Fear of the Q-word

Featured in

  • Published 20130604
  • ISBN: 9781922079978
  • Extent: 288 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

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]

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

On ‘The Natural Way of Things’, by Charlotte Wood

EssayThe women in Charlotte Wood’s powerful and distinctive novel are prisoners in an imaginative landscape that we know only as a remote location somewhere in inland Australia. It is not a place, or a literature, that we have encountered before. There is nothing like it in our literary past.

More from this edition

The women are present

IntroductionIT DID NOT take long before posters advertising performance artist Marina Abramovic's show at New York's Museum of Modern Art were defaced – literally....

Back to base

EssayTINA IS BEAUTIFUL and hopeful, but she tells me she checked herself into hospital at the age of nine to escape her stepfather's sexual...

Snake eyes

FictionHE INTRODUCED HIMSELF as a photographer when he'd pulled away from a group of men to tell her how good she looked. The comment...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.