Last month, Governor-General David Hurley told ACM, publisher of The Examiner, the nation's honours list should better represent women, multicultural communities and Indigenous people. The gender balance among Order of Australia recipients was improving, he said, but the system needed to better represent women. The awards show us how much progress has been made - and how much progress remains to be made.
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In this year's Queen's Birthday Honours list, women received 416 awards (44 per cent). This is the highest proportion since the the Australian honours system was introduced in 1975. The proportion of non-white people who are honoured is much harder to work out because their backgrounds aren't obvious from a scrutiny of the list.
Simply getting the honours list in balance dodges the issue. The problem is not so much that women or Indigenous people are under-represented when it comes to awards. It is that they are under-represented in the roles where awards are won. The leaders of Australian universities, for example, are nearly three times more likely to be men than women.
The deeper problem than the balance of the honours list is that women and Indigenous people are under-represented at the top of society. That is the problem which really needs addressing.
Talent, after all, is divided equally. There is no difference of innate ability by gender or skin colour. If the people at the top tend to be white men, that is a social failure - and an economic failure because it means that the full talents of women and Indigenous people are not being used. Our economy needs all the skill it can get so a failure to promote women and Indigenous people is a failure to use all the assets we have.
Some argue that the under-representation of women at the top is because women bear children and that means a gap in careers. But men could do more. Getting more women to the top might mean men shouldering more of the burden at home.
Focusing only on the balance of the honours list might distract us from the harder question of the balance in top jobs.
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