Each year the 8th of March provides an opportunity to reflect on the progress women have made towards equality, to celebrate those who have led the way and to unite behind a commitment to continue to pursue meaningful change.
This year's United Nations' theme is 'Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world'.
This theme juxtaposes the pivotal role women have played in effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet women continue to be significantly under-represented in parliaments and C-suites. In September last year, our University became a signatory to the tertiary education sector’s Joint Statement on ‘Preserving Gender Equity as a Higher Education Priority During and After COVID-19’. This statement highlighted that without conscious action to address the gendered impacts of COVID-19, the pandemic threatens to derail the tertiary education sector’s decades-long effort to advance gender equity.
Today Dr Emina Subasic, social psychologist and senior lecturer within UON Psychology, help our University community and the broader public reflect on the significance of this day with a public talk at the UON Gallery, Callaghan Campus.
Emina was interviewed this week by the Newcastle Herald. Her article titles: Why Change Must Be More Than Tokenism
Dr Emina Subasic believes it will take time, money and resources to achieve gender equality. But she said not doing anything will cost more.
"We should budget for belonging with the same fervour with which we budget for buildings," said Dr Subasic.
"Change is costly. We need to treat this as an issue that is going to require creating positions and funding - in my sector early women researchers - and looking at strategies to provide support for women coming back from maternity leave, looking at quotas in terms of appointments. I know these are very polarising issues, but I think we have spent a decade now thinking we can just tweak things, we can train women to be better negotiators, we can train them in assertiveness, we can train them to find and work with mentors, but all of these strategies signal that it is a women's problem, which is not the case and they also try and fix the problem by fixing women.
"Gender equality is not a women's problem, this is a common cause for women and men and everyone else in society to come together and solve together. It's a “we for she”, it's not a “she for she”, or a “he for she".
Dr Subasic said change would not be easy, or cheap. "But budgeting for change and budgeting for equality has huge benefits in terms of creating a sense that we all belong," she said. "Organisations where there is the sense that we all belong are organisations that can fully capitalise on the talent and creativity and innovation and energy and also be organisations where people see themselves and feel they're a part of - and that's priceless."
Dr Subasic spoke to UON staff on yesterday which was International Women's Day [IWD]. The theme of this year's event is Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world. UON's School of Humanities and Social Science also hosted a public panel discussion on the making of modern leaders. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard cited Dr Subasic in her book “Women and Leadership, Real Lives, Real Lessons”. Dr Subasic arrived in Australia as a refugee from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1997 and is now a social change and leadership scholar.
"I think we recognise that inequality is no longer sort of explainable by things like caring responsibilities, but part and parcel of inequality is discrimination against women and sexism that's embedded in our society in all kinds of ways," she said.
"I think there is a lot more agreement now that inequality is unjust and that change is needed. Where we get a little bit stuck and where it's tricky is finding some good clear direction for how that change can take place. Some of the ways in which we've attempted to create change may not be as effective as we'd hoped they would be and we might need to rethink those strategies for change."
Dr Subasic said research had shown that stereotypes that equated science with men started to disappear with greater numbers of women in science. "When we have a more equal society, that will just take care of prejudice and bias itself. Effective strategies for bias reduction are creating equal societies, not the other way around." Current strategies that addressed unconscious bias and targeted women, she said, were responding to a system that is still broken.
"Do we want to remove those programs? No, but we also want to rethink their role and we want to supplement those programs with genuine commitment to change."
Dr Subasic said it was important to think of change not as the absence of inequality, or something that happened automatically when barriers to equality were removed. "Change is a process in its own right," she said. "It's something we come together and strategise about and actively are mobilised for."
Dr Subasic said men's involvement in IWD needed to move beyond the tokenistic and symbolic and include genuine engagement.
Emina’s public talk at UON Gallery and at the presence of the University VC, staff and community member clearly stroke the target: Prof Alex Zelinsky’s, UON VC message to the whole staff following her public talk echoed Dr Subasic’s message very clearly when he stated:
“We’ve done a lot in the equity space to speed up our progress to equality. But it has been driven home to us all in the most confronting of ways these past few weeks, that it’s time to shift our focus onto men – who will help determine what the future looks like for people of all genders.
We often hear in discussions about gender equality that young women can’t be what they can’t see. Equally, young men can’t be what they can’t see – so it’s time to think about the behaviour we are modelling to the next generation we teach, share a meeting or dinner table with. As a University, I believe we have a civic responsibility to help facilitate meaningful conversations about things that matter. Achieving gender equality is a shared responsibility.”
The full content of Dr Subasic’s Newcastle Herald interview can be found here:
For the last ABS and WGFA report on the gender gap in Australia see here:
To know more about Dr Emina Subasic research see her UON profile or email her at: Emina.Subasic@Newcastle.edu.au
