Blaze e-catalogue - Catalog - Page 17
Blaze: Working Women, Public Leaders
The health sector—traditionally a female workforce—is well represented by women
in senior leadership roles, as Dr Teresa Anderson, Chief Executive of Sydney Local Health
District, has explained:
One of my surgeons said that everyone who surrounds him—who’s senior to him—
is female, and he doesn’t have a problem with that. That went from the Governor,
to the Minister, to the Secretary, to the Deputy Secretaries, to his Chief Executives and
his General Managers.
Dr Anderson, however, concedes that the situation may be different outside
the health sector:
It’s not unusual for me to go to a meeting with other government agencies and be the
only female in the room. This is a problem for society, I think, when there are twenty
people in a room, and in that room, only one is female.
Former Governor of NSW, Professor The Honourable Dame Marie Bashir AD CVO,
has had a distinguished career in the health sector as a medical practitioner. She has not
experienced bias on the basis of her sex. The same is true for Alice Kang, Director
of Marketing and Communications at Concord Hospital, in her 40 year career. She has
noted the proliferation of women in senior leadership roles, and in the commitment that
the NSW public sector makes towards embedding the principals of diversity and equal
opportunity in the workplace.
Jeannine Biviano, Deputy Secretary of Government and Corporate Services, NSW Department
of Finance, Services and Innovation, has spent a proportion of her career working in the health
sector. When starting as the new Chief Executive of a rural Area Health Service, she was told
by the Chairman of the Board: ‘Jeannine, you do realise that this is a man’s role.’ He advised her
that she should be at home looking after her children. Ms Biviano’s experience was a one-off,
and she believes that being a woman has had no impact on her career advancement.
Margaret Crawford, the Auditor-General of NSW, has worked across many policy fields and
at all three levels of government in Australia. She has not experienced obvious gender bias,
but reflects that in some situations when seeking roles in more traditionally male sectors such
as transport, there have been undercurrents of that nature.
Bias on the grounds of sex was evident in the experiences of one of the State’s pioneer
women health administrators, Lucy Osburn (1836–1891). She experienced significant
hostility as a woman in a position of authority at the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary
in the late 1800s. Male staff ignored her direction, and her superiors sought to undermine
her. Osburn, according to Dr Alfred Roberts’ testimony to the 1873 Royal Commission into
Public Charities, possessed ‘natural disqualifications of mind’ that made her ‘unfit’ for duty.
He wanted a ‘lady with more quiet tact’.
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