Women as Leaders: Tanya Plibersek, MP

Continuing our series on ‘Women as Leaders’ in the lead up to the Women, Management and Work Conference scheduled for later this month, we hear from the federal Minister for Housing and the Status of Women, the Hon. Tanya Plibersek, MP.

With two young children and another due in October, Tanya Plibersek is certainly in a position to be able to speak with some authority on the difficulties faced by working mothers and their families.

“There are issues that keep coming up again again in this area of women and work,” Ms Plibersek told Australian Women Online. “The first is representation at senior levels of management and on boards. The second is the gender pay gap when it comes to work of similar value. The third issue we’ve been looking at is retirement incomes for women.”

“The issue of women on boards is something we’ve been very interested in. If you look at Australia’s largest companies, the ASX200, just over 8% of board positions are held by women and we know that there’s a lot more talented and experienced women out there. So I’ve been very pleased to see that the Australian Institute of Company Directors, the Australian Stock Exchange and senior business leaders have been working on this issue.”

“The Institute of Company Directors has launched a terrific mentoring program with very senior business leaders mentoring women who they see as potentially board ready.”

On the issue of pay equity and the gender pay gap, the Minister said: “The government is currently examining the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace act and agency, and we’re considering our response to the House of Representatives Inquiry into Pay Equity to see how we can encourage business to better in this area.”

“In the area of retirement incomes, pensions have increased since the government came into office. In fact the single aged pension is now a hundred dollars more because of the increases in last year’s budget and the changes to indexation.”

“The changes announced to superannuation in most recent budget will see contributions from the Australian Government up to $500 annually for workers on $37,000 a year or less.”

“A lot of women have broken working patterns, they move in and out of the workforce because they’re caring for children or other family members. So being able to top up your super in a concessional way when your kids are grown and the pressure of the mortgage and the teenagers who are eating you out of house and home is reduced, is actually a really important benefit for women.”

One of the crowning achievements of the current federal government in relation to women and work, has to be the creation of a national parental leave scheme.

“Many women have been campaigning for this for thirty years and the fact that we’ve been able to do it, particularly at a time when we’re not rolling in cash and because of the Global Financial Crisis our spending is constrained in a lot of ways, it’s something that I’m very proud of.”

“I think it will make a huge difference, particularly for women on lower incomes. A lot of women who are public servants or work in higher paid positions, already have access through their employer, to paid parental leave. The people who have been missing out most often, are women who are in low paid industries, casual and part-time workers and our scheme covers all of those people.”

“The other thing that’s important about the scheme is that it’s paid parental leave, so women can take it all themselves of they can have an arrangement with their partner or some significant other who can become the primary carer of the child for a period of time. We understand that families are the best people to decide these arrangements and so we’ve given them that maximum flexibility on how the leave can be shared, and we know that a lot of fathers want to play a greater role in raising their kids.”

“The other area that I’ve been really proud of is in the area of violence against women. We know that one in three Australian women experience domestic violence in their life time and one in five experience sexual assault, and those numbers are way to high.”

“We’re working with the state and territories to develop a national plan on violence against women. But we didn’t want to wait until the national plan was completed and have made significant investments in programs like Respectful Relationships, where we talk to young men and women about how to form healthy, respectful friends and set a good grounding for when their relationships become more series and more complex as they get older and that have healthy expectations of what those relationships should look like.”

“Issues like sexual assault and domestic violence will take working with young people to set them on the right path for the rest of their lives. So responses like the extra $154 million in this budget for Legal Aid Commissions and Community Legal Centres, are important. But we also have to be doing that long-term work with young people.”

Tanya Plibersek will speaking at the Women, Management and Work Conference in Sydney, 29 – 30 July 2010. For more information or to register visit the website: Imsf.mq.edu.au/wmwc

More articles in our ‘Women as Leaders’ series:

• Helen Newell, Director of Corporate Development & Government Relations for Asciano

Coming Up in our series on Women as Leaders:
Claire Braund, Executive Director of Women on Boards; and
Andrea Grant, Group Managing Director of Human Resources, Telstra

Our interview with Tanya Plibersek was conducted via Skype. Make cheap calls to landlines and mobiles – Buy SkypeOut credit here