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SENATOR THE HON PENNY WONG LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION IN THE SENATE SHADOW MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS LABOR SENATOR FOR SOUTH AUSTRALIA GENDER EQUITY AND WOMEN IN THE WORKFORCE: THE CHALLENGE IN FRONT OF US INSEAD iW50 SEMINAR, SYDNEY WEDNESDAY, 2 MAY 2018 May I begin my presentation by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we are meeting, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and by paying our respects to their elders, past and present. (Acknowledgments omitted) It is a great pleasure to be with you all this afternoon as you celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the admission of women to INSEAD and to join you in celebrating the success of INSEAD’s women MBA graduates. This gathering of distinguished and successful women is both a tribute and a reminder: a tribute to your own energy and entrepreneurship, and a reminder of just how far the cause of women’s rights has progressed over the past fifty years. INSEAD is a distinguished school, recognised as one of, by some measures “the”, top global business schools. In terms of graduates’ incomes and the extent of professional networks, INSEAD enjoys a remarkable reputation. So, as graduates of the campus at Fontainebleau, Abu Dhabi, or Singapore, you have every right to be proud of and to celebrate your own personal achievements. Congratulations to each of you. As I was preparing my remarks for this afternoon, I reflected on the themes that have underpinned both my speeches on international development assistance and the addresses I have given to various assemblies of women and girls over the past few months. The fifth of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is – “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”. That is a deceptively simple goal, but it is a terrible fact that, across the developing world, discrimination against women and girls is a key barrier to development and a key contributor to poverty. The UN’s explanation of the goal sets out that: While the world has achieved progress towards gender equality and women’s empowerment under the Millennium Development Goals (including equal access to primary education between girls and boys), women and girls continue to suffer discrimination and violence in every part of the world. Gender equality is not only a fundamental right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. Providing women and girls with equal access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making will fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large. You would be justified in pointing out to me that my workplace – the national Parliament – is possibly one of the least diverse work places in the country. And although the Labor Party is on track to reach 50 percent women’s representation in the Parliament – having reached 48 percent following the election of Ged Kearney – we still have work to do before our party fully represents Australia in all of its diversity. Reaching this target isn’t just important symbolically. It’s important for two substantive reasons. Some of the proudest achievements of Labor Governments happened because women were pushing for reform – the National Disability Insurance Scheme, needs based funding for education, historic pay increases for social and community service workers. The second reason is more fundamental: having women at the Cabinet table means every policy discussion includes a perspective on how half our population will be affected. Without that voice decisions are often made that don’t benefit all Australians. It is true we are doing much better than our opponents, where just one in five of its members are female and diversity is lacking. In fact the stubborn homogeneity of the Coalition is a consistent feature of our political system. So too is their resistance to change, both passive and at times openly antagonistic. Recall the dismissal of Julia Gillard, Jenny Macklin, Tanya Plibersek, Nicola Roxon and I as a “handbag hit squad”; and “quota girls”. (I am always amused that quotas are dismissed as being anti-meritorious when gender based, but jealously defended when protecting National Party ministerial positions). As a progressive party, Labor recognises that we have a responsibility to better reflect the diversity of the community. The Federal Labor Caucus has three Indigenous members – Linda Burney in the House of Representatives and Malarndirri McCarthy and Patrick Dodson in the Senate. And with Dr Anne Aly we have the Federal Parliament’s first Muslim woman. But our Parliament demonstrably needs greater diversity among our women representatives, and that cannot happen until our political parties value diversity in practice. Similarly, we all need to work actively to ensure that all our workplaces better reflect the diversity of the broader community. But for all that still needs to be done here, the challenge is far greater in most of the developing world. In March, Plan International Australia released a particularly sobering report titled Half a Billion Reasons. On just two vectors – marriage age and secondary education participation rates – the report paints a confronting picture. In Bangladesh, 52 percent of girls are married by the age of 18. In Malawi, 46 percent of girls are married by the age of 18, while in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, 22 percent of girls are married by the age of 18 and in Indonesia, 18 percent are married by the age of 18. The figures on secondary school enrolment rates are similarly concerning. In Bangladesh, only 41 percent of girls make it to upper secondary school, while in Malawi, a mere 14 percent of girls attend upper secondary school. It’s not much better in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands where 18 and 27 percent respectively attend upper secondary school. Indonesia has best enrolment rate for girls, with 74 percent attending upper secondary school. We know that the flow-on benefits from investing in girls’ education are substantial. According to the World Bank, the return on one year of secondary education for a girl correlates with as high as a 25 percent increase in wages later in life. And the effects carry from one generation to the next: educated girls have fewer, healthier and better educated children. These figures illustrate the scale of the problem. They bring home the poignancy of words of Mary Jackson, one of the mathematicians whose abilities contributed critically to the success of NASA’s program to get John Glenn into orbit. Many of you would have seen Hidden Figures and would have winced at the institutional, physical and structural barriers that the central characters had to conquer. Her comment “We go from being our father’s daughters to our husband’s wives to our babies’ mothers” holds true in so many parts of the developing world. The best that can be said for gender equity in contemporary circumstances is that it remains a work in progress. There remain significant structural obstacles to equality of opportunity, equality in leadership, equality in recognition and, importantly, equality in remuneration. In my view, we face a range of major challenges that intersect. It is for that reason that gender equity is a complex problem: it is multidimensional and multifactorial. And because the problem has so many moving parts, it is difficult to ‘nail’ it in a single formula. The truth is that ‘complex’ problems have ‘messy’ solutions. There are six principal areas in which we need to push harder if we are to create a level playing field for women, not just here in Australia, but globally, as meets INSEAD’s aspirations in this domain. These six challenges are inter-related, which means that we can work with effect on six fronts at once. First, we must value difference, not just gender difference, but as we go forward we must celebrate ethnic, cultural, professional and occupational difference between women. Everyone in this room is in a unique position to argue for and deliver gender equity to Indigenous women, women from ethnic minorities, women with disabilities, and women from the more marginalised parts of our society. Diversity in leadership means we better reflect the experience of the whole in our decisions. Or to put it in the inverse: decision-making is not improved because certain parts of our community are excluded. All of us here have been fortunate enough to be given the educational and career opportunities denied to so many merely by circumstances of birth or economy. But with such good fortune comes great responsibility. This brings me to the second of the challenges – supporting and championing other women. Success is made up of many parts: ability, determination, opportunity, luck and more. And achievement is never a solo project. It always demands the support, encouragement or engagement of others. This means that we have a responsibility to proactively use our positions, our relationships, our networks, our experience and our insights to help other women achieve. To offer a career changing opportunity or make that all-important introduction, to open doors or offer seats at the table. So this is a personal commitment we each can make, to make a difference to individual women – to their opportunities and to their development. Many of us here undoubtedly has a debt to a woman who took us under her wing at some crucial stage in our careers. We should maintain and strengthen this virtuous circle. And in doing so also make sure we put enough effort into encouraging and mentoring women in disparate professions and employment, to connecting with women in different ethnic communities, and to helping women with disabilities find their place in the leadership circles of our nation.

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