Why Kate Thwaites wants us to stop imagining a better future for women

Speaking to a crowded room at the FW Leadership Summit Labor’s Assistant Minister for Women, Kate Thwaites, said it was up to us all to set about building that future through concrete actions and structural change.

“When I was reflecting on [this speech] … I thought about what I envisaged as a better future for women,” she said.

“As a teenager in the ‘90s, I imagined it looked like Spice Girl-style girl power, smashing that glass ceiling with our platform shoes.

“Ten years ago, I was part of the group of women who were told we could climb our way to the top and have it all if we would just lean in. If only it was that easy.”

Thwaites told the audience how she had come to learn that hard work – not just ‘leaning in’ – was required to drive improvements for women at work.

“It’s not a nice to have if you’ve got time left over or you’ve got a bit of spare change in the budget.”

“It’s not enough to just imagine a better future for women,” she said.

“We need to build that better future, turning imagination into action and dismantling the structural barriers that continue to exist”.

How do we do this? One key way, according to Thwaites, is to have women at the heart of policy decisions.

“Women need to be where economic decisions are being made,” she said.

“… women’s policy isn’t something that you just tack on at the end of a Cabinet meeting or the rest of your agenda.

“It isn’t just something that we imagine. It’s not a nice to have if you’ve got time left over or you’ve got a bit of spare change in the budget”.

Thwaites told the room real progress had been made on the path toward greater gender equality for women at work.

“[We] know now that women’s workforce participation is at an all-time high … [and] the gender pay gap has narrowed,” she said.

“There’s still a long way to go, but it has narrowed,” she added.

“… And for the first time, we have a federal government made up of a majority of women and an equal number of women and men in cabinet. This changes the conversation. It changes the types of policies we put in place.”

But Thwaites also warned against becoming complacent or believing that progress would be linear.

She told the audience that any gain could easily be lost without “real investment, not just in the dollars, but in our political will, in our sustained focus”.

Our gains are hard won, and so we have to continue our momentum so that we’re not just imagining a better future for women at work, but Australian women are living it,” she said.

“We’ve made progress and there is so much more to do.”