Regardless of your politics, the 24th June 2010 marked a special day in Australian history, particularly for women’s leadership.
That was the day that Australia’s first female Governor General Quentin Bryce swore in our first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.
Together they shared a moment captured by dozens of photographers and distributed across the world.
But behind the cameras, Gillard said there was always much more going on.
“What you didn’t see was the strength of the relationship between the two of us as we served in those respective roles,” she said at the Women’s Leadership Symposium in Sydney on Thursday.
“I spent a great deal of time with Quentin, listening to her advice, talking through problems, planning how we’d represent our nation overseas.”
And so it was fitting that Gillard, the 2014 recipient of the National Excellence in Women’s Leadership award, should bestow the same honour on the 2015 recipient, Dame Quentin Bryce.
Gillard officially awarded Bryce the honour at a ceremony in Sydney on Thursday, after delivering a short address on women in leadership. It was a special moment for the more than 200 women in the room to witness both women celebrate each other’s success, and the remarkable firsts they each achieved for women.
Almost five years to the day since she became Prime Minister, Gillard recalled some of her own experiences being the first woman in such a position of power, and noted a few things from her experience she believes still impacts women leaders.
The first is that women in leadership is still relatively unusual – she was the first of 27 people leading Australia to be a woman.
And that meant there was a significant amount of focus on her appearance, and everything that made her different, especially in moving away from the standard “uniform” of the suit and tie a male politician wears.
“For a woman in these roles, particularly for the first time, the focus on appearance becomes acute,” she said. “Judgment on women and appearance go beyond whether they’ve picked the right shirt to that shirt defining who they are.”
The second issue relates to assumptions and sterotypes about the two genders, particularly around women filling nurturing/caregiving roles, and men taking on commanding roles. These stereotypes affect leadership likeability of the two genders differently.
“There are plenty of academic studies that tell us people tend to correlate leadership and likability in men, whereas they tend to not correlate leadership and likeability and women,” Gillard said.
She referenced Hillary Clinton’s current campaign for the Democratic nomination for the 2016 election as evidence that likeability is still a gender issue.
“I’m in awe of her campaign strategies. But why does she need to spend her time our of her van in places like Iowa, meeting with people and getting selfies taken? There must be a perceived political wisdom around that. She needs to do that because people don’t consider she’s very likeable.
“Let’s just take a step back from that and ask ourselves the question, why do people think Hillary Clinton’s not very likeable? What is it across her life that make people suddenly think that this is not a likeable person?”
Asked by an audience member if her time in politics was “worth it”, Gillard responded “absolutely”. She said any perceptions from others that it wasn’t worth it, or that her experience might turn off other young women from pursuing political careers, became a catalyst for writing her book My Story.
“I wanted my book to stand for the alternate proposition that while yes there were some very tough times and things about gender that pressed on my prime ministership, that it was absolutely worth it,” she said.
“Any woman who has an aspiration to be involved in politics, should absolutely go for it.”
Receiving the national award, Dame Quentin Bryce recalled the great female leaders she encountered in the community while growing up, as well her hopes for the next generation of female leaders. But she still expressed disappointment at the still too few number of women in leadership. “Progress is too slow. Look at the pay gap, look at childcare, look at pregnancy discrimination,” she said.
She told women that the most “important tool we have is our voice”, and the most important thing we can for ourselves is to manage our wellbeing.
“Take time for art and beauty, for quietness, for poetry, for music. You can turn to these lovely things for sustenance for recharging when you need to dig deep into your store of resilience.”