2015-04-24
Debbie Gibson
In 2012 the Greens NSW Women's Group decided to survey female members to try and get a picture of their involvement in the party and what they felt were barriers to participation at various levels. The purpose of the survey was to try and provide direction to the group for its work in promoting gender equity within the party.
One area that interested me in the survey was how women perceived their level of contribution to meetings. Disappointingly low was the answer, I'm afraid. Many felt that meetings were very male dominated, both at local group and state levels. This came as a surprise to me. My local group was, and still is, very female dominated. Sometimes it's a bit of a novelty having a bloke in the room. I had never felt my voice wasn't heard in my local group meetings. I think this gave me the confidence to speak at SDCs.
My curiosity piqued by what the survey had revealed, I started taking tallies at SDCs of male and female speakers. The results over a few meetings horrified me. Even when the numbers of male and female delegates were fairly even (not often enough for my liking) the ratio of male to female speakers was around 2:1.
But wait… it gets worse! On the few occasions when I timed the speakers, the ratio blew out to 4:1. Not only were men speaking more often, they also spoke for much longer. No wonder women felt they were not being heard!
The Women's Group discussed these disappointing statistics and began the task of implementing some measures that would, hopefully, address this inequity.
First and foremost was our proposal to hold a Women's SDC. The timing was to coincide with International Women's Day in 2013. Local groups were encouraged to send women delegates. It was a resounding success and is now an annual feature of our SDC calendar. My personal measure of the success of that meeting was how many new faces were there as delegates. It was great to see so many people whose names I didn't know.
But one meeting does not mean an enduring change and I continued to take my tallies.
The numbers certainly improved during 2013. It gradually became a more even balance of male and female speakers.
2014 started off as a year of disappointment, however, and the ratio slipped back towards where we started. Particularly disappointing was at our second Women's SDC. We had 75 female delegates and 29 male and yet the gender of speakers were split close to 50:50. It seemed to me that groups were happy to send women delegates, but they were there as a purely decorative item; the men still had the important job of making the decisions.
We also re-surveyed our women members and found that little had changed in our results.
Happily, the figures have since improved and we are once again heading towards a more even representation in speakers. The adoption of a progressive speakers list has been one measure that I feel has greatly improved the diversity of voices heard at SDCs.
I haven't done the timing of speakers for a while, but I plan to focus on it for the next few meetings, to see where we're up to. I have also expanded my data gathering to include which groups our speakers hail from. Do we have some groups that dominate? Early indications are yes, but I think 12 months of data will give us a clearer picture of this.
Another thing that I found interesting in looking at participation within the organisation was the number of men and women elected to various positions at our AGMs over the last few years. Although there were more men elected to positions, the percentages weren't too bad compared to the figures I gathered for speakers at meetings. We are very willing to elect women for positions they nominate for: women nominated for 41% of positions and 44% of people elected to positions were women.
Our task here then is to ensure that we encourage women to put their hand up for positions, and make sure we have supports in place to help them do so.
There are two things I have found myself thinking most clearly as a result of all of this data gathering, both of which present very frustrating challenges.
First, how much of this is trickling down to local group meetings? Have things changed where it counts most? I suspect not, but I can't prove it. Part of the initial proposal for a Women's SDC was to encourage local groups to look at their own practices to ensure equity in participation. When meetings are held and how they are conducted are important elements in ensuring women have a voice. Can you start data gathering at your next meeting?
The second thing is that while we have focussed on supporting and encouraging women to be heard, maybe we need to look at encouraging men not be heard. They too, can be purely decorative at times.
Just a thought.
Discuss.
Image: Debbie Gibson, Cr Linda Eisler and De Brierley Newton at a NSW Greens SDC.