AMP is rare among ASX 200 entities, having had both a female CEO and female chair in place since 2021, when Alexis George was appointed CEO.

Both Hazelton and George led AMP in the fallout from the banking royal commission, as well as through issues that plagued its AMP Capital arm. They also came to the helm just three years after AMP’s once gender-equal board became all-male, when three female board members stepped down at the same time following investor scrutiny and shareholder pressure.

AMP announced Hazelton’s retirement this morning, with former CEO of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Mike Hirst appointed as her replacement.

Hazelton took the lead on the board after former chair David Murray stepped down in 2020 following pressure on the board over its decision to appoint Boe Pahari as AMP Capital CEO, despite knowing he’d been ordered to pay a financial penalty for sexually harassing a subordinate.

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This is despite the fact that in 2020, Mr Pahari was involved in a workplace sexual harassment scandal that resulted in assets under management falling $6 billion over 12 months as employees scrambled to leave the beleaguered company, and investors pulled away.

While Pahari’s imminent windfall might be contractual and disconnected to his conduct, it’s a cold comfort for people damaged by his bad behaviour.

It begs the question: why is it that bad behaviour does not lead to bad consequences for some?

Compare and contrast this to the treatment that former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate received, for example.

As a consequence of gifting four executives with Cartier watches valued at a total of $20 000 for securing a lucrative deal, Prime Minister Scott Morrison coined the gifts as “disgraceful” in Parliament. Holgate lost her job (despite the government insisting that she quit of her own volition) and has faced severe reputational damage since a slew of incensed men led by the Prime Minister hog-piled on the movement.

There’s a long history of this differential treatment.

Junior publicist, Kristy Fraser-Kirk, sued David Jones for $37m due to the sexual harassment she endured at the hands of then CEO, Mark McInnes. Fraser-Kirk received $850 000 in the end (much of which went to paying her legal bills) and Mr McInnes resigned, complete with a golden handshake rumoured to be at least $2m.

Meanwhile, Fraser-Kirk was labelled a ‘gold digger’ and McInnes an ‘inveterate flirt who had simply misread the signals’. Fraser-Kirk was left to flee Australia to escape the vitriol, while McInnes was employed as head of Solomon Lew’s Premier Retail and Executive Director of Premier Investments up until January this year when he stepped down for personal reasons.  

Cadet reporter, Amy Taeuber, and her freelance sister Sophie were BOTH sacked by Channel 7 after Amy lodged a complaint of harassment against a senior male reporter. A few days after lodging her complaint, Amy was summoned to a meeting with HR and escorted from the building, told she was being suspended. The male reporter remained safely employed.

Or take Amber Harrison, Executive Assistant at Seven West Media whose contract was terminated when the company learned of a consensual affair between she and [married] CEO, Tim Worner. She left her position in 2014 with an enforced gag order firmly in place. Harrison became involved in a messy court battle with the broadcaster after she publicly disclosed details of the affair in 2016, and eventually walked away. As for Worner? He remained in his position for a further three years. 

Just last year, an independent investigation commissioned by the High Court found that former Justice Dyson Heydon sexually harassed a minimum of 6 former associates. Despite this, Justice Heydon retains his Order of Australia.

And most recently, Christian Porter continues to hold his position as a high-ranking minister, despite persistent and wide-ranging claims in relation to his behaviour with women recently and earlier in his career.

I’m sure you can see the pattern.

If you are a senior male, in a position of power and/or profit generation, then bad behaviour doesn’t always lead to a bad outcome. In a country where Aboriginal people are incarcerated for minor offences, how can public and private sector leaders in Australia not see the unjustifiable inequity of this situation?

There’s a lot of talk now about ending the harassment and mistreatment of women at work and in the community. When it comes to the workplace – we have no hope of any change as long as bad behaviour continues to be tolerated, minimised and even rewarded.

Good Leaver/Bad Leaver clauses in bonus schemes have been widely used for a long time – so why do we not see them transparently apply to corporate benefits and recognition? If business is serious about creating change and improving the treatment of people in the workplace, then they need to hold up the mirror and take an honest look at the structural and behavioural disincentives to creating true culture change.

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Alexis will take the Chief Executive Officer role at a difficult time for the company, given the issues that have plagued its AMP Capital arm, and following the fallout from the banking royal commission.

The all female leadership team is particularly noteworthy at AMP, given it was just three years ago that AMP’s once gender-equal board became all-male — with female board directors stepping down following investor scrutiny and shareholder pressure. At the time of AMP announcing these female director departures, the board said it was seeking “meaningful change”.

Current CEO Francesco De Ferrari will leave after just two years in the role — including taking on the additional role of overseeing AMP capital following the demotion of Boe Pahari over sexual harassment.

Alexis’ appointment was announced by AMP chair Debra Hazelton, who took the lead on the board after former chair David Murray stepped down in the wake of employee and investor pressure against the board following their approval of Pahari to lead AMP Capital, despite knowing he’d been ordered to pay a financial penalty for sexually harassing a subordinate.

On accepting the board position back in August, Hazelton noted her commitement to regaining “trust and confidence of our clients, shareholders and employees.” She’s been on the AMP board since 2019.

The appointment of Alexis George means there will soon be eleven women leading ASX 200 companies, and at a time when female CEO appointments are still rare. A late 2020 report from Chief Executive Women found that of the 50 CEO appointments to ASX 200 entities over the past two years, just three of them went to women.

Alexis is currently the deputy chief executive of ANZ, a position she’s held since mid-2018, which has included overseeing the bank’s wealth divestment program, including sales of major businesses. She’s expected to start in the third quarter of this year.

“In Alexis George, we have a great leader and strong fit for the future of our company,” Hazelton said in AMP’s statement today.

“On any measure, she has outstanding industry experience in wealth management and banking, and is committed to continue the transformation of AMP’s business, and importantly, our organisation’s culture. Alexis will work with our executive team to complete and build on the strategic initiatives started under Francesco’s leadership and take AMP forward to its next phase of growth.”

Alexis has more than 25 years experience in the financial services industry in Australia and overseas, including seven years with ANZ.

She was previously at ING Group for ten years, taking on a number of senior positions including CEO posts in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and regional COO Asia responsible for product marketing, technology and operations.

AMP shared comprehensive details on Alexis’ CEO contract and pay, including that she will be paid $1.715 million per annum including superannuation. She will receive significant performance incentives as well as sign-on awards.

De Ferrari will step down at the beginning of July.

“Leading AMP, a business that is part of the fabric of Australia and New Zealand, is a privilege. I wish Alexis and AMP only the best and you can count on me to continue cheering for its success from the sidelines,” the outgoing CEO said in a statement.

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Elsewhere female middle managers can expect to receive ‘inappropriate’ texts and emails from their company’s CEO. These are real examples of sexual harassment reported at the financial services companies AMP and QBE.  

The culture of violence against women at AMP went all the way to the top. In August Boe Pahari stepped down as the CEO of AMP Capital after details of him harassing a female colleague were made public.

In his case, an inquiry found that he harassed the much younger woman by persistent calls for her to extend a work trip in London to buy clothes to go on a date with him.  He said that if she said no, it would be equivalent to saying he had a ‘limp dick’.

It was only when Pahari’s case became public that action was taken. That scandal that finally emerged led chairman David Murray and director John Fraser to resign.

Their resignations were rightly justified. Pahari had been promoted to CEO even though he had been penalised for sexual harassment in 2017 by AMP.  AMP appeared to prefer to back its ‘rainmaker’ while silencing women with legal settlements. 

At QBE Pat Regan was stood down as CEO this month after a complaint from a female employee that breached the code of conduct.  Details beyond that are unclear, but this became public knowledge at a time when the financial services industry was already under the spotlight for the behaviour of its male executives. 

What caused all of this? Much of the focus has been on holding individual men to account for their wrongdoing. Others have pointed to the corporate culture of AMP, the unreconstructed values of its executives, and the silencing of reporting. 

But there is much more to this than men’s behaviour in a single rogue organisation. Focussing on AMP obscures the real scale of sexual harassment, and its cover-up. AMP isn’t a ‘bad apple’, it is a symptom of a much more fundamental problem with leadership. 

In our research we have found that addressing the broader structural and cultural barriers to women’s safety at work is what is needed. This means overcoming the low reporting of harassment and violence at work. To effect change, we need to fundamentally rethink how we understand and practice leadership. 

The idea of leadership originates with male power and hierarchy. This is too often translated into feelings of superiority and entitlement by people in leadership positions. It is this very condition that fuelled Harvey Weinstein and so many other male leaders’ ability to get away with sexual harassment and assault for so long.  

To its credit, the #MeToo movement has made visible the extent of sexual harassment and encouraged its reporting. But corporate leadership has not learned enough from the lessons of #MeToo.  

Changes to a few male personnel at companies like AMP and QBE, while important, is not enough for women to be safe from predatory leaders using sexual violence to control them. As long as leadership is based on power inequality and while most leaders are men, the abuse of women at work will continue. 

To address the normalisation of harassment, tackling leadership inequality is a way forward. This includes increasing the number of women in leadership positions. People have been saying that for decades, but far too little has been done to make any real change. Another part of the solution, and one usually overlooked, is that the traditional understanding of leadership as a form of dominance needs to change.  

The leadership needed is one that not only supports changes towards greater equality, but also disrupts the hierarchy, power and regimes that perpetuate inequality. This leadership is one that is not defined primarily by male values of domination, competition and victory. It is a leadership that sees justice, equality and empathy as the hallmarks of excellence.  

By Alison Pullen, Celina McEwen and Carl Rhodes

Alison Pullen is Professor of Management and Organization Studies Macquarie University 

Celina McEwen is Senior Research Fellow in Management, University of Technology Sydney 

Carl Rhodes is Professor of Organization Studies, University of Technology Sydney 

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Senator O’Neill made the speech after the was approached by the whistleblower and given permission to share her story. The whistleblower remains anonymous, but O’Neill said she’s a “young woman who deserves a medal for bravery and resilience.”

“AMP tried to silence her,” O’Neill said prior to reading the statement. “Tonight I use my platform as a female Labor Senator to give her words a public voice.”

She also used the speech to urge corporate Australia to do better on responding to sexual harassment allegations. And she described the story she read as being like so many others that have been shared with her by men and women in the financial services sector.

“It has to stop,” she said. “This cannot continue. Australia is better than this. Come on corporate Australia, surely you can destroy the cultural stain on our nation.”

O’Neill read the former AMP employee’s statement detailing how over the past eight weeks she has relived her experiences of sexual harassment “with utter dismay that I see the AMP system remains as it ever was.”

Back in early July media reports emerged regarding the appointment of Boe Pahari as CEO of AMP Capital CEO. The board promoted Pahari despite knowing he had been financially penalized for sexual harassment, with Julia Szlakowski publicly revealing details of her complaint against her former boss Pahari last week.

This week, following pressure for shareholders, Pahari has been demoted from the role (but still remains with AMP) and AMP Chair David Murray, who signed off on the “unanimous board decision” to promote Pahari, has stood down.

The survivor says that she endured consistent and systematic harassment as a junior female employee at AMP. She says that after speaking out she was bullied, victimised and ultimately silenced. She raised formal complaints with the company — including via legal representatives — “but none were resolved safely, let alone satisfactorily.”

The details are truly shocking, traumatic, upsetting and as the survivor puts it: life and career-destroying. They are well beyond the realm of “low level” if such a thing can really exist when it comes to sexual harassment at work.

The harassment included being sent sexually explicit photos and emails, constant and public propositioning, physical harassment and the final, absolutely horrific and shocking one — a direct manager threatening to end her career if she did not follow through with his sexual wishes while on a work trip. She says she feared for her physical safety and that her only saving grace was that he was blind drunk. As he poured himself another drink, she ran.

AMP put the woman through months of dragged-out proceedings. She was given five days to sign an NDA — she was almost certain that what was being asked of her was illegal, but she had run out of money to pay her lawyers. She says she signed the NDA because by then she felt physically and psychologically destroyed.

She describes just how vulnerable she felt during this period, how utterly powerless and worthless she felt and the extreme pressure she was placed under to make an immediate decision. Desperate. Cornered. Left to the mercy of those higher up. She became a shadow of the previously outgoing and well-spoken woman she once was.

“I knew I was just one small person who would be crushed by the force of one of Australia’s largest companies.”

But she thought the harassment was so blatant and unequivocal that AMP would do the right thing. That by signing the document, she would salvage her career and keep her livelihood.

She was wrong. She was demoted and wound up photocopying documents. She was told she’d have to continue to attend meetings with her harasser.

This survivor’s account also highlights the trauma and challenges survivors face in getting their complaints taken seriously — as the survivor’s lawyers told her, organisations will often take their chances, knowing that women will be unwilling to risk ruining their lives and careers and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees it’d take to get a case heard in court.

Two of the cases were escalated internally — but in one case the perpetrator went on to be repeatedly promoted. In the other case, the perpetrator was simply given a warning and allowed to continue in his role. He went on to harass another colleague, who then left the industry.

The survivor says her time with the employer destroyed her life, and that it’s taken everything she has to rebuild parts of it — yet she knows that it will never be the same again.

The perpetrators of the harassment instead have gone on to “thrive”.

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 000.

If you need help and advice, call 1800Respect on 1800 737 732, Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491 or Lifeline on 13 11 14. 

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AMP director and former treasury secretary John Fraser has also resigned, while Boe Pahari has been stood down from his role as AMP Capital chief executive.

The string of changes at AMP come following the decision to promote Pahari to the helm of AMP Capital after he had been fined $500,000 as part of a settlement for a sexual harassment complaint from a female colleague in 2018.

Julia Szlakowski, the former employee at the centre of the harassment case, said AMP made “persistent and misleading” efforts to downplay Pahari’s alleged sexual harassment.

Non-executive director Debra Hazelton will replace David Murray as chair, saying in a statement she is committed to regaining “trust and confidence of our clients, shareholders and employees”.

Hazelton has been on the board of AMP since 2019 and has more than 30 years of experience in the financial services industry, including as the local chief executive of Mizuho Bank in Australia and Commonwealth Bank (CBA) in Japan.

Boe Pahari will continue to be employed by AMP, resuming a role at his previous level with the company.

AMP chief executive Francesco De Ferrari will replace Pahari as AMP Capital chief executive on an interim basis.

“These changes respond to feedback expressed by some major shareholders regarding the appointment of Mr Pahari as AMP Capital CEO on 1 July 2020,” AMP said in a statement on Monday morning.

David Murray said AMP always treated the sexual harassment complaint against Pahari seriously and there was always “considerable support” for their strategy.

“The board has made it clear that it has always treated the complaint against Mr Pahari seriously. My view remains that it was dealt with appropriately in 2017 and Mr Pahari was penalised accordingly,” he said in a statement.

“However, it is clear to me that, although there is considerable support for our strategy, some shareholders did not consider Mr Pahari’s promotion to AMP Capital CEO to be appropriate.

“Although the board’s decision on the appointment was unanimous, my decision to leave reflects my role and accountability as chairman of the board and the need to protect continuity of management, the strategy and, to the extent possible, the board,” Murray said.

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Eight men currently make up the AMP board following the exodus of four female board members in 2018. This time last year AMP boasted a board that was 50 per cent female.

The Australian Institute of Directors released its latest board diversity report yesterday, finding that there are four boards that remain female-free zones, including AMP, ARB Corporation, Emeco and TPG Telecom. The number of all male boards on the ASX 200 is down from 26 in 2015.

Slattery has 26 years of experience in financial services, superannuation and retirement, including as co founder of the SMSF Association, which she led for 14 years. She has also served on a number of high-profile board and advisory committees across listed companies, and across the commercial, not-for-profit and government sectors.

She is currently on the boards of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Argo Global Listed Infrastructure and the South Australia Cricket Association.

AMP Chairman David Murray said on the appointed that Slattery’s extensive experience as a business leader and non-executive director, along with being an expert in change, will bring a strong mix of skills to the board.

“Andrea has built trusted relations with government, industry and consumers, and been a strong advocate for the self-managed superannuation industry, and financial services in general. Andrea’s insights into financial advice, wealth management and superannuation will be very valuable to AMP as we continue to simplify and reset our business.”

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But the not-so-good news is that the number fell just short of the 30 per cent target the Australian Institute of Company Directors hoped to achieve by December 31 2018, and women still didn’t crack the 50 per cent appointment rate during the year, with 45 per cent of board roles in 2018 going to women.

The target push hasn’t been helped by the four boards that had no women on them as of the end of 2018, including AMP (which started 2019 with eight board members, all male), ARB Corporation, Emeco and TPG Telecom — although that figure is down from 26 in 2015.

In May last year AMP declared it was seeking “meaningful change” after its three remaining female board directors resigned, following the departure of chair Catherine Brenner. AMP had started 2018 with a board that was 50 per cent female.

Still, there were other wins in 2018 to note, including that the top 100 companies reached the 30 per cent target by May 2018.

Automotive supplier Bapcor leads the pack, with a 60 per cent female board, followed by NIB and MetCash (both 57.1 per cent female), Fortescue Metals (55.6 per cent), Medibank Private (55.6 percent) and Commonwealth Bank (50 per cent).

The 30 per cent target was set back in 2015 when there were just 40 boards across the ASX 200 with more than 30 per cent female representation. That number is now at 96.

The AICD has promised to keep advocating for gender parity on Australian boards. “30% remains the floor and not the ceiling for gender diversity. We intend to continue advocating for gender parity on Australian boards,” said Angus Armour, the CEO of AICD, releasing the results this morning.

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