Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Elizabeth Broderick

Intro: Change happens. How we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how senior business leaders face change. The good, the bad, and everything in between because whether we like it or not, change happens.

Jenelle: Hi, I’m Jenelle McMaster and welcome to the “Change Happens” podcast. A conversation with influential leaders who embrace change, sharing their experiences and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Today I’m joined by Elizabeth Broderick. Elizabeth is Australia’s longest serving sex discrimination commissioner from 2007 to 2015. Liz has worked tirelessly to break down structural and social barriers faced by women and men and to promote gender equality. She’s a globally acknowledged leader, social innovator and advocate. She founded and convened the Male Champions of Change Strategy, activating influential men to take action on gender equality. She’s led 13 major cultural reviews into Australia’s leading national institutions including the Australian Defence Force. In 2017 Elizabeth was appointed by the United Nations in Geneva as a Special Rapporteur and Independent Expert. She’s currently Chair Rapporteur of the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls. She’s managed so much change here in Australia as well as overseas, influencing women and girls in change around the world. I look forward to exploring how she goes about creating change and the lessons that she has learned along the way. Hi Liz, how are you?

Elizabeth: Good, its wonderful to be here having a conversation.

Jenelle: I love it and how have you personally been going dealing with the pandemic?

Elizabeth: You know, I just think every day about, you know, the nation you live in, the family you’re in, your access to power and influence, all those things determine how you’re experiencing this pandemic and I have to say I feel so very lucky, firstly to be here in Australia but also to continuing to be connected to family and friends. The children, they both lost their jobs, their employment at the beginning of the pandemic but as I said to my daughter, who was sobbing on my shoulder, she said “Mum, I thought I was doing a really good job”. She was a para-legal at one of the law firms and I’m sure she was doing a good job but really just to help her understand that external context matters. You can be doing a great job, what's happening out there in the world really matters as well. So I have to say I feel so very privileged the way I’m experiencing the pandemic but I never forget just the experience is totally different for so many people across the world.

Jenelle: Oh, I think your sensitivity to the experiences of others is probably one of your strongest attributes, so I’m not at all surprised to hear you say that. Liz, your current role with the UN. To me it’s a clear indication that despite all the progress that has been made in integrating women’s human rights fully into domestic law in many countries over the years, there’s still obviously so much work to be done. Can you tell us about that role and the mandate of the working group to stop discrimination against women and girls.

Elizabeth: Yeah, the working group was set up about ten years ago now and it was the result of national states coming together with women’s organisations to really say “look, if we need to accelerate change on gender equality and women’s rights across the world, we need some additional UN mechanism” and out of that the working group was born. So the working group comprises five independent experts. They come from every region of the world. So there’s one from Latin America and the Caribbean, from Asia, Africa. I represent what we call the developed nations of the world, western Europe and other groups and the five of us come together and there’s one from Croatia as well. All of us, we have a global mandate but really to advance the interest and the rights of women and girls. So we have a number of roles, Jenelle, and first of all its really to undertake country visits on behalf of the United Nations. So we go to different countries and we look at the status of women and girls and we make recommendations to that nation on how they can lift the status of women and girls, either through introducing new laws or a whole range of things. So that’s one thing we do. The other thing we do is each night we write official communications about human rights violations against women and girls that are happening in different countries and this year or over the last few months, I’ve been appointed as their Lead Rapporteur. So I’m the Chair of the working group which means that those communications go out under my name. So just to give you an example of that, just a few months ago now I wrote to a South East Asian nation about an issue which was happening for young women. So many of these young women were working in the informal economy, they were street vendors and when the lockdown came to their city, they decided to become digital entrepreneurs. So they would start selling their clothes online rather than public states and indeed they modelled their clothes on their Facebook page and what happened a few days later was that the police came around and dragged these women out of their homes. They were taken to prison and incarcerated and they were charged with provision of a crimes act which said that these women had damaged the morality of the country.

Jenelle: Sorry, why was that. What was the damage.

Elizabeth: The damage that they had done was that by modelling on their Facebook pages, some of their arms had been exposed. Some of their leg had been exposed and that was seen to be damaging the morality of the nation. So indeed, human rights defenders came to the working group and alerted us to what was happening in that particular country and we were able to write to the Prime Minister of that country, just asking for an investigation and restating what the international law and human rights law said and I have to say the reason I’m referring to that one is because it had a good ending. Those women were released from prison, those young women and all charges against them were dropped.

Jenelle: Wow, well done.

Elizabeth: But its interesting Jenelle in that it shows the different impact of governments responses to the pandemic because you might have said the lockdown and everything would have impacted everyone equally but it shows there is a gendered impact of some of the governments responses and that was one which I wouldn’t have … sitting in Sydney, I wouldn’t have ever imagined.

Jenelle: Well lets just stay on that. The gendered impact of that. We know that women have been hit the hardest from the effects of COVID, they’re the ones that largely bear the brunt of a reduction in pay or home schooling responsibilities, caring responsibilities, domestic duties. What else have you seen during this time.

Elizabeth: There’s a number of gendered impacts. So one is the significant increase in domestic and family violence, so violence against women. Now, you know, we know that even in a nation like Australia, a wealthy prosperous nation, almost two women a week, so more than one woman a week is murdered by her intimate partner and that really is a result of gender inequality. The fact that there are different power differentials between men and women. What we’ve seen during COVID is because everyone’s locked down in the house, because there’s a lot of financial stress on families and everything else but also because of a power dynamic, that the levels of violence against women and domestic and family violence have increased significantly. In fact, I think here in Australia, just from talking to the CEO of the 1800 Respect line, they’ve seen a 75% uplift in the number of calls to their service and I know many women’s [7.40] are reporting that as well.

Jenelle: Certainly some deep implications there for us to think about and Liz, I guess there are many people who would be listening to this who may well see something in the workplace, may see something in their neighbourhood. What should we be doing in that circumstance.

Elizabeth: I think if you’re witnessing a crime, then you need to ring the police for sure but if you’re in the workplace and someone discloses to you, most workplaces now see domestic violence as a workplace issue. Possibly your workplace will have some strong polices but if not, the best thing to do is to ring the 1800 Respect number which is the national 24 hour hotline and they’ll give you some good advice. You don’t have to know really what to do, what you want to do is to get that individual, either the victim of the abuse or indeed the perpetrator, you want to get them to a service which can actually set up and support them. So that’s one impact. The other really significant impact and here in Australia as well is the disproportionate amount of underpaid work that women are doing. So even prior to the pandemic, women did about three times the amount of unpaid work as men but coming into the pandemic, because of you know, kids out of childcare, home schooling, the additional care for elderly relatives, the amount of unpaid work that women are doing now has actually doubled during the pandemic. So its three times more going in and its doubled during the pandemic and we’ve seen that play out in so many other countries around the world as well. So that is having an impact and even in my own small team interestingly, Jenelle, you know, and we’re all focussed on gender equality. You know, some of my beautiful female staff have said that you know, the way that household chores and everything are being divided has placed an unfair burden on those particular women. The reason for that is often and just as one woman recounted it to me. She said, “look my husband is so worried about his job, he knows that if he doesn’t keep up every aspect of his productivity while he’s working from home, he’ll be the next to go“. So she also has a full time job as well but she explained how the home schooling particularly was falling almost solely on her. So I thought even when couples are aware of this, just because of a way society is structured, you know, the fact of the way work is structured, often the unpaid care work falls disproportionately to women.

Jenelle: What do you see as the role of organisations in that picture. You know, we’ve got some systemic sort of issues in society. I think, you know, a lot of people listening today are employers in organisations, leaders in business. Where do you see the role of business failing in that particular dynamic.

Elizabeth: I think business has a huge role to play here because I always used to say when I was a sex discrimination commissioner, if I could only do one thing to promote gender equality in Australia, what would it be. Well it would be the better sharing of paid and unpaid work between men and women. That would ensure that men had greater opportunity to be engaged in care and no only that women had greater opportunity to be involved in economic life, in working life as well and you know, good businesses are recognising that and helping men to step up, particularly around flexible work. Now interestingly with the pandemic, when we saw that flexible work and particularly working from home, it wasn’t that the technology couldn’t support that. The technology could always support that. It was inertia and habit that was stopping us from doing that and now I think that’s shifted. That means that both men and women can, you know, equally I hope be in flexible work arrangements but not only that, some of the good CEOs that I’ve been working with and some from the male champions of change organisation, they’ve been doing men’s only zoom calls. So getting all their senior men in the organisation, just to share experiences and stories of strategies as to how better to share caring at home, which has been fantastic.

Jenelle: Excellent.

Elizabeth: Unless you can see it, unless you can feel it, you know, its probably hard to understand what it is that you can do but there’s been some really good strategies from that and most importantly is that organisations have policies which don’t presume that women, only women make good carers. So that they’re, in a sense, gender neutral policies that both men and women can also be involved equally in care. I think it’s just so critical.

Jenelle: You know, when I listen to you speak Liz, I remember a conversation I was running, a focus group on … we were setting up a male champions of change actually, a spring off group for one of the industries and we ran a session and I was talking to a bunch of men who are really really committed to try and make a difference and we sat around and one man said “you know, I really feel disappointed with my wife’s organisation who, you know, she doesn’t have any flexibility, not like our workplace but she doesn’t have flexibility to leave early and pick up the kids and it’s just something I wish we could address” and I said “but why don’t you leave early and pick up the kids” and he just … and I don’t think he was a poor intentioned individual at all. It just hadn’t crossed his mind and it seemed really obvious to me. So I think sometimes, you know, you can’t attribute negative intentions, some people just don’t think of it. Their mindset has just been fixed one way so opening those stories up and highlighting that can make a real difference as well.

Elizabeth: That’s right and I think for senior men in organisations to actually make visible their caring responsibilities because when you do that, as a senior man, you kind of send a cultural message that I can be a strong player in the workplace and also an engaged father or son or whatever it is. So you know, there’s no substitute for not just having a good policy. By itself that’s not going to change anything. We need the licence and a critical mass of, particularly men, taking these types of arrangements.

Jenelle: Liz, we, you know, have a lot of conversations around the future of work which, you know, I probably would take out the words “future of” these days, that’s pretty much our reality but we talk constantly about trends like automation, globalisation, climate change, demographic changes. In the context of advancement and moving things forward, but you also think about it in the context of how that might deepen existing discrimination against women. What are some of the ways that that might happen and what could or should we be doing about that. Whether its sort of really strong intent around it.

Elizabeth: That’s one of the worries that I have and there’s so much written about the future of work and that’s globally as well, thinking about the ILO and other, you know, good organisations. Hardly any of them actually look at, you know, the place of women in the future of work. If you look at technology which is becoming ubiquitous and of course with COVID we’ve got accelerated digitisation, that presents both opportunities and risks for women. You know women that can access technology, the better balance working care. So that’s a real positive but the downside of it is technology has the possibility of taking women back to where they’ve been in the past, which is as peace workers because in the gig economy where everyone’s e-lancing, free-lancing. I mean the risk for women is that we’re substituting a digital sweatshop for a physical sweatshop and indeed in many countries of the world, if women’s work is seen to be in the home, that just reinforces the cultural and social norms that exist which actually limit women’s freedom. So its really about a deprivation of our liberty. So I think we have to think very carefully about technology and how it might benefit or not women, particularly around the informalisation also of women’s work and the fact that they are often in more precarious employment as here in Australia.

Jenelle: Where are you seeing signs of there’s real intentionality about the upside and downside of these things. So there’s real thought going into advancing technology. Is anyone getting this right.

Elizabeth: There some good NGOs that, look … even going back to technology, over 90% of AI and machine learning coders, so people involved in the development of those technologies, over 90% of them are men. Now those technologies are shaping our futures, not just our work futures but our … generally our life future. Because they’re being shaped largely by men, you know, potentially and I’m not suggesting that this is done by those men intentionally, but when you’ve got all men shaping our future, its probably going to be a future which is less open and available to women and where women’s needs are requirement and wants are actually not intentionally put into that future or put into those technologies. So I think it is really important that we address the under-representation of women in STEM (in science, technology, engineering, mathematics) because the absence of women in those disciplines means that there’s an absence of women voices and needs in the future that we’re all shaping together.

Jenelle: You have an unbelievable and well earned (by the way) platform and access point with the UN role that you have. There are just so many issues, potentially [17.03] up, you know, you’ve been candid in discussing how several countries are using the crisis to restrict women’s rights, to sexual health and reproductive care for instance. How do you bring attention to that. How do you go about deciding what you’re going to go after. How do you figure out what success looks like each and every day because it could be so overwhelming how many things there are to address.

Elizabeth: You’re absolutely right and sometimes, you know, you can feel really heavy. I mean I have to say at the moment, just looking around at all the violations, human rights violations against women and girls across the world, it is a really heavy feeling. The other thing I’d say is that in many roles you have across your life, you know, you’ll take a particular action and you’ll have an expectation of some kind of impact and the trouble with the roles that I currently have is when you work at the global system level, its so complex that this idea that any given action that I will take, a letter I will write, a country visit that I will do, a conversation that I will have, that that would have a known outcome is an illusion. Its highly unlikely. So I think when you’re working in that environment, instead of judging yourself on how much impact you’re driving on any one day, you need to stand back from that and say “no actually, if I’m going to do it that way, then I’m going to take on smaller and smaller tasks, the only tasks I know will deliver any given outcome” and indeed that’s not where I want to be. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to believe in the truth, the value and the rightness of the work that I do and I’m going to keep those principles as my guiding principles because otherwise I think you can lose faith in the possibility of change.

Jenelle: Absolutely.

Elizabeth: You can start to say, “well why doesn’t domestic violence or violence against women stop, does my work matter, do I matter” because I still believe that you just … you plant an idea, a change and the way change works is that irrespective of what happens immediately after, everything that every one of us does actually will at some point change the world. It might not be in the immediate future but it will be at some time in a longer term view and interestingly, I met a beautiful woman from Ethiopia recently and I also ask people … I say “look how do you stay emotionally replenished and sane in such a crazy world” and she said to me “look Liz, I believe that change always starts with a seed, so if you think about it here in Africa, on the African landscape you’ll see huge trees”. She said “that tree started with a seed came to be and then the rain came and watered that seed and then the sun came”. She said “so you do your part and know that I’ll do mine” and that’s how change happens because I think otherwise to hold the enormity of a responsibility of change, its overwhelming so you have to believe you’re part of seven billion ecosystem and you’re going to do your little part and you’ll know the next person will do theirs and I’ll stay with that.

Jenelle: That’s an incredible line of thinking. I mean is there an underlying train of optimism that you’d say that … pervades everybody that you work with in this space that ultimately there’s this hope and optimism that those seeds will sprout, that people will play their part. Is that a part of the common characteristics.

Elizabeth: I think most people that I, you know, engage with, we kind of live in a world which is between hope and despair and you have to practice hope as a discipline. It’s a learn to discipline, starting with from the minute you get out of bed and put your feet on the ground. All people are different. For me, to have a period of silence, which opens up possibility because I’m a different person today, to who I was yesterday and no only that, the world’s different today, to the world yesterday. So that opens up a whole new set of possibilities because if you bring that narrative of despair into the next moment, then you have no chance of a possibility of change. So I decided I don’t keep a chair at my table for despair. Sometimes I feel it but it won’t dine with me and I remind myself that while I’ve got a heartbeat and breath, I’ve got power and I’m going to use that power to create a better world. So I’m kind of hanging onto that.

Jenelle: I’m hanging on to it too right now. So hope is a learned discipline. I’d love to unpack that a little bit more. How do you learn it. How do you master it.

Elizabeth: Because its interesting. I spoke, in my role also, I’m the keeper of thousands of stories. As you said in your introduction, I’ve done 13 major reviews of national institutions, not just here in Australia but elsewhere. So when I go into listen to the stories, the stories which help the organisation learn, then I hold on to both the hopeful parts of it but also the distressing human harm that’s actually happening. That’s one of the skills I have, not many skills in life but one of the skills I have is the ability to sit deeply with human suffering. Do you know, I don’t really know how I’ve come to that place. I think maybe my parents, actually they ran medical surgeries and I used to sit with the patients, get them cups of tea and coffee, probably from about the age of four and they were people who were going to find out whether they had cancer or brain tumours or whatever so maybe that’s where it came from. But the ability to sit with human suffering and then hold that at what I call “the compassionate part of me”, my compassionate self, that’s the self that feels things emotionally and deeply, I’ve been able now to hold those stories and that emotion is a positive way rather than in a negative way that drags me down. So, you know, when I step up to advocate for change now, its not just me, Liz Broderick, speaking. Its Liz Broderick fuelled by the thousands of instances of human inequality that I’ve seen. So you’re kind of, you know, don’t get in my way. I will create change. I will be influential and powerful and I think it’s the feel I get from the emotion of the stories that helps me do that and the hope that it gives me as well but there is a better future and that shared humanity, that underneath all the brokenness that we’ve seen in the world, there’s such wholeness …

Jenelle: Absolutely.

Elizabeth: … that I will tap into and use in my work.

Jenelle: Wow that’s amazing. You know, your ability to sit deeply with human suffering, to be able to go okay how am I going to use this. Not turn away from it but you use this as a force for change. Society and people, the minute we get bored, we’ve got to get into our phones. The minute we get a bit hungry, we’ve got to grab some food. The minute … we have to relieve ourself of the discomfort really quickly and that moves us beyond what that moment is telling us. It doesn’t forge resilience. We avoid thinking about what do we do with this discomfort.

Elizabeth: And you know, really two moments that I found most deeply challenging. One was probably about eight or ten years ago where actually the Prime Minister and it was Kevin Rudd at that time, had asked me to go to the Acid Survivors Hospital in Dakar in Bangladesh and I was to present on behalf of the Australian government. The largest single check that they’d had for facial reconstruction surgery and I knew I had to steel myself to come into the hospital because acid violence, particularly across South East Asia, its huge, and its often young girls who have had acid thrown at them by jilted boyfriends or lovers and its seem as a personal issue and I wasn’t as good at self-care then. I think I just … I steeled myself and I went in and I met the most beautiful women. Women who were just so courageous in some many ways but so badly disfigured as well. But I still remember one beautiful young woman saying to me, she was ten and her father was quite educated and when this man came to her father’s door and he was … I don’t know, he would have been 30 years older than her, to ask for her hand in marriage, the father said no. He wanted his daughter to continue her education. A couple of days later this potential suitor had gone back to the house and this young girl’s father was out that time and when he knocked on the door, she said “let me bring you a cup of tea” and when she went to hand him the tea, he threw acid all over her. So she was ten and he said “look, if I can’t have you, no one can have you” and I had … I remember she was about the same age as my own daughter at that time. I remember having the most beautiful conversation with her. After I had sat with her, the discomfort of her physical appearance and we had such a beautiful conversation and she said “well you know, I might not be beautiful outside, she said, but I’m beautiful from within and that’s where my power comes from”.

Jenelle: Woooowwww!

Elizabeth: You know, what a gift and coming back to hope and holding onto the beauty of some of the things that I hear and bear witness to, that was one of those beautiful moments and then the other moment that I had and I’ve become better at self-care by this stage and this was just last year when I led the country mission, the UN’s country mission to Greece, looking at the status of women and girls there. I travelled all around the country. I talked to everyone from senior ministers to human rights activists and I also went out to some of the Greek islands. I went to Lesbos. Moira Camp is one of the camps on the Greek Islands which houses refugees and asylum seekers. This is a camp, you may know, that two weeks ago burnt down …

Jenelle: I do yeah.

Elizabeth: … yeah, it was built for 1,500 …

Jenelle: highly overcrowded camp, isn’t it.

Elizabeth: … having 20,000 in there and you know, just so deeply sad but I remember the morning I was going to go into Moira. I was travelling with a number of translators because I was interviewing women from Afghanistan and Sierra and Jordan and Turkey and everywhere, just to talk about their experiences and what was happening in the camp and how we could make it safer for women and I remember thinking I am just so powerless to create change. I mean, these incredibly courageous women will tell me their stories and what is it that I can do with those stories. Am I going to change European nations immigration policies – unlikely. So I thought about it and realised, well yeah, I may not have power externally although of course I have a very powerful platform and I will absolutely use that to tell the stories of these women but whilst I might not feel power externally, I can feel powerful internally because how you turn up and bear witness, that matters and that’s what I did going in there. I, you know, I had some beautiful poems, covered myself with white light, like did a lot of meditation because I’m a keen meditator and I went in there and I heard the stories of bravery and courage, the terrible stories of sexual violence either on the journey into the camp or while in there but I knew, you know, that I would have those stories as the fuel to actually step up and make strong recommendations to the Greek government, which I did and also reach out to some private sector organisations and just try to do whatever I could to create some better condition within the camp and at least give visibility to what was happening there. Not only was it a tragic kind of situation that’s happening, its in a sense become more tragic with the fire that started in Moira Camp following some COVID and then just the dispersal but one good thing was that 300 of the young minors and a number of them that I had met. So people who … young kids who were in the camp without any parental support, they have been relocated to Germany so you know, that was something, but you’ve got to hold onto the moments of … the moments of lightness and change which are possible.

Jenelle: So Liz, you talked about the change happening slowly. You work on things for months at a time, years at a time even. How does it feel when that change has happened. When you see the effect of the decisions that you’ve made or the conversations that you’ve had with others that’s translated to a woman getting promoted, somebody being released from a prison. How does that feel when you’re looking at those people.

Elizabeth: I feel quite euphoric I suppose. When I see that someone’s life has improved. Someone’s voice is now heard but they have more opportunities. A chance of at a different life. I mean that’s the reason I do the work that I do and you know, it’s a beautiful joy of the role that I have.

Jenelle: Okay, taking a step back, I feel like I probably need a breather with those kinds of examples which are so incredibly powerful, but taking a step back Liz to the beginning of your professional career when you started out in law. Even back then, you were in a pioneering space, you had a focus on creating, I believe a legal technology practice and you were the first female and part time lawyer in the firm. What were those early experiences like and were there things that happened there that shaped your views then about leading change.

Elizabeth: It’s interesting because when I look back across my whole career, pretty much its all been about leading change. I probably wouldn’t have thought that. I just thought, you know, I’m just doing my thing but now when I look back on it, change is the common element in every role that I’ve had or done and even starting from school. So I’m an identical twin and maybe that’s why I’m so focussed on fairness and equality as well. I think when you’re born an identical twin, you know right from the get go, that if your sister gets something and you don’t get something of equal value, then the worlds not fair and you’re going to do something about it.

Jenelle: That’s an interesting take, yes I can see that.

Elizabeth: And then interestingly, my parents were quite progressive. They wanted both my twin sister, Jane and I, to have strong and independent lives. So even from kindergarten, they sent us to separate schools. So my mum would trek Janey off in that direction, my dad would take me in that direction and we’d go to different schools and we used to dress up in each other school uniforms occasionally and swap schools.

Jenelle: Oh god, how fun!

Elizabeth: I still remember … we had lots of fun. I still remember the time when my twin sister and I had decided to swap schools. What I forgot to tell Janey was it was the day of a big year 9 science exam …

Jenelle: I feel like there’s inverted commas around that “forgot to tell her” [laugh].

Elizabeth: [laugh], you forgot to tell. I’m pleased to say I came third in the class, thanks very much, thank you Janey. When we decided about what it was that we wanted to do, we were both keen on something to do with people and interaction and so my sister actually started off life as a physiotherapist and is now a professor in Sydney University in the School of Medicine and I went into law and also went into technology law. Now it was the first time the University of New South Wales had ever offered a computer science degree with a law degree and I didn’t know where that would take me but I had strong interest in technology because my father had been a nuclear medicine physician and we had grown up with technology and imaging as part of our lives. You know, so then I did technology and law and even then, so I think there would have bene only three women in a class of about 100. You know, we each went off to do different things. The law side of it, there would have been many more women, they would have been approaching 50% but in the technology side, there would have been only about three women but I think that enabled me to do something which was a bit different. So that when I actually firstly started in my legal career, you know, I was in an area where firstly there weren’t many lawyers anyway and secondly there were no women. So it allowed me to kind of develop some kind of unique practice group and unique perspective and interestingly that’s really where I learnt about my passion for gender equality was some of the work that I did in the law firm.

Jenelle: Look, I know you were making some pretty exciting changes in the technology and law space when you were working, I think it was Blake Dawson at the time, now Ashurt. Why did you leave it and I guess what was the tipping point for you to make the shift from, you know, someone who’s forged out this new successful path there in technology and law and make that shift becoming a full time advocate of human rights and gender equality.

Elizabeth: That’s interesting because I loved every day of my work at Blakes as it was then. I had amazing experiences. I was out in internet incubators when the dot.com boom came along, experimenting with new ways to deliver legal services. I was experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI), you know, rudimentary forms of that in the early 90s and not only that, at that point I was running a team of lawyers. We had a day that started like any other day actually and then one of my junior lawyers came to tell me that she was pregnant and fantastic, when will you take parental leave and how exciting and in that same day another of my lawyers, that same afternoon, and said “guess what Liz, I’m pregnant”. Fantastic, when will you take parental leave and when the next one came the next day and what they didn’t realise was that I was pregnant [overtalking] …

Jenelle: Oh of course you were.

Elizabeth: we had half of [overtalking] team off at exactly the same time. So we had to try and reinvent the business which is … what was so much fun as well, because we all knew that we, you know, we didn’t want to just have our babies and you know, see you later. We wanted to be able to combine work and family. We reinvented the way we worked. We had flexible work arrangements but if you needed to come in on your day off so to speak, you could bring your baby in and you know, I still remember when I left Blakes, as you said at that tipping point, my kids were just so devastated because they had, in a sense, grown up as part of the firm …

Jenelle: They have all these fun aunties with all their cousins!

Elizabeth: … exactly, they had lots of things there but I’d kind of come to a stage where I’d started to do much more advocacy, about work and family, about the particular ramifications for women in trying to build strong careers and those long hours kind of … they were directly overlapping with, you know, child rearing and fertility and how that was going to work and that we needed to reinvent how work happened. So it was at that time I had an opportunity because the sex discrimination commissioner, it was Prue Goward before me, her term was expiring and the government were looking around for a new sex discrimination commission and I was fortunate enough to apply. Look, to be honest, I was as surprised as anyone that [laugh] … that I was successful in the application but there you are, and that started me on a new journey which was just such a brilliant journey as well. I mean there is no better job I think, than the sex discrimination commissioners role.

Jenelle: Well exactly, I mean Liz lets be honest. What you did with that role, longest serving sex discrimination commissioner and during that time, I mean so many things that you did in that time but certainly one of the more recognised, much recognised initiatives that you put in place was the Male Champions of Change initiative and I’ve heard you say actually in order for change to happen you have to disrupt the status quo. It’s something I agree with. So when so much about everything feels like it needs to change, how did you land on the angle around working with the men in power. How did you land on that being the position that you would take to disrupt the status quo.

Elizabeth: It’s interesting because I think I was a bit of a slow learner. I mean I clearly came into that role thinking, listen this is women’s business and it’s the collective action of women that has got us all the rights we have today and we just need to continue with that and really what I needed to do was open up my contact list and actually that we would go from there and I absolutely believe the collective action of women and the fact that some women I’ll never know who she is but if she cared enough a couple of generations ago to step up and demand change, that’s why I can live the life that I live today, I will also honour that and acknowledge that and we do need the continuing collective action of women but we’re missing a part and that is really supplementing that collective action with the collective action of men because what I learnt in the first couple of years that gender equality is about the redistribution of power, whether its in the nation, whether its in organisations or indeed back into the family and if we want to redistribute power, we need to work with those who largely, not exclusively but largely hold the levers of power and that is usually men. So having come to that realisation and working with some good men at that time and also women who saw that as well, we decided that if that was the case, we really needed to step up and ring the most powerful men in the nation which is what I did. I remember ringing me, even like Alan Joyce and the head of Woolworths, the head of the banks and the beautiful man, Glenn Boreham, who was the head of IBM at the time and I made a personal plea. I said “will you use your power and influence, your collective voice and wisdom to step up beside women, not to speak for them or to rescue them but to step up beside them and really take strong action on gender equality here in Australia” and I still remember Glen. He had twins, a boy and a girl and the idea that his daughter would never have the same opportunities as her twin brother, all because she was a girl was just so abhorrent to him …

Jenelle: And that’s got to hit home when you bring it as an example like that in his own life.

Elizabeth: … absolutely. So and once you’ve got the first couple of men to sign up, you know, its easy to get the others on board. So we started small. We started with six and I still remember the first couple of meetings. It was almost like we were running group therapy. You know, every one had their hands in their … their heads in their hands saying “oh my god, I’ve tried everything and nothing seems to work” but we kind of came out of that phase and we also realised that no one of us acting independently would ever be as good as all of us acting together and that’s what we were determined to do. We needed to change the national systems and structures that were still holding back women and ten years on now from that, we have around 270 Male Champions of Change. We’ve got 17 different groups including one in Pakistan and the Philippines, one out of New York and London, all of them stepping up with each other, trialling different strategies because there is no one strategy that, by itself, works. It’s a combination of many things. So they’re running hundreds and hundreds of real life experiments and then offering up that experiment or initiatives together with the learnings from it to everyone else in the coalition, so all 270, to shamelessly rip off and make better in their own organisations, that is really what lifts everyone. So its been a really, not only disruptive strategy but its one that actually has driven impact in many areas, there’s still so much work to go though and they are imperfect leaders. They’re not male champions because they’ve got it sorted. They’re male champions because they want to lead tangible action to create change.

Jenelle: A bit of a surprise here Liz. I get to interview a range of interesting people in this podcast series and as a matter of fact, the last person I interviewed was Wendy Harmer and we were talking about her experiences as something of a pioneer, female stand-up comic, one of the first leading female broadcaster on radio, the first to be running a women’s news series etc etc and I mentioned to her that I was going to be interviewing you next and she actually wanted to ask you a question. So I might just throw that one in.

Elizabeth: Go Wendy! [laugh].

Wendy: Hi Liz, its Wendy Harmer here. My question is. What is happening in our top companies in Australia. The latest statistic says that we are 80 years behind, we’re going backwards. Some companies have no women at all in their leadership teams. Its really disappointing. What’s the answer.

Elizabeth: It’s such a great question. Wendy, thanks for that and Jenelle. You’re right. I’m just looking at the censor data which just came out last week from Chief Executive women. While there’s been good progress on women on the board, so over 30% of women on boards and I remember when I first started with this, it was down at 8% so that’s good progress. It’s the women, female CEOs, they’re declining if I look at the ASX 200 companies and its also women in the C Suite and that part of the organisation is so much more difficult to shift because it comes down to culture.

Jenelle: It does.

Elizabeth: To retain women through to the most senior level is about ensuring that you have a culture which actively and intentionally includes them and the fact is pretty much every organisation in Australia, you know, was created by men for men and is largely run by men and what we’ve done is poured in a few women and stirred and not surprisingly, they’ve been exited for a whole variety of reasons from the organisation and indeed, what I’ve come to learn is that if we don’t actively and intentionally include women, the systems which actually preference the male life trajectory and the male way of operating because the organisation has been created by men, for men. Those systems will unintentionally exclude women and that’s happening all across the country. The fact is whilst we’ve seen some really fabulous female CEOs, there’s not a critical mass of women coming up behind them. Women are taking their talents and starting as, you know, as founders, starting new enterprises and that’s a really positive story of women entrepreneurs. But I think until we actually have some really strong interventions and I’m talking targets. So you know, we can talk about a quota. Quotas are usually applied at the board level. I’m talking about strong targets. I’m talking about intentional action and strong leadership, this is not going to shift itself. What have we learned from Male Champions. We’ve learnt that if the CEO himself steps in, change happens. So we need more of that. We need people being held accountable and that gender equality is not seen as just a discretionary, something nice to have. Rather it should be seen as absolutely core to business strategy because what we know from the research now is that those organisations which have more women, particularly at the senior level actually performs better. They outperform other organisations, but it’s one thing to know the business case in our heads Jenelle, we have to believe it in our hearts and I think that’s where there’s a disconnect. So we have to engage people’s hearts and that’s really where the story telling comes into being.

Jenelle: And I think that has been the blend of what you’ve done, always armed with research, always armed with the stats but those stories that you tell, you know, the holding of the light on the twin and saying you’re going to have a vastly different experience with one of your twins as compared to the other. Those are the things that make the data leap off the page that connect the head to the heart.

Elizabeth: Yeah that’s right because, you know, when you connect people’s hearts then you spur them to action.

Jenelle: Liz, as you know this podcast is about change and you’ve used my favourite words “change happens” throughout this and I know it’s a big and broad question on what your lessons are in leading change, but there really aren’t too many people I know who have created the levels of collective change that you have. If I was to ask you for your top insights on how to inspire and drive and sustain change, what would you say.

Elizabeth: What have I learnt. I’ve learnt that change doesn’t come in a giant leap. It comes of millions and millions of small steps that everyone can take. So that’s one thing. I’ve learnt that, I mean maybe earlier on I used to rush in with a reform agenda and you know, try and get everyone on board. What I’ve now learnt is that change happens more organically when you open up spaces for all the views to be aired. You know, so that you create psychological safety where you’re vulnerable in the way you talk and present change and that you build collaboration and build coalitions of change in a deeply human way which of course is part of the story telling. Sol that’s one thing I’ve learnt. Another thing that I’ve learnt is when you step into a conversation with someone, always assume good intent. I mean it’s a small shift but if you step into a conversation going “oh my god, he’s never going to buy this, what I’m trying to sell, you know, previous experience and his track record shows that he just doesn’t get it at all”. If you step in with that mindset, the conversation actually has nowhere else to go and not only that, you and that individual, whether it’s a he or a she, you might have quite different views but if you can get beyond the view to actually understanding what an influence is that has shaped this individual to hold the view that they hold, then you can step into their shoes for a minute and you can feel some commonality with them and maybe just to give you one example of that. The Chair of the working group at the minute. We come from the five regions of the world. We couldn’t be more different but we’ve all come together for the noble cause of promoting the rights of women and girls across the world and we need to traverse some pretty emotive territory, from abortion to sex work, to surrogacy. You know, where depending on where you come from, you’ll have a different view and just to give you an idea. One of … a beautiful rapporteur that comes from Africa, she has a view on abortion which is probably more restrictive than the rest of us. Now we could disagree with her view but actually what we’ve come to understand is the reason she holds that view is that when she was a very young girl, maybe around ten, there was a change of government in her nation and her parents were taken to a re-education camp, they were arrested and taken away and she was there, left to bring up her brother and sister. Now when she needed help, who reached out but the Pentecostal church. So she grew up in a strong faith in the Pentecostal church and that has helped shape her views about topics such as abortion. So when you understand that that’s some of influences that have shaped her, we can all say “yeah, absolutely we understand why you hold the view, so lets work out where the areas of common ground are because that’s where we can build a platform for reform” and I think you know, they’re some of the lessons that I’ve taken to heart in the work that I try to do to build the bridges of understanding between diametrically opposed views but so I can find some common ground from which to reform and change.

Jenelle: Wow. Such powerful lessons. I know I really feel like it’s … that’s kind of willingness to really unpack the “why people believe” what they do must open up such new areas of understanding and growth. I think that’s really powerful. So Liz, so much here to be kind of getting our heads around. What are some of the basic tools that we can arm ourselves with in everyday life to combat discrimination.

Elizabeth: I think the first thing we can do is it starts in the family. So we can look at the gender division of work. We can look at what we’re teaching our sons as opposed to our daughters. So that’s one thing. The other thing I think we can do is if we look around us and we can ask the question “if I’m not seeing 50/50, I need to ask the question why not” and what I mean by that is look women make up 50% of Australia’s population, in fact a bit over 50%. So if I’m looking at my workplace and I’m not seeing 50% of people coming to the organisation are women or I’m not seeing 50% of them on the talent development course or indeed on the board, I’m asking 50/50 if not, why not. Now there may be, there’s likely some explanation for it but it will help to surface the barriers which need to be removed if women are to thrive equally to men in a workplace.

The last three … three fast questions on change to finish the podcast

Jenelle: I would love to talk to you all day long but I’m not going to be able to do that. So unfortunately we are drawing to a close but I always finish each of these conversations on a more light hearted note. First one, what's a misconception that most people have about you.

Elizabeth: I mean one of the things I think some people have about me, because I come from a place of respected dignity, its integral to my work, that I’m just going to be a pushover but …

Jenelle: Hang on, people think you’re a pushover … that is not a misconception I have about you!

Elizabeth: They may well because of the softness or whatever, you know, try to create … I can assure you, I’m absolutely not. When I speak, get out of my way, so maybe that’s one of them.

Jenelle: Okay and what’s one guilty pleasure.

Elizabeth: Lots of guilty pleasures. I think probably … the main one at the minute. So not to read anything COVID related but just a binge watch scandi crime thrillers. I love doing that from Netflix to [52.11] to On Demand. If its On Demand, you name it.

Jenelle: There’s a bunch of new stuff released, we’ll have to chat about [overtalking] …

Elizabeth: I’m very excited about that so that’s my guilty pleasure.

Jenelle: And what's one thing that you’re hopeless at.

Elizabeth: There’s a lot of things that I’m hopeless at. I think probably the most … the one that I’m most hopeful at is probably domestic duties. It was interesting. I was talking at an organisation the other day and I had the pleasure of my niece giving the introduction and she started off by saying, she said “look Aunty Lizzie will talk to you a lot about, you know, sharing unpaid work, I just need to tell everyone that when the vacuum man came a few months ago and asked Aunty Lizzie where the vacuum was, it took her at least a good half hour to find it”. So yeah, that’s me, I’m hopeless at cleaning, cooking, domestic work. I can do it if necessary but I’m not very good at it.

Jenelle: Okay fair enough, its always good to know where your skills are and capitalise on those ones. So all good. Liz, I really cannot thank you enough for your time today. Its been such a rich conversation. Many many things for us all to take away from that but you know, if I was to try to summarise what's been an incredibly rich conversation, some of the things that I’ve really taken away from this is the need to really get underneath the systemic issues that are going on. What are the underlying causes. You talk about the redistribution of power. Even the underlying drivers for people’s beliefs and opinions. It allows you to find the common ground. It allows you to create the cut through and the advancement of change. I love the story of, you know, Ethiopian friend that you spoke about, the seeds of change will eventually sprout. If you do your part, I’ll do mine. I love the recognition of your … the ability to sit deeply with human suffering can do, when you can take those stories on, when you can use it as something to fuel you and very often we do feel a bit powerless in circumstances but as you said, how you turn up and bear witness is power in and of itself and we can again use this ignite change and I think intentionality to the decisions that we make in business is an important one as well. Things won’t just happen because you think its going to or because you have, you know, you have a positive attitude. The systems aren’t necessarily always built to help things along so bringing some intentionality, some purpose and consciousness to the decisions that we make in business is really critical here and of course, your ability to harness the power of the collective to ignite change is something that we could all learn plenty from. So Liz, thank you so much, its been a pleasure to speak with you today.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much Jenelle, its been fantastic, I’ve really enjoyed it, great conversation. Thanks for having me.

The ‘Change Happens Podcast’ from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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