From victim blaming to system shaming

'Men invented the system. Men largely run the system. Men need to change the system.'

Gordon Cairns, non-executive director, chair, Woolworths Ltd

AT THE END OF 2011 I got a call from the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, who had just been at a meeting in Canberra with the head of the Australian Treasury, Martin Parkinson. They'd been discussing a major review of how women fared in one of the nation's most powerful and prestigious departments, and he was happy to discuss the findings and the plans to address them with me, she said. The interview a day or two later was fascinating, and not quite what I expected from one of the more influential mandarins in Australia. Instead of the usual defensiveness, denial or victim blaming and bland platitudes about doing better, Parkinson said the findings of the detailed and candid review by consultant Deborah May had set off loud alarm bells through the organisation.

He admitted that for years he'd believed that the discrepancies in gender numbers in the upper ranks of the department were mainly the result of childbearing breaks and care responsibilities shouldered by women. Like many of his peers, he said it really didn't occur to him that there could be covert or indeed even overt bias to blame for the lack of women making it through. Treasury, after all, is an enclave of the smartest people in the country, who pride themselves on excellent analytical skills. Surely they couldn't be missing something quite fundamental – and detrimental – about how their workplace operated?

As it turned out, many of the senior bureaucrats had indeed been blind to this. And Parkinson came to see he had been missing a key factor. 'I had a light bulb moment: that we were treating the symptoms and not the cause. I had thought the barriers for women were self-resolving.'

There's a slightly donnish quality about Parkinson, although much of his career has been spent in the top enclaves of government. At a launch of a case study about the gender work done at Treasury in Parliament House, he revealed he was raised in his early years by his grandmother, while his mother worked to support the household. It's clear that along with a growing awareness of the breadth of the issue, he also has a strong personal motivation for seeing better outcomes for women. In 1997 Parkinson joined the IMF before returning to Treasury in 2001. At that time he realised that the rate of female progression hadn't changed much despite a decade of recruiting high levels of female graduates. But there was a reasonable spread of women across the department, and again he thought that time would see these discrepancies resolved. The problem, he thought, would fix itself.

In 2011, he again returned to Treasury after establishing and leading the Department of Climate Change. After a major study on gender in the department, he knew that expecting a change to the status quo without action was a mistake and too convenient an explanation which didn't address the significantly lower numbers of women in many parts of Treasury from early on in their careers. The organisation had indeed focused on addressing the symptoms, not the underlying problem. There were systemic issues and Parkinson and his team set about tackling them using the review findings, which he admits were tough to read. 'I remember very clearly hearing Deb's findings with my Executive Board, and Nigel Ray, Deputy Secretary of the Macroeconomic Group, turned to the group and said, "We are not leading the organisation we thought we were leading"', Parkinson recalls. 'The Executive Board was bound together on this issue from that moment onwards.'

Treasury went on to release information about pay, recruitment and progression. Individual groups in the department reported on their own data – interview rates, conversion rates to appointments and so on, with Parkinson telling interview committees not to stop at advertising vacancies but to actively seek out the best candidates for them. Nigel Ray adopted the '50:50: If not why not?' initiative and encouraged women to put themselves forward for roles.

The results began to emerge shortly afterwards. Dubbed the Progressing Women Initiative (PWI), the program includes gender audits, unconscious bias training, making managers accountable to gender targets, improving flexible working arrangements, and creating a senior diversity committee. It saw female representation in senior executive roles rise from 22 per cent to 33 per cent in three years to 2014, although the level dropped to 28.6 per cent by mid-2015 (according to the 2014/15 annual report). Women made up 51.5 per cent of Treasury's workforce in mid-June 2015, an increase from 50.6 per cent a year before. In 2015 Parkinson was appointed to run the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and there are plans to use his PWI framework as a model to be rolled out across the public sector. His successor at Treasury, John Fraser, however decided not to join the MCC.

There are many reasons why the Treasury under Parkinson and his team was able to make such a shift in operations and rules to change the gender ratio in the organisation. An important factor was that the men running the department underwent a reality check about what was actually happening in their own workplace rather than what they thought was occurring. Making powerful men advocates for women's empowerment has been equally cheered and jeered in recent years but it is an approach that rests on some fundamental logic: many female flag bearers for gender equality have long attempted to have their concerns taken seriously by the men running organisations. Their efforts were of course necessary and steadfast but not sufficient – you only have to look at the sobering list of statistics that haven't budged to know that this challenge rarely made it to the serious business agenda. A circuit breaker was needed.

That was one of the reasons the Male Champions of Change, which Parkinson belongs to, was formed by Elizabeth Broderick in 2010 when she was Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Although he was ambivalent about the all-male membership, Parkinson said the rationale made sense. 'It's men who are in power positions; if you can't get a bunch of men to talk to other men about this, why would we believe the pace of change can be any different? For me it was very much a sense that we needed to be seen as stepping up alongside women, and as men trying to fix the system by trying to do the right thing. That's why it has been so important to work with (membership body) Chief Executive Women on the core strategy.'

When I asked her about the thinking behind the group, Broderick explained why relying on women alone to solve the under-representation of women at the leadership level is illogical. 'Women by and large do not hold...