Recording: International Women’s Day 2024

Transcript – International Women’s Day 2024

AMY PERSSON:  Good morning.  Thank you all so much for joining us for International Women's Day at UTS.  I'm Amy Persson, the Interim Pro Vice Chancellor of Social Justice and Inclusion. To begin today's event, we'll now hear from Aunty Glendra Stubbs, our Elder in Residence at UTS, who will give an acknowledgment of country.

AUNTY GLENDRA STUBBS: (In Wiradjuri language).  Hello, my name is Aunty Glendra Stubbs.  I'm the proud Elder in Residence at UTS.  I'm a Wiradjuri woman and my mob comes from the Mudgee, Dubbo and Narrandera areas.  UTS acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands our university stands.  We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge of these lands.

AMY PERSSON:  I would also like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respect to Elders past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this place. These traditional custodians have cared for country for thousands of generations and I acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty was never ceded, that this continent always was and always will be Aboriginal land. 

Welcome to all of you here in the Great Hall and the many hundreds of you joining us online.  Today we have a special International Women's Day event and I'd like to thank the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for co hosting alongside the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. 

International Women's Day has come to mean different things to different people.  I think it's worth remembering that it started as a protest movement and not a morning tea.  Australia's first International Women's Day was held in 1928 here in Sydney.  It was organised by the Militant Women's Movement. Women were calling for an eight hour working day for shop girls, paid leave, and equal pay for equal work. It's interesting, of course, and important to reflect on how far we've come, but it's also interesting to reflect on how much we still are fighting for 96 years on. 

I am really proud to work for an organisation that takes these issues very seriously and I've seen that firsthand during my time at UTS.  This is not a place that provides cupcakes and lip service to gender equality. It is a place that has equality and social justice as part of its core mission.  It is a place that acknowledges when it can do better and it is a place that provides a platform for the incredible work of so many of our staff, some of whom you'll hear from today during our panel discussion, who are working to make our society a more equal one.  It is also a place that is welcoming to all genders and gender experiences and I would like to recognise all people who identify as women, including trans women, in our activism and discussion today. 

Today's talk is about exposing the insidious ways patriarchy transforms our relationships with one another and systematically divides us along gendered lines.  Even when we think we are alert to the traps, it remains so difficult to escape them. 

A big focus of today's discussion will be the burden of unpaid, undervalued and unacknowledged labour of women, which holds up families and economies around the world.

In delving into this issue, I want to acknowledge that we will often be talking and discussing hetero relationships and that the effects of patriarchy impact every single one of us as a system of oppression, layered with experiences of race, class, socioeconomic background, disability, sexuality and body diversity. 

I am hugely excited to hear from today's speakers.  We are delighted to have award winning author and UTS Alumna Anna Funder to give today's keynote address.  Anna's recent book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life highlights the methods of patriarchy and microcosm through the lives of Eileen O'Shaughnessy and George Orwell. 

Following Anna's keynote, we'll welcome Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa and Professor Peter Siminski to join us in discussion.  But first, I would now like to introduce Vice Chancellor Professor Andrew Parfitt to offer some opening remarks and welcome.  Please welcome Andrew (applause).

PROF. ANDREW PARFITT: Thanks, Amy, and welcome, everybody. Let me also acknowledge we're on Gadigal land.  This always has been, always will be, Gadigal land and pay respects to Elders past and present. 

It's always nice to have Aunty Glendra here even virtually, such an important leader within our community as Elder in Residence and the Jumbunna Institute that we have here, the work that they do to support our students and our staff. 

It's interesting that UTS has among the highest success rates for Indigenous students and a lot of that goes to the support and care that is given to that community within Jumbunna.  We have a very large number of PhD students who are also working with our Indigenous professoriate, which is also the largest in the country, to make a real difference in areas from law to technology to health, pretty well all of the disciplines that we have at UTS, and it's a great pride amongst our community that we are able to materially and tangibly make an impact on those gaps that are so stubbornly refusing to close for our Indigenous colleagues and friends. 

So happy International Women's Day.  You can clap, if you like (applause).  It is, of course, a moment to reflect on successes as well as where there are still challenges that we face.  We celebrate the success of women across our community.  We reflect on progress that has been made in so many areas, but it's also an opportunity to call out where there are still gaps that need to be closed, and I'll come to the gender pay gap later on, which stubbornly persists in many places. 

But the successes   it is absolutely worth us pausing to reflect on all of the terrific work of our staff and our students, over 50% of whom are women, and 10 years ago, 20 years ago perhaps, in the University of Technology that wouldn't have been the case.  So over time, we've managed to make real inroads in terms of participation in professions and disciplines that have had significant underrepresentation of women. 

We've taken some bold steps as a university in areas such as engineering and information technology and construction management to try to build a pipeline of young women, particularly from schools, who may not have considered careers in those professions because they couldn't see themselves in those professions.  If you can't see yourself in a profession, why would you want to be there? 

So by actually, controversially, adjusting our entry requirements for some of the programs  not to drop standards, but to allow more diversity in the entry to those programs   we've been able now to have nearly a third of our intakes in those discipline areas with young women and that will absolutely transform the professions of the future.  It will make a real difference to how those professions are perceived and how those professions value, accept and benefit from the diversity that gender diversity brings to them.  That's a role that a University of Technology should play.  We built leadership teams across the university that reflect the diversity that we should have. 

And although I could call out so many examples, I look around and I can see colleagues here, women who are making a real difference in their discipline areas.  I'll just name one group.  It's a small group of people.  The Australian Research Council's Laureate Fellowships are absolutely the top of the performance and the discipline.  There are so few of them awarded. 

We have three at UTS. Two out of the three are women. Jie Lu in the Faculty of Engineering and IT is a world leader in machine learning and artificial intelligence and she's making a real impact on that profession and not only the technology, because technologies are only as good as the way in which we engage with them, but how they're adopted and how they're used and how we responsibly manage those sorts of technologies. 

And Larissa Behrendt  Larissa is remarkable.  Her championing of First Nations justice, particularly with incarceration and particularly with the dislocation of children from families, is a remarkable effort and she uses a whole variety of tools to do that, not only outstanding academic work, which is reflected in the Laureate Fellowship that she holds, but also through film and through books and storytelling.  These are just two examples of so many people who are making a difference, women who are making a difference to their areas. 

But there is still work to do.  Gender based violence, prevalent across our society, way too prevalent across our society, and I'm really pleased that UTS stepped up through its Respect.Now.Always. campaign to actually raise awareness of the issues, to talk about consent amongst our community, to provide support and to ensure that we call out sexual assault and sexual harassment and address it.

There's still a way to go in that area. 

Domestic violence   we have the work of Professor Anne Summers, and in fact next week   next week? Yes, you're nodding.  Next week we have the Elsie Conference marking 50 years of the Elsie women's refuge and the work that's going on there and Anne's work has absolutely changed policy and making an impact in these areas. 

Antislavery   modern slavery is still a plague in our society and it disproportionately affects women.  You know, it's just slightly over the horizon from many of us.  It's just a little bit out there that we don't see and yet we have Anti Slavery Australia, a group in our Law School, who fundamentally have tackled this as an issue that needs managing across the economy and has led the development that's resulted in Commissioners being appointed and this being an issue which organisations, including UTS, need to report on and ensure that we actually have in view so that it doesn't just get forgotten beyond the horizon. 

Women's and children's health   I was reminded just recently we have formed a new Health Research Institute.  It's a little bit different from a medical research institute because its purpose is to address publicly the public health and primary health care in our communities and how important the Women's and Children's Health Collective is within that Health Research Institute. If you haven't seen their work, I suggest you look up UTS Insight, I think that will find it for you, on whatever search engine you like and you can see the great work that's happening in our Faculty of Health through the Women's and Children's Health Collective. 

And then of course the gender pay gap, which we were reminded of with the publication of the results last week.  UTS is at 11.7%.  That's not where we want to be.  It's no good being at the average.  We actually want to pull this number down.  And it's a reminder to us that sometimes you can have things in view and then they go out of view again. 

In 2019 we identified that we had a gender pay gap and we started to move it down and we actually targeted some investments which were intended to put in place in 2020.  People remember 2020?  An unfortunate time to do that.  But we're now in 2024 and it is just a reminder how easy it is to forget something, to let it slip and not get back to it. 

We had three of our faculties stepping up to address the major gaps that appeared in their areas and this is just a reminder that we can't forget that gender pay gap affects so many women and we have to make a difference and we will.  That's a commitment that we've made to picking this up where we should have done some years ago. 

So on this International Women's Day, let me commend all the work that occurs across UTS, the remarkable women that continue to make a real difference and also the work that we do right across UTS to address the issues that exist for gender equity.  And I commit all of us in the leadership positions across UTS to supporting and championing that work (applause).

AMY PERSSON:  Thanks, Andrew.  It is now my huge pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Anna Funder. Anna is one of Australia's most acclaimed and awarded writers.  Her books Stasiland and All That I Am are prize winning international sellers and her book Wifedom is hailed as a "masterpiece".  We're very proud that Anna is a UTS Alumna, graduating with a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Please welcome to the stage Anna Funder (applause).

ANNA FUNDER:  Hello, everyone.  It's a great honour for me to be standing here today and I'd like to first acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. 

I'm very happy to be here today with my colleagues and friends and all of you at this great university.  I thank Vice Chancellor Andrew Parfitt, Interim Pro Vice Chancellor Amy Persson and her predecessor, Verity Firth, as well for this opportunity and am very much looking forward to the discussion with Associate Professor Vijeyarasa and Professor Siminski. 

I am part of a generation before pointy painted nails and false eyelashes were standard glamour.  I have a wardrobe of fairly androgynous suits in different colours   red, blue, white, green.  My husband says I dress like a Wiggle.  But today I stand before you in this extremely uncharacteristic bubblegum pink get up doing something I never imagined I'd do in my life, I am channelling Barbie (applause)   less the doll and more the movie.  Let me tell you how this happened. 

Last year on my UK tour for Wifedom we started with a publishing lunch.  I was extremely jet lagged, but had to stay awake for an evening event.  So to stay awake, I took myself off to see Barbie.  Afterwards, I walked straight out of the cinema and in an act of mad, sleep deprived solidarity bought this shiny pink number.  I have to say I've been looking for the opportunity to wear it ever since and today is the day. 

Barbie is a work of genius. Part of its cleverness is that the movie posits two worlds, one in which Barbies, women, can be anything they choose to be   they are Supreme Court judges and park rangers, doctors and barristers, Presidents, dentists and plumbers   and another world, the real world, represented by contemporary LA, where men are central and women are peripheral.  In the real world, men run the corporations and the country.  They have most of the power and most of the money and most of the leisure time. 

When Ken, who comes to the real world with Barbie, quietly asks a businessman if patriarchy is still working as well as it did before Me Too, the man leans in and whispers, "We're doing it well, we're just hiding it better."  Men working on a building site feel entitled to humiliate Barbie as she passes by just for fun and to make sure she knows her place in this world.  This is the kind of frontline basic abuse that is the most obvious way patriarchy tells us loud and clear on the street or in the boardroom that men are central and powerful and women are to be defined by them in their interest. 

In our world, Barbie feels ill at ease.  She says she's conscious, but "it's myself that I'm conscious of".  She feels a definite undertone of violence and "a sense of fear", she says, "though without any specific object".  A school mum explains that this is the normal feeling of anxiety of being a woman as we are overloaded and responsible for so much, though relatively powerless in the wider world.  (Baby cries). Hello.  All babies welcome.

Ken says, "I feel amazing". 

One of the reasons I never had a Barbie doll was that my mother was a feminist.  In our household we thought that things were getting better for women and girls.  Indeed, my mother's work as a research psychologist contributed to changes in Australia's taxation system so that divorced fathers would contribute to the financial support of their children.  We assumed that the Barbie world, where women would be central to themselves and able to do anything, was coming, at least to our progressive, rich, post Whitlam corner of the planet, pretty soon.  But it has not come yet. 

People at this great university and many others in think tanks and governments all around the world are preoccupied with this question.  We know that the world needs the talents and time of women to be a just place as well as to improve our nation's economies while looking after the planet.  We see progress in women's equality going forwards in some measures, though stalling or going backwards in others. 

When I was a little girl in the 70s and then a teen and a student in the 80s, it would never have occurred to me that the male id of the world would express itself in tsunamis of anonymous, horrifying and pathetic misogyny online, expressing the terror really that being male will cease to mean being superior to a woman; or that pornography would become about choking and doing other things to women that cannot be about pleasure or love, but plainly about pain and submission; or that poverty globally would be predominantly female; or that Chanel Contos, who was not yet a gleam in her parents' eye, would have her work cut out for her calling out a culture of sexual assault among the most privileged gilded youth of the nation; or, as Andrew has told us, that there would be such a thing as the gender pay gap in the 2020s, let alone in many industries of nearly a quarter pay difference and double if you include bonuses; or that women would continue by powerful, unspoken social expectation backed by punitive tax measures and a privatised childcare system to bear the burden of being both unsung CEO and labour force in the home, generally doing double the work of life and love and care that keeps families going, and all of this right here in what by many measures is the richest, but at the same time one of the fairest, countries on the planet. 

In Wifedom I also examined another world, the one of the marriage of Eileen O'Shaughnessy and George Orwell 80 years ago.  It was fascinating to me how the work of a brilliant, highly educated woman could be apparently invisible to her husband at the same time as it was intellectually and practically indispensable.  Eileen kept George going domestically, supported him financially, saved his life in the Spanish Civil War, had the idea for Animal Farm as a novel, which she worked with him on each day, making it, he thought, the best of his books.  But he never felt the need to acknowledge her in any way and nor really did his biographers after him. 

As a writer, the work of a great writer's wife fascinates me, but as a woman and a wife, it terrifies me. I see in it a huge struggle between maintaining herself and the self sacrifice and self effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time, which are indispensable, are made invisible. 

Time is valuable because it's finite.  So as with all other finite commodities, there's an economy of time.  Time can be traded, bargained for, snuck and stolen. A weekend is finite, as any parent trying to juggle space and apportion time within it with a spouse will tell you. A life is finite. 

Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered.  One person's time to work is created by another person's work in time. The more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him.  To examine a marriage of 80 years ago involved the false comfort of distance. Surely we are more evolved than that. Along with a frisson of horror, things have not changed nearly enough. 

Every society in the world today is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women.  If it had to be paid for, it would cost, by UN estimates, apparently in US dollars $10.9 trillion a year, but to pay for it would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and defame patriarchy. 

How is it that this work, so indispensable, can be invisible?  One reason is because patriarchy attaches the work of care to the definition of what it is to be female and not to what it is to be male. An example from Orwell   decency was a core value to him.  When we say a man is a decent bloke or a good bloke, we mean he's a man of his word, trustworthy, a good friend.  When we say a woman, wife or mother is decent or good, these things have other meanings which are attached to the care, work and time that she gives those around her. 

You can be a decent bloke without doing any domestic or care work, but you could never be a decent woman, mother or wife without caring for others.  This is the swift and dirty trick of patriarchy to attach work done for others to the definition of what it is to be you.  It's not really work.  You're just proving that you're a decent female person. 

There are many individual exceptions to this situation:  single parent households, where one person, most often a woman, does it all; heterosexual and homosexual couples, in which the work of life and love is shared more equally; and we live in an age, this gives me hope, in which the gender binary and along with it what it is to be a good woman or a real man is being challenged. Maybe a more fluid understanding of gender will eventually also free us not only from the fiction of what it is to be male and what it is to be female, but also from the assumptions about work and care that those definitions carry. 

I'm married to a wonderful man who's emotionally astute, deeply engaged with our children and our domestic life.  Craig and I share the financial load, we share most things in our lives.  For him care is central.  But our experience is that the patriarchy still allocates a lot more of the care work to me either to do or to raise in conversation and to delegate. 

I don't think we can or should be tackling this issue of male entitlement to women's domestic labour one marriage at a time.  It is no longer a private matter.  It is an epidemic of inequality and it needs a society wide response. 

In the same way perhaps that at the end of the 19th century society decided that everyone should be literate, a huge social change, and instituted free public education and free lending libraries, we need to decide collectively that society should have the benefit of women's work and time and make it possible.  Like lifting people out of poverty or into literacy, we need social measures, free child care and reform of the tax system for a start, and measures to ensure the removal of barriers to women claiming equal representation in every sphere, including, of course, the boardrooms and parliaments of the nation.  I am not saying it will be easy.  Power and privilege were never given up easily, only taken justly. 

Possibly the most fictitious element in Barbie the movie is how easily Ken gives up power after he took it illegitimately.  He says he didn't really like it.  At first he tells Barbie, "I thought the real world was run by men and then I thought it was horses, but then I realised that horses were just men extenders". 

Patriarchy is the man extender, the imaginary horse they ride about on.  We, especially many of you in this room, know what to do to get them off their imaginary steeds, to come and share with us the work of life and love and our time together on this planet.  Time, as I say, is valuable because it is finite.  It's time this was over.  Thank you so much for your time (applause).

AMY PERSSON:  Thank you so much, Anna, so much provocation to explore.  I'd now like to invite our other panellists to come up on to the stage. 

Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa is a legal academic and women's rights activist.  She is the chief investigator behind the Gender Legislative Index, a tool designed to promote the enactment of legislation that works more effectively to improve women's lives.  Ramona's academic career as a scholar of gender and the law follows 10 years in international human rights activism, which has informed her impact driven approach to research.  She's also the Program Head for the Juris Doctor Program within the UTS Faculty of Law. Welcome, Ramona.  (Applause). 

Professor Peter Siminski is an applied micro economist.  He has over 20 years of policy oriented research experience and is the head of the Economics Department at UTS.  Peter's work applies modern impact evaluation techniques to estimate the effects of Australian Government policies and programs on people's lives.  The measurement of inequality and intergenerational economic mobility is a key theme of his work.  Welcome, Peter (applause). 

Just for everyone here and online, there will be an opportunity during the panel discussion to ask questions of today's speakers.  We are facilitating a Q&A through Slido, which means that you can submit your questions whether here in person or online, if you go to the link up here on the slides, which we're also posting online for people joining virtually. You can also upvote questions that others have asked and I'd ask everyone to keep the questions relevant to the topics that we're discussing today.  So much to discuss. 

We've just heard from Anna about the way patriarchy minimises women's contributions and once you start pulling at the strings, you can see the erasure of so much women's work in all facets of life.  So I'll start with Ramona and Peter and Ramona, I'll start this first question for you. Can you tell us a bit about your work and how it shines a light on the way patriarchy impacts all of us?

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  Sure. Thanks, Amy, and I just want to start by thanking Anna for such a terrific, terrific platform to have this conversation about the erasure of women in the first place. 

So really I think my work could be described as trying to deal with the erasure of women from the law. So right now in Australia a law is enacted and that law governs everyone's lives, but there's just not enough scrutiny to how that legislation is differently going to be experienced by men, women and non binary people. 

However, 18 months ago, Tasmania potentially turned law making in Australia on its head when it created the first ever parliamentary committee in Australia that will focus on auditing legislation for its gendered impacts and that was partly inspired by my research and took from the Gender Legislative Index, which I created to actually evaluate do laws make women's lives better.  And I think Tasmania could be trailblazing, it can be copied by other states, it can be replicated at a federal level, because it provides an institutional platform for legislators to ask gendered questions and this is the kind of shift I think we need to see in law making in Australia. 

So if, for example, you want to create a series of laws and policies to deal with Australia's housing crisis, we know there is a rise in homelessness among women in Australia. There's a link between family and domestic violence and homelessness and women in older age suffer greater financial insecurity.  How could you possibly design those laws and policies without a gender perspective? 

This work I'm doing on trying to bring this women's rights lens to lawmaking is something I continued at UTS, but I started many years ago as a women's rights activist overseas and it's certainly not a project of one person.  It builds on so many years of scholarship and activism where women have been calling out this erasure of women from the law. 

But for me personally, I feel very inspired by the women I met all those years ago living overseas, from victims of domestic violence in the slums of Rio through to women living in the floating villages of Cambodia, because to me their stories really demonstrated how rarely law actually takes into account women's lives.

AMY PERSSON:  Thank you.  Peter?

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: So firstly, thank you very much for asking me to come here.  I feel very privileged to be one of maybe five or so men in the room.

AMY PERSSON:  And welcome to all those men, five of you. (Applause).

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: So my work in this area is mainly with my brilliant former honours student Rhiannon Yetsenga and it is about how coupled families allocate their time, so essentially how much time each member of coupled families spends in domestic work and how much time they spend in market work, and then ultimately sort of testing to what extent does that allocation of time conform with what you'd consider as traditional economic models of the family.  So the traditional economic models of the family started with one Nobel laureate called Gary Becker, who proposed that the allocation of time in coupled families is economically efficient and it follows the comparative advantage of men and women, with women having comparative advantage in the home and then in the market.

The other thing I just wanted to say at the outset is economics has come a very long way since Gary Becker and just a few months ago there was another Nobel Prize given to a lady called Claudia Goldin from Harvard and her Nobel Prize was given for her lifelong work on the outcomes of women in the labour market. 

So these issues have become mainstream economics and for decades now mainly women have been working in this area and gender norms have become again mainstream in what has been looked into.  So it's not even amongst academic economists, it's not all about economic efficiency in terms of what we look at, but gender norms have become mainstream.  You won't hear too many economists talking amongst themselves about the patriarchy, but you'll certainly hear them talking about gender norms as a front and centre issue in this area.

AMY PERSSON:  I'm just going to stay with you, Peter, and just ask you to talk to us a little more about your quite recent work.  So you analyse data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia, so that's the HILDA survey of Australian households, which tracks wages and time use in the home.  What were some of the key findings from that research?

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: Well, in a nutshell, the key finding was that gender norms completely trumped everything else in terms of the determinants of how coupled families allocate their time, heterosexual coupled families, so it really didn't matter what the relative earnings capacity is between the man and the woman, but the woman on average always does more of the domestic work.  So that won't come as too much of a surprise to anybody here, I don't think.  But one way to kind of think about it is that a woman would have to have an hourly wage that is 109 times higher than her husband before the data suggests that they be expected to do equal housework.  So the relative wage, the earnings capacity in the market which was originally stipulated by economists as being a fundamental driver of economic efficiency, basically plays no role at all. 

If you look at it a little bit more finely, when a woman has a higher hourly wage than her husband, she does do a little bit less housework as you go along that distribution, but the man does no more whatsoever.

AMY PERSSON:  I mean, it's really quite extraordinary, isn't it, and it's fantastic that economists are tackling this issue and upending, I think, the orthodoxy of the past. 

I mean, Anna, you write in the book, in Wifedom, that part of why you   I mean, you rediscovered Orwell because you were feeling this at such a pervasive level and I think so many women feel it deep within our bones that that is the situation we confront.  Did the process of writing Wifedom change how you felt or reinforce how you first felt when you went into that bookshop and rediscovered Orwell's essays?

ANNA FUNDER:  Yes, the origins of Wifedom are very close to here. So I wrote a lot of the book at UTS, but I kind of   it began at Broadway Shopping Centre not far from here and a moment of kind of peak wifedom, where I had   you know, like I was pushing this trolley of groceries and dragging this depressed French exchange student around and I was just feeling really overloaded and I ended up in Sappho bookstore and found this collected edition of Orwell's journalism letters and essays and I feel like now, which is, you know, nearly seven years later   I feel that it's been a process where I've been able to find not just Eileen, who was made invisible first of all by Orwell and then by his biographers, but also have a really good look at the methods by which that happened and they resonated with me today in a way. 

So after Eileen and George got married, the biographers say things like, "Well"   she was an Oxford educated graduate in literature with an absolutely brilliant mind and he'd never been to university and the biographers say, "Well, whether by coincidence or influence, after his marriage his writing got better" or, you know, the first letter that she writes to her best friend six months after the wedding   they've been living in a hovel and she's been doing all the domestic work, they've got no electricity, one tap, you know, it's very primitive and she writes to her best friend, "I'm sorry I haven't written to you earlier. I was going to, but we have just quarrelled so continuously and so bitterly since the wedding that I thought I'd write one letter to everyone once the murder or separation was accomplished." 

So I feel at the end of this that I had a look at, you know, what was going on in that marriage, why she wanted to kill him and why we don't know anything about her.  And the biographers say of, for instance, that early period of the marriage "conditions were idyllic for Orwell". So I think the passive voice or  yes, so conditions are idyllic, I wanted to look at who was making the conditions.  Then I'd kind I'd catch myself doing things like that saying, you know, we organised Christmas dinner or the holiday or, you know, the medical care or whatever, I think women have a tendency to kind of   to sort of pretend the load is shared more than it is and I think that's something that we could perhaps stop.

AMY PERSSON:  Ramona, I'll change tack slightly and ask you for some reflections of the international experience.  Nowhere in the world   there is no place where men do more unpaid care and domestic work than women.  It just   the Barbie world just doesn't exist.  But there are many other countries who are tackling elements of gender inequality differently to Australia.  What can we learn from them?

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  Look, I definitely think that's the case.  When I returned home, I'd been living away from Australia for 11 years and when I got back, I was struck by how rarely Australia actually looks abroad for good practice and then when we do, we tend to use the usual players, like the UK, but I am confident that we can do better as a nation if we open our minds to learn from other countries. 

So if you take, for example, maternity leave, in 2011 Australia introduced paid maternity leave and a lot of women in this room and listening online would have fought for that. It was a win.  And if we compared ourselves to the US or New Zealand at the time, we weren't doing badly.  But at the time we introduced paid maternity leave, it was near universal.  There were another 170 countries that already had paid maternity leave.  So we were lagging and we're still lagging. 

So if you look at the way the law is in place right now, we get 20 weeks of leave to be shared paid between a couple and so the most likely scenario based on historical practice in this country is that in a heterosexual couple, the woman will take, say, 18 weeks of paid leave and the man is going to take two weeks.  How is two weeks paid leave actually going to change the sharing of care in that household or how that couple shares care as the child gets older? 

One year ago, if we look abroad, Spain became the first country in the world to give each parent the same amount of paid leave, 16 weeks paid leave each for men and women in heterosexual couples or two mums or two dads.  Now, paid parental leave is very complicated and I don't want to simplify it here, but I think it's just one of those examples of how much we could do better if we started to think about where we are now and all the countries between where we want to get to. 

But in my research I also push us not just to look at these wealthy nations.  So in 2022, Australia had another great win.  We introduced 10 days of paid leave for victims of violence, and New Zealand did the same in 2018 and this is remarkable.  It gives women who are suffering violence at home paid time off from work to leave that home and find somewhere else to live, to get medical help and to deal with violence. 

Fourteen years before Australia introduced that law, the Philippines introduced 10 days of paid leave for victims of violence and right now they have a bill tabled in parliament to increase that up to 20.  So I can't help but think would we have arrived at that point earlier if we just opened our mind to other countries that are really right here on our doorstep?

AMY PERSSON:  Peter, do you want to add to that?  Ramona talked about paid parental leave and that's something you and I have discussed.  Have you got some reflections on the difference that might make in terms of your findings if we did offer men, or in fact if men took more paid paternity leave?

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: Yes, so going back to Claudia Goldin's work, she studied 200 years of history in rich countries and traced the very complex relationship between social institutions and women's outcome in the labour market, but her conclusion for the contemporary world is that the one thing that drives the vast majority of the gender gap in labour market outcomes is having children.  Many other factors have sort of waned in comparison to this one factor as the major driving force, so not only do women earn less, you know, if they work full time, they are less likely to work and if they do work, they're less likely to work full time and all of these things are cumulative. 

Now, the sort of natural implication of that is that policies which are designed to make it easier for women to combine work and family are the ones that would be effective, but underpinning all of that, again, is gender norms.  So making some sort of shift in gender norms and actually, you know, reallocating who is responsible for looking after the kids and doing the domestic work I think is really kind of the priority here. 

I had a look at the EBA of UTS relatively recently about paid parental leave and if a man is to take paid parental leave   sorry, let me start that bit again.  If a man working at UTS has a female partner somewhere else who gets paid parental leave and she takes some paid parental leave, that amount is deducted from how much the man can take at UTS.  So if she takes paid parental leave, he can't. 

So that's sort of a contrast   I very much agree with everything that Ramona was saying, if we can create institutions where men are actually encouraged in their own right to take more responsibility for child care, then we may see some real change.

AMY PERSSON:  I think that's a really nice segue to currently the most popular question that's come through from the audience and that is what is UTS doing to address the gender pay gap?  I'm not going to try to answer that fulsomely, other than to say within the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion we have expertise on that issue. Part of the challenge we've got now  there is an urgent audit under way to interrogate that data. 

As Andrew acknowledged, I think over the last couple of years   it's not necessarily that, you know, we dropped the ball, but the data, the data isn't as good as it could be and there's a strong commitment from HR and from the centre to rectify that, but also dig down into those results and really try to understand what's going on. 

I do think looking at the university's maternity and paternity leave policies is really important, looking at how we're supporting early career researchers, making sure that as an institution we're doing everything we can to really be best practice in those areas. 

I'm also aware of really interesting things happening in places like the Business School that concede there are challenges in terms of their staff make up, particularly their senior staff make up.  Last year they ran boot camps for women ahead of promotional rounds that we got really great feedback on.  So there are absolutely things happening. 

I know Peta Wyeth, the new Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and IT, and Vicki Chen, our Provost, are really acutely aware of the issues particularly in the STEM disciplines and we all know the challenges there and Andrew talked about the work UTS does in schools.  So the Wanago Program is a program fully funded by the university that takes year 11 and 12 students from a whole range of high schools across New South Wales and puts them through the HSC in STEM subjects that their schools don't have the capacity or ability to provide and those students then have a pathway   if they successfully complete that, they have a pathway into UTS.  Now, that program is majority girls that would not otherwise be able to do HSC subjects in engineering and IT that do them because we employ high school teachers to educate them. 

So there are fantastic things happening in this place, but I agree with Andrew, we need to really urgently look at the data and better understand some of the nuances in terms of what's going on and address those. 

The gender pay gap obviously is in the news particularly at the moment because the Workplace Gender Equality Agency released the reporting for all Australian organisations with more than 100 employees.  The results obviously show that every industry has a median gender pay gap in favour of men.  In terms of that transparency, what do you think that transparency means for persistent issues like the pay gap and can it help lead to the systemic change that, Anna, you posit is absolutely crucial when we're tackling issues of inequality. Ramona, I'll start with you, if that's okay.

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  Sure, Amy. Look, I was one of many UTS women who had a heavy heart when I saw the gender pay gap data and my heart was even heavier when I looked across universities.  I think gender pay gap transparency is an excellent opportunity, but it's just that, it's an opportunity that has to be leveraged to actually bring about real change, and I really welcome the Vice Chancellor's commitments at the start of this event and we obviously have a room here and university committees to follow up on those commitments. 

I think there's a couple of things to say about gender pay gap data and the first one is the data only tells so much.  I imagine there are women at universities where the pay gap is showing as quite small where they may be experiencing something different and they're a bit disappointed that the story doesn't offer them a platform for change.  So here we have this platform for change and I think it's about asking questions, some of which are very difficult to ask, so at what levels do we have the biggest gender pay gap; are there women in female dominated faculties in the university who are being paid less than men in male dominated faculties for doing the exact same job; what is happening with recruitment when we recruit from outside, at what levels are people being recruited and at what levels of pay and is that driving the gender pay gap; are we adequately supporting women to promote, which is one of the points that Amy mainly mentioned around a boot camp, which is terrific; and really what's our target, when are we going to close this gender pay gap?  So I think we have this opportunity that we just have to make sure we leverage if we want to see that kind of structural change that Anna was calling for.

AMY PERSSON:  Peter, do you want to talk about that data and the transparency?

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: Yes.  So I kind of agree again with Ramona that the transparency is obviously really good, but that it's just sort of one indicator that can start conversations. 

The thing that I worry about with the very strong focus on the gender wage gap itself in the current discourse is it may actually have some unintended consequences.  The easiest way to improve that gender wage gap would be to no longer employ early career women.  So I don't think Andrew is about to do that, but some organisations that maybe are 105 employees and are being pressured by external forces to focus narrowly on this indicator may sit down and say, "Well, what are we going to do this week?  Are we going to invest our resources into helping early career women navigate having children, or are we going to cherry pick and poach a couple of senior women from somewhere else? 

So I do think that this indicator needs to be looked at really carefully and I think that obviously, you know, gender wage equality is a good thing, but let's not narrowly focus this as the objective.

AMY PERSSON:  I think it's also worth noting on the gender pay gap that there's research released just this morning out of Western Sydney University that shows Western Sydney women earn, on average, about $20,000 less than women in the rest of Sydney.  So even within Sydney you've got this disparity and the researchers say it is more pronounced for women in Western Sydney due to limited local employment options, inadequate child care and poor transport links.

This gap is even wider for newly arrived migrants, Indigenous women and solo mothers. 

So the people involved in that research are saying for the women of Western Sydney, they just want to catch up to the rest of the women in Sydney, let alone men.  Ramona, did you want to talk about that briefly or as long as you want?

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  I wouldn't open the door to that, Amy.  Sure, I'm happy to comment.  I haven't seen the data, but I think we're talking about Western Sydney, people living in the suburbs of Western Sydney, and I think we have to acknowledge that Sydney is very divided demographically and so our Western Sydney population is more people who are from culturally and linguistically diverse people and I think it is just a reminder that gender disaggregated data is only one point of disaggregation and we fall very short on this not just in our organisation, across the board as a nation, we just don't have enough disaggregated data, including on the basis of cultural diversity and race. 

So we have to acknowledge there are hierarchies within gender and of course we want to see those women catch up and I would be angry and disappointed by that data if I was living in Western Sydney because you would be feeling so far behind and really impacted by those sort of multiple identifying factors.  And this is not new, so I think it's one of those reminders that this is something we talked about a long time ago.  Many in the room would have heard of Kimberle Crenshaw's renowned basement metaphor, so the concept that you are suppressed under the basement by your multiple factors that you suffer discrimination on that basis, whether that's gender or race or culture. 

So we've known this for decades and yet we're still not collecting the disaggregated data to show us where we're falling short in particular places and able to do something about it.  So if we are correcting our data set at UTS, let's also step up and show how to collect some of the data in this institution to disaggregate not just on gender but also on other lines, like race and cultural diversity as well.

AMY PERSSON:  I'm just going to go to another audience question from anonymous.  It's a great question.  How do we raise the next generation from age 5 plus to push back against the patriarchy, particularly our boys? 

Anna and I were reflecting on this before today's event.  We both have two daughters and then sons and I have a five year old son who loves Taylor Swift and loves dancing and loves P!nk and I'm watching him go to school, he's just started school, and I'm slowly watching some of that be socialised out of him and it's quite heartbreaking because I think the patriarchal forces at play there mean he's not potentially going to live his whole self and I wondered if you wanted to reflect on that.  How do we raise our kids to help tackle this issue?

ANNA FUNDER:  I'm not sure I have   I do have three children, but I don't think I have any particular expertise on this question.  I think that the most important for them is to have strong and happy mothers, you know. So that's why I think that we need these measures that make them see women and femininity as not associated with being overburdened or anxious, you know, and that that would kind of open things up.

AMY PERSSON:  Peter, do you want to reflect on that question? I appreciate perhaps it's not your area of expertise, but have a go.

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: I feel like one thing that is starting to happen a little bit more in contemporary society is the gaze of gender norms is sort of shifting slightly from being exclusively focused on women to being focused a little bit on men as well.  So we've talked for decades about the role of women in society, but only relatively recently have I seen, you know, I guess the scrutiny or the more kind of care and attention put on what does a sort of healthy contemporary masculinity look like, what is the role of men in today's world? 

So I think that those conversations are quite early and I think that's a really important frontier in the space of gender is to tackle toxic masculinity and present opportunities for boys to be diverse and for men to be diverse and to be accepted in society and the whole spectrum of what that means.  How to do that, that's   yeah, that's a little bit outside my realm.

AMY PERSSON:  Ramona, do you want to add anything?

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  Oh, sure. You know, I love that Anna embodied Barbie today because when I was watching the Barbie movie with my daughter, she turned to me and said, "Mummy, are you crying?" And I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry in the movie because you're seeing the world as it could be and then you see the world as it is. 

My daughter also turned to me and said, "Mummy, you look like President Barbie", which I just loved, not least because my last book was actually about women Presidents and how too few there are and the difference they make on the lives of fellow women.  But it kind of made me think, well, we can only really change the world if there's enough role modelling for the younger generation to actually see the world a little bit differently. 

And I don't have boys, I just have two young girls, but this is something that's taken me a really long time in especially my women's rights activism to come to realise.  I spent so long sitting with local communities because the organisations I worked with were very grassroots.  So we'd sit with these women farmers in a rural community in Tasmania in a small community hall talking about their experiences and they would fill in these time use diaries to monitor their unpaid care and they wouldn't even want to write down the time spent having sex with their partners and then cleaning their partners, which is a cultural expectation in some of these communities. 

So I felt so frustrated at the time at how little power these women had that I didn't really want to talk about this lingo that came from the United Nations around engaging men and boys.  I just had spent so long with women who had so little. 

But what I've come to realise is that if we're going to make change, it has to be done inclusively. We have to include men and boys in this change because really in the end the patriarchy is the way certain people hold power to control and suppress everybody else and changing that is to the benefit of everyone and that has to be the way we see change in a country like ours, where you still have one woman dying every week at the hands of a male partner.  So it has to be done in a really inclusive way.  We have to get there in a way that we're bringing boys and men along with us.

AMY PERSSON:  I'm going to stay with you, Ramona.  We have a question that's come through asking if you could comment on the need for the judiciary to be better educated on gender, especially in relation to domestic and sexual assaults.

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  Yes. You know, I think this also goes to this question of role modelling what you see.  When I did my study of women Presidents or another space, executive office, where there are so few women leading, when women make it into these spaces, they've been so challenged to get there that it's very difficult to then break the mould and do something differently.  They've got this short period of leadership or the challenge to make it.  And I'm not excusing women who make it to power and fail to bring women along with them, but there are so few that it's a heavy burden they wear on their shoulders. 

And I think the same can be said of the judiciary.  There's not enough role modelling of the judiciary of great women who get there and do things differently.  But there's two things I'd say about that.  One, we have to imagine it's possible.  You know, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who I think many people delight in having left this world, said to us that there's only going to be enough women on the judiciary when there are nine because there were nine men for so long and no one had a problem with that, I think she's reminding us that we have to get to the stage where we see a remarkable change. 

And the second thing I would say is for everybody who's ever thought about how judicial decisions are written without this gender lens, there are fantastic scholars across the world who have this fantastic project which is called the women's judgments project, Feminist Judgments, they rewrite actual judgments with a feminist lens to prove that that judgment could have been decided differently, and not just in areas where we naturally think about women's rights, gender based violence and reproductive health, every area of international law, laws and judgments on housing, aged care, constitutional decision making because you can bring and should bring a gender lens to everything. 

So, yes, we need to educate our judiciary because these women have shown us that those decisions could be written differently if those judges had wanted to do so, and I think what's particularly nice about that project is it's done with care to be legally accurate.  So don't say that bringing a gender lens means you're going to make inaccurate or the wrong decisions.  These things could be done differently.

AMY PERSSON:  And speaking of writing things differently, Anna, you highlight the complicity of Orwell's biographers in dismissing Eileen's impact at every step, from her work in the Spanish resistance to her influence in Orwell's writing, but even going so far as to altering firsthand sources of her opinions of Orwell to be more sympathetic to Orwell.  It is deeply frustrating to read.  What can we learn from that in terms of the systematic erasure of women's contributions?

ANNA FUNDER:  I love the idea of the feminist rewriting of the legal judgments.  I feel that I've sort of rewritten a biography of Orwell in a way, although he's not my main person, my main person is Eileen, but from the point of view of a woman.  But in doing so, I did have to   I'm very grateful to the biographers because I relied on the biographies, but in order  they leave Eileen out in order really to make it look like George was a solo genius and a decent bloke who owed nothing to women, not his feminist and suffragette mother and aunt and not his brilliant wife.  So they are left on the cutting room floor.  It looks like he did everything alone. 

And then they also  they can't leave out entirely what they refer to in his many, many kind of infidelity/assaults on women throughout his marriage and afterwards, they refer to that as the Orwell pounce, a euphemism that I don't use.

So there was a lot to rewrite.  There was a lot to look at that was either omitted or trivialised, doubted, stuck in their footnotes, and so on. 

The instance that you're talking about is where Eileen said of George once to someone who wrote it down, "George has a remarkable political simplicity" and Sir Bernard Crick, one of the eminent biographers, just I think probably couldn't bear that and so he just rewrote it so that he has Eileen says, "George has a remarkable political sympathy" instead. 

But mostly   so two things.  Mostly I don't think it's as obvious as that.  It's kind of more swift and dirty.  As I'm saying, it's footnotes and it's calling the aunt, who was a suffragette and got arrested with the Pankhursts, was very close to Orwell. They used to swap books about gender roles and identity, she was an Esperantist, and so on, the biographers say, you know, she's eccentric.  "Eccentric middle aged woman" is the way that they get rid of actually quite a few women who were important to Orwell and helped him a lot.  I think that, you know, if you read through the lens of what this is like for the woman at the centre of it, like what it's like for Eileen, you just see the whole history, the marriage, the creation of the work really differently. 

The biographers themselves, I don't think it's a conspiracy except to the point that patriarchy is a conspiracy, so I think it's more   some of it is conscious and some of it is less conscious.  So it's probably conscious to swap simplicity for sympathy, but other things are kind of part of the culture.  It's just how men are trained to think about women as secondary. So, you know, someone who runs  Aunt Nelly, this suffragette, as I said, and a Fabian, ran a literary salon that was quite important, HG Wells used to go to it.  No, she's an eccentric middle aged woman instead.  So not so much conspiracy, but just so deep in our culture that it's hard to see.

AMY PERSSON:  It does feel like, at least in Australia but potentially around the world, there's been a couple of major cultural moments over the last sort of 6 to 12 months where the patriarchy is something that has been named and called out and discussed, and you talked about Barbie and the global success of a movie about the patriarchy. 

For those of you who have been to a Taylor Swift concert, there is a moment during the concert where 80,000 to 90,000 girls, women and some men scream in unison "fuck the patriarchy".  Like it's a really interesting moment and it was an interesting moment for my daughters, who aren't allowed to swear, sort of looking at me for permission to join in, which of course I gave them, but is there   do you have a sense that the fact that   and of course your book, which has become a global phenomenon and rewrites the history of this person with the patriarchy very much in view, is there something to take   is there hope there that we are engaging in a bigger, broader discussion that calls out the patriarchy in such explicit ways?

ANNA FUNDER:  I'll just say something brief about that.  I mean, patriarchy was a very unfashionable word when I was a student, so in the late 80s and 90s, and it's coming back into view.  It's sort of  it's very useful because it's like a pair of spectacles or a lens through which to see power relations, so it's like talking about slavery and enslavement, which is about power relations and racism, or patriarchy.  So it's just a very clarifying set of spectacles and it identifies things that were previously invisible and I think it's hopeful in that there is a call to action, Taylor Swift most prominently.

AMY PERSSON:  Peter, did you want to add anything to that?

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: That's probably the hardest question for me really.  I mean, there's absolutely no doubt even to me that the amount of power that men have held over the decades and the centuries is enormous. 

I guess in the economics world, the way that it sort of appears to me at least, is a story of convergence on many levels, you know, with huge progress in the last 50 years or so, especially in the area of women's education, which has led to better employment outcomes and the like.  I guess in economics we don't really talk about the patriarchy as such is probably the best answer I should give.

AMY PERSSON:  And I think you and I agree we need more female economists   

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: Oh, absolutely, yes.

AMY PERSSON:     to perhaps to bring that lens to a field which, as you acknowledge, has come a long way but is still extremely male dominated.

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: Absolutely.  And that's something that we are very, very aware of as a discipline and struggle with quite a lot.  We're more male dominated than STEM, but all the effort that goes into addressing that in STEM doesn't really get funneled into economics.  So it is something that needs to go a lot further than it has.  All these amazing women that have contributed to these debates in recent decades are still a very small minority of the economics discipline.

AMY PERSSON:  Although winning Nobel Prizes, which is excellent.

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: Yes.  Only three, I think from memory, Nobel Prizes in Economics have been given to women. 

AMY PERSSON:  Ramona, did you want to comment on that?

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  Yes, because I think that's precisely why we need this feminist economics lens to the situation because, as Anna said, we don't want to change the situation one marriage at a time.  You know, a lot of the things that we think of that women take on in terms of care, load and work, they aren't individual choices.  You know, if the tax system is written in a way where a woman may not return to full time work for the fourth or fifth day of work because when you take into account her income, how much tax she has to pay and how much child care costs in this country, then they aren't individual choices.  We live in systems that are shaping and assigning these gendered roles.  So that's why we need the feminist economist to be telling everybody this and it just can't be individual. 

I mean, is there hope? I sometimes fear for the world that my young children will grow up into.  I teach first year law students and I look at these young women, haven't started my profession in corporate law in Sydney, and we want to create excellence in these future lawyers and I have   hold back a concern that we're sending them out into the world where maybe the legal profession just hasn't changed enough and we don't want to set up these young women for failure.  So there are some major systemic challenges ahead. 

So I love that we have language and I love that there's this mobilisation and a movement.  In my daughter's case, she's not allowed to swear, so she wears a hat that says "girls rule".  But then I tell her well, actually, unfortunately, girls aren't ruling, we don't rule anywhere, we're not in any of those leadership roles. So we need to sort of balance  it's not all negative in my house. She did say to me when I told her, "We've only ever had one female Prime Minister in this country", she said, "Well, that's unfair", and I said, "Exactly". You know, we need to balance the hope with actually pushing for the systemic change so that we can actually deliver on what we're creating these young people to believe will be their future.

AMY PERSSON:  I've got another next most popular question that's come through and Ramona, I think probably this is another one for you. How can we tackle wifedom in academia, that is, the expectation that female academics take on more non promotable work, such as unrecognised administration?

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  That is a great question.  I wonder if they were anonymous or not.

AMY PERSSON:  They are anonymous.

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  So fairly recently I was asked to sit in for an academic leader in my faculty in a cross faculty meeting that was to deal with some of these issues.  So we have cross faculty meetings where we talk about issues in the university that need to change and in this case it was a teaching and learning space.  And I remember sitting in this meeting and it was a leadership role that obviously people had taken across various faculties and there was one man in a table of about 20 women, and these were leadership positions, but it is often women in this university who take on those extra roles.  I'm not sure if we're putting our hand up ourselves because we want to do more or if we're being tapped on the shoulder to do that extra work, but this is definitely a phenomenon and in many respects, that's unpaid care work. 

Sometimes it is also very emotional work.  Some of the roles where we look out for the wellbeing of our own students is very emotionally demanding.  The young people today are growing up in a really challenging environment, so we're being told stories of self harm, stress, financial stress, where our young students are struggling even to pay to make it through their education to afford a house and to afford food.  So some of these extra roles we take on as university leaders and support roles are not only unpaid, but they're also very emotionally draining and demanding. 

How do we change that? Having conversations like this one, rethinking how we value our own labour, quantifying that labour with actual hours, sitting down and thinking how many hours does that take.  Now, I'm in a leadership role and I was asked to quantify the number of hours it takes and of course I underestimated by about a fifth the number of hours I spend in that role.  So it's also about putting it back on ourselves to really think how do I quantify this unpaid labour that I'm doing and then deciding how do we value it, and that value might be through pay, it might be through promotions, it might be through bonuses, it might be through acknowledgments, but I think that we start with having conversations, quantifying and deciding that these are things we value and they have to be rewarded.  (Applause).

AMY PERSSON:  Peter?

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: Yes, so I think the solution is to change how people are promoted and I've never been on a promotions committee, but I am hearing from my senior colleagues that that change is happening and that sort of recognition is more likely to be acknowledged.  We have, as you were saying before, Amy, the promotions boot camp in the business camp and people are encouraged to put all of these things in their promotion applications to make sure that they are clear and explicit and they're not sort of unpaid care work because it's completely within the institution's control as to what is promotable and what is not.

AMY PERSSON:  I'm going to ask each of you a final question  no, that's not true, I'm going to ask Anna one more from the audience for you.  Anonymous again: How do you hold on to grace amongst the frustration of invisibility?

ANNA FUNDER:  I don't know   

AMY PERSSON:  Or do you, do you hold on to grace or do we get really pissed off?  One of my friends recommended I read your book many months ago, but she said, "Don't read it when you're on holidays with your family because it's going to make you really pissed off."  And there's something in that.  Do we hold on to grace, do we channel different emotions?

ANNA FUNDER:  It really wasn't my intent to piss people off. It was my intent to kind of make something that was   by making something and someone and a mechanism in our society, these things that were invisible by making them visible, you kind of contain them and they're not so scary and we can fix it.  I thought I was writing this   well, cheery might be like exaggerating, but a hopeful book, liberating.  You know, Gloria Steinem said   

AMY PERSSON:  I think it was those things as well, absolutely.

ANNA FUNDER:  Yes, right.  Well, she says, you know, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."  That's how I feel. 

I don't know that I do hang on to grace.  I have  there's something thrilling about doing the writing work and the research work that I did.  I was very happy to be able to do it and, you know, I enjoy lots of things in life, but I can see the society that we live in, so I can kind of separate, you know, what's joyful and what's nourishing from broad problems that need addressing, you know.  I kind of make those distinctions.  I can't walk around in a state of distress at the patriarchy from morning till night, you know? 

AMY PERSSON:  And none of us can, right?  It's not something you can hold day in, day out.

ANNA FUNDER:  No, life is really finite and we are here for a good time, you know.  We're just trying to make it better for our children as well.

AMY PERSSON:  I'll ask a final question of each of you.  In each of your experiences, what do you think will be the lever that will dismantle the inequalities created by patriarchy? Will we see significant change in our time?  It feels like women's work.  Is it? Peter. 

PROF. PETER SIMINSKI: So cultural change is very slow. As I said earlier, there's been a lot of progress made in terms of women's outcomes in many realms, but the underpinning gender norms in Australia haven't really changed that much. 

I think that the lever for additional change comes through policies in the realms of child care and in the realms of parental leave.  I think they're the two main areas where we really, really could make a big difference at the national policy level in order to not only make it easier for women to combine work and family, but also to encourage men to do more of the unpaid work and thereby contribute to cultural change.  So that's where I think sort of the main game is in the future.

AMY PERSSON:  Ramona?

ASSOC. PROF. RAMONA VIJEYARASA:  I'm sort of mulling over different things here and if I can afford the time, I just want to pick up on something Peter just said around the cultural norms in this country.  So I actually am the children of migrants and my parents moved here in the 1970s and when we moved here, my father became the primary carer   the primary breadwinner and my mother was the primary carer and I'm often asked, you know, in that cultural environment, "How did you grow up to be a feminist and a women's rights activist?"  And I often think I'm glad I just had sisters and no brothers because we were treated all the same within the household.  There was no gender discrimination among us.  And I think if I had a brother, maybe with the culture that I grew up in, the culture that my parents brought here, we would have been treated differently. 

So I just wanted to make the point that when we talk about Australia in these sort of very monolithic terms, we have a really culturally diverse country here and obviously everybody is living in a different cultural environment and challenging some of those norms that they're experiencing themselves.  So some of it has to be familial and at that level. 

But if I think what's a really big lever, I'm probably going to go back to the point I mentioned before about women's leadership.  I think women in this country have really just struggled for too long to have seats at the leadership table and to have their voices heard and actually counted for and respected at those tables, and I don't just mean leadership in politics. I mean leadership in business, leadership in the academy, leadership in the not for profits, across the board. 

So I want to see more leadership at that level because I think that's what you want to be role modelling, but I think that level of leadership of women is only really going to dismantle the patriarchy if women bring women with them and if women lead for fellow women.  (Applause).

AMY PERSSON:  Anna?

ANNA FUNDER:  I think I agree with everything that's been said already.  I think that if men were involved in parental leave and that would have to be made somehow a cultural norm or that they are required to take that leave, as I believe that they are in some other places, I think that that would be an enormous thing because that involves them in the kind of   you know, there are really wonderful things about caring for small children and feeling that connection and responsibility and I think that would be a big cultural change. 

I think the tax system that I think it dates from John Howard, if not before, where on the Thursdays and Fridays some women are working for $20 an hour or for nothing on Fridays, we have to just get rid of that.  That doesn't seem   that seems like a no brainer and very easy to do, as well as, you know, public excellent subsidised child care, I think those things are so easily doable it's almost not understandable why they're not already done.

AMY PERSSON:  Thank you so much.  And thank you, all.  That wraps up today's panel.  Thank you so much to Anna, Ramona and Peter for sharing your expertise and insights. (Applause).  We'd love to know your thoughts on today's discussion.  So if you go to Slido and go to the polls tab, there's an opportunity for you to share some feedback, which we'd love to have. 

I'd like to invite all of us here in the Great Hall for refreshments.  Perhaps there will be cupcakes, I'm not sure. 

But before we go, I'd like to echo Andrew and highlight that next week UTS is hosting the Elsie Conference, which recognises and celebrates 50 years of the women's refuge movement in Australia.  The first women's shelter was named Elsie and it was opened just a short walk from here in Glebe and we're really lucky to have one of the trailblazing women who broke into an unused house and set it up as a safe place for women escaping violence and that's the incomparable Professor our Business School Anne Summers.  So we'd love to see people there and for more information, there's a website on the slides and I think we're adding a link in the chat. 

Thank you once again. Anna's book is for sale in the foyer for anyone who wants to be both pissed off and incredibly inspired and if you'd like to read more.  Thank you so much for coming and I hope to see you all again soon.  (Applause).