I love celebrating International Women’s Day. It’s a time to reflect on how far we’ve come since Australia first awarded women the vote back in 1902. Recognition of the progress we’ve made in recent years to get business focused on gender balance. And a reminder that we still have a long way to go, in order to ensure true equality, fairness and safety for women.   Read More

To wrap up this week’s theme of Women on Boards I’m attaching the 2012 Census of Women in Leadership produced by the Gender Equality in the Workplace Agency (formerly the EOWA) and launched on 27^th November – so you may have already seen the results but it’s worth revisiting just case.  In a nutshell, the Census has been tracking the number of women on boards and in key executive positions in Australia’s public companies for the past decade, and for the first time ever the number of women on ASX200 boards has reached double digits – coming in at 12.3 per cent.   Read More

When it comes to gender diversity on boards, it seems that not everyone agrees on what the blockages and issues are to increasing female representation.  According to the 2012 Board of Directors Survey, conducted by Women Corporate Directors, Heidrick & Struggles and the Harvard Business School in 58 countries, men and women directors share similar views on economic outlook, political and regulatory concerns, and the business challenges facing their companies.  Yet when it comes to board diversity, opinions differ between the sexes. Read More

I’m supposed to be at an Equal Pay Day event right now… but I was so cranky that women still earn 17% less than men in equivalent roles that I decided to stay home.  Instead of hearing more women speak about how unjust the gap is, and decree another call to action for the female audience to demand change, I took my frustrations out on the garden.  After much hacking and pruning of the hedge I’ve let off enough steam to write this post, which I need to do because I’m speaking next week at a BPW luncheon in Geelong on this very topic... even though I’m quite convinced that no one really cares about pay equity anyway. Read More

They are all among the list of companies that call on the expertise of 20-First and benefit from the gender balance expertise of its CEO, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox.  Avivah is the author of the best selling books "Why women mean business" and "How women mean business" and she is coming to Australia in May to advise Australian organisations on how to achieve gender balance in their own leadership ranks. Read More

Back in 2005, just a couple of years after completing my MBA, my classmate Bianca sent a copy of Off-Ramps and On-Ramps (a Harvard Business Review article by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce) to all the women in our cohort.  The article which highlights the large numbers of highly qualified women dropping out of mainstream careers was one of the catalysts for me starting sphinxx... or at least shocked me into some form of acknowledgement that the lack of women in senior ranks was a global and profound issue for business. Read More

Welcome to a new year, resplendent with new opportunities.  I love this time of year, when we can choose in our work and in our life what we want the year ahead to look like, what we’d like to achieve, how we’d like to lead.  To this end 2011 could look remarkably the same as last year or the year before… or it could also look very different. Read More

Halla Tomasdottir managed to take her company Audur Capital through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland by applying 5 traditionally "feminine" values to financial services. At the recent TEDWomen, she spoke of the conscious decision she and her business partner Kristin Petursdottir made to escape the testosterone charged financial markets environments they had experienced in their careers and start their own business based on these values and the importance of balance. And the payoff they have achieved in the global financial crisis and financial meltdown in Iceland. Read More

Don't forget that earlybird pricing to the forthcoming Executing Women’s Initiatives Within Firms event end on 17th December.  This important one-day connected forum will explore important issues for the advancement of women in firms including: Read More

In a past life I worked in a global consulting firm and I think that if you’ve never worked in professional services it can be hard to visualise some of the obstacles women face in forging professional careers.  At the time there were no female partners I could turn to for advice. The firm was run by men who shortlisted team members for new projects at Friday drinks at the local pub, with the night often ending with partners snogging their PAs (not everyone was invited but the brave and the stupid regularly turned up up for the drinking competitions in the hope of winning a spot on the big accounts).  Their past times included racing Porsches on the weekends and entertaining clients at sporting fixtures.  Team building endeavors included canyoning, skirmish, go carting... get the picture?   Read More