The long road to gender equality: Overcoming institutional resistance to change

In recent weeks, media coverage out of Australia’s national Parliament has been dominated by the unedifying spectacle of political point-scoring over the leaked phone messages of former political staffer and victim of alleged rape, Brittany Higgins. Allegations of sexual harassment and assault by Liberal senator David Van from current and former senators Lidia Thorpe and Amanda Stoker quickly followed.

These disturbing developments have led many to wonder whether the toxic workplace culture within Parliament House has improved at all, despite the groundbreaking Jenkins review and the implementation of a raft of the review’s recommendations.

Read more: Fixing Australia’s toxic parliamentary workplace: What we can learn from reform in the United Kingdom

In February 2023, the first annual progress report of the cross-party Set the Standard Parliamentary Leadership Taskforce was tabled. The report indicated that considerable progress had been made towards transforming Parliament’s workplace culture.

Six recommendations had been implemented, including codes of conduct for parliamentarians and staffers, and 21 were partially implemented or in progress.

Kate Jenkins, then Australia’s National Sex Discrimination Commissioner and the woman behind the review, wrote that this progress “sets an example for workplaces across the country where proactive change is not only possible, but essential”. So how is it that only four months later, all of that progress appears to have flown out the window?

Our research findings, recently published in the Journal of Gender-Based Violence, offer insights into this question by demonstrating how challenging institutional change can be, even with the best intentions.

The persistence of inequality – gender, power, and the state

Political institutions have long been unwelcoming places for women. Edith Cowan, the first woman to be elected to an Australian parliament (in WA in 1921), suffered verbal abuse and frequent interjections during her maiden speech, despite the convention (then and now) that parliamentarians not be interrupted during their first speeches.

Cowan also famously endured the indignity of having to go home to use the toilet because there were no women’s toilets in parliament. Women in the Commonwealth Parliament experienced the same situation until 1974. This is a stark example of how the institutions of government were designed for men, by men.

The situation hasn’t been any better for women in the public service. Before 1966, women had to resign from the Australian Public Service (APS) when they married.

Today, despite decades of work by dedicated femocrats and repeated commitments from consecutive governments to improve gender equality within the APS, recent data (2021) indicates that while women now make up 60.2% of the APS, they continue to be over-represented in junior roles and under-represented in senior positions (at 44.6% in Senior Executive Service Band 2 and 3).

Where have we gone wrong?

After several decades of trying to transform government, inside and out – including the introduction of paid parental leave, women’s leadership programs and gender mainstreaming – it appears that institutions, and particularly political institutions, not only reflect and reinforce gender inequality, but they resist gender equality.

And while it’s critical to develop written formal rules, such as codes of conduct, it’s equally important to create new unwritten, informal rules or norms regarding acceptable behaviour and “the way we do business around here”.

Our research examining the first three years of the Victorian government’s trailblazing Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council (VSAC) is informed by in-depth interviews with the inaugural council chair, Rosie Batty AO, eight senior policymakers, and supplemented by 31 interviews, from an internal government report, with current and former victim-survivor members of VSAC, the VSAC Secretariat, representatives of the family violence sector, and policymakers.

We found that despite the best intentions – and being established by former minister Fiona Richardson (now deceased), a feminist and survivor of family violence – policymakers acknowledged that they struggled to make the policy environment safe for victim-survivors. Instead, the government’s interests were put ahead of those of victim-survivors, compromising the outcomes and public value that VSAC could deliver.

We found that a lack of clarity about VSAC’s role meant there were very different views about its purpose. This led to tensions and made it challenging to identify responsibilities, assign accountability, and measure the extent to which VSAC delivered outcomes.

We also found that policymakers were unprepared for the trauma victim-survivors would continue to experience, nor were they ready for the vicarious trauma the public servants working with VSAC would experience. As a result, there was a lack of appropriate trauma support provided.

Perhaps of most concern, we found that power imbalances made some victim-survivors feel they were being controlled and silenced, triggering trauma responses. This was felt most acutely by those from marginalised communities, which experience multiple disadvantages and forms of discrimination (such as racism, ableism, sexism).

More positively, we found that the role of the VSAC Secretariat, which spent considerable time finding ways around institutional barriers and battling internal bureaucracy for adequate support, including allowances and reimbursements for VSAC members, was critical. This is the work of driving institutional change.

Our research concluded that the state is a site of contest where players can and do bring about positive change. This happens through identifying, resisting and reforming written and unwritten rules. But other players will attempt to maintain the status quo and hold onto power by trying to silence those who speak out and resisting change.

Persistence is key

Our findings won’t be news to Kate Jenkins. Her team heard from hundreds of current and former parliamentary workers about their experiences of abuse, harassment, and discrimination. The Set the Standard report makes repeated references to the role of power and entitlement, gender inequality, culture and norms.

But all too often, we expect change to happen with a bang when it’s more likely to sneak up on us gradually.

As Rebecca Solnit wrote in Hope in the Dark, how social transformations, uprisings and revolutions happen is rarely remembered; they do not happen on “centre stage” because “less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – often laid the foundations”.

Providing victim-survivors with a voice in family violence reform is critical. But policymakers must be prepared to be challenged, learn, and ultimately change themselves and the institutions and systems they work within; to do the groundwork.

This will lead to more effective policies and services, and better, safer institutions for all of us to work within.

The authors note that interviews for their research took place in 2018 and 2019 and focused on the first three establishment years of the Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council (from July 2016 to April 2019). The research does not reflect the ongoing work done and outcomes achieved as the Council has matured and established its role at the heart of Victoria’s family violence reform agenda, nor does it reflect that since April 2022, VSAC has had the Family Violence Lived Experience Strategy in place to guide government and the sector to embed lived experience across the full spectrum of family and sexual violence reform.