Yesterday morning, the team at Franklin Shanks and a number of our clients attended the Australian British Chamber of Commerce (ABCC) International Women’s Day breakfast. The excitement amongst the crowd was palpable from the moment of entering the venue, for many attendees this event being their first large gathering since COVID-19 began. As one of the principal corporate sponsors, we were very excited to be part of such a significant event exploring conversations around building a bright future for women in the workforce.
The panel discussion was led by Sally Loane, CEO, Financial Services Council, supported by other notable guests including:
- Ming Long AM, Non-Executive Director
- Dr Meraiah Foley, Deputy Director of the Women & Work Research Group, University of Sydney
- Cathal O’Rourke, Managing Director, Laing O’Rourke
COVID sent everyone home at once which had immediate and lasting impacts upon and the family dynamic. As Ming highlighted, ‘Women in particular are electing to embrace their new productivity of working from home. As for men, there wasn’t really the opportunity to engage back into home life as they didn’t feel it was okay. Now having a taste of it we are starting to embrace working from home and breaking the moulds that have been sitting in place for years.” While younger parents are very keen to be back in the office, everyone is different. That’s what flexibility is - giving employees the choice of the model which works for their personal circumstances, as well as for the business. The promising trend we have seen during COVID was that managers realised work really does get done from home, a reversal from long-standing assumptions that workers at home aren’t productive.
Ming continued to drive the message home “9 to 5 needs to go out the window. We need leadership to establish how teams are going to work more effectively. The assumption that it is much easier to manage you by, if I see you, I can manage you. The problem before covid was leadership believed you couldn’t work from home because I can’t see you - so we need to break these status quos. I need all that language to go out the window and we need to talk more hybrid.”
Cathal added, ‘We were already a bit flexible pre-covid, leaving work early to pick up children but it was a bit of a secret, now we’re shining the light on it.’ He hopes the open and transparent shift to flexible working will remain permanent, but also stressed the need for companies to table the conversation around what works for all parties – such as requiring specific days in the office.
Dr Foley shared thoughts on the impact upon managers, observing that, “Managers have told us, we need training and time to learn how to manage in this different context…” Dr Foley thinks it is too early to say if this is a permanent change but if we want to lock in some of these changes it is going to start with leadership, and leaders need support in order to adapt to the changing landscape. Ming was quick to support this notion and summed it up in 3 words: Fail. Learn. Change.
Next, we moved on to the topic of the men to women ratio in the construction industry. There is a fantastic programme in which Cathal is involved in called STEM Plus, which attracts women in schools into the construction and engineering industry via hands on experience. Starting at early ages has ingrained the interest in the industry and yielded great results with graduates going on to become engineers, interns and construction lawyers.
The gender pay gap is another continuing problem and the social economic impact is great. Overall women are still paid 13% less than men and that is the best-case scenario at the moment. As Ming put it “Some women feel they need to stay in relationships due to a lack of financial independence or in roles they may not necessarily be happy in and I want to make a point that you will never get the best from these people”. The moral injury and trauma attached to individuals who feel like they can’t raise certain issues, what we lose as a result of this could be avoided if they had been safe in their role. What we weren’t aware of was the alarming fact that the fastest growing segment of homelessness in Australia is women over the age of 55 following divorces due to their lack of economic freedom.
An interesting thought raised by Dr Foley was occupational bias. How occupations dominated by men pay more than occupations dominated by women, think aged care and nursing. It is important to understand what that means and how it contributes to long-term things like superannuation and economic freedom. We looked as far as how we bring up pay increase discussions and Dr Foley raised that inequality applies to compensation conversations as well, citing a scenario of when women ask for a pay rise to a male managerial position, they are perceived as too forthright, overstepping their boundaries, contrary to the positive reaction their male counterparts receive.
The discussion ended on a strong note. We have all seen the recent government issue covering headlines which stemmed the conversation around misconduct in the workplace. The essence of the conversation was companies might believe that they have processes in place to protect their reputation and their employees. But the true way to measure the effectiveness of these policies is to see whether the impacted individuals are still with the company a year later. So, while we are encouraging women to join the industry are we pushing for a more equal and fair workplace? Are we really building bright futures for women in the workplace? We emphasis the message of ‘choose to challenge’.
For more information please visit https://www.internationalwomensday.com