 It's really lovely to be back here at ANU for all the reasons that Brian mentioned and I would like to start by acknowledging that we're on Aboriginal land, we're on the traditional land of the Ngunnawal people and I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and all emerging First Peoples leaders. Usually addresses like this are not easy but they are things I'm quite comfortable with and but being back at your alma mater having received an honorary doctor it makes it very special but it also makes it even more interesting when friends of my daughter who are now here as undergraduates, my daughter's at Melbourne University in her second year of university, many of her friends chose to come to ANU from Sydney and so some of you are in the audience and you make me very nervous because you will be my harshest critics and you will be reporting back to my daughter to see how I went but it's lovely to see so many of younger undergraduate students here to think about what we do on this very special day. I said at the time that I was granted my honorary doctorate that it was very special in 2018 to receive that doctorate in the same year that this university made two very big, they made two very important people, very special and they were Susan Ryan AO who last year was this university's alumna of the year and Professor Megan Davis who was last year's Indigenous alumna of the year and both those women are very well known to me now, we're good friends and I think of them as people I constantly learn from because of their immense experience and their courage and their own pioneering that they have done in their respective ways and it was Susan Ryan who joined the then Hawke cabinet in 1983, first woman to hold a cabinet position in this country and that was the year I started my undergraduate degree at ANU, so you can't be what you can't see as they say and for me to see a cabinet minister for the first time, a woman in the cabinet with a significant portfolio and then 30-odd years later to see her recognised as an alumna of the year for this university was very special for me and Professor Megan Davis if you haven't followed her work and the leadership that she, Pat Anderson, a number of Indigenous people but particularly Indigenous women are leading us through in understanding the offer, the very generous offer that was made to all of us through the Uluru statement from the heart and I continue to learn from the authors and the process behind the Uluru statement and I hope all of you on this day can think about the enormous power that Indigenous women have brought to that conversation and the advocacy they bring to us to think a bit differently about what that acknowledgement of Indigenous peoples and First Peoples in our Constitution might look like as we engage further on that issue. So it is really wonderful to be back here on International Women's Day and in light of those women I hope I can share some thoughts with you today that you might take away and think a bit differently about either gender equality, your own role in gender equality or perhaps even the things that are going on in your organisations whether it's here at the campus or if you're not from here in your organisations that do need changing and how we as individuals need to really look inside ourselves if we're to be truly equal. I also want to start by congratulating the Vice-Chancellor and the entire team here on the announcements that you repeated again this afternoon but those structural changes on superannuation and on paid parental leave, removing the gendered language from leave so this is not maternity leave it's not the domain of women and women's careings role this is about parental leave and we think about that as well for carers leave that whilst the bulk of the unpaid carers work and parenting work is still done by women the only way we will move to get to a position of equality is when we think about care and parental responsibilities as being equally shared. So to celebrate that and make sure that those that are primary carers not only have the opportunity to take that leave and have paid leave but then for women to be paid superannuation during unpaid leave for that 26 weeks extra that is remarkable and they're the kind of step changes that are required for us to achieve any form of parity. In fact on the superannuation question the OECD ranks countries in relation to their treatment of women and Australia generally does very well and is generally very high up in the opportunities for women but this year we were pulled down to I think almost sixteenth on that chart and the single thing that dropped us down was the failure to deal with superannuation for women as they take leave for various purposes that they never catch up and that was seen as a very significant marker of inequality and inability for women to be equal citizens. So the superannuation announcement is is significant and I wouldn't underestimate the power that has and if you're not from the university or other institutions it's one that's very important and I think you should copy as a form of flattery for such an important piece of change. Now I've been asked by the university to speak about what change feels like when you're put in a position of bringing gender diversity into difficult environments and I will come to some personal remarks in a moment before we go to questions but I thought it was important just to really start with the structural issues at the core of why we continue to celebrate International Women's Day and why this matter remains still so hard to resolve when it really shouldn't but there are significant structural barriers that we all need to engage with and understand if we're truly to think about gender parity, gender equality and what I call bridging the respect gap. So we're talking about the gender pay gap, the gender superannuation gap but for me the gender respect gap sits at the heart of all the things that I'd like to share with you and in my career since leaving this wonderful institution is that hoping, wishing and praying for gender equality outcomes is not a great strategy. It just doesn't work, I've tried it, it didn't work. It's the same reason I say to young women looking at men as a future financial certainty for you as a partner is not a good strategy for choosing your partner in life. We've got to really understand what it means to be empowered women who have the ability to go into the world and actually achieve that gender equality that we will aim for and so I don't agree with the hoping, wishing and praying and saying that over time we will get there and that natural cycles of change will help this, they won't and my experience has been that these barriers need very specific targeting and the targeting is in every sector, it's in every part of our economy and worldwide and it's not a feature of developing or developed economies alone, it's all of us and that's why SDG5 in the sustainable development goals is so important because it also applies to Australia so gender equality under that goal and all of the requirements and targets under SDG5 are critical. But when I think about those structural barriers I think about things like the fight we still have as to whether quotas have a role in fixing this problem and I'm unabashed about this, I'm a big quota supporter. I've been the beneficiary of quotas on many occasions and I'll talk about that in my personal reflections about how you get beyond the idea that having a quota appointment makes you any less than a person who gets a job in any other way, particularly as we are solving such deep structural problems and you may have some questions about that and want to sort of tease that out because it's one of the incendiary matters that sits at the heart of how we create change and it gets straight to this false argument about merit, merit versus quotas. So I am a number one fan, I'm a ticket holder for quotas and done well but we can talk about that a little bit later. Meaningful targets within a business case or in this case for the university, meaningful targets of where you want to go and then backcasting. So we do a lot of forecasting in our worlds, we don't do a lot of backcasting but the mission to the moon, a moonshot was a backcasting, put a man on the moon by this date by the Americans, announced by a president and they met it. Had to work out how to do it having set that target. We should be setting those targets with our climate ambitions and talking about net zero, buy a date by this country and then you work backwards, you backcast as to what would have to change to get to that target and it's no different with gender. If we set ourselves the ambition as a nation, as a maybe a moonshot for this nation around gender equality and full inclusion, we would choose a date, it might be the SDG's 2030 date and say by that date in this country we want, we are determined by setting a target to have achieved certain things that we can measure and then we would come back and say what would we need to be doing today? Less than 15 years out from that target, it's more like 10 and what would it take and that would build momentum and we would build I think currency in the idea that much can be done, that the moment we do by incrementalism, by forecasting. So those targets, meaningful targets in a backcasting fashion I think help us get to achieve the big heavy lifting of gender equality. And under that are all the policies and procedures, you hear about this all the time but in every organisation I've been part of, unless you unpack all of the unnoticed bias, gender and otherwise in policies and procedures and the typical cultures that drive behaviour, unless you do the hard work, it doesn't matter what you're saying as an ambition, the way we do things around here doesn't change and there's lots of great statements, lots of great speeches, but you speak to a woman deep in an organisation about whether she thinks things are changing and she will invariably say, not where I sit. I'm too junior, there's a guy still ahead of me who I can't get around, people don't listen to me, I have no voice, where do I find my voice? And so for me, having policies, procedures, processes that create cultures that can get to these big systemic issues is very important. And part of that is real consequence. So in the organisations that I work with and work inside, there is now absolute consequence for breaching some things that are sacrosanct. So the reason that Kate Jenkins, the National Sex Discrimination Commissioner, is travelling the country talking to women particularly around harassment, sexual harassment in the workplace, is that we've not dealt with this issue, we've not collected the data, we've not understood it and it is rampant. And it might not be in the form that most people think, but it is, there are so many forms of this that Kate Jenkins will report upon. And so many of the women will say, it doesn't matter what I do, once I've signed the non-disclosure agreement and had my payment, there's no consequential price paid by the perpetrator. That person stays very senior, the matter's dealt with, the non-disclosure is signed, we don't talk about it anymore and the culture goes on. And people see that. And so for me, as much as you have great policies and culture, if anyone by dint of seniority is not held accountable for breaching those codes of how culture should work, then the whole system fails. Because everyone in that system, men and women, but particularly women, just look at that and say, if it doesn't apply to very senior in this place, then how on earth am I going to be taken seriously? And that's why we've seen, I think, through the Banking Royal Commission and elsewhere, a number of very senior people held accountable for behavioural issues, not of gender, but of fairness and customer issues. And it's the same with gender. Unless senior people are held accountable, lose their jobs, lose their bonuses by virtue of breaching the culture of an organisation, there's no point having all of those other ambitions. Language matters. So the structural barriers of language. I've already mentioned the issue of just how gendered the term maternity leave is. And when you think about maternity leave, part-time work, if it's women taking part-time work, it's assumed they have no ambition, they're going off to do caring responsibilities, happy to come back into a part-time role, because something's happened once they had that child or looked after that aged member of their family. And it couldn't be further from the truth. When we take leave, when we step aside to do those caring responsibilities, men or women, and we want to come back flexibly, it doesn't speak to the fact that we lack ambition or we lack the notion that we want to be important again or rise and earn more money or finish our PhDs and do great research. It means that we want respect for the fact that we're making choices about how we flexibly run our lives so that the good things about community still continue to happen. And so the language of flexibility, the language of how we incorporate gender programs into organisations is very important. So that's why I congratulate the university on the thought that a primary carer, man or woman, can now get that 26 weeks leave, that's important. And I would encourage you, Vice Chancellor, if you can, companies that I have been involved with, where men have started to take those roles on, we celebrate them, we put them on the internet, we get them to tell their stories, not just to other men but to other women to have confidence that the system is working. And I've got to tell you a man on a video inside an organisation saying how much he likes being an active father or an active carer of anyone in the family and how proud he is that he can do that and his company lets him do that, that spreads like wildfire culturally in any organisation. So you have to celebrate the men who are going to break those moulds and we've got to support the women who then come back and are carrying a different kind of responsibility because they are not the primary carer of that young child or that aged parent or that person of need. So all these things matter and I think they matter even more now because we should really reflect today that as of today, since the beginning of the calendar year 2019, 11 Australian women are no longer with us. They were murdered by a current or former intimate partner and the murders we've heard about in the last few days particularly have been horrific. I mean, almost too hard to bear when you read about what's been done to these women, where they've been thrown away, where they've been hidden. And that is the ultimate end of a course of violence against women in our community that is still staggeringly high and is still not really seen. Until recently, I think the politics of the day and the fact that we're heading to elections means that people are getting energised by this and putting money into primary prevention and the national action plan, which is all great. But these are community issues about how we actually understand respect, that respect gap. My daughter lives in a college in Melbourne, in a lovely residential college up in Parkville and she started university in 2018 in February. And with a month of her being there, you really see Dickson, who's just slightly older than Lottie, was walking home past Parkville, up through Carlton and was raped and murdered on an oval, 500 metres from where my daughter, I want to feel, is safe. Late last year, a young woman catching a tram home from a concert, just an event going home at 11 o'clock at night on the public transport system was also raped and murdered. So her time in Melbourne at university is bookended at the moment by young women who are no longer with us, who are dead and they're gone. And they were the victims of a more vicious attack that wasn't about a partner and the kind of violence we see inside domestic situations. But it all was about that respect gap, that lack of respect for women. And I chair something called the National Research Organisation for Women's Safety and ROSE. It's the co-ag-funded body that produces the evidence base for evidence to action on reducing violence against women and their children in our community. And last year we launched with our watch, the fourth instalment of the National Communities Attitude Survey on Australians' views about respect for women and violence against women. And that survey was fantastic in many respects because for the first time in four surveys, back from the early 2000s, the survey showed that Australians generally now care more about preventing violence against women than they ever have. But there were some disturbing trends, if you dug deep into the data, that actually said for many people still in our communities, men but also some women that still believe that some violence perpetrated on women is because of their fault, that they've done something to create that moment of that violence is okay. And some still believe that actually the move for full gender equality and the full respect for women in our communities was not something we should be worrying about really. We really didn't want that kind of change. It's worth having a look at the NCAS, the data, there's some really great community sheets and information sheets that you can have a look at. But they tell a story that we're moving positively to do good things about trying to fix this, but we've got to deal with the nub of the issue, which is about actually respecting the fact that women have an equal place in this society. And the last thing I'll say structurally is it's really become very surprising to me that it's only now we're realizing that we don't apply a gender lens to most of our investments at governments, at universities, by philanthropists, by businesses. We think we do. We think we know what we're giving to women and girls. Actually, there is very poor data on exactly what we give, what the money we invest in women and girls that then shows what the gap of the investment in women and girls for the purpose of an outcome. And this is a global issue. In fact, I'd encourage you to have a look at Bill and Melinda Gates' annual letter. They write a letter every year. This is their ninth year, I think, of writing the letter from their foundation. And they normally talk about the year they've just passed and give some views about it. This year they wrote a letter about the things that surprised them in 2018. It's a really fascinating letter and gender is just one part of it. But the thing that surprised them in gender was that they have been giving billions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to gender-related projects around the world. But they were staggered to discover that there has not been much of a mechanism globally of actually measuring the gender, putting a gender lens over how we invest generally. If you put that gender lens over investments or all government programs, all investments, you find a very big gap still. And we know that the dollars invested in women, wherever they are, has a mass escalating benefit to any economy, any society. So we're missing out on something, apart from just solving the issue. So what I'd like to do now, that's sort of my preach on the things that we've got to change, and it's a big job, but I'm really confident that, particularly given the number of young men and women in the room today, that if we set our targets right, set that mission. We can do this, but we need to be very serious about that ambition. So I thought what I'd do is just briefly, before we open to questions, is just share what it is like to be going into organisations, going into roles where there have never been women. And what that feels like for me, and it's probably a story more for the women in the room, but the men might find it interesting, given that it was men that I was joining to do this work and to do the broader work of the organisations I joined, and it was working with them to sort this out that I learned a lot from. And I'll go back to my comment on quota. So I was a quota appointment to the AFL Commission. 2004, the then chairman of the entire Football League said it was unconscionable for there to be a governing body with no women represented when almost half the people who enjoyed the sport were women and girls. And so he said, we're not going to fix this. A lot of his colleagues around Football Circle said, it'll come in time, we'll find someone, let it go. So he took this to an annual general meeting of the League. And thankfully, 13 of the then 16 clubs said, we will make a quota appointment. Three clubs though in 2004 or five said no, not ready for it. So it wasn't unanimous. But that decision by Ron Evans, who was the then chair of the board, to actually acknowledge that something needed to change and that it wasn't going to happen, I don't believe into this day that there'd be the three women there are today on that commission if we were still hoping, wishing and praying for a system to deliver a woman into that boardroom. Because I've sat in that boardroom and I know that the prevailing culture at the time was one of the guys in the room didn't know the kind of women that could sit at that table, but they knew a lot of men that could. And groups of people who are like minded and come from similar backgrounds, similar gender, similar ages, feel much more comfortable choosing people like them to come and join them as the seat becomes available. And that's what had happened in football over many, many years. So for them to find a woman, it wasn't going to happen naturally. Ron knew that. And so he had a headhunter go out and seek 10 women across the country. And he put us through our paces. We had to have law degrees. We had to be able to be good communicators, have commercial practice and understanding how business operated. We had to know and love the game and prove that through some tests and interviews as to whether we actually knew the game. I don't know if it bloke's ever been asked to prove if they know what a hanger looks like, but we did. And then we were put through interview after interview and it got down from 10 women to two. And then I was the very fortunate recipient of that position. And I wore that badge of being the quota with pride because it was a purposeful act to do something. But men hated it. They couldn't get around the fact that men hadn't been part of that process. And I was staggered after I joined the commission going to events like this and talking about why I love footy and why I like to be on the commission. And it was women that would come up to me to say, I would never have done what you did. It's disgraceful. You will never know if you're as good as the men because you will never test it against them. And that was the first part of change that I learned. My heart sank that the women who I thought as a group we would all be kind of wanting to get in there. But I realized that this issue of the quota and being a quota is very difficult for a lot of people, for women particularly, not just the men who don't think it's an appropriate way to balance things. And so I made it my job to talk to women about how proud you can feel as a quota appointment because we are going to break down barriers and you take the quota appointment on certain conditions. And one of them is that you just do the job really well. You get in there and prove that you are the right person for the job and you put the naysayers to one side, but then you commit to the people you've joined that you're not going to be the first and last. That's your job working with the organization to make sure there's another woman who joins you. So that was my deal with Ron Evans and then the subsequent chairman of the league, Mike Fitzpatrick, that the next person appointed would be a woman and it was. It was Justice Linda Desso, who is now the governor of Victoria. Pretty well credentialed person, I think. And it turned out that she was the other person on the list when I was appointed. And I think I got it because I was in Sydney and they got geographic diversity as well as gender diversity. But be that as it may, Linda and I became rock solid friends as the two women on the commission. And we had to find a way to work to then get another woman appointed and then make sure our voices were heard. And that process of change was not easy. We had to hold our tongues often. We had to listen to often, not in the commission room itself because they were very respectful men and I am a great fan of them and I'm fond of them as a group. But out in the broader industry, we heard things that were just terrible about women's role in sport and women's role in football. And in fact, when I first started raising the notion at the behest of women who were playing the game around the country, who didn't have a voice at the commission, when I first started raising the idea that perhaps we could have a women's competition, the responses I got from the men in the industry, I can't really say who you're here today because it was deeply flawed thinking about why women would want to play football. They had never seen a woman really go out and want to be an athlete in this game. They couldn't understand why a woman would want to be involved in contact sport and throw her body around. Now, I don't know about any of the women in the room here but I wish I had grown up in a time when I could throw my body around like men in contact sport because I would know the full power of my body. I didn't get to do that. The sports I played made me feel restricted and I loved watching men playing footy for the reason that it is thrilling and exciting and dynamic. And whilst I wasn't playing football as a young woman, a lot of women in the footy states were. But by the time they got to 15 or 16, there was nowhere to go. So they chose, they either gave up sport or they chose other sports and went on to be superstars. In the NBA in America, the WNBA, they became cricketers. They went and did things where they could have a pathway. So, but the men at the time said it's fantasy. The idea that we'd have women playing football, it's never gonna happen. It took 10 years but to have people like Susan Alberti putting their money in as an incredible philanthropist to the girls, to have all the women around the country giving us the information that Linda and I needed to work with the commission. For us to work at how we would take the chairman and the chief executive into the change rooms of a women's senior game so that they'd stop thinking of them as girls trying to be men and actually meet them on their terms as elite athletes, warming down, wanting to talk about the strategy of the game and how they played. And watching the scales fall from the eyes of men realizing that these women were just great elite athletes who loved the game just like they did. And they wanted to play like their dads, their brothers, their uncles, their grandfathers and they could play. And so fast forward 2017, we launched the AFLW season, sellouts all around the country. And that change program, it was hard. We had to be persistent about how it was developed and show great respect to the women involved. But just to give you a sense of what has happened because this was no longer about gender, this was about the future of the sport. Today, almost 550,000 girls and women across the country play Aussie rules. That has been increasing in the double digit figures, compounding every year since we said we would have a women's competition. A third of all total people who now participate in the AFL as participants, active players, a third of them are women and girls. It's gonna be a half before too long, I'm sure. And I tell you that story because there was a huge range of young women ready to play that game. They were sort of graduating from Auskick and junior footy ready to go in the same numbers as boys and then they were stopped. And it was actually a huge change program that got us to that point. And I was trying to find a reference for you that would give you the equivalent of the university. So today we know that 59% of bachelor degrees in Australia are held by women leaving institutions like this. But the drop-off of those, almost 60% of our undergraduates moving into their next part of their life is a drop-off in their opportunities compared to men. And the gender pay gap that comes almost immediately is profound. So I think of it in the same way you need change of the kind that we had about advocacy, determination, building a pathway, setting the precedent to actually enliven that for women so they could actually see themselves on that pathway. And it was tough. And I'm gonna close this with a little reference because I'm sure the younger women will know all about notorious RBG, from the notorious RBG, well, Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States. She's become a phenomena in later in her life, in her 80s, still in the court. But she's one of those women I look to and read about and read of to sort of give me a sense that change does take a long time. It takes perseverance, it takes tolerance, but it takes ambition. And it takes a bit of quirky humour along the way. So I was reading her book of her own speeches and her own reflections. And there's a beautiful moment where she reflects on the fact that when she joined the Supreme Court of the United States, she joined another woman who had been there already, Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice O'Connor. And she just says this, and this reminded me of what it was like to be on the AFL commission, or on any board I've joined as the first woman, as a quota, and the second or third women have come. This is what happens. This may be a story for the men as much as anyone, because I think it's universal, and I love the way she tells this little story. She says that court watchers have seen that women speak in different voices and hold different views just as men do. Even so, some advocates, each term, revealed that they had not fully adjusted to the presence of two women on the High Court bench. During oral argument, many a very distinguished council, including a Harvard Law School professor and more than one solicitor general, began his response to my question, this is to Justice Ginsburg's question of council, well, Justice O'Connor, sometimes when that happened, Sandra, that Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice O'Connor, would smile and crisply remind council, she's Justice Ginsburg, I'm Justice O'Connor. This is in the Supreme Court, this is in the middle of a matter, very big issues of state. Anticipating just such confusion in 1993, my first term as a member of the court, the National Association of Women Judges had t-shirts made for us. Justice O'Connor's read, I'm Sandra, not Ruth. Mine said, I'm Ruth, not Sandra. And I kind of think that Linda and I should have had exactly the same and maybe we should have worn them under our jackets and displayed them with pride. But it goes to show these are universal things that happen and with just that one story, you get the sense of just how hard change is and how getting a woman's voice heard, whether it's the Supreme Court of the United States, whether it's at this university, it's in football or sport, in climate change, in any of the fields where women are excelling and deserve to have their voice heard. Thanks a lot, I'm just going to go get the kids. No, please do, I'm sorry. Much more important. And so my journey is one of telling that story because for the women involved, it is tough. Don't be frightened of quotas, don't be frightened of being picked out, even if you don't think you're that woman that can do it, someone else believes you are, so get in there and do it. For the men, understand that our lives are different and when we join you to do things together, that we do bring different perspectives and we have to find a mutually respectful language that we can achieve these great goals. We should be proud together, the genders together, about this and really believe that that moonshot of gender equality, at least for Australia, is attainable. And let's start back casting and seeing how that would change. And it starts with events like this, you going away with your own course to action wherever you are in all of your communities and taking up all the challenges and opportunities that your university is giving you, whether it's the mentor walks, whether it's the feminist events, whether it's the unpaid leave or superannuation, we've just got to grab it and run with it. And then I have great hope that International Women's Day is doing its job. So thanks very much and I'd love to take your questions.