How to engage men in the equality conversation

If policymakers and those responsible for workplace culture do not adopt positive changes, the progress of gender equality in Australia will stall, leaders have claimed.

Salesforce ANZ and ASEAN CEO, Pip Marlow, said there’s a responsibility for leaders in business to create workplaces with a single culture.

“You can have a process or a policy but if you don’t have a culture that celebrates and really encourages people to take advantage of that, then I think it’s great on paper, but it doesn’t happen,” Marlow told the Future Women Leadership Summit 2022.

She used the analogy of companies and businesses seeking greater market share through growth plans as an example of how leaders can adapt with change.

“Companies like us, we want to grow 20 per cent market share, we need to apply that same growth aspiration to ensuring that gender equity is achieved earlier,” she said.

“Because frankly, there’s a whole next generation of women who aren’t going to have parity in the workplace. They will not be paid the same for the same work they do. They will not reach the same heights as men do.

Plan International Australia CEO Susanne Legena speaking on a panel discussion about how to engage men in gender equality

“We wouldn’t accept this in other places, and we’ve accepted it for too long when it comes to gender equity.”

Susanne Legena, CEO Plan International Australia, said the conversation around gender equality needed to engage more men.

“We have to find a way to unlock this conversation and you shouldn’t need to have a daughter to be involved in that conversation,” Legena said.

“It shouldn’t have to happen to you for it to matter to you.”

Tarang Chawla, a gender equality and mental health advocate, said his experience showed men are interested but do not know how to approach the topic.

“I think a lot of men in particular come from the noblest of intentions but have very little clue – almost like comically low of an idea of what to do and how to work,” he said.

“It’s almost as though male development occurred at some point up until age 16 or 18 and just stopped.”

Chawla believes a lot of this will change, thanks to the work of countless individuals, including as sexual consent activist Chanel Contos.

Contos made global headlines in 2021 after spearheading an online petition and policy conversation on sexual consent education in Australian schools.

“It’s about how do we as a collective, make the opportunity for business, for organisations, so that women are empowered,” he said.

“If you look statistically at the population, women are 50 per cent of the population and yet they occupy so few positions of leadership. That doesn’t make sense.”

Legena agreed.

“I think, engage some good male allies, train them to start having those conversations with other men. It doesn’t always have to be women to men,” she said.

“It can be men to men, in fact, it can be more powerful when it’s done and can create a safe environment where men can talk freely about their own experiences and their trauma about the expectations of being men in a culture like Australia.”

Bastion Transform and former ABC News Director Gaven Morris (left) and anti-violence advocate and There’s No Place Like Home host Tarang Chawla (right)

Gaven Morris, Bastion Transform and former Director, ABC News, admitted the national broadcaster was slow to act on female representation.

“I think like any large organisation the ABC for a long time was slow to act on some of these things,” he said.

“Not just the representation of women in storytelling and senior roles across the organisation but also the representation of all Australians.

“And a place like the ABC that’s just not really on. It’s a public media owned by all of us.”

Morris, who worked in the Press Gallery in Australia’s Parliament House decades ago, also commented on parliament’s serious workplace issues.

“It was just an extremely poor culture. And I think 25 years, 30 years later we’re now having that conversation about Parliament House in a concerted way,” he said.

“How on earth has it taken that long? How on earth has it taken us in the media not to grasp onto these issues much earlier on and ensure women’s stories and everyone’s stories are told much more fairly and much more honestly. It’s been incredible to me that it’s taken this long.”

PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK BROOME