Category Archives: Status of women

Situations pertaining to leaders #4

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Last week I had the opportunity to interview one of the leaders of a large charitable organisation whose mission is  “enhancing life and increasing hope for disadvantaged, marginalised and oppressed persons, especially women and girls”.

The organisation has existed for more than 150 years, and sprang from the work of an order of nuns whose vision and commitment still animate the organisation today. The leader shared a story with me about how he and the organisation discovered what integrity really meant.

The test

About 15 years ago, the organisation faced a test. The State Government, led by Jeff Kennett, a deeply divisive figure in recent Australian political history, had just overturned the basis on which governments and charities had worked together for decades.

Until that point, charities worked together to assist their clients. They shared information with other organisations, and each organisation looked out for the other. They understood the efforts and successes of one organisation benefited all.  At one stroke, however, the government decided that henceforth charities would have to compete against each other for government funding.

Shocked and confronted

Each organisation in the sector was thrown back on itself to contemplate a future in which they would be isolated, competitive and obliged to assume the role of supplicant.  It was a time of deep despair and dismay for all organisations. Many doubted whether they would survive, and they feared for the lives and wellbeing of their clients.

At first, this man’s organisation was no different.

Shocked and confronted, the leaders of the organisation gathered together to choose their course of action. And that’s when the spirit of the long-ago nun who founded the order, a woman known as an “innovator, an ambitious person, impatient of authority”, rose again.

The group decided they could not take the government’s money on these conditions and they decided to speak out about it. They considered their long and illustrious history and the impact on the thousands of clients should their organisation not survive, and then they chose to fight anyway.

The eye of the storm

It was the beginning of a very difficult period in the life of this man and his organisation. They were subjected to threats, had to make staff redundant and endured, he said, “many sleepless nights.”

The threat to the organisation’s survival lasted for many months and was only resoundingly decided when the government, against all predictions, lost the 1999 election.

Looking back on that time, the man said while it had been “torrid” and hugely confronting, there had been many unexpected benefits from the organisation’s refusal to participate in the game of competition; its refusal, as he put it, to “sell their soul”.  One of them was the impact on writing their next mission statement.

Shortly after it became clear the eye of the storm had passed, it happened to be their business-planning season. This time, he said, writing their mission statement was a whole different exercise. This time everyone was conscious they were choosing words they had to be able to stand by should the situation require it.  Everyone had gotten that

it’s one thing to talk about integrity, it’s another to live it.

***

Image: Girl not alone, 2011, acrylic, gold leaf and coffee filters on canvas, 135 x 240 cm, by the wonderful Ghadah at Pretty Green Bullet

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Personal archaeology

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Remember I wrote a letter from six months in the future? It was addressed to Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, and of course, myself.

In the letter I described a version of myself I’m inventing during these six months: self as a conduit for expression and creativity to pour through, just as the famous cellist, Jacqueline Du Pre, with whom Ben played Schubert, was a conduit for music.

He tells this story of her.

When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, “I see you’ve just had your chance to perform!” And Jackie answered, excitedly, “No, no, I’m just about to!”

“Even at six,” Ben notes, “Jackie was a conduit for music to pour through.”

***

A week or so after I wrote the letter I came across an old photo of myself. That’s it above. I think I must be about three years old.

Looking at it, I’m struck by my freedom and delight. I have the same joy Ben describes in Jackie at age six, and it’s the exact expression of self I was groping towards in my letter.

So I see this new self I’m inventing is a revealing or reclamation of a previous self.

***

When I found this photo I looked more closely at other photos that were lying around from when I was about ten years old.

These are a whole other matter.

In photo after photo, the freedom and delight has been replaced by something else, something cautious and watchful.

I’ve previously mentioned the fact of the ruthless conditioning girls receive. It was the subject of the “Beyond Wanting to be Wanted” series. It’s a conditioning that suppresses and seeks to obliterate what a girl feels, what a girl thinks, what she looks like, her very being. It colonises her soul.

Now this is not a matter of blame. I’m not blaming my parents or my society or my culture. My parents loved me dearly and always wanted the best for me.

It’s just the way it was, the way it probably still is.

And by acknowledging that I also had a choice in the matter – the choice of not submitting, of rejecting the conditioning, of keeping my soul alight – I’m not blaming myself either. I was a child, dependent on my parents and my society, and I didn’t even see the possibility anyway.

No, I’m not interested in blame. I’m interested in reclaiming that earlier free and delighted self, that unabashed, untrammelled young girl and letting her roam.

It’s her time again.

Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.*

***

* Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 4

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The book is Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted by Polly Young-Eisendrath.

The hypothesis is as follows:

 In her book Polly Young-Eisendrath hypothesises that Lacan was right after all: women want to be wanted, not to be loved.

Women’s compulsion to be desired and desirable persists into old age, wreaking havoc on their “self-direction, self-confidence and self determination.”

The compulsion infects every sphere of life, showing up as the desire to always appear in a positive light, the “perfect mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover … the kind neighbour, the competent boss.” Women are trapped in images, not wanting to be known for who they really are.

This final post is about getting out of the trap.

Continue reading →

Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 3

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The hypothesis so far.

In her book – Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted – Polly Young-Eisendrath hypothesises that Lacan was right after all: women want to be wanted, not to be loved.

Women’s compulsion to be desired and desirable persists into old age, wreaking havoc on their “self-direction, self-confidence and self determination.”

The compulsion infects every sphere of life, showing up as the desire to always appear in a positive light, the “perfect mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover … the kind neighbour, the competent boss.” Women are trapped in images, not wanting to be known for who they really are.

This post is about that word “want”, and the factors at play.

Continue reading →

Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 2

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Where were we?

In her book – Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted – Polly Young-Eisendrath hypothesises that Lacan might have been right: women want to be wanted, not to be loved. She also suggests that women’s “compulsion” to be desired and desirable persists throughout life, wreaking havoc on their “self-direction, self-confidence and self determination.”

This post is about outlining the issue and its scale.

Continue reading →

Beyond wanting to be wanted: Part 1

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About seven years ago I read a book called Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted whose initial premise rankled so hard I’ve had to keep re-reading it. The premise, attributed to the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, is that women want to be wanted, not to be loved.

Now, starting on it again, I see for the first time that my reaction and its trajectory is exactly the same as the author’s, the psychologist, Polly Young-Eisendrath.

She writes,

About ten years ago, while reading a biography of … Lacan, I came across something he said about women that struck me as uncomfortably true: women want to be wanted, not to be loved … A sometimes brilliant theoretician, Lacan was also terribly sexist and terribly arrogant, so I wondered if I could take his claim seriously. Yet, despite my doubt, the idea stayed with me. Over the ensuing years … I came across nothing quite as bold and blatant as Lacan’s claim …

Continue reading →

The dearth of females reviewed and reviewing

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Jane Sullivan in The Age reports today on the organisation called VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and “The Count” they’ve published for 2010.

The count concerns various “influential British and American literary and cultural journals” and two ungolden ratios:

  • the ratio of book reviews written by male and female authors
  • the ratio of books written by male and female authors that were reviewed.

What took them so long I say? We looked at the same question on this blog back in 2009.

Here is what we found (click on the titles):

Women in Australia: paid 83% of what men are paid, heard 27% of the time

The US: Land of the 27% woman too

And here are some of the stats VIDA found, in this case, for The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.






*****

A compassionate man: Australia Day 2011

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Like bowling clubs, trams in Sydney used to have the best real estate.  One of the trams that ran until 1960 terminated at The Gap, the dramatic sandstone cliff on the ocean side of Sydney Harbour, next to Watson’s Bay.

The Gap has been a tourist attraction since European settlement, and for most of that period too, a notorious suicide spot.  The first reported suicide was in 1863.  Anne Harrison, the wife of the licensee of the Gap Hotel that stood on the site in the 1860s was suffering after the accidental death of her young nephew who slipped and fell over the cliff while visiting.  One night, after she and her husband had moved to the other side of the city, Mrs Harrison took a cab to The Gap in the middle of the night and leapt to her death.

In recent times, up to 50 people a year have taken their own lives at The Gap.  For years, there have been discussions and disagreements among local residents about the wisdom of fencing the cliff and installing lights and other deterrents.

One local, however, has been quietly getting on with saving people’s lives. For more than 40 years Mr Donald Ritchie has coaxed people away from the cliffside with an invitation to “come back to my house for a cup of tea.”  Keeping watch from the second storey bedroom of his nearby house, Mr Ritchie has officially saved the lives of 160 people.  Unofficially, he says, the figure is closer to 400.

Some, at his urging, have quietly gathered their shoes and wallets, neatly laid out on the rocks, and followed him home.  Others, tragically, struggled as he grabbed at their clothes before they slipped over the edge. (1)

Mr Ritchie, 84, has today been recognised in the annual Australia Day awards for his words and actions in times of trouble.

Mr Ritchie said on ABC radio this morning, “I can’t live here and not do something.”  He concluded,

All I do is give them the opportunity to change their mind.

*****

Among the awards given out today there are two others that thrill me.  Jessica Watson, the 16-year-old young woman who sailed around the world solo in 2010, whom I wrote about when her achievements were being trivialised and her integrity impugned, has been awarded the honour, Young Australian of the Year.

And Sally Sara, the ABC’s foreign correspondent stationed in Kabul, has been awarded an AM.  I’ve written about Sally’s compassion and intelligence in her reporting on the story of the little girl, Benazir and her family in the Pakistan floods, and the acid attacks on women in Bangladesh .  She’s the finest correspondent in the land.

Happy Australia Day!

*****

Notes

1. “Three of the best”, Sydney Morning Herald by Amy Corderoy, January 26, 2011

2. Information on Anne Harrison from “The Gap” by Robin Derricourt, The Dictionary of Sydney

Follow the money, or Org Chart Bingo #1

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For years I’ve had a dark hobby:  ogling org charts.  As a consultant it rather goes with the territory of starting an engagement with a client, or prospecting for future clients.  Why?  Because the org chart is God’s gift to the consultant and anyone else who wants a direct window on to what it’s like inside an organisation.  Yet so revelatory are these documents that I also look at them for fun.  And for laughs.

Case in point was one I came across a few weeks ago that I want to share with you today in the first of a wee series I’m hereby kicking off: Org Chart Bingo.

Where the money is

You’ve probably gathered by now that the status of women is pretty important to me.  There is one issue within the field that galvanises me like no other, and that’s money. Specifically, equal pay for equal work, and generally, women and money per se, including …

that women are where money is not, and money is where women are not.

What’s so

There are basically three types of organisations in our economy:

  1. government bodies that produce goods and services
  2. not-for-profit organisations that produce goods and services
  3. for profit organisations that produce goods and services and money.

It’s this last group of organisations I want to focus on, specifically, publicly-listed companies.  And the game is simply this: to look at the org charts of a sample of such companies, and draw no conclusions or give no explanations.  That’s right.  Simply to look at the org charts and get the “what’s so”.

Want to play?

Everyone’s welcome to play.  Just request a particular company and I’ll look up the org chart, or submit an org chart yourself via email or comment.

In the meantime, here’s today’s org chart.  In this case, it’s abbreviated to the list of the executives.  It belongs to AGL, a large publicly-listed company that produces electricity and gas.  Following are a few quick facts about the company (from the Annual Report for financial year 2008-2009), an outline of the executive group and a link to the list of executives.

Few quick facts

History Operating for 170 years in Australia; one of Australia’s first listed companies
No. of employees Not stated, though in the thousands
Revenue $ 5,909 million AUD
Net profit after tax $ 378 million AUD

Executive group

AGL’s executive group, or “Leadership team”, consists of nine executives.  Eight are male, one is female.  She is the Group Head of People & Culture. Naturally. A clickety-click and a legs’ eleven for that one.  This is how it looks charted.

Link to list of executives

To see the list of executives, click here.

*****

The shock of the feminine pronoun

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Every time a radio or TV announcer talks about the new Prime Minister they use the pronoun “she”, and I get a little shock.  Can it be? “Prime Minister” and “she” in the same statement?  Always the most powerful and telling unit of speech, the pronoun’s in neon at the moment.

When I think of what it means for Australia to have its first female Prime Minister I’m very moved.  Like the election of Obama in the US, it’s what it now makes available in the world that’s the thing. According to Mary-Anne Toy in today’s Age,

the Melbourne headquarters of Emily’s List, the group that Gillard, Joan Kirner and others founded to get Labor women elected, has almost sold out of its ‘Future PM’ t-shirts for girls.

For the first time, 22 million men and women, boys and girls, will see a woman wielding ultimate authority.

*****

Image: Emily’s List