Human Rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson felt duped as she graduated from Oxford University in 2006, an Australia-at-large Rhodes Scholar. At a lunch panel session hosted by NAB Private Wealth at TedxSydney on the weekend, Jennifer said she started a PhD but then decided not to continue when she realised she wouldn’t be able to have it all.
“Damn those feminists,” she told the audience.
Jennifer Robinson: felt duped when at end of her Oxford degree realised that as a woman she couldn’t have it all. #tedxsydney
— Marina Go (@marinasgo) May 4, 2013
Jennifer, who is also on the legal team representing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, said she had grown up with the belief that she could do anything and everything. Her disappointment resulted from a reality check that centred squarely on the ticking clock that starts to get louder in the back of a woman’s mind the closer she gets to 30.
Jennifer believes that it’s impossible to reach the top in a legal career if you also want to be a mother. She said that if she had stayed on to complete the PhD she would run out of time for motherhood. And it was the reality of needing to choose between progressing her career and having children that made her angry with the “having it all” message.
I immediately felt guilty as she asked that women start being honest with the having it all discussion. I have been vocal in my support of women having it all because I feel that I have been able to do everything that I have wanted to, including being a mother to two incredible boys.
Fellow panelist, former managing director of Apple Australia Diana Ryall, snapped me out of my guilt with the retort that while it may not be possible to have it all at the same time, it is possible to achieve career goals five years later.
“Women live longer than men anyway,” she added.
Di: you can’t have it all at the same time but you can have it 5 years later. But women live longer anyway. #tedxsydney
— Marina Go (@marinasgo) May 4, 2013
Diana said her career at Apple took off after she had her children. As a working mother with a supportive partner she made it to the very top of the local Apple tree.
Then Jimmy Possum furniture founder Margot Spalding jumped in with an important wake up call for everyone who thinks all women have the luxury of choosing one or the other. Margot said she had no choice but to work right through the early years of her children’s lives because she didn’t have the money that would have allowed her to focus on full-time motherhood. It was that fighting spirit that made her a success at juggling absolutely everything that life threw her concurrently.
Margot Possum: life isn’t over once you have kids. You can do it later. #tedxsydney
— Marina Go (@marinasgo) May 4, 2013
Margot told Jennifer that she can do what she needs to for her career later. And that’s the message isn’t it? The feminism message is essentially that women, just like men, can do whatever we choose to. There are no time constraints against that. It’s an over-arching principle. I feel as though my career is still evolving and my sons are already teenagers. I completed my MBA when my youngest son was five years old.
I make no apology for believing that women can do everything. I have been able to and there are so many examples of other women who have too. The next generation of female leaders need to stop blaming the trail-blazing women of the sixties who fought for our right to choose and start figuring out how to embrace that choice in a meaningful way in their own lives.