Women on boards: Do they only exist in stock photos?

So the glossy, smiley, Photoshopped, flawless world of stock photography seems to have a thing for corporate shots involving women participating next to men in meetings.
Sadly, it seems to be the only place where women are represented equally on boards. Currently, women only make up 8.3% of directors of the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, and there’s growing support for enforced quotas that would see more board positions occupied by women.

The idea of forcing a company to promote a certain number of women to a senior management level seems like an easy solution, but I think it will raise more problems than it solves. Here’s why.

In mixed-gender PE classes, the teacher will sometimes instigate a rule during ball sports that means a team can’t score a goal without the ball first being handled by at least two girls. Sounds like a great way of getting everyone into the game, but instead what happens is that the boys will stop playing as they were, and with a dramatic roll of the eyes pass the football/basketball/puck to the nearest girl, only to have it immediately returned. Do the girls get to touch the ball? Yes. Do they feel valued, appreciated, and like they’ve made a worthy contribution to the team? No. They feel patronised and stupid, made to perform as part of a token gesture.

I’m not saying that women don’t belong on boards, or that if they were forcibly elected that they wouldn’t do a damn fine job. I just think that having a quota is going to inspire resentment in the males who should have been more respectful in the first place and potentially self-doubt in women who may feel as though they’ve only been included to avoid a spanking From Higher Up.

Other ways to include women in companies could be:

• Encouraging women to apply for management positions so they feel as though they have a chance of achieving the role
• A policy that sees all resumes handed in contain no gender-identifying features such as a first name or title
• Catered meetings during lunchtime instead of having them after-hours when women may be occupied with their family
• Maternity and paternity leave to encourage a men to take on domestic responsibilities as well as their partners
• Fostering a culture of acceptance instead of enforcing rigid gender roles

Then again, progress is slow. In the 1992 government report ‘Half Way to Equal’, the recommendation for ‘action strategies’ to redress gender imbalances in senior positions was supported. It’s almost 20 years later, and I can’t see much evidence of things changing.

Maybe people will only see that women are capable of playing the game if they have to pass them the ball. Maybe it’s just going to take a much longer time than we were hoping for. Either way, if women and men could get on board with this, we could all kick a lot more goals.

Perfect

I found the process of learning to write pretty frustrating. In primary school, my teacher would ink out these incredibly well-shaped letters on the whiteboard and I’d struggle to copy her, my own lettering a squiggly mess. Once I’d started to get the hang of it, I had a dream of myself skimming my fingers over a page and producing typed print. I assumed if something kept getting better, surely the end result must be that it becomes perfect.

Over time, my handwriting became neater and neater, and now it’s a tight cursive – but there’s still crooked lines, skinny loops and sloppy corners. It’s not a flawless print, and it never will be.

Even in popular use, the idea of ‘perfect’ usually ends up just meaning ‘adequate’ or ‘to a high standard’ – for example, the perfect candidate for a job is the one that fits all the criteria. I hardly think an employer, upon finding an employee they deem ‘perfect’, would realistically expect them to turn up to work at 9.00am on the dot every day or never make a mistake.

Likewise, although a great deal of fuss is made over celebrity bodies, if there was one ‘perfect’ quality to determine beauty, how could people differ in their opinion of the most beautiful woman?  The perfect body just doesn’t exist.

Nothing in life will ever be perfect, not even in airbrushed magazine covers or movies. When a girl sighs in the 1999 film American Pie that she wants the act of losing her virginity to be perfect, her friend is blunt: “It’s not a rocket launch. It’s sex”. Her point was that it doesn’t have to be meticulously planned out (although even rocket launches have their share of imperfect moments).

I’m never going to have a perfect life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Life is a damn messy business. You try at things and fail, you make mistakes, you waste your time and lose some things forever. That’s what makes all the good times so worthwhile. And I’m not going to spend my life waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect man, the perfect idea or the perfect time.

It’ll never come.

Three songs, no flash

Taking a photography course last year, I asked my tutor what the best way of taking photos at somewhere like a bar was. His response? Don’t do it.

I’d heard that getting good photos of live music was one of the most notorious challenges of photography. The conditions are exactly what you don’t want – indoors, night time, low, rapidly changing light and lots of movement. It’s a nightmare.

So I thought I’d have a go.

Armed with my limited photography knowledge, my recently purchased Canon and a supportive friend, I headed out to Rock the Bay at the Espy, an alternative music lineup featuring 40 bands over three stages.

At first, I was bloody nervous. I didn’t want to push my way to the front and annoy the audience. I had no idea what setting to begin with. And when I discovered when there were other photographers there who clearly knew what they were doing, I felt even sillier. But pressing on, I tried lining up a good shot of the first band. This is what I came out with:

Yep. Blurry and crap. Gig photography was definitely going to be hard. Luckily, after I’d peeked at the settings of the more experienced photographer in front of me, I adjusted my own, headed off to the next band and tried again. And this time, after a few more dodgy shots, I got a few I liked.

Tim from the Tim McMillan Band

Lead singer of The Beards

The Beards in action

Lead singer of Barbarion

Barbarion guitarists

There were some seriously great bands there, which helped – The Beards, that sang songs about beards, including ‘No Beard, No Good (There’s Not Enough Beards in My Neighbourhood)’ and ‘If Your Dad Doesn’t Have a Beard, You’ve Got Two Mums’. There was Bellusira, with their energetic lead singer, the Tim McMillan band, who mashed up a variety of genres and guitared them to death, and Barbariön, the Viking metal band with some out-there costumes.

I’ve been to many a metal gig before, and knew there’d be other hazards at the show than bad lighting – so when I was shoved by drunk fans, had beer spilled on my leg, ducked out of the way of Barbarion spinning around a fan in the mosh pit and narrowly avoided being hit in the face by the long hair of a headbanger, I really only had myself to blame.

My camera and I survived however, and despite the vast number of bad shots I ended up with, I feel I’ve learned a lot. I’ll be back for more – hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.