CONVERSATIONS ABOUT QUOTAS to increase the number of senior women in business seem unreal. It is as if instead of living in contemporary Australia, we have stepped through that mirror with Alice, and are making our way through Looking Glass Land, talking nonsense. Given the utter unlikelihood of any Australian government imposing quotas, why are we even having the conversation?

Maybe it is guilt, or at least discomfiture about the continuing low numbers of women on boards and in executive ranks of leading companies. In late 2012, women made up 15.4 per cent of the non-executive directors of the ASX200 companies[i] and held just 9.2 per cent of executive positions in the top 500 companies.[ii] Worse, according to Workforce Gender Equality Agency, there had been ‘a decade of negligible change for females in executive ranks’.[iii]