8 March 2020, Melbourne, Australia
Happy International Women’s Week everyone!
It’s been 109 years since the first International Women’s Day was celebrated and, more than a century later, there’s still plenty of unfinished business we need to discuss today.
I would like to begin by acknowledging that we’re gathered on the traditional land of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to elders past and present.
Modern Melbourne is built on 60,000 years of continuous Aboriginal history – that is a breathtaking thought, and awesome in the true sense of the word.
In this week, I pay special tribute to our female elders past and present and emerging female leaders. Their stories are an essential part of us and must be remembered as we grow.
Melbourne has been praised for nearly a decade as one of the world’s most liveable cities. But is this the case for women? Is it a good city for women?
I would love to be able to say that Melbourne is the world’s most liveable city for women.
But first we need to do a few measurements.
Let’s start with the question: what’s good for women? Because what’s good for women will be good for Melbourne.
First of all, financial security:
Do women have access to good employment opportunities in our city?
Pathways with choices and promotions?
Do we earn enough to pay for essentials, to be independent at any age?
Equally important: personal wellbeing and security.
Do we feel safe and respected in our city?
Can we move about free from abuse and harassment?
Is our community supportive of us, regardless of our age, race, religion, sexuality or disadvantage?
If we’re as good as we think we are, then we have a story worth sharing with the world.
If not, we need to put women at the centre of our thinking and figure out the gaps, blind spots and failures. And that story might be even more worthwhile sharing with the world.
Let’s put our city to the test. I love a challenge.
Every woman in this room already knows the report card is going to be very mixed.
My story
I’ll give an entirely personal perspective to start with.
I have grown up in Melbourne with every advantage. A loving family, a good education, great employment opportunities, networks of friends.
You couldn’t wish for a luckier life. When I got cancer in my 30s, I had the best doctors and health system in the world to look after me. Very bad luck and very good luck – I came through it - and I don’t take much for granted these days.
With all of these advantages, a lot of opportunity has come my way. Don’t get me wrong - there’s been plenty of sexist behaviour and some structural barriers along the way, but not enough to cripple my sense of self or halt my momentum.
So for thousands of middle class women with dreams, ambitions and a solid work ethic – Melbourne is a city rich with possibilities, unquestionably a good city.
But I have more recently begun to see that we are not a perfect city.
Almost to two years to the day, the opportunity came my way to throw my hat in the ring to become Lord Mayor of Melbourne.
Politics was not something I had anticipated or contemplated before.
I campaigned and won - and in my excitement, turned up to work three days early – but that’s another story.
I’d never been inside Town Hall before. The first thing I noticed was the gargantuan portraits of Victorian gentlemen adorning the vast corridors and stately rooms of our civic centre. Lord Mayors of the 20th century were more humbly displayed in photographs.
The headcount was very telling. Out of 104 portraits, 101 were men. Just 3 were women women, including me. Three, white, middle class women. Over 177 years, women have led this city for a grand total of 4 years. It’s hard to believe I’m the longest serving with less than 2 years under my belt.
So straight away we know there’s a massive gap in Melbourne’s political and civic fabric.
I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of Lecki Ord or Winsome McCaughey, our first 2 female Lord Mayors in 1987 and ’88 respectively. Why didn’t I know their names? Why didn’t I know their stories? I rang them and invited them to Town Hall. No one had invited them to Town Hall or called on their civic expertise since leaving office.
These two women played a pivotal role in modernising Melbourne at the time when our city was suffering from a population deficit. Melbourne in the mid-‘80s was a drab and empty place, hollowed out once workers left for the day and headed home to the suburbs.
Lecki and Winsome implemented Postcode 3000, a policy to attract people back to the centre. They transformed our city. Now we are vibrant, exciting, industrious – voted the world’s most liveable city for nearly a decade. The pulsating centre attracts residents from all over the world. Within the decade Melbourne will be Australia’s biggest city. Their vision and leadership should be celebrated, but unless we tell their story and mention their names, Lecki Ord and Winsome McCaughey’s legacy is invisible. It is lost.
I knew so little about the female movers and shakers of Melbourne from just 30 years ago, I wondered what other wonderful women were missing from our collective memory. Plenty as it turns out – in the short version of Melbourne’s history - and the long version - our 60,000-year Aboriginal history.
If we do another headcount of statues and monuments around the city of Melbourne, there are 23 men and 2 women - Queen Victoria is one of them.
On Swanston Street alone, we’ve got Matthew Flinders, Burke and Wills, Sir Redmond Barry, 3 businessmen and a bronze dog named Larry LaTrobe.
So where are the women? Did they sit idly by with their parasols chatting about the weather as men built the city? At this point, the name Madame Brussels is often trotted out. She gets a lot of attention for running a small business at the top end of town, a popular service provider for men, and good on her. A laneway is named after her. It’s a colourful cameo, but who were the real stars of the era?
Unfortunately, women have been discounted or erased as city shaping leaders in the story of Melbourne.
So I’m going to tell you some of their stories today.
Stories are important
From the 1850s, Melbourne grew from a small town to a city of more than half a million people in just 10 years in the rush to our famous goldfields. It was thirsty work all that prospecting, and Melbourne was a city of pubs and inns. At least 50 percent of them were owned by or licensed to women. Publicans, by law, had to live on the premises. Authorities believed women would run “a more orderly house” and have a calming effect on drunk patrons. It was a golden opportunity to get ahead for widows, deserted wives and working class women without an education.
Running a business, in any era, requires grit and the women were hard at it from day one. Food, beer, wine, champagne and lodgings – it was rough and ready but it set the foundation for modern Melbourne’s extraordinary food and wine scene. Our pub culture was the beginning of our modern tourism industry and women played a founding role. How about a monument, a mural, a painting – these enterprising ladies should be celebrated.
Our second city-shaping hero is Vida Goldstein. Not long after Australia became a unified nation in 1901, our young country became big news across the world when the vast majority of Australian women won the right to vote and – even more shocking - the right to stand for election.
Melburnian Vida Goldstein was the driving force behind that hard-won change.
She was revered internationally as the leader of the “votes for women” movement and invited to the Oval Office by US President Teddy Roosevelt because he “wanted to see what an enfranchised woman looked like”.
He met a tall, intelligent, witty woman, passionate about issues affecting “mothers, wives and children” to quote Vida. In other words, serious economic and social policy. She addressed Congress and travelled to the US, the UK and Europe on speaking tours. When she came home, she was among the first four women to stand for federal Parliament. She lost, and tried 4 more times, without success.
But each campaign, she fired up the national conversation about wage equality, about the right to be safe and free from violence in the home, about women’s rights in general and women’s responsibility to step into the political arena: all issues that are still top of our agenda today in the fight for respect and gender equality.
A hundred years on we’re still having the same discussion. Either Vida was way ahead of her time or we are taking too long to make change.
In 1907, Justice Henry Higgins handed down one of the most important judgements in Australia’s modern history. The Harvester case established the right to a basic minimum wage for every worker – another bold reform that gained international headlines.
Melbourne historian, Professor Clare Wright has unearthed evidence that it was Vida Goldstein who provided the detailed research on living standards which underpinned this judgement. It famously found that a “fair and reasonable wage” should be enough to support a wife and 3 children in “frugal comfort” based on the cost of clothing, food, housing and other essentials. That certainly sounds like Vida’s work.
Vida died in 1949, without tribute or recognition. There’s a park bench dedicated to her in Portland where she was born. In the 1980s the electorate of Goldstein was named after her – but it’s not something that captures or promotes her story. This lady needs her story in lights.
Our third leading lady is Zelda. Fast forward to 1969 and working women are fighting for equal pay.
Zelda D’Aprano was 40 years old, a dental nurse who had had a range of jobs in factories, hospitals and now as a clerk at the Meatworkers Union. In all of these jobs Zelda had been paid a fraction of her male co-workers’ salary. In all of these jobs she’d asked for equal pay and found herself sacked on more than one occasion for her impertinence.
In 1969 the Court of Arbitration was hearing an Equal Pay test case brought by the Meatworkers Union, Zelda’s employer.
She said: “There we were, the poor women, all sitting in Court like a lot of cows in the sale yards, while all the men out front presented arguments as to how much we were worth. I felt humiliated, belittled and degraded, not only for myself, but for all women.”
Technically, the case did deliver equal pay. The court ruled that equal pay would apply where a woman was doing exactly the same work as a man - on the basis that cheaper female labour might cost a man his job.
It was the most hollow of hollow victories. In the meat industry, as in most industries, there were no or very few women doing exactly the same work as men. Qualified women were relegated to support roles and, in the public service, required to resign upon pregnancy.
Zelda, fed up with being polite and ladylike, chained herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building the next day, in protest.
She said “I was convinced that genteel meetings at the city square would never achieve anything. Women would have to fight for what they wanted.”
A policeman asked her how she felt about being the only woman prepared to protest like this, in other words, wasn’t she embarrassed?
She told him: “…today it was me, tomorrow there will be two, then four women, and it will go on until all women are demanding their rights.”
And she was right. She was joined by other women fed up with the gap in wages and respect.
Zelda’s radical protest made the news. Guess what happened next? The union sacked her for being too outspoken.
She went on to lead the women’s liberation movement in 1970s Melbourne, encouraging women to be bolder and more activist. They made a point of paying only 75% of the tram fare because women earned 75% of men’s wages. They organised pub crawls to protest against a law that only allowed women to drink in the ladies’ lounge. They organised the first pro-choice rally in 1975.
She said: “Almost all people, given the circumstances, can perform heroic deeds.”
Zelda was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001 and died a couple of years ago.
Statues are important
I think Zelda deserves a statue. I know what you might be thinking ... statues are a bit quaint, old fashioned, a place for birds to do their business.
But actually statues, monuments, plaques and pictures in public spaces are important, because storytelling is important.
Social researchers and historians tell us that these visual representations of leaders and trailblazers influence the collective psyche of a community. In simple terms they are storytelling devices, singling out which people and events are important and worth knowing in the history of our town. They signify authority, respect, reverence, credibility, importance and gravitas.
When only men and male deeds are given civic and cultural visibility, there is an impact on women. Unconscious bias seeps in.
The more women are represented publicly, the more authority and respect they receive. This permeates through society, right through to the way women are viewed and how they view themselves, how they perceive their own actions and value their own lives, including within their own homes.
I wonder, if we close the respect gap, will it help close the wage gap?
The pay gap
That brings me back to the question of why the pay gap is still so wide, 13.9% nationally, 50 years after Zelda’s “radical” protest?
Here we are, men and women, still having the same conversation. In 2020, women are earning around a thousand dollars less per month than men, on average full-time earnings.
Before telling others to get onto it, I thought I’d better check the progress of my own organisation, which brought in a raft of gender equality policies in 2015.
The stats tell me the City of Melbourne is a good place to work if you’re female.
As of February 2020, 60% of our employees are women - that’s more than a thousand employed at the City of Melbourne.
Just over half our management team is female. Just over half of our executive team is female. So in terms of seniority and remuneration, women are thriving in this organisation.
Our pay gap, last reviewed in 2018, was 3.9%. With so many women in senior roles, that gap might have closed completely now.
There are some gender imbalances. Male dominated areas include:
▪ Technology Services (70% male)
▪ On-street Compliance (65% male)
▪ And Capital Works (59% male)
but all have improved in their ratios over 5 years. Only Infrastructure, with 70% men, has gone backwards
Female-dominated areas feature:
▪ Community Services (94% female)
▪ And customer relations (71% female)
Only Property Services has flipped from male to female dominated with 56% women in 2020.
The respect gap
The City of Melbourne also has a set of about 10 policies designed to close what I call the ‘respect gap’.
• We participate in numerous public events supporting the elimination of violence against women, provide training to support employees who have experienced family abuse and we offer 20 days paid leave a year.
• Our sexual harassment policies and codes of conduct are clear. However the legal system needs to be brought up to speed to meet community expectations.
• Paid parental leave is de-gendered, recruitment panels are gender balanced, all roles are flexible.
• We measure the gaps in our pay equity and we pay an extra $500 per year in super contributions for women, to recognise the significant imbalance.
I think understanding and closing the ‘respect gap’ inside and outside all of our workplaces could go a long way towards making our community safer, fairer and more encouraging for all women.
But how much wider are these gaps for women who don’t have access to the well-protected, well paid jobs in government or larger corporates and established institutions or industries? For women who didn’t have the advantages that I had growing up in Melbourne?
What does the wage and respect gap mean for the women I see sleeping rough in our city? Has the wage and respect gap led them into a state of their homelessness? The answer is yes - we know that family break-up, violence and low paid work are all factors for women experiencing homelessness.
What about migrant women facing language barriers or racial prejudice?
What about young women making ends meet in casual jobs and shift work?
Is Melbourne a good city – a good employer, a thoughtful, inclusive community, a caring and safe environment for these women?
Does anyone here know the name Lady Gladys Nicholls, one of our leading Aboriginal activists?
From the 1940s to the 1970s, her community work around the inner city, especially caring for young, homeless, destitute Aboriginal girls was legendary and should not be forgotten.
Lady Gladys at least has a statue, our only local woman. Arm-in-arm she stands in bronze with her husband in the Parliament Gardens. She was cherished by the community.
Our Aboriginal women were not even counted as citizens until 1967. They have faced systemic disadvantage on a crushing scale. Are we a good city for them yet?
The way forward
I believe the Melbourne I represent wants to be a better city for all of these women. We are not perfect, but if we understand where the gaps and failures are, we can do a lot to consciously create opportunity and a fair go, so no woman is left behind as our city grows and prospers. This is my ambition.
When I think deeply about our priorities as a council, I want to embed a strategy that says you are welcome here, you are safe here, you can find a job here, you can relax and enjoy yourself here - and you will be respected here.
Everyone belongs in Melbourne. I want women to feel that this is a good city for them.
Leadership is important. I urge all of you to use your platforms and networks to push the conversation harder, to disrupt and create a new status quo so that it serves all women fairly.
Today I want you to return to your organisation, your community clubs, your own family and think about the stories large and small that deserve to be told about women – your mothers, grandmothers, aunts, daughters and friends. Some will be personal stories and others will be yarns about the accomplishments or agony of others.
I’ll finish today with a modern story unfolding before our eyes. The AFLW is a beautiful expression of the change I’m talking about. A man’s game no longer, women have taken to the field, and it’s a level playing field that includes all women, with no barriers of race, language, sexuality or class in the way.
It’s wonderful that the next generation of kids have some 300 women running around in club colours providing role models and inspiration. There’ll be new stories and legends – and already there’s a prototype for a statue - Tayla Harris kicking sky high in Federation Square, kicking sexism out of the park.
The AFLW is a very Melbourne creation. I think it embodies our values as a city. It is proof that Melbourne can be a very good place for all women.
Conclusion
Vida, Lady Gladys, Zelda, Lecki, Winsome and Tayla: thank you for being bold, radical, unflinching and determined.
Your words and deeds have helped Melbourne women - and men - find their voice. Unafraid and unashamed, you showed us how to speak up. You shaped our values and our city. You made this a better place, a fairer place for everyone.
We’re not perfect, we’ve got a way to go but we know how to make change and that’s your gift to us. On International Women’s week 2020, we salute you.