Blaze e-catalogue - Catalog - Page 11
Blaze: Working Women, Public Leaders
Women have worked in the New South Wales (NSW) public sphere for well over a century,
but as historian Kay Whitehead has observed, little is known about how their labour
constituted the workings of the State. Today, women make up 62.5 per cent of the NSW
public sector workforce, yet they represent just 36.1 per cent of leadership seniority and
41.2 percent of government board and committee appointments. What is known about the
work of women in such leadership roles? And does a lack of knowledge and awareness about
their work contribute to the underrepresentation of women as the statistics indicate?
These questions lie at the heart of Blaze: Working Women, Public Leaders, an exhibition
and publication produced by NSW State Archives.
Spanning a 150 year timeframe, Blaze looks to a selection of women from the past who
were trailblazers in carving out roles for females in the NSW public sphere. They were the
first women to hold positions that had been traditionally occupied by men. These ‘past’
Blaze women led the way for others to follow and they re-shaped the institutions of the
State from within. As ‘firsts’, their leadership enabled future generations of women to pursue
opportunities that they themselves might only have imagined.
Turning to the present, Blaze engages with the stories of fourteen women who currently hold
senior positions in NSW government agencies, departments, boards and/or related initiatives.
In their day-to-day work, they make a high-level contribution to the work of the State and
the communities of NSW. For Blaze, each of these ‘present’ women have reflected on their
careers, and in doing so, provided unique insights into their formative, professional and
leadership experiences.
Blaze lays the stories of past and present women side by side within the policy areas through
which they work: Education, Communities, Health, Sport, Planning, Architecture, Law, Justice,
Finance, Regulation, Information and Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics—
or STEAM. This policy-based approach provides a curatorial framework designed to link
the work of the State Government as it has evolved over a century and a half. In practice,
however, such divisions are less distinct. People move in and out of policy fields and in many
cases, straddle several at once. This has certainly been the case for many of the present Blaze
women: Professor The Honourable Dame Marie Bashir AD CVO, Jeannine Biviano, Margaret
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