Whether you’re heading back to work after a break or have made a career move, it can be hard to feel confident and in control. Host Amelia Phillips talks to best-selling author and journalist Jamila Rizvi about the confidence deficit holding women back and how to overcome the barriers to career success.
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
I don’t know about you, but being a working mom has really challenged my confidence, knowing I’ve only got this limited time and bandwidth to get all my jobs done. For me, this has led to periods of feeling pressured and worried that I’m gonna drop the ball somewhere. Frankly, something has to give and usually it’s my sanity.
This is healthy Her with Amelia Phillips, whether you are. After a break from work or you’re thinking about making a career move, feeling confident and in control at work can be a real challenge. Jamila Rizvi is a best selling author, former advisor to the Rudd and Gillard government, and one of the youngest ever chief of staff to a cabinet minister.
Now, a mom Jamila believes that there is a confidence deficit holding women back, and I’ve definitely felt it myself. So what exactly does this mean? How does this influence our career decisions, especially when we’ve got family needs pulling us in all directions and what can be done to help us feel confident and in control of our role without feeling like we’re sacrificing our family?
Jamila, what a juicy topic. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me. So somewhere between working in politics and being the editor in chief at Mamia, appearing on the project writing for the Sydney Morning Herald and other great publications and chairing future Women events.
You’ve written some incredible books now in your book. Not just lucky about why women do the work, but don’t take the credit. You talk about a confidence deficit holding women back. What do you mean by. So what I do and not just lucky is talk about this twofold impact on women’s careers, and I begin with the reality of women’s involvement in the workforce.
The workforce in Australia and in most countries, certainly in the developed world, was created by and for men. The way we work was developed during a time when women stayed at home and looked after babies, or some were allowed to work until they got married. There was actually something called the marriage bar in the Australian public servants where my mom was a young woman, which meant that when you got married, you’d.
Left like that was it. You just stopped working. You weren’t allowed to be in the public service anymore. So we all grew up and we were socialized in this world, and we’ve come to work in these workforces where the workplace was designed by men and for men, and it meets. Male needs and reinforces a male way of being.
And sure there have been changes, but we are talking about women encroaching on a space that was created for men. And as a result, we always feel a little bit like outsiders and we are socialized to expect things of ourselves that are not what men are expected or socialized to expect of the. So for women, it manifests in this deep desire to be liked that our job above everything else is to make ourselves.
Likable to other people to be useful, to be helpful. And what that means is that we feel like there are a whole lot of things that aren’t open to us, that aren’t an option for us because it’s not nice to ask for a pay rise. It’s not a way to make yourself likable to put up your hand or thrust yourself forward, or make yourself bigger or take up space at work.
It is for men. But it isn’t for women. And this kind of double standard has evolved in our heads because of patriarchy, because of sexism, because of inequality, but because we’ve internalized it and made it our own as well. It means that we start to doubt ourselves and we don’t recognize it as an external problem with an environment that wasn’t made with us in mind, but rather that we are doing something wrong that maybe we are not good enough or not strong enough or not smart enough, and that zaps us of our confidence.
Why do you think men don’t have that same likable urge that we do? I mean, obviously some men would, and we are generalizing here. What is it about women that have this likable desire, stronger than men? I think we absolutely have to recognize that these are generalizations and we are talking at a general level.
There will always be exceptions and sometimes there are numerous exceptions. But I do think that at a general level, women doubt themselves at work more often than men do, and feel that lack of confidence, and it’s because they feel like they don’t belong. It’s because, as I’ve said, those workplaces were.
built to facilitate male needs, and you will all know what it’s like to walk into a room where you don’t belong. Most women who are working women will be able to tell you over time they’ve walked into a boardroom or walked into a meeting or walked onto a work site or walked into an office or a cafe or a kitchen and gone, Oh this.
Yeah, it’s all blokes. I’m the only. This doesn’t feel right. Yeah. There are a few men who have experienced the same thing except where they are in charge. When men experience that, more likely they are going to be walking into a room where they’re the principal at a school of teachers who are all women, for example.
They’re the business owner in a hairdressing salon on where it’s mostly women working in the salon on in more junior roles and they’re the head hairdresser or they’re the. So yes, men experience the same thing. There are female dominat dominated industries the same way. There are male dominated industries, but women tend to be at the bottom.
Of male dominated industries and men tend to be at the top of female dominated industries, and when you’re at the top, you create your own sense of belonging. What do you think it is about becoming a mother that influences this confidence deficit? I think it takes a confidence deficit that already exists.
And reinforces it. It’s like it’s doubled down upon. So women have this experience of feeling slightly outside the workforce, feeling like they’re not quite getting ahead, that there’s this set of expectations of them that don’t apply to others. And of course, they are faced every day with a degree of sexism, whether that be sexual harassment, whether that be assumptions about their ambition.
And what they wanna do or what they might be good at, what they might not be, that they should be the one clearing away the tea, for example, at the end of the meeting, they’re already facing all of that. And when you have a baby, it’s just magnified because people make a lot of assumptions about what you are going to be like when you come back to work.
Oh, she’ll have less time. Oh, she’s got other priorities now. She doesn’t need her fulfillment here at work in the same way that she used to. She’s gonna be dashing out the door for school, pick up at 3:00 PM She probably doesn’t want that promotion because she’s got kids at home. Employers start to make these assumptions, workmates start to make these assumptions, and they stop women climbing the tree.
And of course we then internalize those assumptions. We start to think them about ourselves. We go. Maybe I’m not as, I can’t work as hard as I used to, or I shouldn’t want the same things that I used to because I, I have got this other priority. And that’s fine. That’s fine if that’s how you feel, but we don’t have the same set of assumptions about men.
In fact, there are some fascinating studies that show that men become more employable, more likely to be promoted, more likely to get a pay increase after having children. Whereas women become less employable, less likely to climb the tree, and more likely to be assumed that they wanna work part. So it’s just this double standard that’s unfair.
Yeah, and it’s really interesting to hear you saying it from both angles, from that social angle, but then also from the internalized angle as well. Because I know personally I never felt. A confidence deficit before I had kids. But going back to work, having a change in the work conditions, as I said earlier, feeling like, Oh my goodness, I’ve still got all these amazing things I wanna achieve and do, but shivers, I can’t just go into work early.
I can’t just stay late. So that, Zapped my confidence. I don’t know how I’m gonna get all this done. Um, I think a lot of women, when they go back to work after having babies, they, the role changes as well. They realize that the old role that they had isn’t gonna suit them or they don’t wanna do it. So you suddenly thrust into a new role that you might not feel as confident and effective at.
And then of course, the time out of the workforce. What if you’ve had a year off? What if you’ve. Five years off. What if you feel like you’re starting from scratch again? And I think that that is a massive emotional drain. I wanna hear about your experience, if you don’t mind, because I know that when you went back to work, you’re actually the editor in chief at Mama Mia when you fell pregnant and then you went back there.
After having your B only was it owned quite soon, like four or five months, Is that right? Yeah, I wanted to get back to work as soon as I could. I, I, I love working, I’ve always defined myself by my work, and so after having my son, I went back, I think about four days a week, um, quite quickly. And my husband also went to, I think he went to three days a week at that point.
And so we juggled it between us with the help of some nannies and family support and the rest, but I found that return to work incredib. Difficult. I think it, in really simple terms, the workplace had outgrown me in that short period that I was away. What do you mean by that? I think it had evolved. It was a, uh, it was a business that was expanding really quickly and a lot was happening and it was a fast paced environment and in a fast paced environment, if you disappear for four or five, The place for you in that environment doesn’t seem to exist anymore when you come back.
And what’s really interesting about that is that we are talking about a, a very female led and very female centric company as well. So it’s amazing that even when you’ve got a company that you know is very female, Oriented, it still doesn’t mean that it’s gonna be the right fit coming back. Yeah, sure. I think, I mean, just because a business hires a lot of women or tries to sell its products to a lot of women, doesn’t mean that it knows how to look after its female staff when they’re going through particular changes.
And I think most Australian businesses, government not for profits. Aren’t necessarily the best at this. Australia actually lagged behind the rest of the world In this space, we like to think we’re all about equality, that we are innovative with, that. We’re a country that’s kind of ahead of the curve when it comes to gender equality.
We’re not, we were one of the last countries in the O C D to give women paid parental. We are slow on this stuff. Isn’t that interesting? I think because we’re a country with pretty entrenched gender roles and organizations and businesses as employers, traditionally I think have felt like this wasn’t a priority, that it wasn’t their job to help smooth women’s transition in and out of the workforce.
But if we want more equal workplaces, if we want women to make it to the top, if we want women CEOs, women on boards, women heads of government departments, then we’re gonna have to get better. I a hundred percent agree with you, and I also a hundred percent believe that those board roles and those CEO roles suit women so well, particularly in the board roles because number one, I think women have an amazing ability to empathize, to be able to look at 360 to degree view of say, a company, and to be able to influence cultural change.
What would you say that we need to do as a culture to shift so that workplaces are more suitable for women and for moms in particular? Mm. We’re already seeing. Some of the really exciting things that organizations who want to attract more women and retain women into senior roles are doing and we’re seeing it work.
So there are organizations that are offering extensive paid parental leave who are offering extensive paid parental leave that is incentivized for men to take as well. So we know that when a baby comes home from hospital for the first time, particularly that first baby, and if you’ve got a heterosexual couple, for example, That nobody knows what they’re doing.
No. Nobody ever knows what they’re doing. Right? There’s no mother who goes, Oh yeah, you know what? I just had that mother instinct and I had it all down pat from day one. Nobody does. But because it tends to be mom who stays at home in those early months, she develops a pattern, she develops a new set of skills, a new set of confidence around the baby and dad doesn’t necessarily, But if mom and dad were both taking time off in those first year or.
Then both of them develop those skills and that kind of split and fairness between them around paid work and unpaid work will follow them throughout their lives. Whereas if you set those standards early where this is mom’s job and mom’s domain, then it’s hard to let go. Becomes really hard to let go cuz you are better at it cuz you’ve done more of it.
So there are companies that are incentivizing that. There are companies that are offering childcare onsite subsidized childcare onsite to make it easier for women to breastfeed at lunchtime, for example, uh, and not have to hide away in the toilets and doing so, but make it comfortable for, oh my goodness, the amount of times that I had to sit staring at the back of a toilet.
Door while I was pumping away thinking, what do the people in the cubicle next to me think that is going on? Cuz it’s a breast pump can sound a bit like a, a vibrator with low batteries at certain times. totally agree. I lo But I just getting back to your earlier point about that shared parental leave, I think that is really clever.
I have never thought of it like that as far. Actually sets the dad off on the right foot for being a competent parent and for being able to, to share that load for developing that confidence, um, and competency around kids. That’s a really interesting one. Okay, so we’ve got that one. And then, yeah, making workplaces just more suitable, such as having childcare on site.
What else do you think? I also think the pandemic has shifted our thinking or has the pan potential to shift our thinking in this space. Of course, there are horrors that have come out of this situation for so many employees, particularly those who’ve lost their jobs. But I think there is an opportunity here because workplaces have realized, or a lot of workplaces have realized that employees can work from home and it is not the end of the world.
You can just go home and get your work done there. And I hope that working flexibly, working from home, working unusual hours, being part digital part in the office becomes normalized. Not just for health reasons, but recognizing that we’re. People who have lives outside of our work and caring responsibilities outside of our work.
And I think for decades women have been trying to get that flexibility. And we’ve been told again and again, Oh no, it’s not possible to do that job from home. I’m sorry. It just doesn’t work like that. Well, the pandemic showed that overnight we could make that happen. Yeah, Huge corporations, government departments upended, everyth.
Everything in terms of that’s the way we’ve always done it. Yeah. And we were able to mix it up very, very quickly. If we can do it for a pandemic, we can do it for equality.
You know what’s really interesting is that still with the pandemic, women are still taking on way more of the domestic load. I was reading a covid report from the Institute of Fiscals. Studies and they found that women were only able to do one hour of uninterrupted work for every three hours of uninterrupted work for men.
And also the women were looking after children 10.3 hours a day, which was 2.3 hours more than what the men were doing. And also the women were doing 1.7 more hours of housework every day, which was just a recent study that came out through. The pandemic. So isn’t that interesting that still in that work from home environment, we’re still seeing that inequality there?
Well, I think that takes us out of the government policy space and the organizational policy space and recognizes that what happens in the home is still gendered and. That is a challenge for families, and that is a challenge to continue having those conversations. I remember when I first got married before we had our little boy, my husband and I talking about shared care and our values and how we wanted him to be raised equally.
And I thought you had that conversation once, and then you just did it . You have that conversation every day for the rest of your life. If you don’t, you will fall back into traditional gender roles. Yeah, that’s what you’ll do. You’ll go back to what you were socialized and trained to do as a kid and what you saw around you on television, what the world makes easier.
You’ve gotta push back at an organizational level, at an employment level, at a government level, but also at a personal level. You gotta ask those questions in the home. You gotta keep talking about. Because we sway away from equality, we have to push into it. A real light bulb moment happened for me in an interview I did with a New York Times bestseller, Julie Morganson.
And, uh, it was, it was one of my episodes called a Blueprint for Time Management for Moms. And she’s a time management expert and she divided the working day into an A acronym, but one of them, she called a for a range and she was talking about everything we have to do as parents to arrange. For our children.
So, you know, booking in for the school sport, buying their uniforms, doing the shopping, blah, blah blah. And she said, That is invisible. That is something that people don’t account enough time to. She said that takes something like four or five times more than we ever give it credit. That’s the stuff that you’re doing at 11 o’clock at night, you know, on your phone when you should be doing 10 other things.
And I’ve noticed with my husband, And we slip into these gender roles, even though we both work, is that he’ll be like, Why? Why didn’t you do that piece of work for me? What have you been doing that’s making you so busy? And I’m like, Oh my goodness. I have just done all this arranging. But no one gives it weight or value or credit.
It’s just like the invisible thing that’s meant to happen magically. And yet it’s not a work job and it’s not happening visibly, you know, like putting dinner on the table. And it really frustrates me because that’s not given any value, and yet I’m being punished for the fact that I couldn’t do extra work on that day.
I think it’s a recognition that the majority of unpaid administrative work in our economy is done by women, and the vast majority and also the majority of emotional labor is. By women. Yeah. I think the only way we get better at that is to not do it. Yeah. Is to not do it. And the second step, which is just as critical, is to not judge other women for not doing it.
Yeah, I totally agree because, let me give you an example. I remember when I was on book tour and one day I was flying out to Perth on a Saturday morning for a bunch of, uh, book events. So I was incredibly busy at that time and my husband was taking our then three year old son to a friend’s birthday. Now this friend’s birthday, uh, the child was the child of our mates.
They were our mates, but they were really my husband’s mates. He’d been friends with them since high school. I’d come in late. These were his friends as we’re going out the door. He goes, Oh, damnit. I didn’t get a present. And I kind of looked at him and went, mm-hmm. , . Of course he didn’t get a present, but I tell you what, if he’d showed up to that party without a present, what would people’s reaction have been?
They would’ve gone, Oh, Jeremy. , there’s Jamila jetting off to Perth. The work, again, Jeremy’s here, he doesn’t even have a present. They would’ve felt sorry for him and blamed me. Oh my goodness. You are. They would’ve. They would’ve. Cuz it’s still my job, even when I’m not there Now, on top of that, of course I had the present, of course I’d bought it and I’d wrapped it and I’d thought about it.
I’ve got a card and it was sitting there for them to ride on and take to the party. And I do that because I know I’ll be judged if I don’t. Wow. So step one is us not doing it all the time and letting someone else do it. And step two is not holding other women to that impossible standard. Let’s bring it back to work for a moment.
Let’s talk about confidence for the mom’s listening that might be in a situation where they’re starting a new role or they’re going back to work after a break. What are some steps that she can take to feel more confident and to take control of her work again? Yeah. If I could start by stepping back and say, This is a process that shouldn’t begin when you are going back to work.
This should be a process that begins when you get pregnant. When you get pregnant. One of the most important relationships in your life is you and your boss talking about how the workplace is going to support you as you exit the workforce for a period, how you were gonna stay connect. With your work while you’re out of the workforce, not doing work while you’re out of the workforce, but stay connected to what’s happening.
So you feel like you’re still part of the team and you know what’s going on, and you’re not returning to a completely foreign environment. And then how you transition back in, That’s not your job alone. That’s you and your employer’s job together. So I’d really encourage women from the moment you get pregnant, start having that conversation.
Soon as you’re ready to with your boss and with your immediate superiors about how you are gonna support the workplace to function without you, and how the workplace is gonna support you to move in and out for a period. I think it’s really important when you’re on leave to have some keeping in touch days.
Those days should be paid. And you should talk to your employer about that if they don’t already have a system. And I’m not talking about a bunch of time, and I’m not talking about you coming back and doing work or staying up late at night when you’re expressing and trying to get work done. Nothing like that.
I’m talking about making sure you can attend the Christmas party. Making sure you can attend a team lunch, making sure if there’s a day where you’re discussing the company’s values again and talking about how workflow is gonna change. I’m talking about catching up for a coffee with your boss now and then so that you are connected to what’s changing and what’s happening in the office while you’re on leave in a way that is achievable for you in a way that is regular but is not off, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Okay. And then if you’ve done those things by the. It comes for you to return to work. You’re not coming in cold, You’re coming in off the back of a plan, and I think at that point, what’s really important to recognize is that what you think you’re going to want when you have the baby or just before, isn’t necessarily what you’re going to want by the time you come back.
And that’s something you should know when something your employer should know. And I think as you come back, it’s critical that you ask for help. Yeah. That you ask for help, that you talk about what’s hard. And I’d really implore women not to feel like they have to hide the fact they had a baby. Don’t feel like that’s not relevant and don’t feel like that’s a drawback.
I learned an enormous amount during the period I spent full time at home with my son. I’ve learned an enormous amount in the first five years of his life, and I am a better employee. A hundred percent I am a better employee. It is work. Parenting is a joy. It’s still work. And work requires skills and it gives you learning and it makes you a better person and a stronger person and a more capable worker in.
Other settings. We just, we undervalue parenting so much when they first came up with the concept of gdp, of gross domestic product, how we measure what our economy does. They talked about putting unpaid labor in that figure. They discussed putting all the housework we do for free, all the parenting and childcare work we do for free.
They talked about valuing it at the cost of childcare or a cleaning service or a gardening service, and they decided not. And partly because of that, we’ve undervalued that unpaid work that women have done ever. I could imagine though, for a lot of moms to have that conversation with their boss and say, I’m struggling, or How are we gonna do this together?
Or, my output has now changed. It is an impossible task. I, I bet a lot of women are sitting here shaking their heads, going, I could never have that straight conversation with my boss. I mean, what’s a gentle way of, of going? And if you’ve never had a really. Straight relationship like that. I mean, that takes a level of confidence to go and say, Hey, listen buddy, here’s how it’s gonna be.
Yeah. I think we talk a lot in the workplace more generally about how to be a good manager of people. Right. I’ve been promoted, I’ve got a team of three people working for me now. I have to learn to manage them. We don’t talk about managing. , Yes. We talk about managing down. Managing up is more important.
Yes, it is so important and it is so challenging, and I think managing up is a skill set that more of us need to practice, and I think managing your boss’ expectations around you, having a child can seem really intimidating when you turn it into this one big conversation that you have to have. And it’s very scary managing your boss.
Managing their expectations around you, but also taking you out of the center of the equation. Always have you in mind, but take you out of the center of equation. The equation, when I had big teams and was managing big teams and hiring people often, almost always, when a woman would come to me for a pay rise, almost always, she would tell me why she needed.
Or wanted it, not why she deserved it. Isn’t that interesting? So to have a woman come into the office and say, We’ve got three kids now, so I need the money to be able to do this, or I’m saving up for my wedding or rent in Sydney is really expensive, or whatever it might be. All of those are very valid reasons to want to pay rise.
Absolutely. They are not valid reasons for your boss to give you a pay raise. They’re not, They’re not relevant. Yeah. What is relevant? is the work that you do, the fact you’re outstanding, the skillset you have, that you are going above and beyond your original job description, that you are adding more value, that you’ve, you have four more years experience than you had when your pay was first set, and that should be recognized.
I think the same approach we should take to discussing pay in those circumstances where we talk about what we can do and what we give the company as opposed to what we want. . I think we need to apply that in this circumstance too. When you are having those conversations with your boss, think about what they want.
It’s in their best interests to have a smooth transition for you in and out and back into the workforce. Or they lose all of the intellectual capital they’ve invested in you. They don’t wanna lose that. Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense. So you’ve gotta talk to them about why that keeping in touch, why supporting you in a certain number of ways, easing your transition back in why that’s good for.
Not only why it’s good for you, and I think that makes it an easier conversation to have. Putting my manager hat on. Now, my last business, we had 56 staff. There were three men, everyone else was women. Um, and we were very pro mums and pro-women. And just having my manager hat on, I had so many babies. Born.
And I have to say that it was the mums that would say, Right, I’ve gotta be out by four 30 every day. And that were clear in how they wanted their work environment to be, that were fantastic. And I just always know, Oh, we don’t book a meeting with so and so after four 30 cuz she’s got to leave. It was the mums and I could see it.
Now looking back, it was the moms that were. No, no, that’s fine. You, you need that work done. Okay, sure. And I could see the fluster and the stress and actually looking back on it with my manager hat on, I, I see now that they were doing themselves a disservice by just saying that they were available to do anything at.
At any point and not setting up those boundaries. I think, you know, in the workplace we like boundaries and I, I didn’t judge that person any less for saying that they’d be out the door by four 30 cuz they were also the person that if I know a project needed to be done, that they were able to manage their time to get that project done.
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. And one thing we do know for sure about parents who take leave around the birth of a child is you become more efficient. Oh, don’t you ever. I am way more efficient than I used to be, and in the end, it shouldn’t be about the hours you work. Or the hours you’re seen to be working cuz so many of us feel like we’ve gotta work through that lunch break so people see us at our desk, be there after 5:00 PM leave the jacket on our chair so they think we’re coming back for it.
It’s not about the hours that you work, it’s about the output that you provide. And if you can do that output in less time and make it work. That shouldn’t matter to your boss if you don’t have that front facing job where you have to physically be there for the hours. And a lot of us have that flexibility now that we can get the work done in our way on our time.
And I think, and I hope that the experience of the pandemic with so many of us working from home for long periods, I homeschooled my son, so with my husband for seven months here in Melbourne. While both of us continued to work full time. It was doable. It was doable. It was hard, but it was doable. Now he’s back at kinder now, so I suddenly I myself all this time again.
But the reason we got through was the efficiency of being parents who could fit the two around one another. That’s a skillset. Yeah, that’s a skill you learn on maternity leave. Don’t undervalue. Absolutely. And it, you know, it strengthens your relationship as well because you become a, an incredibly tight team.
And talking of productivity, my friend, you have published even more books Post Covid. You were a busy girl. Let’s talk about untold resilience, stories of courage, survival, and love from women who have gone before. And I know you interviewed 19 incredible women. Your own story, which is amazing as well.
What would you say a key learning that you’ve gleamed from interviewing all these incredible people? Well, untold resilience was an idea that came to me in the first lockdown in in Melbourne. I desperately wanted to talk to my nan, who had lived through the polio epidemic and through tuberculosis epidemic, not a pandemic, but during polio, she stayed home from school for six.
And I just wanted to talk to her. And she died seven years ago, so that wasn’t possible for me. So I went and talked to 19 other people’s Nans instead and heard their life stories, but also their wisdom for helping us get through difficult periods, not just a period of health uncertainty, but a period of financial and economic uncertainty, which so many families are going through now.
And I think the one thing that stood out for me through all of those stories was. They were all in their eighties and nineties. Pretty much they’d lived through enormous global upheaval. And yet other than one or two, most of them, the biggest things, the most challenging things that happened in their lives were not that.
They were the human challenges, They were the divorces. They were the loss of a parent. They were the illness of a child. They were escaping from a war torn country. It was the personal that stayed with them, the personal that shaped who they. And that political global fear and question and conundrum for all, but a couple that was more of a backdrop to their lives.
And these women got through it by doing what needed to be done. They always had a task they had children to raise or a job to do, or money to earn or whatever it might be. And I think the tasks also helped them keep going. They had purpose it. I was gonna say it gives you a purpose. Mm-hmm. . And I think, I think that purpose was what sustain.
them and it’s what I’ve tried to focus on during the, the many months of lockdown in Melbourne is that purpose is what matters and purpose will get me through, and that this two shall pass, this two shall pass. We also wrote a gorgeous kid’s picture book called I’m a Hero Too, to help them feel empowered and reassured about how they can be a hero, especially in response to Covid.
What are your thoughts on how we can empower our kids to feel confident? In what is going to be a very different world to when we grew up, because for me, my purpose now is so much around my children and raising them to be equipped for such a changing world. I think it will be a very different world to the one we grew up in.
But then again, I don’t think any of us wishes to exactly recreate the parent. Of our parents . Most of us are gonna take some good things and leave some others in the past. So I think we’re gonna change things up regardless. So I don’t think we should be afraid of that, but. I think it’s important to remember that the science tells us that the first five years of life is when most of the neural pathways are formed in a child’s brain.
90% of brain development happens in the first five years of life. So the role modeling in that time, the values shaping in that time, the learning in that time is critically important. Not just what you can give as parents, but what other members of your community, your family, your child’s. Childhood teachers can give them is absolutely critical.
So I think during that period, we need to focus on values above content. I think a lot of us think, what do they need to know before of school? They need to know the alpha, that they need to know the numbers. They need to be able to add, they need to be able to do this, whatever it might be. Sure, okay. I’m not saying any of that’s not important, but you are gonna have wonderful qualified teachers who will take care of that.
Values are hard. , and I think talking to your child about what happiness is, what equality is, what fairness is, what kindness is for me, I think that will equip them for a difficult changing world. I cannot imagine a world where those values aren’t needed down the track. I don’t know if they’re gonna need to be coding robots or not.
Yeah. But I do know that raising an empathetic. Funny, warm, generous human being, inclusive human beings. That will hold them in good stead no matter what. Oh, I absolutely love that idea. I think it can be hard to put into practice when you’ve got different age children. And it was only recently, I mean, I’ve been hearing about creating values for your family for a long time, but it was only recently I started to actually put that into action.
And what I did was I. I would pick a week and I would kind of pick one value. And so for my family, cuz my kids are all under seven, so we’re talking about young kids here. So the first value I doubled down on was I said, Guys, we have a family value that we do not hurt ourselves and we do not hurt other people.
So every time Angus. Kicks Locky in the nuts, which he did this morning. , that’s the first thing I do, is I say, Guys, what’s our family value? We don’t hurt ourselves and we don’t hurt other people. And then the next week I picked another one and I said, We always tell the truth even when it’s hard to, And again, on the weekend, they rated the chips covered, which they weren’t meant to raid, and they pretended that they didn’t do it.
And then I said, Guys, what’s our family value? We always tell the truth and Charlotte said, Even when it’s hard to, And I went, Yep. And they were like, Okay, we did it. We did it. And I think values are kind of a bit ambiguous and I think with young children you’ve gotta make it practical for them. And so I like this idea.
And so you could, you could look at equality, like how do you teach your children about equality? Like that is such a difficult thing, especially when a lot of us live in environments where there might not be a big cultural, um, variety, which is what I’m finding where we are living. What would you suggest that we do as far as teaching equality in our children?
I think you fi have to find that variety and diversity, right? Yeah. In the same way. When we look for a school for our child, we look for a wonderful music program or an excellent drama program, or great sports access or whatever it might be, a good gymnasium. You know, I’d be asking the first question to the school, what’s the cultural diversity of the school like, what’s the gender split of the school like?
I want my son to learn in an environment that. A mirror of the environment. He will live and work in one day in the workforce when he is an adult. I don’t want him to get a shock when he, when he goes to the workforce and goes, Oh my God, not everyone’s the same as me. Yeah. I don’t want him to have that experience.
I want him to experience diversity, and I think it should be something we deliberately set out and look for, not something we hope will come along. Because most of us live in our own little bubble. Right. Most of us become friends with people who are similar to us in some way, and I. You have to be deliberate in searching for that diversity and having those conversations about diversity and equality.
And if you’re struggling to find them and make them happen in your physical life, you can make them happen in your cultural life. So you can make sure you’re seeing a diversity of theater and a diversity of films. You can talk about why in this book does this character have to be a boy. It’s a. Can’t it just be a rabbit?
Does it matter that it’s a boy rabbit? My son and I often switch up the gender roles in his books. We’ll have discussions about language that’s used in the story books that we are reading together. We try and ask a lot of questions around what different people believe, even when the big conversations come up.
When my son first asked me, What happens when you die, we. a huge conversation over a couple of weeks about different religions and what different people believe to expose him to schools of thought that are not just the thoughts of his family and the beliefs of his family. I think it’s another deliberate practice and we all get it wrong from time to time, and we all get a bit lazy from time to time.
That’s fine. It’s fine. It’s parenting. Sometimes it’s exhausting. But I think that kind of diversity and search for equality takes deliberate action. And as you say, sometimes you have to tell the truth, even. Hard, and that means talking to your kids about the fact the world’s not perfect and that there are children who don’t, for example, have the same privileges as them.
And I think interesting tying this back into work, when you look at voluntary gender targets at work, and particularly in boards, that’s where I feel like this just becomes so, so important. I’ve heard you talk about group. before in a board situation. Can you explain how that works and why we wanna avoid it?
Yeah, and I, look, I, firstly, I’d say it’s not just in a board situation, it’s in any situation, but let’s use boards as an example cuz they’re often spoken about. We talk about the importance of getting women onto boards. First things first. We should have boards that reflect the organization below them. I think that’s a good moral thing to strive for.
But more diverse boards make better decisions. The data tells us that multiple studies have shown us that, that if you have a board that is all straight white men, for example, as many boards are, those men will have a similar outlook on the world, will have similar experiences of the world. They will have gone through the world experiencing it in a particular way.
Even if they have all the goodwill in the world, it’s so easy to be blind to some people’s experience within that organization or to strategic directions that organization could undertake, which they might think of. If you’ve got a board that is culturally diverse, that is inclusive of the queer community of a board, that includes people with disabilities of a board, that includes men and women and non-binary people, you are going to bring a wealth of different experiences and outlooks and skills.
In the world onto your board for the purpose of better decision making. The same way that if you have a board that has got seven people with a marketing background and you’ve got no one with a legal background, you’re probably gonna miss some stuff. Yeah. We should think about experience in the way we think about skills and education.
That you want a diversity, that a diversity is a good thing. And as you say, it avoids group think. It avoids us all patting each other on the back because we think in a similar way, being challenged in a setting like. Is a good thing because it ultimately will mean we can argue our way to a better decision, a better outcome.
And look, I think sometimes we assume we can just put ourselves in the shoes of someone else and we’re fine. I became disabled about two and a half years ago, and I think if you’d talked to me five years ago, I would’ve said that I was a compassionate person that cared about equality, that tried to think.
Decisions and workplaces in the world from a range of perspectives, including that of people with disabilities. And I think I did try and do that. I don’t think I did it very well. tried. I don’t think I did it very well. Sometimes it requires lived experience. To know and to understand challenges, and I think that’s why that diversity question is so incredibly important and a range of different measures.
Mm. And that’s why I do feel really passionately about women and moms in particular, getting on boards And, and I say to all you moms out there that it might be a little seed in, in the back of your head. Going out and, Oh, I could never do that. Oh, I don’t have the skillset. I, I really encourage moms to think about doing that because that real cultural change will come from the top, and I want moms to be leading the charge in that way.
Yeah. Jamila, finally, for a mom that’s sitting here that’s either started a new role or thinking about changing their career, what is one parting tip that you would have for them to go into that feeling confident and more in control? Yeah, I think when you’re on parental leave, it can be really isolating, even though you are with at least one small person, sometimes multiple small people, all the time.
You’re never alone. It can still be really lonely. And when you are lonely, your brain can play tricks on you about what you’re good at and what you’re not, and it can play tricks on you When it comes to comparison with. You look out into the world and you think she’s doing that and she’s doing this, and oh my God, we were in the same year at school and look at that, and oh my God, we were at the same level at whatever at work.
Now look where they are. Look where I am. And you start to paint this picture in your head that you shouldn’t take chances because you feel like your ego can’t take more rejection, that you don’t wanna apply for a job in a new sector. Because what if they say no to you? When someone writes their resume, they only include the good things.
They only include the things they won, the things, the jobs they got, the achievements they made, not the things they messed up or the stuff they missed out on, or the periods they had out of the workforce stressing out. You’ve gotta remember that. I would say keep that in the back of your head. I would sit down if I was you with a blank piece of paper and plot like it’s a graph.
All of the major career in your events in your life, good and bad, the jobs you missed out on. The moments that you messed up and you got in trouble at work, but also the day you got that degree, the day the boss patted you on the head for that. The day, whatever might have happened, plot them all out. And then I want you to erase all the low points and just draw a beautiful upward curve of all the extraordinary achievements.
That is what you are presenting to the world because that’s what everyone else is presenting to the world. Don’t compare your up and down JY jaggedy graph like you’ve had a heart attack. with the person’s upward curve. Don’t do that. Of course, yours looks rubbish, but that’s only because they’ve painted out the bottom dot.
Don’t compare your real life with other people’s highlights, reels. Go for the job, have a crack at the degree, ask for the pay rise. And if the answer is no, you get to erase that dot later, so don’t worry about it. Jamila. Thank you so much. You’re so welcome.
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