep doing that. That's where we need to start to help get compliance but if we still don't get compliance I can get their minister involved. I can name and shame but I can also take them to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to get an order directing them to comply and when you think about that I hope I never have to use it but it's something that speaks of the fact that gender equality in Victoria is no longer a nice to have, it's a must have and all of that would be public and I don't think any public organisation is gonna want to be dragged to VCAT so I'm hoping that that will all mean that we get compliance and so far we have, we've only just started but we've got the data in, almost every organisation is compliant and we're just getting the plans in now. I also have a unique power in dispute resolution so like most of you would probably be aware if you have a sexual harassment complaint or a complaint about gender inequality in your workplace you can take that to your state anti-discrimination or territory anti-discrimination body but if you are a group of workers who feel your workplace is unsafe and you might be susceptible to sexual harassment or your employer's not doing anything about the pay gaps or not anything substantial about the pay gaps you as a group of employees can bring that complaint to me and I will help resolve that complaint as long as there's a clause in your EBA that allows me to do that and all of the workplaces in Victoria that are covered by the actor currently putting that in we haven't had a dispute yet but I'm sure once the data's out there we might start getting those in so it's the first time that a state statutory officer has been given powers under federal EBAs. We've also got the possibility to set targets and quotas we won't do that until we're really sure about the data that we've got and what progress is being made and what might need to be pushed along a bit with those sorts of things and we can also develop funding guidelines for government funding around gender equality and also procurement as well so there's a lot in it and it's really exciting. There is a lot in it and thank you for sharing that with us. I'm going to turn now to Jane from KPMG and I'm going to take the opportunity to announce that we, Juul and KPMG have entered a very exciting partnership which we're announcing today which will marry Juul's research expertise with KPMG's ability to translate that into action and the question I'm going to ask you is really about the translation into action so we've heard about regulatory approaches. You would deal with businesses, public service departments, organisations who are saying to themselves we would not want to not only comply with the relevant regulation we want to excel as we do that but we don't know where to start. You know how do you go about helping people work this through and actually aiming high on gender equality in their workplaces? Great, thank you very much. It's lovely to be here as well. First of all I will just acknowledge that we're very, very excited at KPMG to have the opportunity to work with Juul. I've learnt the new acronym today. To work with Juul and really to take that opportunity to combine the power of evidence and data with the experience, the practical experience of creating real change in organisations which is really the focus of our business in the people and change practice. And I might use an example to answer your question in terms of how we bring the evidence base and actually combine that to lead to real change. If we think about the comments that Professor Ryan made at the beginning around one of the key missteps that organisations can take is the inability to recognise that it's a culture or a systemic issue within their organisation and a tendency to suggest that if we fix the women that the problem might go away. We work really closely with organisations, our clients across all sectors in Australia and particularly in the public sector to really understand the deep cultural drivers that are occurring in that organisation that are leading to this sense that the culture is not supportive of workplace gender and other equality. So we work with them to understand what's going on across sort of the seven areas of culture that we think about and then we help them to measure that progress is being made. And that's very much an adaptation, a learning cycle. We can see real opportunities to bring a much stronger and more rigorous research base, an evidence base in how we support people, organisations, leaders in organisations to really understand the nature of the progress that's being made and then to continue to adapt in order for that true cultural change to occur. So there's an opportunity as well on the other side of things to bring some of that practical experience of implementing real cultural change into the research domain as well and look at how we can combine that expertise. And do you find it hard to convince people? Do you need to put a case as to why change matters? I think most organisations these days, particularly through the environment, social and governance, the ESG agenda, are very clear that they need to take action. And of course the Workplace Gender Equality Agency and other government agencies have made that pretty obvious to most organisations. Where I think it's difficult is often how to go about that change. So there might be a pretty clear view that we do need to do something. Making the decision and then with discipline and rigor, managing the change process is often where people need some support. Thank you for that. I'm going to turn to Geraldine now. It's reconciliation week. Michelle in her opening referred to intersectionality, to looking at the fact that, you know, not all disadvantage is about gender. We get compounding disadvantage. A friend of mine in London put this beautifully. She works for a very major global organisation that went about diversifying its corporate board and did a big unveiling of its new corporate board. My friend is a black woman. When they unveiled the corporate board, there were women on it, but all white women. And she did make the comment, well, you know, how does that relate to me? To which she was told, oh, don't worry, we're getting to racism next. Now, that's not how people live their lives. You know that from the work you do with refugees. How can we make sure that as we're pursuing greater diversity, that it's true diversity from all perspectives? Thank you very much. So I sit on the board of the ANU Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership, which is partnering with Dool and really excited to be part of this event. So at the Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership, what we're really recognising is that there is a gap in terms of ethnic representation across Australia's public institutions as well as the corporate sector. And so we're really trying to advocate and put in place evidence-based approaches to increasing that. Some of you may have seen that the Governance Institute in Watermark recently released the 2022 Board Diversity Index, and it showed that again, the typical director of the ASX 300 companies is 60 years old, white, male, and from an Anglo-Aesthetic background. And in fact, while we're making progress in terms of appointing female directors, we've seen a 60% to 70% increase since 2016 in terms of the number of directors in the ASX 300, cultural diversity is stagnating. So 90% of those directors in the ASX 300 are from an Anglo-Aesthetic background and another 3% are European. So if you think about Australia's population and you think about the fact that that's stagnating, it's really quite problematic in terms of organisations being able to understand the customers, the markets that they're working with, their people, and just to really reflect what Australia looks like. So we're really hoping that we can see things like cultural data legislation. We've seen the impact that the Workplace Gender Equality Act had in terms of gender equality, so we'd love to see that. And also at Cal, the centre, we're also looking at a project around county for change, so really getting ethnic diversity into the census in an appropriate way, following a process of research to identify how you would best do that, and also looking more at the business case around cultural diversity and leadership. And when you talk to people about change in this area, do they get it? Do you find it hard to convince people that this broader approach to diversity is in the interests of their organisation? You mentioned in your answer, you know, for example, understanding your customer base. Do people see, apart from doing the right thing driver, do they intuitively get that there can be productivity and economic drivers here? I mean, I think there's mixed... There's not very much recent research around this in terms of the business case. I think if you look at organisations themselves, I mean, there's many organisations that do get it. I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the organisations that I've been, a senior executive, have had markets overseas and, you know, strong customer base. In fact, in Virgin, we had three directors who were from Asian backgrounds, because they were our shareholders. So, you know, I think there's organisations that definitely do get that we need that representation. But I think we've seen perhaps too much of an emphasis in terms of one aspect of diversity, in terms of thinking about, as you said, putting women onto boards and not casting the net wide enough in terms of thinking about the broader ethnic diversity that we need to represent. So I think it's hard when we don't measure it. It's not in the census. It's not in... It's very hard for organisations to collect it. There's self-reporting that is done in some organisations. But I think until we have an agreed methodology for how we capture that data, it's also hard to establish the business case as well. So we need some evidence to help us. Need some evidence. And, Mary, are you going to add to that? I was just going to give people an update is that we're now starting some work on how we collect that broader diversity data as part of the Wegeo data set. And that will enable us with that data to do all the analysis that we do on a gender basis, on a broader diversity basis as well. But the work we've got to do is work out how we support employers to capture that information accurately in the first place so they have the capacity to report through to us. But we've asked a question in this year's reporting, which is just underway at the moment about who is collecting data. So we have that baseline of how many have got it already. And so we're then in a position to say, well, let's start collecting it or actually doing the work to help companies collect it so that we can too. But we're on a pathway for that, which I think is very exciting. And similarly, the Gender Equality Act in Victoria asks organisations to report on intersectional gender inequality. It's this time around, we've got very little data on that. And so looking, and we've been talking to Mary as well about how we collect this kind of data more routinely and in ways that don't cause people discomfort. One of the interesting things that came out of the research I referred to earlier about gender pay gap reporting is when you analyse all of this globally, there's a lot of sensitivity in some nations to any form of ethnic diversity reporting. Nations in Europe, who obviously in World War II saw genocidal violence against Jewish people. There's actually laws that prevent employers asking people about their ethnic background or recording their ethnic background because that's part of their cultural predisposition about how you generate better equality. So it's interesting to see those differences and happily we're in a nation where I think people would understand that getting this data can be a great spur for change rather than a great spurt for some forms of discrimination. So interesting global outlook. Mary, I'm going to come back to you. I know one of the things that you're trying to do, the agency is trying to do, is to look at an employer of choice designation. And whenever we look at the economic data at the moment, often it's full of talk about inflation and cost of living pressures. It's also full of talk about skills and labour force constraints. People are talking about the war for talent. How do their businesses get the people that they need? How does being an employer of choice play into that, the kind of decisions someone might make about where they would best prefer to go and work? So we've had an employer of choice for gender equality citation for a long time now. It's had various forms and we're in the process of reforming that to create a pathway for more companies to do it. About 120 companies are considered employers of choice, but they very clearly, and especially the ones who use it well, see it as a differentiator for their recruitment processes. They see it as an opportunity to very clearly signal that they've gone through a comprehensive process, that they care about these issues, that they're driving change, they're continuing to improve because the criteria improves and gets harder each and every year. So, but we also know about the current generation of employees that they care about these things. They're values driven, that meaning and purpose is important, and they live equality in a way, in a different way than my generation and they have expectations in relation to their workplaces and having a broader perspective. So, I think the combination of being able to say that you're committed to it and that you're taking very serious action, leading the way, combined with the workforce that's coming through, makes these sort of citations significant differentiators and attractors of talent. Could I add to that? Yes. Because I think in the current environment, in the very tight labour market that we find ourselves in, the ability of organisations to avail themselves of all of the available talent becomes even more important. We did a survey earlier this year which is called What's Keeping Us Up at Night? It's a survey of CEOs across Australia. And for the first time, talent was the top risk by a long way. And when we were asking people to look three to five years out, talent was still one of the top risks. It trumps cyber as risks that organisations and CEOs are seeing. So, I think it's a real moment where the ability to attract and retain people, to attract them by making sure that we're not discriminating against anybody in the labour market for, you know, dumb reasons, but also then the ability to create that sense of belonging and meaning that you talked about becomes even more important at this moment in history. I'm surprised the answer to that wasn't counting in undecided seats as keeping people up at night, but it all depends on the timeframe of the survey. Nikki, I'm going to come back to you and ask you to compare the public sector with the private sector. Many people, I think, in the private sector would think to themselves, look, it's a lot easier for the public sector. You don't have as many competitive pressures. You don't have the market bearing down on you about your share price, the quarterly returns, all of that kind of stuff. It's much easier to do this big transformative change in a public sector environment. Do you think that's true? Look, I think perhaps it's true in some parts of the public sector and it's certainly easier for government to regulate organisations over which they have a lot more control and obviously public sector work is using public money. It should be model workplaces. But when you think about the public sector, you think about police and emergency services, fire. You think about transport and logistics and then you think about office work. Those are very different workplaces and you have the same thing in the private sector. So I think the same principles apply and the work that Mary's organisation, which she has been doing for many years, is looking at what works in terms of workplace gender equality and we know that leadership is important. We know that measuring and reporting and making a plan and then measuring your progress and so forth are really important. And that applies I think across the board in any workplaces. So yes, there are some differences, but I don't think they're necessarily as big as we might think they are. But I think where we know what works in some workplaces may have to be applied differently depending on the workplace situation. So you might, whilst it's important to have safe and respectful workplaces where women and anyone, men, people of other genders are not discriminated against, how you might go about intervening to create change might be different depending on the workplace and not just whether it's public or private sector. I'm going to ask now about the post-COVID environment. Though even as I say post-COVID, I'm very careful about using that terminology because the pandemic is by no means over and we're obviously sitting here with an audience all wearing masks, which we would not have done before we were all talking about and having our lives upended by COVID. But as people have gone back to work, the rigor of lockdowns has ended. Has this given us an opportunity to see change in the workplace? I'm going to turn first here to Jane. I think your fond of referring to this period is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Can you take us through all of those adjectives and what they spell? Sure, sure. So the word that's become vuka. Yes, as you say, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous absolutely characterizes the nature of the environment that all of us find ourselves in across both public and private sector. And I think COVID really was just an acceleration of what we were already seeing in the nature of the complexity in particular that organisations and leaders within them are grappling with. I think COVID gave us some positives in terms of advancing the idea that flexible working could work, as we all know. We all did it overnight, notwithstanding those employees of course who don't work in an office environment and have to turn up to work. I think if you look at the Productivity Commission study in September of last year, it highlighted that lots of people, in fact the majority of people, three quarters considered they were at least as productive working from home as they were working in the office. And the other piece of data that was interesting in there was that many employees were willing to accept a pay cut or change jobs in order to continue to work from home. So I think it's notable that while that's the case and while all of that uncertainty that we were faced with meant that we were able to respond by working from home, I think one of the key things that we're now, as we come back into, even if the workplaces are not quite what they were before, is how we take the advantage of that, particularly the flexibility that was awarded to people and of course the ability for employees to balance their work, balance is probably not the right word, to manage their work and their life alongside each other and the opportunities to do that. Now there's obviously some perceived costs in that where people perceive that perhaps the manager face time, the ability to have the water cooler conversations, the ability to engage in collaborative creative work can potentially be damaged. So I don't think we've landed on exactly what's going to happen yet, but I think we know that we've got to monitor the effects of this hybrid working on all of those things that we already track around, you know, gender pay gap around promotions, around all those things where people have legitimate concerns. I'm going to ask if anybody else has got an observation on the post-COVID environment. I mean one thing that we've been thinking about at Juul is it obviously sounds fantastic for occupations that can combine virtual work with in-office work, that there are, you know, plenty of options and people can, you know, self-select as to whether they're going to work from home or not. But I do think, given we know that domestic and caring labour is not equitably distributed, that there's a risk that if nothing else changes in five years' time, what we'll see is a pattern where women have chosen, particularly women in the family formation stage have chosen disproportionately to work at home. Men have been much more regular attenders at the office and that very visibility, if nothing else changes, will show in who is being considered for promotion, who's being considered for sponsorship, who's being put on the best of the training opportunities because the women will be kind of invisible behind the screen. And another thing I can certainly feel with the organisations that I work with, that whilst the virtual working did keep us going, the longer it's gone, the more your organisation does become fractured along silo lines. So you might have a very productive working relationship with your immediate team, but the further you get from that, the less cultural, strategic organisation or cohesion you've got across the organisation. And when the project of equality is to make such a big difference across structures and cultures, I think that fragmentation is a bit concerning. But are there other observations about how we could be grasping the moment in a positive way or dangers to look out for? Mary, did you want to add? We see, particularly some of our employers of choice, we're hearing some of the stories about what people are doing and how they're managing it. And it's absolutely critical about being intentional and measuring and monitoring the impacts of that exactly, as you've said. We've got one employer of choice, Medibank, who talk about work as something you do, not somewhere you go, which really appealed to me in terms of thinking about it. But they have, for example, that all roles are flexed and you have to justify why you're required to be in the office on certain days or from home and you work up a program for the employee for how it works for them. And if there's that flexibility there to have those conversations, they also have been very intentional about why you need to be in the office and what you're achieving in that time and what the objectives are there. I think it's also important that we expand the definition of flex as working from home or not. There's other flexible work. And people say, well, what about in workplaces where you have to be present? Well, maybe you could work longer days or four days in five or job share in some of those areas that haven't had the same focus, but build up the picture of what flex looks like so that it can work both for men and women as long as companies are then making sure they're very purposefully measuring the impact of that and that it's not a gendered outcome as well. So just a couple of comments. The first, I think in terms of one of the benefits we can harness is just that we've mainstreamed it more. When we've tended to have more women working from home or flexibly before, we've had more men that have had that experience and understand more the pros and cons and how to set it up. So I think that that's something that we can build on. But I do wanna cover, I guess, that there's great disparities and from an equity perspective, just in terms of people's salaries or the types of jobs that they do. So for example, one of the things that we identified at Future Super is that people that had high incomes were more likely to have a home office or to have facilities at home whereas other people weren't and they were in sharehouses and they were just starting out. They were living at home. It was much harder for them to do their jobs from home. So we introduced an allowance and we still have that for remote working where everyone that's paid a base of under $120,000 gets $100 fortnightly allowance to help them be able to work from home effectively and be set up for that. So I think that that's quite important and having facilities for people to go into the office if they need to for a whole range of reasons. The other practice that I'm aware of with one of the other companies that I work with is this was pre-pandemic, but they still have it now. It's that whenever there's somebody working flexibly and joining by video or joining by phone, everybody has to do that. So rather than having the dynamic that leads to what you're talking about in terms of the visibility in the office, so if they've got a meeting and five people are in the office and three people are working remotely, the five in the office go and they dial into the video from their desks rather than sitting in the meeting room and that's been the common practice and worked well then during COVID and continues to make sure that there's that quality in terms of how people are showing up at the meeting and there's not sort of a side meeting going on as part of that meeting. So I think we have to be really intentional about some of those practices. Yeah, I do think over time we're also gonna see more and more technological developments that even if some people are in a room, the vision that you're getting, I mean this is already happening, the vision you're getting if you're dialed in remotely and your sense of presence in the room is different than a lot of people would only have the technology now where if you've dialed in remotely you can just see tiny little people that big or gathered round a meeting table and you're so visibly on the outside of it I think that will shift. Nikki, is there anything you wanted to say about this COVID moment and as we design the new world what we could be doing better on gender? Yeah, I think it's probably mostly already been said. I wrote an op-ed for a Victorian newspaper a couple of weeks ago about proximity by us, that potential for you not being present and not being seen and so forth and the need for us not to say well we're not having flexibility because of that but to actually deal with it which is what both Mary and Geraldine have just spoken about. I think my own experience was and the experience of my team was I got the job, came into Victoria to set up a commission under lockdown and so we've been a virtual team for the entirety of implementing this legislation. Some of my team members I didn't meet in person for months and months and months and so now we can't say, well you have to come into the office because we know that everyone's been able to work perfectly well some from their home bedrooms and things like that but we do now have an office and we've made a commitment different to what you were saying Geraldine that every meeting, every event we will have a hybrid option so we have got people in the team in the workplace and online and so far that's actually working well but I guess we're very used to that environment it's new for us to actually come and be together as a team but it's a unique experience I think particularly to us. Can I just add that I think one of the key things we've seen like many things that COVID's done is it's spotlighted poor leadership practices and poor management practices and it's helped us to see that in fact that management by control or management by presentism was always ineffective. You know the focus on outcomes is what we really need to focus on and in the recent Global Institute paper Manuela Tomei if I'm pronouncing her name correctly talked about what would a gendered equal approach to remote working look like and her point was supporting managers in dispersed workforces to shift away from management by control to management by results and I think that's really at the heart of how we enable the hybrid and the remote working to work. But we're going to have to train our middle managers I mean I think that that's the thing that follows your point Jane is the middle managers is they're going to bear the brunt of this so we've got to put the skill building in for that management in a hybrid context that no one's developed that training yet and so that's the gap that we need to get onto I think to make sure then it can succeed within organisations and people can manage teams effectively. Yeah I agree with that and then of course there is you know if you meet people for the first time that you've only been dealing with on Zoom they're wow you're really tall effect or maybe that only happens to me but everybody seems taller than I imagined they were going to be. And then Geraldine I'm going to come to you on the question of money because you know a lot about money and you know a lot about investing and you know a lot about ethical investing and you know many sources of capital now being very discriminating on environmental grounds and other ethical grounds so they don't want to put their money into a business that isn't doing the right thing by climate change they'd be much prefer to direct their investments to you know organisations and businesses that are on the right side of climate change history. You know there's all sorts of other ethical reasons people look at when they're investing there's been a lot of campaigning for example on the anti-slavery work to make sure that nowhere in your investment chain or your supply chain is anybody using forced labour and the list goes on but in a world where there is quite a long list of things for an ethical investor to consider how do we make sure gender equality diversity more broadly are on that list that they're preferring businesses that are an employer of choice to use the language that we've been using now. Yeah absolutely so perhaps I'll start just by talking about some of the approaches that we take at Future Super so we were set up to really create a future free from climate change and inequality and if we look at the way that we invest for example in listed equities and for our Verve Super fund we don't invest in any companies that don't have at least one female director on the board and then in terms of Verve Super as I'm sure you may know we actually created a special index based off the Wigia data we set out a number of things that were important to us from a gender equality perspective and built a special index that's used for the Verve Super fund that only invests in companies that are hitting good data so again it shows the value of having this public data and then we can then do that and we do that in addition to screening for fossil fuels and climate change and so on and really what we're trying to do is drive systemic change so if our success is that everyone's investing in that way and really trying to use the power of your money to invest from that perspective so we think it's this good business it's just social license to operate to focus on gender equality and to focus on these issues and I think it's becoming increasingly important to the generations that are coming through so I think we're starting to really see people shifting their money and really focusing on it so for me it's not an either or I think we have to do both and I think we've seen that really clearly come through from the Australian population as well in the last couple of weeks in terms of that theme of doing both so there's ways to do it it's important and more and more companies are starting to do it but again I think just like ASIC's been looking at greenwashing in terms of people saying that they're doing it but not actually doing it we need to think about how we're doing the same around gender equality so organisations saying that they're investing their money in that way or even saying that they've got the gender approaches but aren't doing it really so we need to make sure that ASIC's looking out for that as well in terms of how we communicate and what you're able to say about how you invest How widespread though do you think that equality piece is? I mean I can, you know, absolutely there would be a lot of investment vehicles now that would be very aware that if they invested in a way that was seen to be counter to the climate change agenda that there would be a real reputational risk around that Do you think that in the broader investing market people sense that there's also emerging reputational risks around not doing due diligence on gender and diversity or is that we're just at the start of that and if so what more can and should we be doing? I mean, you know, people in the audience here probably thinking to themselves I'd love to run a venture capital fund but I don't you know, are there things that individuals can be doing? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, look, I think I think climate has definitely become really significant and again we've seen that with the influence that Mike Cannon-Brooks has had on the AGL demerger in the last couple of weeks so I think decisions like that get people to sit up and say, hang on, this is really coming and every board in Australia will be looking around and saying, you know, what kind of exposure do we have? I am in terms of the way we make decisions I don't think we're as progressed in terms of gender equality in terms of the decision making process but I think we are more progressed in terms of having some of the data and the metrics to make those decisions from and there's been a really big movement around that I think, you know, the more that, you know, Wigia that everyone starts publishing data around who doesn't have female directors who doesn't have the gender equality and I think this goes to what you're saying in terms of the next iteration and building on Wigia in terms of having that greater transparency because we don't always have the greater transparency around things like pay equity around those policies. Certainly I think in the work that I've done with going around and speaking to institutional investors and those that are making, taking votes in terms of, you know, at the annual general meetings they're starting to ask more questions so with BlackRock and others really starting to drive that movement and ask questions of companies what are you doing about gender? What are you doing about sustainability? That's getting boards, chairs, you know, chairs of remuneration communities to sit up and kind of watch what's going. So I think in terms of what we, as individuals what we can do is we can move our own money. We can really ask those questions of our, you know, funds of our investors and where we're investing our own personal money. Obviously we can also ask questions within our own companies about what's happening in terms of how we're investing money and really, really hold our companies to account internally as well and then we can support the movement to greater reporting and more data that helps us to make these decisions. In the minutes that remain to us I want to circle back to where I started. Obviously we're here. There's a new government. What, if you were giving the incoming minister if you were writing the here you are please do the following three things. What would those three things be? And please don't confine yourself necessarily to the person holding, you know, the equality portfolio. If you were thinking about everything that government does and you're in a position to slip a post-it note in that said, do this or slip three post-it notes in. Not meaning to imply from that that ministers only read post-it notes. That's not true. Please do not walk away with that impression. But what would you put on it? Oh, I had the magic wand question here because I've heard your podcast and you asked that question. I would have acts like the Gender Equality Act in Victoria right across Australia. I think and like the workplace gender equality the sorts of extensions to it that Mary's talking about. I think this is, it's not the only way. It's not the silver bullet but it's a really important thing to do. But there are all the other things as well that support women working and we need men to take on the responsibility for caring and emotional work if we're ever gonna have equality. So if I could wave my magic wand and suggest some ways to government to do that I would certainly be pushing that along as well as things like universal childcare and paid parental leave that requires men to take it or lose it basically. Those magic wands unfortunately are in short supply aren't they, hard to get your hand on one. But if you had one, Jane what would you do? Certainly the childcare issue I think that is very much on the agenda and obviously KPMG has been very vocal in the support for that, both the societal as well as the economic benefits of greater investment in the childcare subsidy. So I think that is on the agenda and I would put that at the top of the list I expect on the basis that without that we're just not getting the full participation of women in particular in the workplace. Indigenous reconciliation would be at the very top of my list. Again, a broader equality issue and I think as well some of the commentary I would echo your point about the commentary about the work that you do marry with your agency and continuing to strengthen that. Geraldine. So before the election the Chief Executive of Women put together a very compelling research-based platform and I'm very supportive of the key for recommendations that they had. So first of all we'd be investing in a well-paid secure care sector because I think the more that we can get better pay and better conditions into childcare and education and aged care is fundamental in terms of achieving gender equality both for the gender pay equality both for those in the sector but also supporting more women to be able to participate in the workforce. The second thing is that I would expand the Commonwealth Pay Parental Leave, really take that to at least 26 weeks, preferably 52 and really have that shared, equal share so we use it or lose it provision in terms of making sure that that's shared across men and women because I think the more that both men and women are involved in the early stages the more likely that's gonna be reflected going through the different stages of parenting. And then universal childcare, get more childcare. And I think this is a particularly inequality issue because we really do need to not, I mean I think we started talking about some of the issues around sort of people that do have more money, we often talk about directors and senior leadership but we really need to make sure that everybody makes sense for everybody to be able to get into the workforce and that it doesn't cost more for childcare or for early childhood education so I would absolutely put that in place. I think that's fundamental. I feel we're all in furious agreement here so let me, in addition to everything that's been said I think there's a real opportunity especially with the focus on childcare and some of the low paying care and sectors is to really try and take and it's probably a generational change but address feminized and masculinized industries and really go to gender stereotypes which often underpin a lot of the issues that we have in workplaces across the board and certainly in some of our highly gender segregated workforces so I think not only addressing some of the pay issues but really going to the heart of why is the care sector 80% women? Why have we only got 20% women working in some of the construction and mining and more masculinized industries and how do we create different pathways and a significant part of that is pay but there's a lot of stereotypes that are behind that that we need to shift as well in addition to of course childcare and parental leave and of course enhancing our capacity as a collector of information and a driver of change so lots of agreement there across the panel I think. I think a lot of agreement I think that magic wand would be nice to find we're searching for it but whilst we're handing out post-it notes for action for the people in our audience today if you could set them a bit of homework about what they could take out of today's discussion and potentially do in their own workplace their own organization obviously people will be at different occupations different positions but are there sort of things that people can take from today as an action step themselves? I guess if your organization isn't already doing it encourage a workplace gender equality audit have a look at a good look at where you stand you hear whenever you ask organizations who haven't done it they always say well there's not a problem with our workplace but invariably they will find something that does need to be addressed in terms of gender inequality and I think the starting point is if you're not already doing it do an audit and then make a plan to act on anything that needs to be done to address any inequality that you find I think one of the most critical things to do is to influence your organization to make parental leave about men and women not just about mothers we've recently done that at KPMG and the signalling that it gives to our organization that's got a long pay forward on it in terms of generational change and men talking about it doesn't disrupt your career it's a moment in time and you do come back in and you are able to continue with a long and productive career despite the fact that you've taken time off to look after your children and obviously all of the societal benefits that go with that as well so that would be the top of the list for me. So I urge everyone to really think about the role of bias and unconscious bias recognize that we all have a form of bias and start with that in a few ways one in terms of thinking about the fact that bias is formed in the early years really if you've got children or you're interacting with our kids really thinking about how you're breaking down stereotypes and helping to expose them to a wide range of cultural experiences and seeing equal caregiving and really starting to think about how we have respectful relationships really early on and then within the workforce really thinking about how do you be aware of biases and when do you take systemic interventions to tackle them so for example there's great platforms out there like Applied where you can do de-identified recruiting where you're not looking at CVs we're not looking at names but all of your candidates are applying answering a set of questions and then you assess the candidates based on their answers to those questions and compare the questions rather than comparing the candidates so there's nudges like that that can help us to address some of that bias so think about what are the right interventions for your organization to acknowledge we all have bias, how are we gonna address it? And one of our best kept secrets I think is that on the Wajir website we have a wealth of information about every employer, private sector employer with more than 100 employees it doesn't have the remuneration data yet but it has everything else it's got boards, it's got make-up of the management and non-managers, it's got have they done a gender pay gap audit and what action was taken as a result or why didn't they take action what are the policies and practices in place so you can actually go and have a look at your own employer or anyone that you're thinking about going and working for and then ask the question, start the conversation generate that discussion about well what have we done why haven't we done it, you know how is that, what impact has that had and be part of the momentum for change but being informed by the information it's there and we're really trying to raise the profile that this information is available that we want people to use it and then use that to be a driver of change Thank you very much, you come to a discussion at a university, you get homework that's just the way that it is but I am going to thank people for coming and thank the panel just in those brief words but what I'm really going to do is invite Professor Michelle Ryan back onto the stage Michelle Everyone, join me in thanking our chair how wonderful, such an informative discussion I think I started by setting the tone in a kind of negative way what are the things that people get wrong and I think we've definitely elevated it to find out what people are doing and what they're getting right and it's very exciting to see all the initiatives that are happening and what's going on there So we titled our talk today our panel today about what works and I think we've had a lot of examples some very concrete examples of what works there was a lot of talk about data and evidence so whether that's in terms of finding an evidence base for what needs to change or using data and metrics and audits to find out what has worked and what is successful and what isn't so I feel like that evidence basis came through very, very clear other themes were around accountability and transparency so really making sure that people have to say what they will do and they will be accountable for what they do whether that's in terms of consequences or rewards or whether it's carrots or sticks I think there are a number of ways in which we can do that but accountability really is key and I think what was really clear to me was about this intentionality so often when we talk about gender and gender equality we get a sort of feeling like we know what equality looks like and we know what we sort of need to do but this really idea about acting intentionally and not just feeling like it'll work out okay in the end and having a very clear plan about how that works I think in terms of what is needed to affect change resources I think is something that came through loud and clear as well this is something that we have to resource whether that's in terms of people's time whether that's in terms of legislative resources if we think about it in those sorts of ways and that time to allow change to happen as well whether it's in terms of quotas in terms of support there are a lot of mechanisms that we've seen today that can affect change as well but I think what also comes to me is that there's no one easy solution I mean if we knew what the silver bullet was we would have used it a long time ago so the complexity that's coming out is really really key to me as well that we need to be making change on multiple fronts and in multiple ways so whether that's at federal, state, organizational sort of level whether we're talking about individuals that need to change and I think that final discussion about what individuals can do to change is really important whether we're looking at public or private whether we're looking at legislative or cultural change, policy change there's, it's something that I think we need to attack on multiple fronts and I think we have now some of the inspiration and some of the evidence base on really what works so please everyone join me again in thanking our fantastic panel