Tag Archives: iwd

Breaking bias

Posted on by
1

Australia was recently ranked overall 50th in the global gender gap (including 70th in ‘economic participation and opportunity’ and 99th in ‘health and survival’, but equal 1st in ‘educational attainment’). But while gender remains an issue worth discussing, our discussion needs to move beyond ‘women’ and consider complex structures and practices of power and equity. An article in yesterday’s Guardian by Sisonke Msimang argues that white women’s voices and anger are now being presented as central and as relatable, while the voices and stories of “Aboriginal women, women in hijab, women whose skin is far ‘too’ dark, and women who live on the wrong side of town; who can’t go to university and who will never report from parliament or file stories in newsrooms” are ignored. She adds that “Black women have pioneered the landscape of courage. … everywhere you look there are Black women who continue to be punished for loudly wearing their anger.”

As I reflect on the IWD 2022 theme of ‘break the bias’ I continue to consider how to acknowledge my own biases and privileges, and seek to understand the ways in which I help or hinder the project of diversity, inclusion and equity. I know that posting a blog post, photo or hashtag does little to address existing biases and their impacts on groups and individuals. I know that action and advocacy are needed in micro and macro contexts, and that sometimes appropriate action might be to speak less, take up less space, or question my own way of being in the world. I am proud of edited books such as Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership (which features 19 women out of 25 authors) and Flip the System Australia, but know these are imperfect in their attempts to share a diverse range of voices.

The following blog post is on the WomenEd website as part of a suite of worldwide reflections for International Women’s Day 2022.

Source: @PIRO4D on pixabay

Each year, International Women’s Day is surrounded by questions as to why the day is needed. Yet a dig into data from any country shows that gender equity is far from a reality. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated gender inequities, as this UN policy brief and this UN technical briefattest. There has been an increase in unpaid domestic and caring duties often taken up by women, an increase in gender-based violence, a decline in the availability of reproductive health services, and lack of women’s representation in pandemic planning response.

The 2022 International Women’s Day theme is ‘Break the Bias’. But how do we ‘break’ bias when it’s unconscious, unacknowledged, or invisible? With so much complexity in the social world, accepting stereotypes, tropes, and assumptions about gender can make the world a simpler place with less cognitive load, easier judgments, and faster decision making. But left unchallenged, biases can block, hinder, and harm individuals and groups in society and in organisations.

The education world should look at how bias might be influencing school communities and students’ experiences of learning, living, and being in the world. In schools, sometimes the racial, ethnic, ability, sexuality, and gender diversity of the staff does not match the diversity of the student and parent community. Sometimes there is a lack of diversity in the community, or in the teaching or leadership staff. Conscious and unconscious biases of those overseeing staff recruitment and promotion can influence who is recruited, who is promoted, and who is overlooked. Biases of educators can affect response to student behaviour.

The questions we ask of ourselves and of others can help us to understand our own biases, to challenge the biases of others, and to encourage different ways of being and behaving. In a recent conversation with Jacob Easley II on my podcast, The Edu Salon, he challenged educators to take the time to explore their professional identities, beliefs, and purpose. He suggests that a place to start is with the question of why a person is entering the teaching profession: “Is it really to work with certain types of students, and not others, those who are more like me, and not those who are different from me?” This is something we should all ask ourselves. How do we respond (to a student, parent or colleague) when someone is not ‘like me’?

We can break open, or splinter bias, if we ask good questions. How about: Do we like to teach those students mostly like ourselves? To what social issues do we draw our organisation’s attention? What and who do we ignore or pay little attention to? Who is visible, celebrated, and recognised? Who is ignored or ridiculed? Who do students see ‘out in front’ at assemblies and events? Who do the school community see in middle and senior leadership?

Do we hire mostly people like ourselves, or do we seek to recruit a diverse workforce? To whom (if at all) do we offer flexible work options? While it may seem fair to apply the same decision-making framework for all people, aiming for meritocracy can perpetuate existing advantage. Is it more equitable to consider the varying needs and barriers of individuals, and to seek to tackle those barriers on a needsbasis? What is our approach to a situation with which we are unfamiliar or to someone whose experiences and perspectives are vastly different from our own? Do we engage in uncomfortable conversations? Do we dismiss or seek to understand concerns?

We can ask these questions of ourselves and others. From there, here’s what else I think we can do.

  1. Interrogate our responses. Be ok with not knowing, with learning, discomfort, and respectful challenge. Be willing to listen and to learn. Work to identify biases in ourselves and our organisations, and the barriers and inequities they create.
  2. Anchor ourselves in our values. Be brave enough to know what kind of individual and what kind of organisation we aspire to be. ‘The community won’t accept this without resistance,’ is not a good enough reason to remain stagnant on issues of equity, social justice, diversity, and meaningful inclusion.
  3. Educate and advocate. Stand up. Support. Resist. For example, when someone is critiqued for their cultural dress or accent, speak out. When someone is not being considered for a role or promotion, question why or point to attributes and experience that may have been ignored.
  4. Implement practices and structures that support mitigating bias, such as transparent and consistent recruitment processes with diverse representation across the decision makers, thoughtful leave policies (including flexible and generous parental leave and carer’s leave), options for flexible working where possible, and an organisational culture in which staff are trusted and professional expectations take into account a diversity of life responsibilities.

We all have influence, and we all have a responsibility to take bias seriously and to engage with its realities and ramifications, even and especially when those biases work in our individual favour. If there is one thing the pandemic has taught me, it’s that we need to work for the greater good over the individual good.

This year’s IWD pose reflects ‘break the bias’.

How to #BalanceforBetter this International Women’s Day?

Posted on by
Reply

IWD2019

I realise that this year’s International Women’s Day theme #BalanceforBetter is focused on advocating for more gender balance for a better world. It’s about more women as leaders, on boards, and in STEM. It’s about closing the gender pay gap and accelerating gender equity.

But I keep seeing the #BalanceforBetter hashtag and thinking about my personal battles with ‘balance’ as a woman. I have over the last 12-18 months been working on the notion of balance in my life. Redressing the balance towards self-care, wellbeing, health and mental space, factors that have been crowded out by busyness, work, commitment to family, wanting to make a difference. I have written about trying to say ‘no’ to more things and to prioritise what matters.

I’ve been writing a book as part of my push to be ‘10% braver’ as the #WomenEd squad would say. Two other projects are examples of my advocacy for women; as co-editor of the recently-published book Flip the System Australia: What matters in education, we ensured that more than half of the chapters were contributed to by women authors, and I have co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration and History in which we offer female-authored papers on re-imagining school leadership. I’ve been lifting heavy weights to feel physically stronger and floating in floatation tanks to feel mentally lighter. I know this is a first-world take on the notion of ‘balance’. I’m in a privileged enough position that I can consider my writing, wellbeing, family and leisure time. I have choices available to me, which is not the case for all women.

This week I saw the following sculpture at Perth’s Cottesloe beach as part of the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition.

1E6A3477

It is by Hamish McMillan and is called ‘Internment’. The wire figure interned within the cage slumps over his desk, met by the words, ‘Nice work, Jeff!’ on his computer screen. He is surrounded by boxes with messages of those things perpetuating his imprisonment in a toxic work culture: “obligation to colleagues”, “I make a difference”, “credit card due”, “mortgage due”, “failure is not an option”. How many of us are chained to our devices or caged within our work worlds because of obligation, inspiration, ambition, bills to pay, or the desire to make a difference? At what cost? Is it being a ‘bad feminist’ if a woman does not aspire to a powerful, well-paid management position? Or is it just making good choices that suit us, even if it does nothing to balance gender roles at the highest levels of the workforce? Three female politicians have recently left the Australian Liberal Party. Sticking it out in an unsatisfying, harmful or misogynistic work environment may not be worth the power, pay and prestige it provides.

In my field of education, the longitudinal Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey of principals and deputy principals has found that in these top school roles, a disproportionate number of women are consistently paid less than their male colleagues. It also found that physical violence towards principals and deputy principals is now 37% or 1 in 3 principals (9.3 times the rate of the general population). Women are most at risk with 40% experiencing violence compared to 32% of men. So women principals and deputy principals in Australia are more likely to be paid less and also more likely to experience physical violence in their work than their male counterparts. This survey also reveals worrying trends in work hours, mental wellbeing and physical health for principals and deputy principals, something that dissuades potential candidates, particularly women, from aspiring to and applying for these roles.

Those who lead organisations or who stand on the stage normalise ideas about who can lead, who should speak and to whom we should apparently listen. Often in leadership roles, keynote presentations and film, advertising or media representations of leadership, women are under-represented. So what can we do to #BalanceforBetter?

Organisations can consider how to advance women in their ranks, including into top jobs, governance positions and roles traditionally held by men. Conference organisers, event planners and awards panels can continue to work on broadening the diversity of those who present, sit on panels (no manels, please!) and receive awards. The media can stop asking women how they cope with juggling work with family, while not asking the same of men. Colleagues can refuse to tolerate off-hand remarks that are sexist or demeaning to women, even when masked as ‘jokes’. Men can question those things they take for granted or see as normal, that perhaps work in their favour, but do not benefit the women around them. Researchers can consider the diversity of their citation practices. Women can consider how to equalise and advocate for gender balance in their organisations, and also how to find a sense of balance and wellbeing in our own lives. We can all take positive, even micro, actions towards more balance.

Voice and action on International Women’s Day

Posted on by
3

mural in George Town, Penang

Today is International Women’s Day. It is a day that is about raising mindfulness and action around parity, equality and inclusivity. In some ways, the world is changing. In the last week, a man in Belgium has been fined for a sexist comment towards a police officer. In October last year, Jacinda Ardern was appointed as the prime minister of New Zealand at the age of 37, making her the world’s youngest female head of government. Her first day in office, however, she was quizzed about whether she had plans to have children, and has since been the subject of plenty of opinion about her pregnancy, including during a 60 Minutes interview that focused on her pregnancy and her appearance, rather than her politics. Many have noted that male politicians would not be subjected to similar attention.

There remains gender disparity in leadership. Women currently account for 27% of ASX 200 board positions, up from the woeful 8% in 2009. In Australia, only one in four IT graduates and fewer than one in ten engineering graduates are women. In the education sector in Australia there remains a discrepancy between the amount of women in teaching versus the number of those in school leadership. 80% of primary teachers are female but only 57.5% of primary principals are female. 58.4% of secondary teachers are female, yet only 41.7% of secondary principals are female. Australia’s National Excellence in School Leadership Initiative has named 2018 the ‘Year of Women in Leadership’. They argue in their white paper that there are insufficient leadership opportunities for women, inadequate support mechanisms, and a paucity of role models for female teacher and students who aspire to leadership. I have reflected before about masculine models of leadership, in which the (often white) male leader (usually in a suit) is normalised as an image of ‘leader’, and what this tells people who are female, Indigenous, black, brown, or LGBQTI.

In her 2017 book, Women & Power: A Manifesto, Mary Beard writes that “we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.” In advocating for a world in which power can exist in diverse ways, she adds:

“You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession.”

Social media has been the vehicle for much of the global solidarity and activism surrounding issues of discrimination and inequity, and a way that some use to try and think about power differently. It can be a democratised platform where everyone can speak, regardless of power or position.

There are those who use humour to shine a spotlight on the absurdity of how the world can see women. The spoof Twitter account @manwhohasitall, for example, tweets out advice such as:

“MY DREAM: That one day boys will become anything they want to be – male chairwomen, gentleman drivers, men writers or boys who code”; and

“I am interviewing a famous working dad who manages to juggle 3 kids and work outside the home for a magazine. What should I ask him?”

There are more serious movements on social media, too, such as the #MeToo and #TimesUp hashtags, which build on the work that activist Tarana Burke began as a grassroots movement in 2006 as a way to help young marginalised women feel safe to speak up about sexual assault, in order to support survivors. After Alyssa Milano’s 2017 tweet using the hashtag #MeToo, the hashtag was used more than 12 million times, helping to de-stigmatise speaking up about assault. TIME magazine named its person of 2017 as ‘The Silence Breakers’ of the Me Too movement. Then, early this year, a number of high-profile people from Hollywood founded the #TimesUp movement to build momentum from #MeToo by confronting discrimination, harassment and pay parity across industries. On a recent Q&A ‘MeToo Special’ on the ABC, however, the panel showed no understanding of the history of the MeToo movement, despite being directly asked by an audience member:

“The #MeToo movement was initially created in 2006 by social activist Tarana Burke as a means to promote empowerment for women of colour experiencing sexual harassment. How can we ensure that this campaign is inclusive of all forms of diversity going forward?”

Host Virginia Trioli responded with, “It started, of course, as you say, correctly, Janet, as a very privileged white conversation. But it doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way.” She and the expert panel showed no knowledge that this was originally a grassroots movement in a black community, not a ‘privileged white conversation’. On the one hand, these movements can be seen as powerful attempts to rally the world to address issues of inequity, and bring attention (and hopefully action) to issues of discrimination and inequity. On the other, I wonder what these movements say about power in our world when the words of Tarana Burke, a black woman activist working in her local Alabama neighbourhoods, only become legitimised and amplified when appropriated by those who have power and platform. Pleasingly, there are actions emerging from social campaigns. TimesUp members have set up a legal defense fund to help victims of sexual assault that has raised over $21 million. They are advocating for legislation that penalises companies that tolerate persistent harassment and that discourages the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims.

Meanwhile, I have been working on the Australian Flip the System book with my co-Editors Jon Andrews and Cam Paterson, and thinking on inclusivity. The book is an Australian take on the theme explored in Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up (Evers & Kneyber, 2016) and Flip the System UK: A Teachers’ Manifesto (Rycroft-Smith & Dutaut, 2018). Flipping the system is about subverting power hierarchies in the education system, and elevating the voice, agency and influence of those often ignored or marginalised by the system. This involves sharing teacher perspectives and Indigenous perspectives, for instance, alongside the academic voices of scholars. What we have found, however, is that elevating the voices of those at the nadir of the system is full of challenges. Often there are vulnerabilities or ethical tensions that deter individuals and groups from sharing their stories. Like those voices who have brought prominent social campaigns to the fore, it is those who have the most power, stability and security that often feel most free to speak. Those who have the most to lose, or who are in the most precarious circumstances, can be wary about speaking up or speaking out. I wonder about how much career stage and level of influence make a difference to the extent to which it is possible to disrupt the status quo.

Tarana Burke said in an interview with The Guardian that “having privilege isn’t bad, but it’s how you use it, and you have to use it in the service of other people.” Those of us with a privilege and a platform to be heard can ask ourselves: Who gets to speak? What voices are heard and what voices are ignored, drowned out, or silenced? How might we resist power structures, rather than perpetuating them? Are we participating in slacktivism, self-aggrandisement and self-congratulation, or are we taking positive action?

To ‘Press for Progress’ in issues of discrimination, opportunity and diversity, we can be mindful of those things that are normalised in our world in terms of who gets to speak, where power resides, and (when the social media storm melts away) what is actually getting done.