The idea that an individual merely needs to work on themselves to become more successful is no longer relevant.
That’s the key advice from Professor Renée Leon, the Vice-Chancellor and President at Charles Sturt University who believes that societal change requires collective action, not only individual improvement.
“It’s very difficult for a single individual to expect to be heard about anything because they look like they’re just pressing their own case,” Professor Leon says. “We’ve got to address the structural factors that are impeding equality for women at work.”
Professor Leon will speak at the She Leads Conference in Canberra on August 4, joining other female and non-binary leaders sharing expertise on the importance of collective change within a workplace. Speakers and participants will unpack the strategies and practices that enable organisations to embrace leadership potential.
When Leon began her role as Vice-Chancellor in September 2021, she noticed that academics who’d recently given birth, or had become new parents were often missing out on key promotions and advancement opportunities.
“In my own institution until last year, the way in which academics got a promotion is partly based on their publications in the past two years, so if you happen to have been off on maternity leave in the past two years, you’ve got nothing and so you don’t get promoted,” she said.
“We have to take into account the fact that a year earlier, an academic had a slew of publications before they went on maternity leave. And so we fixed that.”
Professor Leon said that the change made a huge difference to the university’s gender statistics in promotion.
She will also be speaking at the conference about the importance of using a company’s rhetoric to create impact.
“You’ve got to be attuned to the organisation that you’re in to be effective, which means speaking in the tone of your organisation,” she said. “Speak the language of whoever it is you’re trying to change. That’s not only true about gender and leadership, it’s true about everything.”
Leon plans to relay personal stories from her own life as a leader across several public institutions to underscore this point.
As the Former Department of Human Services (DHS) secretary and the Department of Employment, she has extensive experience in both Commonwealth and State public administration, covering policy, program management and service delivery.
“To be effective and persuasive in an organisation, you do need to be attuned to what the culture is, and how you are going to be able to shift it,” she says.
“You might need to do some gentle cultural change before you’re going to be able to be accepted as an assertive, competitive female.”
Professor Leon also notes the ways organisations can address unconscious bias.
“Organisations have to do deep work to identify unconscious bias, because I’ve discovered…even though some places thought they were totally equity focused, naturally, they rate women differently at performance appraisal, because all of the unconscious bias that comes in,” she said.
In 2013, Professor Leon was awarded a Public Service Medal for her outstanding service to public administration and law. In her time working across various organisations, she observed a significant problem for women was the extent to which workplaces are not friendly to family responsibilities.
“[Companies] might let you work part time, but then you’re on the kind of mummy track and you don’t get opportunities for visibility and promotions and task forces and not seen as management material,” she said.
“Similarly, a lot of organisations are going through hybrid working at the moment and more women are choosing to work from home than men because they’re actually juggling everything else.”
Professor Leon believes this trend is causing women to have less access to senior management positions and less visibility to networks that could be helpful to them.
“Structural invisibility due to working from home is now gender imbalanced,” she says. “ So that’s the kind of thing that managers have to think about.”
She is also wary that the issue of childcare is still being contested.
“It seems very old fashioned that we’re still talking about childcare. Work-based childcare makes a huge difference to women’s ability to juggle work and family.”
Speaking about the upcoming She Leads conference, Leon says she’s looking forward to the experience and especially hearing from a diverse group of women and young leaders.
“I look at what’s happening in the workforce, and the women coming up now and it seems like not nearly enough has changed. I was in the workforce when the Sex Discrimination Act was passed. And, and so lots of discrimination is now no longer present, but covert discrimination still persists. And although sexual harassment has been banned, it’s still very pervasive and incredibly limiting to women’s opportunities. I wish that I could say that feminism in work was now unnecessary, but sadly it’s not.”
Professor Leon will appear at the She Leads Conference in Canberra on August 4. You can get tickets here.