Recording: Leading the Future for CARM Women

DR KUMI DE SILVA: OK.  Well, welcome, everyone, to this event, which is part of Inclusion Festival: Leading the Future For CARM Women.  My name is Kumi de Silva and I'm the Gender Equity Programs Manager at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at UTS.  It's so lovely to see all of you here.  I want to acknowledge that we are meeting here today on the land of the Gadigal people and acknowledge the Elders past and present as the custodians of knowledge on this and where UTS belongs.  I want to also extend that respect to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people here, or listening in online when we finally get an audio recording for this.

So before I introduce our lovely panelists here ‑ you'll have to wait for a minute or so before I tell you who they are ‑ I just wanted to kind of show you a couple of graphs or pictures.  So this is from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, and the pyramid you see is that women make up more than 50% of the Australian work force, and then as we go up the top of the pyramid, which is seen as the leadership ladder in this context, we have very few women at the top. There's 22% there.  And the other graph with the figures again shows you that about 22% of CEOs are women.

But when I thought about this ‑ I want to set the scene by saying when I looked at who I think are women of colour making an impact in the world that I live in, I see all these wonderful women out there: Marlene Kanga, the President of the World Federation of Engineering Organisations, and she set up benchmarks for engineering degrees globally so that anyone who does an engineering degree in any of the countries that have signed up to that agreement, your qualifications are going to be recognised.  Now, I think that's a fantastic thing to do. We have Professor Vicki Chen, who is our Provost, leading the way; people like Megan Davis at UNSW and Nidal Eon(?), who is a human rights advocate.  Sarah Ibrahim founded the Racial Justice Centre, which is also doing really great stuff, and people like Faezeh Karimi, who is the Director for Women in Engineering and IT here at UTS as well. 

But then also there are other kinds of leaders. This year I went to the Sydney Comedy Festival to an event called Brown Women Comedy, and that was the most amazing thing.  It was all these brown women just laughing at ourselves and the rest of the world, and it was just the most beautiful thing.  So if you go to any comedy festivals, usually there's one woman. You're lucky if they're a woman of colour.  You'd never have two women of any kind on any of these shows.  So to me, these are also people who are leading the way.  They might not fall into that particular category, but that's certainly who they are.

So I'm going to introduce to you now our panel. We have Dr Celina McEwen right next to me here.  Celina is a Senior Researcher at the UTS Business School.  She has an interdisciplinary background in social sciences, adult education and information science.  She draws on theories, methods and processes as well as on her lived experience as a multicultural woman ‑ French, English and West Indian ‑ to examine issues of social justice and inequality at work and in higher education.  Welcome, Celina, and thank you for being on the panel.  (Applause). 

And then right next to Celina we've got Leila Khanjaninejad.  Leila is a Lecturer in the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. She's passionate about gender equity and inclusion in male‑dominated sectors and the impact of organisational policies on equity. Her expertise lies in development studies and social sustainability.  In the past 10 years she has conducted and contributed to research projects on women in management and leadership, sport and higher education STEM fields.  So welcome, Leila.  (Applause).

Then we have Leila Subijano, who is the Senior Engagement and Events Officer ‑ oh, sorry.  'Leah'.  See, I knew this was going to happen.  Out of all the names we had to have Leila and Leah together, and my brain is going to be dysfunctional!  I'm really sorry, Leah.  Leah Subijano is a Senior Engagement and Events Officer at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion.  She's also a freelance artist, dancer and performer with a deep passion for culture and spirituality.  Her mission is to fuse together her skills and passions to co‑create a better world where historically marginalised communities, especially women of colour, can authentically be themselves, take up space and be free of oppression.  So welcome, Leah.  (Applause). 

So you would have seen a little handout on your seats and we are going to address what I think is the elephant in the room at the moment, which is this label CARM ‑ Culturally and Racially Marginalised ‑ which is a new term that the Diversity Council of Australia has coined. I must admit that when I first read the report and saw this label, I went: What? I'm not a CARM woman, even if there's an L in the middle there, right!  So what is this about?  But I must say that I have warmed up to this term now.  But we're not here to talk about what I think.  So I'm going to put to it the panel.  I don't mind who goes first.  What do you think of this term: culturally and racially marginalised? 

DR CELINA McEWEN: Thanks for the question because I had the same reaction.  When I saw the 'CARM', I went: resistance!  Obviously I still don't relate to the label.  I am not a CARM woman, but I think it's a really useful term to describe a particular situation that happens to women of various backgrounds in organisations that find themselves just blocked from the sphere of influence.  So I think it's a really, really useful term, although at the same time I would probably prefer the term 'intersectionality' that looks at the structural barriers that happen for people who are seen as belonging to various categories of difference. And so women like us might fall under those categories.  For me that is a more useful term because it doesn't point to the person, which then implies that it's up to them to fix the problem, but it points to the system where the issue lies. So for me, that's a very interesting one.  I might leave it at that and then pass it on. 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: I did not feel very comfortable with the CARM as well, specifically with the marginalisation, because there is a sort of stereotype and it feels like taking the power from those women or those specific groups.  But I do understand that that's the bigger umbrella that DCA is trying to introduce to cover the majority of groups. Previously it was CALD, which included linguistically diverse.  We have so many different terms that speak about that, that speak about diversity of different types of women, including women of colour, but I think that they came up with the idea of CARM ‑ culturally and racially marginalised women ‑ as a bigger umbrella to cover all sorts of marginalised groups under that. 

I was thinking about that and I personally would prefer to have it as 'culturally and racially diverse groups' rather than 'CARM'.  I would like to have that, yes.  But I think that as a bigger umbrella, it makes sense to cover the wider range of women. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: That's really interesting. Leah, do you have a view on this? 

LEAH SUBIJANO: Yeah, I hate it! Joke.  I don't hate it.  It's very useful and I'm glad that the DCA came up with a term which divides racially privileged and racially marginalised because that's what we need when we do our research. That's what we need when we're talking about race relations and power structures.  So I think it's very useful in that context, that we have a term that specifically points out racial marginalisation. 

But for me personally, I'm not out there in the world being like, "Yeah, I'm a CARM woman!  I am culturally and racially marginalised".  I don't relate to that at all.  I think using that term still centres whiteness, with, with my identity, I'm not about that.  I come from a lineage of thousands of years of women and men ‑ gender‑diverse people from the islands, the Luzon islands, which is in the Philippines, and that's how I prefer to identify myself.  I prefer to identify myself as a Filipino woman who was born and raised in the place that we know as Australia, and that's how I navigate this space.  So whilst 'CARM' is very useful in research and looking at power structures and race relations, it's not a term I like to label myself with. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Yes, thank you. 

DR CELINA McEWEN: Can I expand on what you just said, Leah?  I think one of the other issues with the term is that it assumes a fixed identity, and CARM is really a situated phenomenon, so we might be seen as CARM or labelled as CARM at work, but outside we are anything but.  So it really depends on the context.  I think that tends to be forgotten, that it is a situated context, and I might be CARM in this country and not in another country or in my community or whatever.  And so we need to remember that as well when we use it. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: And maybe we need to remember that in the conversations we have when we use these terms, because I'm going to put my institutional hat on now and say that we used this term for the first time, the demographic data, in the recent Wellbeing Survey, if anyone did that survey, and I'm really pleased to see that 89% of the survey respondents actually responded to that voluntary question, and to me that says a great deal that we can ask this question.  We had around 20% who said yes to that question, but 89% of survey respondents actually said something for that.  So I think that's important from a context when we're looking at staff wellbeing or student wellbeing.  We need a way of gathering that information somehow.  So, in context, we need to keep that going, I think, but again, keep that broader conversation around what it really means to all of us.  So thank you for that.

So now we're going to go on to the next kind of word in our title, because I'm very structural in my thinking so there has to be a linear progression with these things.  So that was leadership.  We are all here to talk about leadership.  And we talk about leadership a lot at UTS, but I wanted to ask each of you ‑ and Leila, Leila in the middle, I got your name right this time ‑ I might start with you.  What does leadership mean to you and what do you see it as? 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: Well, when we look at the examples of great contemporary leaders, we can see that the majority of them have certain characteristics in common, like having the vision or being accountable, being emotionally intelligent, but I think that what makes a leader great is ‑ and we are living in a culture that leadership tends to be very much performance oriented, getting the task done, but I think that considering the globalised context that we are living in and the multicultural society that we are living in here in Australia, I think that the ability of a leader ‑ or a great leader is someone who has the ability to bring people together and is not only performance‑oriented because it's very important to get the task and job done, but being people‑oriented as well, and have the openness and willingness, most importantly, to hear different voices and bring them together. I think that's one of the most characteristics ‑ because we are living in an ever‑changing world and it's only in this way that a great leader would be able to adapt into the changing environment, and specifically with all of these sustainability issues that we are facing, specifically societal issues that I'm interested in. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Wonderful.  I think that bringing different voices in is quite profound and I think that's always left as the additional thing that a leader does. Leah? 

LEAH SUBIJANO: So I Googled this.  So I put in Google "What is a leader?", and the top results, which was from Harvard Business Review, I think Tony Robbins was up there, it was all business‑oriented pages.  They had something generic like: bringing people together to achieve a set goal or objective.  And I was like hmm, alright, whatever.  So then I Googled: "What is leadership from an Indigenous perspective?", and the sources that came up on the first page were both Australian, American sources and what they had there was that community and the betterment of the community at its core.  So then I forgot about both of those definitions and tuned into what leadership means to me, and this is a personal thing.  You won't find it on Google.  This is just my own interpretation of what I think ‑‑ 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: That's what we're here for: unique perspectives. 

LEAH SUBIJANO: Well, I think a leader is someone who embodies their values and empowers people for collective good.  I think collective good is a really, really important part of that because, yes, you can be a leader and you might be making lots of profit and making lots of money, but is what you're doing necessarily for the betterment of the entire collective? So I think someone who can empower others to move forward and set meaningful change for the next generation, that is what I see as a leader. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Great.  Thank you. 

DR CELINA McEWEN: I think you might find there's a bit of a theme going here.  For me it's a leadership.  There's lots of studies around leadership and it comes back what the hero who's going to lead the nation towards whatever, whatever.  For me that is not leadership. I probably wouldn't even use the word "leader".  I would use the word "leadership" because it's practice, it's a relational practice; it's about what you do with others, for others sometimes, but very much with others.  So for me it's part educational role, part facilitation/collaboration, carrying projects, leading, initiating, but always with and for others.  So, as such, I see it as solidarity.  It is really about that collective action, which is really core to the leadership practice that I understand and that I look up to, rather than the isolated hero that just leads us blindly towards something. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: That's really wonderful. And listening to the three of you, what I was thinking was how have we forgotten that this is the important thing, as we climb up that pyramid that was up there, how have people forgotten that this is the important thing that we need to be doing? 

So both you, Celina and Leila, are academics within this space in your different specialities, so I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit ‑ maybe, Celina, I'll start with you ‑ a little bit about your research work and academic work first, and then we'll go on to talking about how you navigate leadership spaces yourselves as well. 

DR CELINA McEWEN: Thanks for that.  So we have done a little bit of research around this, leadership diversity but also women in care work, and so this is within the UTS Business School.  So I've worked with people like Carl Rhodes and Alison Pullen, who's at Macquarie Uni, and as part of the UTS Ageing Research Collaborative, just to give you a bit of context.  I'm not an isolated researcher.  I work with a lot of other people.

So what we have found is that we have done quite a few studies in organisations of different kinds, different sectors, different sizes.  What we have found is ‑ so I will use the word "CARM women" in this context, not to identify particular women but because of the situation that happens for them when they're seeking leadership positions.  So what we found is that quite a few CARM women probably are not aspiring to leadership positions for various reasons, either because that's not what they want to do, they don't aspire to that, or because there's a lot of blocking within the organisation, and we have seen a lot of blocking happening.  So in that instance, we see women go elsewhere to try and seek promotion elsewhere. 

What we've also seen is that when people who are CARM women stay in an organisation and are keen to seek promotion and go to a leadership position, they might be promoted to those positions either on a temporary basis, to "act as" ‑ and we have seen a lot of that happening; however, to act as a leadership position until a better‑suited candidate comes along.  So that's always the very interesting component there in that equation.  We've also seen CARM women appointed to leadership positions but in times of crisis because we know that there's this assumption that "They're so happy to get a leadership position, they'll do anything", and so they're appointed to these leadership positions ‑ these are broad generalisations, right; we know that is not always like this, but these are the categories that have emerged of situations and instances that we have seen over and over again ‑ so they're appointed to these positions: "They do well, great.  They don't do well?  Great. We can blame them".  And there's lots of literature around that. Another instance ‑‑ 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: That's what they call a glass cliff, right? 

DR CELINA McEWEN: Very slippery, exactly. The other situation we've seen is CARM women appointed to specifically dedicated leadership positions in diversity and inclusion because that's great, you know; you have a visible representation of the work that the organisation is doing.  Maybe good work or not, doesn't really matter, but you have the visible representation.  So we've seen lots of cases like this. 

What's also emerged is that there remains a really big issue for CARM women getting into leadership positions, for those who want it, for several reasons; one, because intersectionality is not recognised and so we say, "OK, we're doing work along these various categories of difference", so we're to advance women here, we're trying to advance cultural diversity here, but we don't look at the intersection and we never look at class.  Class is the other thing that kind of slips away.  So you find that if CARM women are appointed to particular leadership positions and you kind of look a little bit closer at the class, what they do outside of work, who they hang out with, in quite a few organisations we've noticed that class matters.  Class kind of is a trump card for the rest.  So if you have the right class, great, OK, that's fine, and bonus in terms of representation and things like that.  But class is really the missed thing. So the categories of differences and the hierarchies in differences are quite big barriers in organisations, things that we don't see. 

The other thing that also are barriers to CARM women being appointed or promoted to leadership positions are this idea that leadership has really an idolised form of equality; you put the policies in place and everybody else does the work and things will happen.  So there's this disjunction between the policies, the discourses, the rhetoric and the practices.  And then there's this other disjunction, especially in organisations that see themselves as doing the work really well, like they see themselves as champions of D&I, they have these two faces of D&I.  So they have the external D&I and then they have the internal one.  So it doesn't quite match.  However, a lot of people kind of see one as equal to the other, and so that's another reason why we have these issues and why CARM women are not able to get to those leadership positions when they want to. There's more to it, but I'll probably leave it at that.  I can share afterwards if you want. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: I've just been sitting here nodding at everything you've been saying and I'm sure for most of you it rings true.  Leila, from your work? 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: The work that I've been doing is mostly about leadership, sport and women in STEM fields. While we were talking about the networking in class, I was thinking about the importance of social capital, specifically when it comes to leadership; the network that you have, the people that you spend your after‑hours or during the work with. So these all build up your social capital, which is very important.

In the very male‑dominated fields of sport and STEM, that is something that is really lacking for women.  I don't have any specific data about CARM women in sport and STEM fields to present but the fact is that when we look at the statistics, government is the sector that has the largest number of culturally diverse women working there, and we have around 49, something, women directors working in government, but only less than 6% of them are culturally and racially diverse. It just speaks a lot.  When it comes to very male‑dominated fields of sport and STEM, the social capital that you have plays a very important role, specifically in sport.  Even though I don't have any statistics about how many CARM women we have there, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is significantly low because these are all the components that are extremely important in getting to the top level positions as well. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: So do you think there's a research project in there, research proposal?   

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: Definitely. Definitely. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Maybe there's somebody in the audience or a few of us who might want to help you with that. So, Leah, you bring a very different perspective into this in your own experience of how you choose to live your life.  So can you tell us a little bit about how you navigate these two very different aspects of your life? 

LEAH SUBIJANO: Yes.  So I work here at the Centre for Social Justice. Shoutout.  Love you guys.  And I also am a freelance artist, where I feel like I'm two very different people in those spaces.  I guess some similarities that I have in working across the two is that I do my best in both.  I love collaboration and team work and I think I have a positive optimism that I like to bring to the teams and to the groups that I work with. But I think in the artistic space ‑ and I'm not going to say creative spaces, all of them ‑ but the ones that I navigate ‑ so I do Tahitian and hula dancing and I am part of an all‑women samba reggae rhythm collective, and then about a decade ago, I used to dance hip hop and Jamaican dancehall.  So they're very cultural.  Something that I've realised is that what is super‑empowering about all of these spaces is that culture and uniqueness are all at the core of it, and as well as that, they're all in ways forms of resistance.  Like these traditional styles that I dance, the colonisers tried to ban them, and so by reclaiming that and dancing that, that is a form of resistance, and hip hop, dancehall and samba reggae ‑ I won't get into the history of it but they were all created as a response to oppression. I think what's very powerful ‑ and I'm not from any of these cultures, by the way ‑ I think what's very powerful is that it is that culture and history are central to that space.  So what I'm trying to do is trying to merge the two, like how can we have that empowerment in a workplace, a 9 to 5 workplace setting? I haven't figured it out.  But I think MWN is one form of that.  I think that's my answer. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: So what does leadership look like in those spaces then, that you see that's different from the more university structures? 

LEAH SUBIJANO: That's an interesting question and Christine ‑ oh, Christine is not here ‑ but she showed me something on Instagram and I was like: Yes! So when we think of leadership, we see in the slide that Kumi put on before, it's a pyramid, it's a triangle, and it's about getting a seat at the table, a seat at the table at the top, and in a lot of other cultural spaces or artistic spaces, it's not that.  The meme that Christine showed me, it said "F your table" and it's an image of brown women sitting on the floor, like weaving.  So I think that is how I envision leadership. In a lot of the creative spaces I'm in, it has a lot more collaboration, like the hierarchy is a lot flatter, and so decision making and ways of doing and being are a lot more inter‑relational and less hierarchical.  So my vision ‑ I don't know how this is going to come about ‑ is to change leadership from a pyramid structure to more of a circle structure. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Yeah.  Beautifully said.  Thank you.  I might go to Celina and Leila.  So you have this academic perspective but you also have to live your lives within this structure.  How have you navigated the leadership space and what have you done to make things easier for yourselves perhaps? 

DR CELINA McEWEN: Probably not well! (Laughs), given where I sit in the organisation. Oh, is this recorded? Oh, damn. (Laughter).  So what I find interesting in this question is for me it depends on how you're perceived.  So it goes back to that relationality, right? So you are CARM women because that's how people see you.  As I said, I don't carry that label.  I don't relate to it at all.  But it depends.  So depending on the leadership, how they perceive you ‑ if they see you as a hindrance, if they see you as a threat, if they see you as a benevolent worker who's going to do the work because, you know Black women don't break, they bend, or if they're not going to see you at all because you're totally invisible, so I think that the navigating around within leadership is kind of a response, which probably goes to that bit of the CARM, which is the marginalised.  It's a response because you're not in the sphere. You are not able to influence within that sphere.  So you are around, yes.  You're on the periphery and you are responding to how you are perceived, and that's the bit that's really difficult, just to break that perception. 

I think things that we've been doing ‑ and the Multicultural Women's Network is one of those ‑ is to create a new space. So again the space is not within the space of power but it's kind of a little bit more visible and a little bit closer and it has that solidarity element, which means that we're a little bit stronger.  We are visible ‑ well, we've always been visible to each other ‑ but we make ourselves a little bit more visible.  So I think that's been the way, just to find those pockets and to find that we have the strength, right? So finding that strength that's encouraged, supported, listened to, and then we can carry on with our work and just face however people perceive us, even if it means I'm putting a barrier; I'm not actually responding to that.  So it is about a response to those things. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: I think just give the Multicultural Women's Network a few more years and we're going to be in there. People are going to want to come into our circle, that's for sure. 

Just before we go to you, Leila, just a personal reflection.  Some of you may know that I've transitioned careers from being an academic to a professional staff member, and that's actually eye opening in some aspects.  So I walk into a room and you see this small brown curly‑haired woman.  You have no idea what she brings, right? And there have been times when I've felt very dismissed.  People don't even listen to what I have to say or look at me, whereas there are other circles in leadership circles where it's been very inclusive.  People have included me in these conversations.  So that's been quite interesting as well.  I think any woman who changes careers like that and you're not an expert in that field will feel that, not just CARM or not. Sorry for the digression! Leila, what about you? 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: Well, I feel lucky that I've worked most of my career in educational institutions, working in educational institutions.  So there has been most of the time attention to gender equity in some aspects, specifically in recent years, when we have the conversation around sustainability very seriously and there are KPIs for universities! And there are some mandatory criteria.  So there are in other institutions as well, but education sector is specifically paying attention to that.

We have so many initiatives around gender equity in different areas.  But I don't think that necessarily the component of being culturally and racially and linguistically diverse has been factored in those initiations or in those initiatives.  There might be so many reasons, and one of the main reasons might be that the gender inequality and disparity that we're facing has been so big that the whole focus has been mostly on the gender component, rather than any other components that play a significant role in the marginalisation of different groups of people as well. There is a lot more work to be done in this area. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Absolutely.  I'm just going to draw your attention to a little piece of paper that we gave you there.  On the back of it, there's one of the outcomes from the report that they had four different barriers, or locks as they call it, and then what can be done to address those. Now, to me, that little box of what can be done to address this, it is a bit, hmm, OK. So the things that they talk about that are the difficulties that CARM women face, which has been called a glass ceiling in some spaces, but I think perhaps for CARM women, I've also heard a more relevant observation  in that it's actually either a concrete ceiling or a bamboo ceiling, so that just means that you can't even see the other side of this ceiling and people on the other side of the ceiling don't see you.  At least if it's glass, you can see through; you just can't break through, right?  There's this additional barrier.  The things that they talk about is that gender equity tends to overlook race; biased leader prototype, which we have talked about; inaccessible social capital because you're not at the table; and that voices are ignored.  These are the kinds of things we have talked about today.

Leah, I'm going to talk to you first about what can we do really to dismantle or disrupt these things, or what do we do? Do we build our own house that has the ceiling as high as we want it to go? Do we use networks like the Multicultural Women's Network? Where do you see the real potential for us to make change collectively? 

LEAH SUBIJANO: I'm a very jaded person.  The thing is when we talk about breaking systemic barriers, we need to look at who holds the power.  In most institutions, the people who hold the power are mainly boomer white dudes, so we can say, "Do this, do that", but ultimately they need to give up or share their power, which is why I'm just like, I'm over it and I'm just going to do my own thing on the side and live my life and work with women and amazing people the way that I want to do that.  I think I've given up the idea of becoming a CEO ‑ not a CEO, but I did want to climb up the ranks, say, about 10 years ago ‑ and I'm now just like absolutely not.  I don't want to be the only brown woman at a table full of white dudes. It's just not for me.  But the thing is if you have that vision for yourself, I will applaud you and support you all the way.  I think that systemic change does need to happen from both the outside and the inside.  I prefer to be on the outside.  But there is work that needs to be done on the inside. 

In the past 10, 15 years of being in a workplace setting, I've been to a few career, leadership development workshops and a lot of the focus is on what we can do: like, change your mindset, be more confident.  I think what annoys me is when it doesn't address the systemic barriers at play, when they're talking about "changing your mindset".  I actually don't have an answer to that question but I think if there are things that can help, I do think that mandatory unconscious bias training, cultural diversity training is really important, and I really encourage everyone, especially those who hold power, to really reflect on their biases, especially if they're on job interviews and promotion panels.  What biases are you bringing and are you only taking in people that look like yourself? Anyway, that's my answer.  It's not going to fix systemic racism but it might be a little start. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: That's right. 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: Just following on from what Leah said ‑ and I resonate with lots of it as well ‑ and reading the DCA report and what other CARM women said, I resonated with them a lot. I think that we talk about systemic barriers and we talk about how we can bring meaningful change, but for a long, long, long time, the focus has been on individuals and the focus has been on changing the mindset, for example; be more confident. It's putting the burden on individuals instead of really accepting the fact that we really need to change the system.  We really need to bring the change in organisations.  We need to redefine things.  We are not living in the world like 50 years ago. 

The fact that there is a lot of advice on trying to fit in, but the reality is that, yes, fitting in can help to increase diversity in organisations but it doesn't change anything.  It means that me as an individual, I'm trying to change myself to appear, to look, to sound like others to fit into the situation. It means that I'm changing myself as individual, and by changing an individual, nothing is going to change. So the concept of fitting in is something that sometimes really annoys me because is fitting in ‑ this sort of advice on things, is fitting the solution? It's a very, very easy solution to ask individuals to change themselves but we really need to think and question: is it a source of equity and inclusion that we want? Just fitting in, that's it? Without asking institutions to bring meaningful change, to work on the unconscious bias of people who are making decisions, who are making decisions about promotions?  We understand that it's mostly unconscious.  It's not conscious.  It is unintentional. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Are you sure? 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: Well, trying to stay positive here! It's very important because people have a tendency to pick people that look like them and they feel that they have the same values, they are not different and they might feel scary that they look different, their values are different, they might not be a good fit.  It goes back to the fitting in concept again.  So it's very important to start from the top positions, from redefining the leadership, what are the values that we are expecting from people. We know that most of the values in the leadership position is very masculine, Anglo  values, like being assertive, promote yourself.  Many of the things that might not be values in other cultures, specifically if you're talking about Asian cultures that are very collective.  It's not individualistic.  So we might have different values there.  Self‑promotion is not a value.  It's not good.  Having humility, showing humility, is something that is valuable, not self‑promotion. So considering those differences and bringing change at the organisational level and not putting the burden on an individual is something that can help us in the long term hopefully. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Yes, thank you.  Celina? 

DR CELINA McEWEN: No, it's good.  I would agree with the burden, that happens a lot, that you shift the burden and the responsibility of change on to the people that you see as being the problem because of the level of tolerance you have for others. But for me, unconscious bias training is part of the problem.  It actually reinforces the fact that: oh, unconscious bias, what can I do about it? 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: "I can't help it". 

DR CELINA McEWEN: That it's part of human nature. That actually gives you licence to keep on doing what you're doing.  So I have a real ‑ what is the expression ‑ bee in my bonnet about that.  This is research.  It is not me just making it up.  Some researchers have done this as well, that this points to the fact that unconscious bias is really not enough.  It's a good place to start and it has been there for quite a few years. We're not seeing much difference and much change, right? So obviously there's something more that needs to happen.

Celebration with multicultural foods, great, but that's not going to make any difference either, and you're going to be asked to bring the cooking and the meals and explain what's in it.  So that's also the other one that really revs me up. 

Moving away from those, I think you're right, the issue is that we need to change things within the organisations, if we are talking about changing things within, because we have spaces outside. We don't need to change spaces inside if we don't want to.  But the spaces within organisations, if we want to change those, there's a lot of work that needs to happen and I'm afraid that it's everybody as well as us that need to take it on.  I don't see any other ways.  But it requires everybody within the organisation, as well as leaders, as well as HRM, human resources people, and diversity and inclusion people making changes, I think it comes down to power, of course.  For me I'm a critical researcher.  Power is the centre of the issue.  How do you make a group of privileged people share their power? How do you do that? What's in it for me? Why would I share? I don't want to share? I haven't had to share for centuries.  I'm not going to start now.  So that is the issue.

I think that within that there's also a need to understand the political nature of all of this.  The reason why they have those categories of differences are to reinforce privilege.  They're not natural categories.  They're meaningless.  We put meaning into them. They are baseless.  We put meaning into them because they're social constructs.  So it is about unpacking those, just making sure that we're not working around these really rigid categories that mean nothing, only just to preserve the structures that are already in place. It's a really tough one.

So we need to talk about not business case for diversity.  We need to talk maybe about the moral case, the political case for diversity.  We need to unpack what it means ‑ discrimination. It's not just a category of difference. It's more than that.  It's hard work.  I have a whole list of things, but I think to be practical, we need to understand the historical development of all of these things, how we got to that place, and within organisations, it also means within your industry, within your profession.  It is not a natural phenomenon.  It happened over many, many, many years, centuries, in order to support a particular way of doing things.  So we need to go back to that historical development and kind of figure out how we got there and how we unpack it, and that requires a lot of listening, I think. A lot of solidarity and a lot of pluralism, accepting, embracing lots of different ways of doing things. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Beautiful.  So my last question ‑ and I'm going to skip over that because I think you've already answered that, which was one tip of what we should do; there's many tips of what we need to do.  So we're going to open up to audience questions, so please think of those really quickly for our lovely panelists. 

But one thing that I wanted to bring up was simple things that we can do to change ‑ not we, but people in power can do to change the environment and the way people behave.  So I'm looking at all these lovely faces here today.  Our session today was Future for CARM Women.  Who's here listening to us? Us!  There's no‑one here who is from the other who's listening to us, who wants to make a change, who wants to support us, and this is exactly the same feeling, disheartening feeling, I had with the panel event earlier on in the week that I was at, which was on supporting academic women.  Have a guess who was in the audience? I don't need to articulate this. 

So to me, this is very disheartening and very saddening, and we are going to share this audio recording with leaders across the university, if they are listening in, which is IF, in capital letters.  I hope people take this into consideration and just come to these events.  Even if you were here for 10 minutes at the start of the session, we would have seen you ‑ because we look, right? We would have clocked this ‑ and it would have made a difference to us.

So I'm going to stop going on and hand over to questions from the audience.  One at the front here. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. I think all of us want to ask this question of Leah.  Speaking of who is in the room and not in the room, and as a person in dance, Raygun. Would you like to discuss white women, mediocrity and leaning into the future in POC and Black‑dominant spaces in your area? 

LEAH SUBIJANO:  She's actually a friend of a friend of mine so I don't want to! And the thing is I'm actually not in the hip hop scene, and what I have seen coming out from the hip hop scene in Australia has been incredibly supportive because she's part of the scene and, like I said, I'm not in the hip hop scene, I'm not a breaker, I'm not in the street dancing, so I feel like I don't have an ‑ I mean, I could break it down and ‑‑ 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: That's another event! 

LEAH SUBIJANO: I can see it both ways.  It's like she's a person, let's leave her alone, but then I also understand the critiques of her being a privileged white woman in the space.  But I think that is all I'm going to say.  The hip hop community have been incredibly supportive of her and I think breaking is a cultural sport and most of the critiques have been people who are outside of that culture.  A lot of the critiques online are from, like, rando white Aussies who are like "Rarr, why is she representing Australia?", but I feel like the critiques that need to be honoured are the ones that are from within that culture. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'd like to ask this question. We talked about white men and then we talked about white women.  How do we change the way we are perceived? Do we look at getting them to participate in looking at how they behave towards everybody? For example, the majority of us here come from Indigenous culture.  Earlier you were talking about the Chinese culture being the big boss and stuff like that and how different cultures operate.  Do we get them to come and see our ‑ because British, Scotland, Ireland, they also have Indigenous culture, and that culture is community‑based, and all that community base has been thrown out the window and all the strong people in this culture have taken that on board and said, "This is the way we run things because this is our way" and they've taken that.  Now we study all this stuff.  We know some of it is not right.  How do we take these ‑ because for it to work, we have to go on this journey with them to get them to see that everything we know right now would be thrown out the window, based on being individual, the I'm the big boss, I'm the top, I'm blah, blah, blah. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Yes.  In the interests of time, I'll throw it up to the panel to answer that question.  But in a way, we know what happened with Brexit, right? So dismantling systems can be totally chaotic.  But do you have any opinions, very briefly, around how we engage with the rest of community and leadership? 

DR CELINA McEWEN: Having said all the things that we have said, there are companies, organisations, leaders in organisations, who are interested in this conversation.  I think it goes back to the fact that it's really difficult because we are talking about power, we are talking about sharing the resources, and not them always pulling the blanket towards themselves.  It's about seeing us differently.  It's about seeing the richness that we bring, the cultural richness, the practices that we have, the beauty that we bring, and the warmth and collegiality and solidarity and all of those things that would be so much better if we all ‑ but this is me saying idealistically, this all would happen.  I am not sure what we can do.  We start with those who are happy to come on the journey with us.  That's where we start.  Those who resist will continue resisting until they see something that looks a bit shiny and they can go, "Oh, OK I want to be part of that".  So I think we work with the people who are keen to do that and little by little we chip away.  I don't know if there's a quick and easy way of fixing it because it's been like that for so long and we've tried so many things.  I think that's all we can do at this stage, I think. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: I think that's really great advice.  Go with the ones within your sphere of influence, for another way of saying it. The two Ls. 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: Well, I think that, as you said, there is no easy answer.  There is no shortcut.  There is no quick fix into this.  We were talking about glass ceiling for a while.  We moved to concrete ceiling.  So it shows the depth of the issue that we are facing. I agree that the first step to bring any meaningful change is that those who hold power accept and see CARM people, specifically women and non‑binary people, and try to engage, because if those people who hold the power do not engage and resist ‑ we still can find other ways but the process will be much longer.  The bit by bit will be a really small bit and it takes more time. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: Leah, you can have the last word. 

LEAH SUBIJANO: I don't know if I want the last word. It's a bit controversial.  There was something that I wanted to say earlier but I didn't, but just something I want to note on having CARM women in leadership, that I don't think that in itself needs to be the goal.  If we have a woman of colour who is just perpetuating oppressive cycles and is just a puppet for white supremacy and the patriarchy, that's not success.  That's not a win.  So I think we need to look at ‑ and the thing is it shouldn't just be on the woman of colour to drive that change.  It needs to be everyone in leadership who has that common goal for collective betterment or collective improvement. That was not the question that was asked but ‑‑ 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: But it's totally relevant, though, right? Like, what are those things that need to change for us to get up there. So one more quickly, yes? 

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question was going to be: a lot of the leadership styles that we see demonstrated in organisations and universities are very Western styles of leadership, picking up on what Leah was saying. How can all of us, and I say this collectively because I think we, at the grassroots, also have some power, change some of those processes where we recognise and reward those other ways of leadership so that we can kind of bring that force and bring that momentum up? Picking up on that point that you just started there, Leah, because I think that's a really good one: how do we reward and recognise different types of leadership, that there are other ways of doing and leading? 

LEAH SUBIJANO: I think the first thing is active listening and actually going out there and meeting groups and people, and I'm thinking specifically Indigenous spaces, that we learn.  We are on the continent of the longest living culture in the world.  They have incredible wisdom and incredible knowledge of ways of being.  I think we need to listen and then from there, maybe we can make some change. 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: This is giving me an idea for the Multicultural Women's Network.  Something else for them to do because they don't have enough! But I wonder if we not just start by celebrating ourselves, what we do and what we understand to be leadership.  How about we have not a CARM, but a Multicultural Women's Network awards for leadership in the sense that we understand it. 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: Wow.  With any of the committee here, I think that might be a great thing. 

DR CELINA McEWEN: Is this a committee meeting decision being made right now! (Laughs). 

DR LEILA KHANJANINEJAD: We might have made it already! 

DR KUMI DE SILVA: So thank you. It's one minute past 2 o'clock, when we should be going.  I want you to please thank our lovely panelists: Celina, Leila and Leah. (Applause). And thank you to all of you for showing up, for being here, for being supportive.  Thank you so much.  (Applause).