 Hello, everybody. I'm bringing us all back to order. My name is Melissa Conley Tyler. I'm the National Executive Director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Role I've been playing for 11 years now. And during all of that time, I've been thinking about issues about women in foreign policy and national security. I feel, and this is particularly for the younger people in this audience, I feel like this conference has marked a very important moment for me. There have been presentations given that I cannot imagine having been given even as recently as 10 years ago. I feel like there has been some fascinating and wonderful changes. And I think, as Marina was talking about yesterday, it's time to entrench this. So in my mind, this goes down as an important moment, this conference, almost up there with the AFL Women's Competition. You'll show my noburnian there. So this session now is going to look at how do we increase the representation of women in national security organizations. And what we're looking for is really what's the best practice across a whole range of different organizations that we can learn from and then we can apply in our own cases. Now, I think you've heard a lot, and you will continue to hear a lot, about the way that diversity definitely makes our workforce stronger and enables us to achieve more. It increases our capability. We understand all of that. And so a lot of the arguments we're going to make all about the organizational benefits. But I think it's important at the same time that we don't forget one of the other reasons to do this, which is around, I don't know, old-fashioned concepts like rights and citizenship, that a less heard these days are also important, that if we have important national institutions, they should represent the diversity of our society, both for their credibility and for their social acceptance, but also just because that's part of their obligations as institutions in society. So on both fronts, it's a good thing to do and it makes you more effective. There are many arguments why we should be increasing diversity. So in order to look at some of those issues of what works, we have four speakers, and they are drawn from a wonderful range, giving us views across the public service as a whole, from the intelligence community, from defence, from business, from police, and from the world of think tanks. So we have a range of different perspectives. And I know they're going to give us a number of answers to the questions of how do we ensure better women in diversity. What I hope they won't give us, I'm going to put this off the table, is that it's just a pipeline issue, that if only more women are recruited, then inevitably in another, say, 20 years, we're going to have more women in senior positions. We know that doesn't work. It's not just about that level. So in my area, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been recruiting equal men and women since 1985. So the pipeline has been equal for at least that long. But then you have to look at what enables women to get to the senior positions. And when I did an analysis looking at DFAT, you can still see things like the legacy of past direct discrimination, the marriage bar that stopped women, married women working in the public service. You can see indirect discrimination. You can see differential impact of family responsibilities. And you can see social construction of what is a role, a gendered role, that some jobs just feel more masculine. And they were all still holding women back from senior leadership positions. Now, DFAT has moved into having a women leadership program, which I greatly commend. But, yes, certainly the answer we won't have today is it's just getting more young women in. There's issues about all of our organizations and how we, if we want, as our Chief Marshal, Bims can discuss it. If we want top talent, we need to develop it. We need to have a vision for diversity. And we need to think about the cultural change we have to make to achieve that. So without any further ado, I'm going to ask Stephanie Foster to come and speak to us. She's the Deputy Australian Public Service Commissioner. She's had 16 years in the intelligence community and six years in defense, public service medal, and can tell us a lot from her varied experience on women in diversity. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's fabulous to see so many people here wanting to engage in this issue and caring about making a difference. As I was reflecting about what I wanted to cover this morning, I was smiling somewhat riley to myself that I was even participating in this panel and remembering back to when I was an EO1 or EO2 about 100 years ago. And I refused to place on a fabulous leadership program because it was one of a number of places reserved for women. And in vain, my division head reasoned with me. He could jolt. He even threatened me. But I was absolutely resolute that I was a person. I was not a woman. And I would only accept a place that was for a person. I can still remember my first feminist awakening. I was about five or six years old. And my brother had just started working at the Coburg Post Office. And he was getting paid more than our four older sisters. And there were 10 of us around the dinner table. And there was this incredibly lively debate about the rights or wrongs of this. And I can remember just sitting there saying, but there must be some mistake. They must have got his pay packet wrong. And mum and dad were trying to explain to me how, no, this was just the way of the world, that men got paid more than women. And I still, you know, some 40-something years later, am a bit bewildered by the concept. And I grew up believing that feminism was doing everything the boys did, only better, and to a greater excess, which landed me in all sorts of messes. And I never thought about what it meant to be a woman in the workplace or a woman in the world at all. As an aside, I remember one of my sisters skiing bare top down the slope at Nantbulla one day with exactly the same misspagotten idea, because it was a sunny spring day, and all the boys had taken their tops off. And she thought it was good enough for them, it was good enough for her. So I traveled along like this for a long time. In fact, until I was an SES officer and I was up in Brisbane talking to a group of defense, to talk to a group of defense employees about one of our reform initiatives. And at the end of it, I was approached by a woman in her 50s who was an APS 5, I think. And she put her hand out and she touched me on the shoulder. And she said, I've heard about senior women in defense, but I've never seen one before. And she was working in an environment where no woman in that office had ever been acted in or won a management position. And so for her and all of her female colleagues, the aspiration and their capacity to fill their potential was absolutely stunted by the environment in which they worked. And I think at that moment, it was a real light bulb moment of saying, it's not okay to say I've succeeded by sheer, pushing not believing in the barriers that that's not actually everyone's experience. I can talk today about our policies and our data and I will do that. But to steal Peter Drucker's line, culture its strategy for breakfast every time. We have a great gender equality strategy and I commend it to all of you. It really seeks to position the APS again as a leader and an influencer in gender equality. It's a place we should be for two reasons. One, because we're a very large employer in Australia. And secondly, because we are the public service, we're paid by the government, we're paid to lead and show and set an example. We've had a mixed history in the APS, I think. When I first heard about the marriage bar, excluding married women from permanent employment, forcing them to resign when they got married, I had that same kind of incredulity that I experienced at five or six. And although its repeal was recommended for the first time in 1958, it took eight years of argument for it to finally come into force. So for eight years, people genuinely debated whether it was okay or not to exclude women on the basis of them being married. On a more positive note, the numbers of women in the APS climbed really steadily after that point, initially at the lower levels, but you can actually see it moving as a bowel wave through each classification in the public service. So we reached parity across the whole system in 1999. That's now 58% of women across the APS. We have 50% or more women than men in all levels up to and including the executive level one level. So for the people who care about a pipeline and a pipeline matters, we're starting to develop a strong basis for that. We've got lots more work to do at the senior levels, but we are having a terrific rate of change. So over the last 20 years, the proportion of women at the executive level two in the SES band one has doubled to now being about 42%. The proportion of women at the band two level has tripled to 38%, and at the band three level, so the feeder group for the CEOs and secretaries, the increase has been fivefold from 8% to 36%. At the secretary level, having been static in percentage terms for more than a decade, we now have six of 18 secretaries, one third who are women, and just to round off the data, about 31% of APS agency heads are women. Some of this success can be attributed to policy settings. For example, Maternity Leave Act for Commonwealth employees bought in in 73, which entitled Commonwealth female employees to 12 weeks of paid maternity leave was really very trailblazing in its time. And we began trialling flexible work hours as early as 76. We began taking on employees in permanent part-time positions in 1986. And all of the research shows that those things have had a really significant impact on the number of women we have. But in some ways, I think our early successes had begun to work against us. When I came into this job a few years ago, I was really struck by the absence of a focus on general quality. There was a really strong feeling around the system that we were in good shape. We could cite the raw numbers and we would compare ourselves really favorably to the private sector. There were pockets of groundbreaking work taking place. Treasury is a very celebrated example. Geoscience Australia, the Office of National Assessments and more recently, DFAT have all been doing really fabulous work around general quality. And the work that Defence has been doing has also been extraordinarily thoughtful and all-encompassing. But it wasn't really until last year when Minister Cash released our strategy, Balancing the Future, the Australian Public Service Gender Equality Strategy 2016 to 2019 that we really turned the spotlight as a system back on general quality. And we started off with all of the things that you would expect to see as we drafted the plan. So we had a plan for every agency. We had targets at every management level. We had published reporting of progress. We had development opportunities. And we were feeling pretty pleased with the draft and the Minister was pretty pleased with us. And I took a copy of it to a group of deputy secretaries from all departments across the Commonwealth to discuss it, to get some buying before we finalised it. And about halfway through the conversation, there had been one of the blokes sitting there really thoughtfully, not participating. And I was looking at him wondering, are you not committed to this? Why aren't you contributing? And I was really disappointed that it was one of the men in the room that was so visibly hanging back. And all of a sudden he sort of broke into the conversation and said, you know, we could do everything in this strategy and not make one iota of difference. We could tick every single box that you've put here and nothing would change. And he had been sitting there contemplating something that had just happened in his agency. They had advertised Bantu round, Bantu senior executives. And even though they had not bad statistics at the band one level in terms of gender mix, they had almost no female applicants for the job. And so we went round and he spoke to the women that he had expected to apply and asked them why they hadn't applied. And there was a range of reasons, but the one that really, really shook him was the woman who looked at him and said, you mean you think I've got potential? And the organisation thought that she was exploding with potential. And there were two really sad things about that. One was that they hadn't told her and the other was that she was waiting to be told, waiting to be asked to put herself forward. And so that generated for the next hour the most extraordinarily rich conversation about what would it actually take for us to make a difference rather than putting out a glossy strategy doing a launch and all the things that we were proposing to do. So we added a pillar to the strategy which was explicitly called driving a supportive and enabling culture and we peppered what we'd call cultural levers throughout the rest of the strategy. Perhaps the most important thing that we did was put in an action for the secretaries of the APS to form a council to drive gender equality through the APS. That's since been formed, Martin Parkinson gives it extraordinary strong leadership. All secretaries are members and it's very clear to all of them and for all of them that this is more than a box ticking exercise, this is something which all of them are embracing as a core leadership responsibility. We've got a range of obligations on senior leaders in the strategy which are very explicit and for which they will be held accountable. We put in the kind of levers that some of the agencies have been trialing like a flexible by default approach and I know we'll all have our different stories here but I will never forget a young man coming up to me in a session in Tassie and saying that when he went to talk to his manager, he was an SES band one about working four days a week so that he and his wife could share the childminding for their new baby, his manager looked him in the eye and said, mate, are you joking? Have you given up any thought of a career? And that sort of thing is happening all over the system and until we actually make it easy for people to approach those conversations and make it not possible for managers or make it harder for managers to have that conversation, then we won't change the behaviour of men or help enable the behaviour of men to change in relation to those sorts of issues which is so critical to our success. So we did all of that stuff, we did some really practical support and I was just looking, we generated a number of fact sheets the first of which is called 10 Tips for Men to Forward Gender Equality and they're really sensible practical things that anyone can pick up and do. There's a whole series of those things on our website. We've worked with all the agencies to do all the technical stuff in the plan. Every department in the APS now has a Gender Equality Action Plan. They will all be published on their websites by the end of this month and the reporting against their targets will also be public. We've targeted specific areas so we're targeting functional areas that are affected by agenda imbalance through pathways and partnerships with universities and industry. We've got diversity networks linked up all across the system. We're showcasing stories of inspiring male and female leaders. We're working to increase the proportion of female leaders from diverse backgrounds in Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander communities culturally and linguistically diverse, disability, LGBTI, and mature age. There are little things happening like naming department or meeting rooms after notable women, all of the small signals which show that we're taking this really seriously and it's part of our way of thinking, our way of being, not just a strategy that sits on itself. So to return to Peter Drucker, it's what we do as senior leaders, as middle managers, as teammates that will actually help put the APS firmly back where it belongs in my view which is in a leadership role in gender equality making our society better and fairer for everybody. Thank you. Thank you very much, Stephanie. I took a lot of that from that in terms of how do we create environments that foster the aspirations of women and how do we become organisations that actively promote gender equality that see it as part of a senior leadership responsibility, not just a ticking the box strategy but part of our operations, so thank you very much. I'd now like to call upon Heather McIlwain who is the CEO of Chief Executive Women. She'll be bringing her insights from long-term roles in senior human resources at KPMG and Allen's Arthur Robinson and I know this is an area she's been working at with Treasury, Westpac and many others, so thank you very much. Okay, so Chief Executive Women's a lot like Professor Valerie Hudson. We've got PowerPoint evidence to prove that this is the right way to go. What is really clear I think to us is that we are all people but even just looking at the way the delegates from dinner last night moved onto the buses then travelled back to the hotel I think is telling us an interesting story about the way men and women are a bit different. We were sitting on that bus and we were about to arrive at our destination, the hotel. And before we even stopped, I was standing in that aisle, I had my bag on my shoulder, I was ready to go and that's because I've been completely assimilated on the rat run, a Qantas rat run between Sydney and Melbourne dominated by men. Basically, if you haven't trampled your way to the front of the plane before the little light goes off, you're being left behind. What was really stark about last night's bus? We stopped, I was the only one standing in the aisle. We waited till we actually pulled into the curb, the doors opened, people were still sitting down. I was thinking, what's wrong with these people? Why won't they get off the bus? I'm thinking, why am I maximising my shortest possible trip back to the hotel? Why am I maximising? They got off the bus in an orderly fashion and we made our way swiftly into the night. It's very stark. No one got trampled, we all made it off the bus. So that's a fact, right? That's different. If that was a male-dominated bus, it would have been different. Who wants to argue with me? No one. Okay, good because I've got the microphone. So what is Chief Executive Women? Well, it was founded in 1985 by a bunch of women who weren't making the progress they wanted to make in corporate executive roles. And so they basically all went off to become entrepreneurs, their household names. And the first thing that they did was to decide on their core mission. And our core mission is women leaders enabling other women leaders. So the membership criteria is exacting. You'll be pleased to know that the six out of the 18 federal secretaries who are women are members. Francis Adamson, for example. And what it means to sign up to Chief Executive Women is that you are essentially stamping your name out in the marketplace as an activist for gender. You can be the right level of seniority but you still won't get in if your back page isn't there. And by back page I mean a record and a history of actually enabling other women leaders. That's really important. So we strive to educate all aspects of Australian society on the importance of women achieving executive level leadership. And by executive I don't mean boards, I don't mean chip in on strategy once a quarter and maybe you can sack the CEO if you want to. I mean actually driving the bus. And our programs are always informed by evidence-based research and led by the fact that our members are peers to the people we are striving to influence current leadership levels across Australia. So every year we do evidence-based research. We work very closely with men because unless men are informed, educated and advocating for these insights and changes nothing is going to change. And we really focus on illuminating the vast difference sometimes between what people think is impeding the progress of women and the reality of what is actually holding the back. I'm not gonna spend very much time on the actual demographics. Like I said, we cover the public sector, the not-for-profit sector, the corporate sector. There are lots of CEOs and bankers in our organisation because in a corporate context that's where we've made the most protest, progress. We can tell I'm not talking to investment bankers today because I'm not wearing very, very high heels. So not enough progress. There is some progress but it's still incredibly slow. And if you compare the private sector to the public sector, it's not very edifying. So they're very, very briefly confident. Are women confident that they have equal opportunity to be promoted to senior roles? And the answer is it's only at the very junior levels that we see anything close to parity and if you're banking a 15-point gap as parity you know you've got some troubles going down the ranks as they get more senior. The confidence gap is not closing. It's really important to look at the relativities between men and women. And I think it's also very important for us to frame what it means to talk about the confidence gap to achieve these outcomes and getting to senior executive levels. And I will in just a second. So here we go. We'll start at the start. Okay, the first piece of CW research which we did with Bain and Co, our trusted partners was to get behind what was actually causing this imbalance and there are two things that come up. Challenges associated with competing work-life priorities and more importantly the failure to value the different styles of leadership often employed by many women. 60% of all the respondents to this study felt that gender specific approaches to management situations are a bigger obstacle to women's career advancement than competing priorities. But let's look a bit harder at the data. We always segregate the results of these surveys on gender and lo and behold, men and women answered these questions very differently. So 78% of women believe that the thing that's holding them back progressing to senior leadership roles is not the fact that some of them like to have children every once in a while, but it's about the leadership style. And what's valued in our current workplaces and organisations, guess what? How do you reckon the men went with this question? A majority of men, more than 60%, believe that competing work-family commitments is the main inhibitor to senior leadership roles for women. The key findings in this research are, is that both male and female senior leaders do not value the different leadership perspectives that commonly women will bring to a team. We all know that leaders tend to appoint leaders that look a little bit like them. I have someone in my team who was a lawyer for a long time. She has heavy, chunky black glasses and I like the way she thinks. Everyone is, no one's immune to this tendency. We found in the survey that women and men are viewed as equally effective at building high performance teams, making commercially sound decisions, forming complex ideas and arguments, managing high pressure situations and delivering transformational change. But men and women think that men are better at promoting, so working with men was one aspect of that, managing emotions at work, which means to have no emotions at work, speaking up in leadership meetings. Women, of course, are better collaborators. We're good at maintaining work and family commitments. It's a bit of a skill. Working effectively in a team and building relationships with colleagues. But the most important, most critical leadership attribute, unbelievably, that both men and women rated men better at, was problem-solving. Seriously, it was problem-solving. So we move on to the critical middle years and I know that many of you are at that stage in your career. We care about this stage because it dramatically precedes the dramatic drop-off in female workforce participation and it doesn't matter which sector you're in. Women have, you know, I could talk about graduating from universities, blah, blah, blah, you know all of that. So women still make up less than 15% of senior management positions, i.e. men have a nine times better chance of making it to the top of large organisations. And this is absolutely, despite the fact that women are as confident and as ambitious as men. So let's talk about confidence. If you're in an organisation and you can't see any senior female leaders around you, is it logical to feel confident about your prospects of making it to senior leadership roles? It's not particularly logical. The second thing, and this has been proven time and time again in studies, Harvard, business schools across the world, the confidence gap is not necessarily a bad thing. When you start looking at confidence gaps, you could reframe it as the, I listen to feedback and I've got the skills to calibrate my behaviours and adjust them accordingly. Peers rating themselves and hearing their peer ratings, so in other words, group work, you get a range of indicators from your peers about how you're performing, women are much more likely to dramatically calibrate the way they rate themselves on a go forward basis. Once they've heard what everyone else thinks about them. And the converse is not true for men. There might be a little dip, you go from a five out of five to a 4.5, but you won't go from a 4.5 down to a 2.5, which is the common outcome for women. I'm gonna tell a very quick story. Women do listen to feedback and they genuinely try to deliver what they're told accordingly, so be very thoughtful about the feedback you give a woman. Tim Walsh coaches the women's rugby sevens, they went on to win the Rio gold medal. He has coached both male and female rugby teams. He said, when I coach men, I will give them a list of the things I want them to do. I'll say, you got that? They'll say, yeah. They'll go out on, that's a really gross stereotype and I apologize. They go out onto the field and guess what? They deliver 15 to 20% of what they've heard in the room. There's 5% of magic that no one told them to do. There's a whole bunch of stuff that just happens. When he coaches the women's rugby team, the seven rugby team, he will give them their instructions. Here's one I want to see. He'll then get 20 questions. So when you say, you want me to do this, does that mean that she's over there and she's doing that? Because if that's happening then, what's she doing over there? How do you think we should judge whether we're doing a great job at this 20 questions? They go out on the field, guess what? They deliver 95% of what's been asked of them because they've listened, they've processed, they've applied, they've thought about the other people in the team. And that's Tim Walsh saying that. Let's hear some more from the Tim Walshers of this world. Moving right along, visible and committed leadership. Guess what? Real organisational change appears to only happen when there's visible commitment from leadership. So this is a necessary, this is a sufficient condition. Sorry, unnecessary, but can I, I'm just gonna start again. I had too many caffeine this morning. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for organisational change. So we spend a lot of time working with senior male leaders who comprise the vast majority of members of executive teams across Australia, whether that's private sector, public sector, and that's because that's where the change needs to happen. And guess what? There is a very limited number of critical leadership behaviours that will actually deliver this change as perceived by the people in their organisation. In other words, it's conduct that counts. So the three things are, you need a track record of ensuring women are appointed into senior line roles. Telling everyone that you believe in something and they're not actually getting the numbers there probably means you're not very good at it. And people won't believe you. And the longer you talk about how committed you are to something and the numbers don't catch up, there's an incongruence which is going to go to your integrity. You need a track record of actively sponsoring women and assisting their career progression. And we can talk more about that later. And this is the most important one. You need to hold other executives accountable for achieving the targets and the outcomes that you want to set. I hear a lot about the middle management permafrost and so did my members. Oh, you know, we really get it at the senior levels. We are really committed to this. CEO or equivalent, CEO minus one, sometimes CEO minus two. But geez, what are we gonna do with those middle managers? They just, they just don't get it. They're not believing in it. And my challenge to those senior leaders is that it clearly means that CEO minus two and three are saying the right things, but they're not doing the right things because middle managers reflect what is being cascaded down to them. So this is all about what happens when CEO, CEO minus one, isn't in the room. Flexibility, we did a great piece of work on flexibility. It went global with the New York Times and the Washington Post because actually it was about men, not women. It's funny how that happens. So workplace advocacy highly correlated with flexibility and advocacy plummets where flexor work arrangements are not offered at all. Again, this piece of research debunked the myth that women seeking flexible options have checked out of their careers. In fact, the opposite is true and let's face it. If you ever have worked part-time in your career, you know what incredible tenacity and commitment to your career it takes to continue on in that organization. And I think the really interesting thing here, and it backs up what you said, Stephanie, we don't see the same positive trends for men. So if you look at the net promoter score piece here, women's advocacy and net promoter scores, that's basically how positively you talk about your organization, how likely you are to stay and how much discretionary effort you spend, i.e. extra work, goes up if you work flexibly as a woman. The opposite is the case for the men and we found that the key thing is inhibiting men from taking up flex work opportunities is a lack of senior support and a negative view from their peers. So men are not free to make the same choices as women, so good on your girls, you've won that battle. If you wanna work flexibly, there's less of a stigma than there ever was, but guess what, we need to make workplaces where this is also the case for men. This is a bad slide because it's hard to read, but it's important and it brings us to our next piece of work, the merit trap. We did this in collaboration with the male champions of change and basically we wanted to debunk the myth that appointing on merit is often something that's used to actually entrench the status quo. And the more that organizations promote themselves as meritocracies, the more their managers show greater bias towards men over equally qualified women. So I'm just gonna read out some of those quotes. He's a great fit for the team. She's not tough enough. She's too aggressive. She's a great performer, but she can be a bit cold and distant. Don't really know who she is. I don't even know who she is. Who is that woman? These are all things that executives say when they're making decisions. She's great, but she's not ready yet. That's really common, unfortunately. She probably won't be interested now that she's got a family or conversely. He's got a wife and children to feed. He'll be very hungry for performance in this role. We can laugh, but all of those are things that I've heard said personally. So I want you to think very carefully about what merit actually means. It's a critical evaluation of who is going to get a job. I'm out of time. I'm gonna say it anyway. Look at performance and potential. Look at impact as a part of a team as well as an individual contributor. Make sure that bias in your process is minimized, and make sure you think about future needs. If you're saying it takes a long time to grow leaders because they need to do X, Y, and Z experience because it's impossible to do that job without it, i.e. the person you're gonna appoint looks like every single other person who's ever done that job. Have a think about whether you're meeting the needs of the organization in the future. This one, very, very quickly. There's a dirty secret out there in Australia, and that is that managers are not giving feedback to anyone. That's the first thing. So men and women equally disadvantaged, but you'll be unsurprised to learn that women are slightly more disadvantaged. So they're much less likely to get feedback on their performance. It's much less likely to be specific. So they're two times more likely to be told that they need to be more confident. We've already gone through what that might be pointing to and also more likely to be told they need more experience. Whereas men, when they do get feedback, it's specific, and it's gonna help them to actually progress. This slide's too complicated to talk to in any level, but the only thing to take away is that women get feedback on their leadership style, not positive feedback, they get negative feedback about their leadership style as soon as they actually hit executive level. And it's usually for the first time. It shouldn't be a surprise and it shouldn't happen for the first time. There are lots of good reasons for that. So because I am out of time, I'm going to stop. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Heather, and I know you could have gone on for a long time with that wonderful material. I'm taking away from that that real issue of differences in style of leadership, the social construction we have about what we think a leader looks like and that we have to change that. Also, the idea of the visible commitment that organisations need to make, whether that's on men, for example, making sure that we include and involve men as supporters and champions, and also for women. So the women who have succeeded not to pull the drawbridge up after them, but to be thinking about how they can enable other women to become leaders. So thank you very much. Okay, I'm now gonna draw a call on Deputy Commissioner Leanne Close, Deputy Commissioner Operations in Australian Federal Police. She's had a long and decorated history in police in aviation, human resources, protection, and previously an ACT policing. She's the recipient of the Australian Police Medal. Thank you Leanne. Thanks very much for having me along this morning, and thanks very much to the National Security College. I do speeches of this nature a lot to various forums, and I often feel I'm preaching to the converted because we have a lot of women in the audience, but today it's so pleasing to actually see so many men here, so congratulations to you for coming along and listening to the stories and hearing about the data and the other stories that you'll be told about on people's various journeys and experiences. I know that both men and women will be able to take that back to their workplaces and be a bit influential in changing things. I thought I'll just give you a quick outline of the AFP, a little bit of the demographic. I understand my former boss from the last 12 months, Chris Morator, spoke yesterday from the Attorney General's Department, and I had the privilege of working in AGD for the last 12 months as well on a secondment, and the demographics there are quite different to the AFP, so I want to touch on that as well. But having worked in what's ostensibly a national security agency, a very operational agency like the AFP, I do want to focus as well, and you'll hear some consistent themes and messages from what you've heard this morning and from other presenters over the last day or so. In relation to how do we think we can increase women's participation at all levels of our agencies, it's a key theme that everybody's working on. So I've been in the Australian Federal Police for over 30 years now, 31 in fact, apart from the 12 months that I've just had out at AGD. I joined when I was 19, so I was a very young person joining out of Canberra, born and raised here in the ACT. When I went through recruit training, there were six women on my program. I didn't think about a gender aspect when I was joining the AFP, although I had actually applied for the Department of Defense once and before when I was still in school, and I was asked by the psychologist there, did I realize that the positions in AFP and defense that I was going for are very male dominated, and what did that mean for myself? So I had no concept that that was something that others would think about in terms of a woman applying for these types of roles. And it's only in later times that I've thought about that, and I think it actually sort of relates more to his thinking rather than what I was looking at there in terms of a job that was pretty rewarding and fulfilling. And when I joined, I also remember that my parents were very keen to push me into looking at other positions that were challenged and be really rewarding. But my mother is one of the people that Stephanie referred to who joined the public service when she was around about 17, 18 years of age. When she got married to my father, she had to leave the public service. She then went to private sector. When she got pregnant with me, 12 months later, she had to leave the private sector as well. And that's something again that I hadn't really fully comprehended for a long while until I'd sort of churned over what does it mean about for women in organizations and where we've come from. Having said that, I think the AFP hasn't gone as far as we should. So in terms of demographics, the AFP has about 6,500 people, maybe a little bit less now. Of that, we have 32% women. I know I've spoken to defense colleagues previously and they're saying that's a great statistic. Well, it's not really because we've been 32% women for over 20 years. But of the 32% women in sworn police or sworn protective service officer roles, we go down to about 23% of the workforce are women in those roles. And as you can imagine, the 32% are predominantly in lower levels of our agency. As you move up in through the ranks and levels of the AFP, women are much less predominant in EEL 2 equivalents, band 1s, band 2 positions in the AFP. So we have had a good hard look at this in the organization. I'll touch on that a little bit later about what our cultural change program is trying to focus on following a review of by Elizabeth Broderick and staff surveys and other things that we've undertaken in the organization since the commissioner, Andrew Colvin, since our commissioner was appointed two years ago, two and a half years ago. So when I went to Attorney General's Department, it was such a different organization. Demographics are completely the opposite to the AFP. So in AGD, there's 68% women. Women are at least 50% in every level, maybe with the exception of SES 2s, but I think that's changing right now because there's been a promotional process. I so agree with what we've been saying, what Heather just mentioned there around it takes leadership to change this. Leadership is the key to changing demographics, the culture, the way we treat people in any organization. So Chris Moradis, the Secretary of AGD, every conversation we have at our executive forums, bringing the SES together, bringing other people together, we're always focusing first on the people issues, on the diversity aspects of looking at people with disability, looking at people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, understanding how the organization and the culture works to attract and retain and keep people there. Interestingly though, AGD's other demographics that are completely the opposite to the AFP, they've got about 16%, maybe a little bit higher this year, attrition rate, whereas the AFP's is less than 3% right now. So AGD's possibly a little bit high and certainly Chris and the executive team had a lot of close observation of what does that mean. Was that a leadership issue in the organization? Was there something we were doing wrong that we weren't able to retain people? The AFP's is probably unhealthily, it is unhealthily low. We actually need to move and bring more people in through the organization, but it's tough when people join an organization that they love, they love the work. It's been a career for a lifetime for people as well. So how do we get the freshness that comes with constant recruitment in AGD, the younger demographic coming in with new ideas, enthusiasm. What we found in AGD is most of the people who are leaving have moved on because they've got fantastic opportunities in other public sector agencies, in the private sector, overseas. So it's also the culture there about welcoming people back when they do want to come back, and that's fantastic for the organization also. So when I joined the AFP, as I said, we were recruiting about six women per course. It took courses around about 25 people, and that hadn't changed very much and hasn't changed much. Although we do now have a very strong focus on at least 50% women per course. But that's not going to fix the problems that we've already heard and looked at the demographics. If we continue to have 50% women per course, it'll take us about 75 years for us to have any dent at other levels of the organization. So it takes a lot more strategies than that. It takes the commissioner, the SES, all of the staff in our middle management roles to focus on the issue at every point where we're talking about anything to do with performance, when we're talking about anything to do with roles, higher duties opportunities, international opportunities. We've got to start looking at the hidden biases that people have within our agencies. And everybody has hidden biases, men and women. It's not just something that, because we're a male-dominated organization, that it's just all about males. We also need to ensure that women support other women through every process that we have and in mentoring and guiding and giving them that confidence, having those discussions that potentially people can't have in an organization or that we haven't encouraged them to have focusing too much on the negative. Another thing that we haven't done as well in the AFP, we haven't focused on marketing what it is that we do. I know that in the USA some years ago, because I was in HR for a while, in the States, you wouldn't think that they would do it, but they focused on having women predominantly in their media and marketing material about what it is that we do in national security agencies, what do we do in law enforcement, and trying to encourage people to think more broadly about it, but it's not just about wrestling with people and doing all the physical side of things and that we do want to have that broader demographic of the community represented in our agencies. Other things that we're starting to work through in the AFP as a result of the Elizabeth Broderick review, that highlighted some really harsh lessons, I think, for the AFP in terms of the way we treat our people. Women and men completed that survey and we got some data that showed that there has been people who have been assaulted, sexually assaulted in our agency. The bullying harassment statistics were appalling as well. So part of it you get a bit defensive and you're thinking, well, that's never been my experience. Was this because it's anonymous? Is it actually accurate? You start questioning all those things. What we've done in the organisation is established a new area on reform culture and standards and a concept of safe place, which I know others have similar sorts of concepts. We've got all the best policies and so-called procedures in the AFP as compared to all the public sector agencies, compared to other law enforcement agencies. We've got all the plastic policies and procedures, but they don't get implemented or they don't get managed well. So a lot of our reform processes around how can we look at how we treat our people in the organisation, where can they go to report things, how can we resolve things before it becomes a blown-up issue and we either lose people from the organisation or you have this sort of cultural aspects coming out or people go to fair work or whatever it might be. So what we're doing there, in a range of different HR strategies, we're looking at things such as blind applications. We just ran a NL2 process that was predominantly a blind application, although, again, people questioned it because we had 50% or maybe I think it was 53% men and I got a HR people over there and about 47% women got interviews and we looked, or sorry, applied and then the interview process went really quite well from that point. We had independent people coming in and having a look at that. And we went through a range of assessment centres and other things. We haven't done that in the AFP for many years. We've relied on panels that we consolidate. We bring together from within the organisation and so we're trying these different strategies, but that is just such a small piece of what might change things. The biggest issue for us is holding ourselves to account at all levels in all parts of the agency because you do measure. You achieve what you measure. There's no doubt about that. So how can we hold people to account to make sure that there are opportunities for other people? I'm a huge supporter of HR. I love what HR does and can do, but the organisation needs to empower HR as well. I think we should be centralising where you can in even in large agencies. Centralise some of the decision-making about these aspects because you take some of the biases away. You have more independence there or have them at least as advisers in terms of running panels, et cetera. One other aspect that I just want to touch on is the fact that we are in national security type agencies, particularly in operational agencies, Defence, Police, Emergency Services. One thing that I find people in our organisations do is talk about command and control and command and control requires us to treat people differently. Well, I want to turn that on its head. I don't think that's accurate at all. I think we need to challenge that assumption. Command and control is about issues. It's about emergency situations. It's about incidents. So absolutely, we have to get that under control. We have to coordinate activities around that. But even throughout dealing with those sorts of situations, we always lead and manage our people. Always, no matter what. And so you just can't turn up to a situation and expect to be ordering people around and they're just going to follow that. It takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of investment in development. It takes a lot of respectful leadership in the workplace to make sure that people feel that they're valued, they can contribute, et cetera, et cetera. So that when a crisis does occur, people know their roles and they get on with it. So I'm really looking forward to getting questions from the floor and being able to touch on any of the aspects that I've raised here this morning with you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Leanna. And thank you for focusing, as I'd asked, on the progression to management issues and how significant they are. I got a lot from that. Even, as you say, at the base level, making sure that our workplaces are safe places where we don't have the fear of sexual assault or bullying and harassment. Dealing with the hidden biases and unconscious biases people have. Encouraging talented women to travel and take up other opportunities and even simple things like just putting yourself forward by having women in marketing materials. So thank you very much for that. I thought it was instructive this idea of just walking into another workplace and seeing how different it can be. I hadn't thought of that as one of the things you get from a secondment, but it's interesting, your experience walking into attorney generals and just seeing how different environment looks when you do get to 50% women in management. My guess is it probably almost becomes a non-issue. There's a moment at which it's no longer salient. You're just people, you're working in a workplace together, and if you hit that moment, then I think we've achieved what we want to achieve. Can I now call upon Jennifer Moroney, who has very kindly stepped in when we had a scratching due to illness. Thank you so much. We're lucky to have the expertise to draw upon today. Jennifer is the director of Rand Australia and a senior political scientist at Rand. She's responsible for establishing a very successful Rand office here in Australia and we're hoping it will long continue when she goes home. She's worked during the last few years on a range of reports from disaster relief to security cooperation to security and justice sector partnership models and is a very significant thinker and writer in this area. I understand she's going to give us some insights from the think tank and research community. So thank you, Jenny. Thanks very much, Melissa. I'm here because I don't have a pocket. It stays there. I'm going to talk just a little bit about some of my experiences at Rand. I think they're relevant to this discussion and not so much about the role that I currently have as the director of Rand Australia, but a previous management role that I had. Just a quick kind of overview background of Rand. I would imagine about half the people in the room haven't heard of Rand and some might have a general idea about what Rand is, but we are the world's very first think tank, actually. We're 70 years old now, a non-for-profit, very policy-focused, evidence-based research and analysis, very multidisciplinary in our approach. We have about 2,000 full-time researchers in the States and also in Europe. And my office here is relatively small, but I have a sort of reach-back role at the moment in starting to establish our presence here. About 48 percent of Rand is women, at least by my last check, and that's a really, you know, it's a pretty good number. When I started at Rand 14 years ago, it was somewhere around the 37 percent women. Rand has two subsidiaries based in the U.S., but we have two subsidiaries internationally. So Rand Europe is based in Cambridge and then our office here. So part of the reason that we're set up here is to draw in Australian talent so that we could do new and interesting things and try to look at policy perspectives differently with the mix of American, Australian, and European talent to problems here. So again, I've been at Rand for about 14 years now and I've had three different senior management roles. And I want to talk a little bit about the role that I had prior to coming here, which was as a department director, research department director. And Rand in the U.S., we have four research departments and my department was called Defense and Political Sciences. And I had about 150 to 175 researchers in my department ranging anywhere from the newly minted PhDs all the way through senior ambassadors. And, you know, there's some egos to deal with along the way and it's a pretty big and pretty diverse group. And my role in that particular job was professional development for the staff, performance evaluation certainly was a very important part of my job. Hiring and finding talent was a very important part of my job. Firing on occasion, I don't like to do that but it has to be done sometimes. And developing corporate strategies and contributing to Rand's sort of place in the world and how we see ourselves and how we want to evolve. But in my role of finding and recruiting talent, I noticed something fairly early on because I mean we would go through a pretty lengthy process to identify candidates, to review them and then to decide to bring them into Rand to interview them, to have them do a job talk. It's pretty standard for a research position at Rand. And once we decided we liked them and we wanted to make an offer, it was my job in the defense and political science space to call them and to try to recruit them. And one of the things I noticed really early on, the first couple of calls I made was that the men I was calling were much better negotiators when it comes to benefits and salary. And what I noticed, really at all levels from the women I was talking to is that they were very happy to accept their fair offer that I put together. So noticing this right away and not wanting to have differences in data and certainly having the men paid more than the women, I took steps pretty early on to make sure that the outcomes were very fair and consistent across the board. But it's, you know, in my three years in that role, it never really changed. And I always was very well prepared depending on who I was calling and knowing that the outcome was going to be pretty much the same. So after onboarding people at Rand researchers, I mean, there was, you know, obviously a group of people who had no experience leading projects, but we saw a lot of potential for them to be in those roles over time. So, you know, I wasn't the only one to do this by any stretch, but I definitely worked very, very hard to bring on both the women and the men who I thought really had leadership potential or talking about leadership potential earlier and to have them co-lead a project with me so they got the experience of designing the project and figuring out what the method's going to be to staffing, to budgets, to working with the sponsors, to monitoring progress, to reviewing, and just to give them that opportunity. And I oversee and I do this in a number of, maybe if I had any given time, I might have had three or four projects going on and at least two of them were in that sort of vein to really help bring out talent and skills and surprise, surprise, mostly when I was making those offers to people I thought really had talent, mostly it was the women who took me up on that, which I always come very encouraging, but of course I was happy to work with anybody who I thought really had talent and what it took to be a good leader, project leader at WAN. And just to switch gears a little bit, around 2014, right before I moved to Australia actually, a couple of months before that, in my department, which was still my department at the time, there was an organization that was established kind of organically and it was re-established really, it was sort of a resurrection of an old organization. It was more or less kind of a support group for the women in the national security space and we called it the Women of Mass Destruction, which was all that it's chalked up to be. And this group started with more of a sort of two junior researchers, one of them that I had mentored and another one, and they saw what we did sort of in the early 2000s, we had this group that really kind of fizzled out after a while because it kind of, we started to get into arguments with each other about salary, which is just not useful, started to compare salaries and no good really came from that discussion. So I gave them that advice, if you're going to resurrect women of mass destruction, let's make it less about salaries and more about sort of helping each other and educating each other and having these discussions around what it's like to be a woman working in a sort of think tanky practitioner's policy oriented space in Washington D.C. And also of course Santa Monica and all of our other offices were included in that too. But it's grown to about 350 maybe more members, I can't quite tell because I don't see the alias anymore, but they have informal speakers that are brought in and formal speakers that are brought in and come back discussions and lots of emails on women in combat for example or whatever the latest policy issue is of the day. And I just see sort of lots of chiming in and really sort of direct conversation that happens in the space. It's not just the women, it's actually, there's a lot of men, really encouraging to me to see a lot of men chiming into those discussions too. So I've really enjoyed watching the way that women in mass destruction group is sort of taken off. And it is just a sort of ran thing internally and it's a very sort of safe space for them to have these discussions. And I would strongly recommend this model for organizations to encourage junior policymakers, junior researchers who have an interest in wanting to support internally within their organization, other women, to sort of take on this type of a role. It needs to be supported with resources and not led by a manager because that takes it out of that sort of safe space to be able to sort of learn and share ideas and experiences. The other issue I just want to talk about briefly and I don't want to go into too much detail on this but it was mentioned earlier, performance evaluations, performance reviews, and we at RAND about maybe three years ago, four years ago, we tried to give, we changed our entire structure in the way that we give feedback and it applies the same to men and women but the experiences have been a little bit different in these one-on-one meetings. But you know how it's sort of hard to give bad news? We came up with the idea or read about it, I'm sure it was in literature, on the sandwich approach is bad. So you're doing okay but you've got some issues but overall you're doing okay. Now for a high level performer, they focus on that fatty bit in the middle and say what is wrong? What am I doing wrong? And it was sort of just an ignited discussion that didn't need to happen. But for the mediocre performers, they would say I must be doing great. So nobody really knew where they stood and so we don't do the sandwich approach anymore. But I have had some of the most difficult, the best meetings generally with the sort of national security-focused women at Rand in taking that feedback on board, if it was negative because I was genuinely there to help them with advice, with counsel, with here's what you need to do to get out of this slump. And I had some very hostile conversations with men. And it just, but it didn't, you know, that approach I still think is a really good one is to sort of, if they're doing great and they've got one little minor hiccup, don't talk about the hiccup. Just tell them they're great and figure out from there what you need to do to move them to the next level. If they're having a problem and they're doing some things a little bit good, but mostly bad, don't even talk about anything good. Just tell them what's wrong and how do you improve that? And it's worked generally better, but again, the responses I've gotten, it was quite a task to have to give those reviews to, can imagine, every year 150 people and the reactions were always quite different. So that's just a couple of anecdotes from my experiences and I don't have anything comparable to offer at RAND because I haven't worked in that space quite as much with Australian talent, but hopefully in a couple of years we'll have some different anecdotes to share. Thanks. Thank you for sharing your insights as a woman in management. Clearly encouraging women with mentoring and working alongside. I think that's a great message to take from it. And I liked what you were discussing in terms of peer support, the way that women in a workplace and in industry can help each other. I did research recently looking at the Department of Foreign Affairs and trades, very successful Indigenous recruitment and career development strategy, and the peer support of the Indigenous Employees Network, for example, is a really big part of what's helped that succeed. I took away from what you're saying that there are things we have to be aware of as managers about men asking more for things like money and promotions and all the rest, we have to think about that. But also as individuals, are we promoting ourselves enough? Are we leaning in? So I think that's a very good program for us to discuss. So we now have the remainder of our time till lunch to get good quality discussion happening. Can I get some hands up for people who have questions that they want to ask? We have some roving mics, and we can move across the room, depending upon where we have the most questions. Hi, I'm Sarah Percy from the University of Queensland. My question is for Stephanie. And I wanted you to let us know a little bit more about what you started your speech with, which was the leadership for you didn't want to go on because you were a person and not a woman. And I wondered whether or not you reflect on that in a different way now and what you think about that decision that you made earlier in your career. Thanks. I think I was really wrong-headed and I guess that's what I was trying to explain with the story about the woman in Brisbane that for all of us, I think there's a really important role in demonstrating not only how proud we are to be who we are, but also to talk about and to demonstrate the challenges and the vulnerabilities and all those things. And so by refusing to do things like go on a program because it was designated as a spot for women, what I think I was really saying was I'm refusing to accept that there are particular challenges for women reaching senior leadership positions or acting as senior leaders. And I think that that was not true to all of the women in my professional life who I think need not only their senior leaders but their peers and their teammates to stand up and have honest conversations about the challenges that affect women and others in the workplace. Hello, Annie Broussic from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. My question is for the panel. I'm interested to know what your thoughts are on managing women's career and progression post-maternity leave and then being in sort of long-term part-time working arrangements from there and particularly being at the point of promotion but having kids at the same time and what that means from your perspective, I guess. The AFP does this absolutely appallingly but my experience in AGD is they do things so well. Again, we have some of the best policies and procedures in the AFP in terms of flexibility returning to work, part-time, job share but the barriers are our own internal barriers so I think we need to centralise there some of those decisions and take that out of managers' hands as Lisa and Stephanie were saying earlier we need to normalise that that's an appropriate thing. However, in AGD they've got some fantastic practices for people returning from MATLEA the first was staying in touch and keeping in touch is a critical one and understanding how people want to do that and making sure you resource that internally so that people can see what opportunities are coming along encouraging people to apply for promotion women on MATLEA I got promoted to a sergeant in the AFP when I was on maternity leave and I came back part-time had that discussion with my manager and they were fantastic about it I've also had the experience in the AFP where people have said well it's not going to be approved anyway I'm not going to bother because I don't want to have that difficult conversation instead of actually coming in and having the chance saying absolutely we can job share the two of you coming back at the same time want to do that, that's perfect so getting back to AGD though all roles are considered flexible if we have people at the moment there's a discussion about how far down the ranks or the levels of the agency do we go to but if we have people working part-time we put people on high duties if someone's three days someone does two days high duties and that's becoming a real norm in Attorney General's department and no one's batting an eyelid job share arrangements at SES levels are really working well because again the demographics of AGD allow it there's 68% women so a lot of women are having children and fathers are now taking up some of those opportunities as well much less so but they know that it's something that's accepted within the department so again it takes leadership and drive and also the the confidence of women particularly to come forward and ask and say this is what will work for me I'm Jennifer I work for DFAT but my question is actually for Leanne if that's okay and Leanne actually you said the AFP does part-time and flexible working arrangements not particularly well but you do it beautifully about 25 years ago I came to you and I said Leanne can I please work part-time and you said of course you can in fact you'd come back and you'd gone part-time yourself after getting promoted it was the early 90s I know that dates us but it was the early 90s and it wasn't something that we took for granted it was a hard fought battle within a culture that said there was a stigma attached to working part-time and flexible arrangements in that very male dominated space so thank you you actually said a really good path for me and said a really good example and I think one of the things that's come out from what's been said today is that what's really important is driving that supportive culture and you drive the supportive culture you and people like Justine Saunders the Chief Police Officer Audrey Fagin before you there's been lots of women in that space that have driven that supportive culture I wonder what that's been like for you over the last 30 or 30 years how's that felt and have you had people who have given you that support along the way? Absolutely I've had lots of different support over the years particularly first of all, first and foremost my husband actually is retired now he's been retired the last two and a bit nearly three years and that's been fantastic I've actually made comments probably appropriately that I now understand what men like when they have their hard wife at home giving them that support it's a lot more freedom but as we've had our daughter you know we've both been working full-time it's been about having that sharing the responsibility and he always has shared that I've also been lucky to have broader family support but internally in the AFP there's been people who've mentored and guided me along the way I've tried to give back to people in the same way taking advice from people too sometimes more so in a career as opposed to flexibility and other arrangements like that but taking advice from people saying that often they can recognise an area for you to go for development sometimes you don't recognise that in yourself to take yourself out of your comfort zone go to a corporate area for example and that's where Jen and I worked in learning and development and then subsequently HR I asked to go to HR I lobbied for it quietly because I knew that that was something that I needed in my experience to help me be a better SES officer OK, thank you OK and I think our next one is here Good morning my name is Natalie from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and I'd appreciate your views on what advice you might provide to senior leaders on the importance of being actively involved in bringing about change and perhaps mechanisms to ensure that accountability exists So I'll have to go with that one I think one of the most important things to say is that and it's been said so many times if you haven't set targets you're probably not trying that hard targets are important because then you can identify the change that you're looking for and then hold and cascade those down through the ranks it's a standard part of the KPIs for most people in the corporate business you know you don't get that big bonus in the rev if you haven't hit your diversity targets and then sometimes you still don't get it because of the shareholder activism so that's a really important piece of work the other thing I was going to say is that and it's been said again this is about leadership capability so our leaders just because they made it to leadership level doesn't mean that they're great at leading there are lots of reasons why people get promoted not always because they're great at leading and actually to lead on gender around these issues can be very tactical very small behavioural things that have to change so we did something with the Male Champions of Change it's called the leadership shadow it divides leadership into four easy to remember categories what I say the next three are trickier what I do what I measure what I prioritise and you need to make sure that your activity in those four areas is covered a really good dead giveaway for a leader who talks the talk but doesn't actually do what's required tell me what have you learnt on this journey what do you do differently well the organisation has a fantastic diversity strategy and I'm really pleased to report we've gone to X to Y tell me what you do differently as a result of what you've learnt well I'd really like to talk about the organisation now is there one thing that you do differently you need to be able to identify as a leader here's what I used to do here's what I'm aiming for here's what I've learnt along the way think about what you do what you measure and what you prioritise to say that you're a champion for flex work and then cancel all the cast spaces for those who work flexibly well I don't know the saying do doesn't work next one here my name is Susan Hutchinson my question ties in quite nicely with that answer I hope that's okay I wanted to hear from you I'm not allowed to direct in general I did want to hear from a couple of you about more general idea of diversity obviously we're here talking about women in national security but I think there's a couple of there's two key sub-components to that that I wanted to hear about one is about this culture of men taking paternity leave and men taking flexible working arrangements to meet family commitments and the other is about other types of diversity so I'm interested in a little bit around disability inclusion it's seeing I'm kind of apparently the only person with a quasi-visible disability here today but I'm interested you know there's lots of different types of disabilities and lots of different ways that people with disabilities can contribute in the national security space so I just wanted to hear some thoughts about those two things okay so I could like to Jennifer Stephanie do you want to come in so why don't I talk about disability first because a lot a lot of what we've been talking about today you could take out the word gender and you could put in disability it's about flexibility it's about looking to help every person in the organisation fulfil his or her potential whatever that is it's about openness to different ways of working and not seeing it as a lesser way of working but a different way of working and that applies equally to people with all sorts of different levels of ability as much as it does to people with caring responsibilities or whatever and so we've also got some fabulous work happening right across the system in the APS on creating both a leadership culture and a set of enabling frameworks to make sure that we're doing better not in a bums on seats sense because it's easy to count the statistics but on the quality of the experience and the environment the way in which we're enabling people of all abilities to work and participate our secretary's committee counselling on equality and diversity last week had we're sort of doing spotlights or focuses rather than trying to do everything all at once we had the commissioner for disability Alistair McEwen and five employees with disability come and speak to the secretary's group and it was an absolutely the changing experience for the senior leaders in the room to a person they went away saying wow there's an awful lot that we can do and that we must do as the senior leaders of this system to to make sure that these stories we're hearing aren't happening again so really happy to talk more with you offline or to connect you with the folks in the APSC but I feel enormously heartened by the changing attitudes I'm seeing at all levels but particularly that critical senior leadership level of saying this isn't a nice thing to do, this isn't a social responsibility it's actually about getting the best possible workforce and then making sure that as I said that everyone's fulfilling their potential thank you and thank you to all of the presenters I feel like we've done you a bit of a disservice in not enabling sufficient time to bring out all the wonderful data that you have and I just wanted people to be aware that the survey that you referred to Heather and also the work the APSC has done are both available on the websites if people want to interrogate that data more fully but one of the questions looking at leadership that you brought out Heather was this disconnect between leadership skills that got people promoted and the other leadership skills that women excelled at so whilst women were better rewarding men were considered better at inspiring so I'm actually wondering whether rewarding people inspires them or not as a result of that that kind of result and men were also considered better at influencing and I'm wondering whether that means they're better at influencing their superiors who usually happen to be males and therefore that's actually a disproportionate way to do and I guess the final thing I was going to say is I really wondered how people would have come out if you'd included resilience in there it's really it is fascinating isn't it and I think it's important to take a step back and say just because women and men perceive certain things doesn't mean it's actually true so that's important to say and the one that really gets me is the problem solving thing and I think we all know that women are excellent problem solvers just as men are excellent problem solvers I think it's about what are the cues that we pick up on and measure identifiably as performance in problem solving where does that need to change are we really good at understanding what good looks like are we good at identifying in advance of what we think we want to achieve we probably don't spend enough time looking at that stuff carefully and it's very much linked to the merit question as well on resilience resilience or grit I'd rather call it grit grit has been identified as something that really differentiates people getting to leadership positions that ability to keep going against all costs what we find and it's particularly through the lived experiences of these incredibly senior women who are outliers, let's face it they are at the top of their game they've been very successful they get to a point when they hit those senior levels where they actually stop listening to feedback if you're not getting good feedback or you're getting feedback that actually maybe you stick out a bit now your leadership style is not quite right a little bit more like this a little bit less like that you have a choice to make you're going to take it on board just because you get feedback doesn't mean you have to do something with it and I think women could take a leaf out of men's books in that regard you're either high achieving you're either achieving the outcomes that you want to achieve the organisations moving forward as a result or it doesn't it doesn't mean you're completely shut down anything you don't like to hear really great leaders seek it out but they're careful about who they seek it out from and I encourage a little person in this room to seek feedback because that's where you learn the most and you know who you respect it's good to know actually feedback from people you don't respect because they're obstacles in the way there's a master class that we're working on at the moment which is about the campaign to become a CEO this is about operating an environment where the rules are not clearly demonstrated or shown to people a lot of women think that if they do great work they'll pick them to be CEO that is not the case if you want to be the CEO you have to plan for it minimum of three years out and you have to knock off every single aspect that's required and then you might get there it's not luck and it's not because you're great it's because you played the game effectively and it's important to share that information so grit plus that means you'll get there I love these messages I love you, whatever you ask Jennifer's going to answer it well that's good because I'd be very happy for Jennifer to answer my question, I'm sorry I'm Tonya Smith from Nowscrew my question follows on a bit from the last one because I'm interested in the feedback theme that came through for me because I'm old a lot of the themes that we've been discussing have been around for quite a while in different places and some of the attitudinal barriers that we've been continuing to struggle with but particularly a new insight for me from the panel was that I think three of the speakers talked about the differentiated approach to feedback, the way that women receive feedback differently so they want to think about what we might be talking about in 10 years time and the evolving agenda to what extent do you think is something that does warrant further exploration Jennifer do you have ideas about what we do with that information beyond what you've talked about making your own adjustments with how you deal with people in the workplace do we need more explicit policies or procedures or narratives around the giving and receiving of feedback and the extent to which that experience has a gender dimension Thank you Before I was at RAND I worked in the private sector for a while for a defense consulting firm a small one and what I saw with getting feedback in that organization was they did sort of top down we're all familiar with the top down reviews where your superior gets feedback and then sort of delivers that message to you about how you're doing or you seek it informally that it used to work that you'd get sort of bottom up reviews so you would get feedback from people who you've managed and it's anonymized so you can't go after them if you don't like what you hear but I really learned a lot from that as a sort of junior manager in that organization before I came to RAND and got through trial and error got RAND starting to think about getting the sort of bottom up reviews getting feedback from your superiors is normal but getting feedback from people who see you as a leader that's incredibly helpful and then to take it sort of a step forward I used to work with the folks in my department because we'd review them once a year very formally they do a self evaluation and they had four different boxes they were looking at from research quality to entrepreneurship and communications those sorts of things but we would come up with a plan afterwards for anything where they thought they were having some problems in and we would tackle that plan and we would meet regularly to tackle those problems I didn't do that with everybody because a lot of people but there were some that really sought it out they wanted to get better they knew they had an issue of challenge and they just weren't completely well-rounded to excel at RAND at the rate as maybe some of their colleagues were doing it the plan really helped and I saw like again when I'm talking I'm thinking about mostly the women it really was the women who wanted that kind of one-on-one mentoring and wanted that when I offered the plan they're like yeah we're going to work on the plan so I was sticking to it and I didn't know there was a comment maybe about that there I think our feedback is often given to men by men outside the office and if you're a woman you're participating in those informal networks to quite the same extent so if you're a leader think about how you can replicate that environment and that atmosphere and that positive energy before you say whack someone between the forehead you know what will it take to get both of you relaxed in the right frame where will that happen and make sure that you are divvying that out on an equalised basis if it happens to the cricket or at the pub that's great think about all the people who don't go to the cricket at the pub with you I'd like to say thanks to KPMG and to all of our wonderful speakers