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.

Being a Dickhead’s Cool

Hipsters. We’re all jumping on the bandwagon to bag them out – but what are they, and when will they stop playing ‘80s synth?

As a sometime Bachelor of Arts student (albeit one with a major, which means I’ll actually get a job one day), I see hipsters every day of the week. You know the ones. They’re wearing an old knitted jumper with see-through tights to look as though they don’t care about fashion. They’re crowded into the café-that-also-sells-vinyl-records to deliberately not be seen at Starbucks. They love screenings of obscure movies. In fact, they love obscure anything at all because it makes them feel like they know more than the average, “mainstream” person.

Hipsters are also the least favourite subculture of the masses right now – they’ve taken over the place of emos for being shot down, with a raft of anti-hipster sentiment present in memes like Hipster Ariel and the infamous Being a Dickhead’s Cool song.

But why?

Style over substance is the main complaint here. While emos were denigrated for being melodramatic – complaining about how tormented they were although most of them came from very wealthy backgrounds – the gripe with hipsters is that they pretend to be knowledgeable and trendy, when in fact all they have down is the look. Superficiality rules in hipster-land, an ethos that is easily detected and hard to accept.

It’s the utter insincerity of the hipster that really irritates me. Just because someone spent five minutes on Wikipedia reading about Dadaism doesn’t mean their collage of photos is any more incredible than the zillions of other collages in the zillions of other bedrooms around the world.

The thing that annoys me the most, though, is that hipsters spend so long trying to look so unique and nonconformist that actually, they all end up looking the damn same. And isn’t that the most “mainstream” thing of all?

Really, the hipster movement has some positives. Hipsters are, after all, highly educated people who recycle, make an effort to avoid overly sexualised trends and aren’t afraid to have an opinion.

If only they didn’t smother it all with petty, egotistical wankery then people might actually start taking them seriously. Until then, I guess they’ll just have to keep on having new age fun, with a vintage feel.

Ridiculous

In 1959, a nine-year-old boy went to a library to borrow books to quench his thirst for knowledge. And he was refused. Because he was badly-behaved? No. Because there wasn’t an adult with him? No.

It was because the library didn’t lend books to black people.

Fast-forward about twenty years and Dr Ronald E McNair held a PhD in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a specialist in laser physics. The idea of refusing him books at a library because of his race seems, to us in Australia in 2011, ridiculous. Who cares if someone’s black? Or a child? Or religious, or a woman, or gay? Shouldn’t they be allowed the same privileges as the rest of their society?

The sense of injustice I felt when learning about the refusal of books is very similar to the way I feel about the current legislation against gay marriage. I don’t see being gay as a disadvantage, or a handicap, or as a problem. Human rights should apply to all humans. And I don’t understand why a rational government would prohibit gay people from marrying each other and being allowed the same rights as people who, through no conscious decision of their own, happen to be heterosexual.

Apart from an unsatisfying move by Centrelink that accepts de facto relationships into their system (purely because it means they can pay people less if their partner earns a certain amount), the changes to gay marriage have been slow despite the fact that 60 per cent of Australians support it.

The shifts are coming. Gay marriage is on the political agenda now, with Penny Wong openly in favour of it. Hasn’t convinced J-Gil yet, but it must be tough being in politics and trying to keep everyone happy.

I’m glad that things are changing, however slow. I hope not only that change will come, but that when we look back in another fifty years, that the idea of not letting two people get married just because they’re gay will seem just as ridiculous as not letting someone borrow a book just because they’re black.

Shoe-throwing stories miss the target

Get this: some hippy bloke threw his shoes at John Howard and missed, BOTH TIMES. Missed! What a shit throw!

Yes, on Monday night anti-war protester Peter Gray threw both his shoes at John Howard during Q and A on ABC. But the media reports I’ve seen on the incident have mainly focused on the fact that the ABC didn’t give his shoes back afterwards, or that he failed to hit his target.

Extraordinarily charming (note: sarcasm) columnist Andrew Bolt called the confiscated shoes “twin trophies of yet the latest humiliation of the Left”, and compared Gray’s poor planning with the “typical Leftist” attitude of speaking “as if nothing could possibly go wrong in building Jerusalem in a day. Or even in stuffing free insulation in a few million homes”.

Rather than the shoe-thrower himself, it might be the media that have missed the point here. Surely the media articles should at least explain, as only a few of them actually did, that Gray threw his shoes at Howard to echo an Iraqi journalist who threw his at former US president Bush during a visit to Baghdad, as in Iraq, shoe throwing is meant to display “extreme disrespect and contempt”. When U.S. forces helped topple a statue of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein after rolling into Baghdad in April 2003, jubilant Iraqis beat the statue’s face with their shoes.

Or isn’t that relevant? I admit, I found the shoe-throwing hilarious – shouldn’t everyone be able to draw their own meaning from it?

When I was in high school, studying the media, our class was asked what the main aim of a newspaper was. We had pretty idealistic answers as 16 year olds: “to give people news”, “because people are interested in current affairs”, “to hold society responsible for their actions”. The answer, according to our teacher? To make money. That is the primary goal of any media outlet, she told us, and should never be forgotten, because it affects everything you read in the news.

The headline ‘Anti-war protester throws shoes at ex-Prime Minister to demonstrate contempt for stance on Iraq war’ wouldn’t have been anywhere near as catchy as ‘Protester throws like a girl’.

It doesn’t matter what is actually in the public interest, as long as it is interesting to the public. The media will always sacrifice the whole story for an attention-grabbing headline.