Western NeWs

By K E RRIE DAVIES

March 8 is International Women’s Day.

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Kerrie Davies 0422 067 644

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The glass ceiling is a metaphor used to represent an invisible barrier that keeps a given demographic from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy. The metaphor was first coined by feminists in reference to barriers in the careers of high-achieving women.

Standing here in 2023 and looking behind us, you’d have to say in many ways that glass ceiling has been shattered. We have females in major cEO roles, running massive companies. Female leaders in politics, as Premiers and holding Ministerial portfolios. and if you look around you, many women run small businesses these days.

Sure, many would point out situations where we haven’t reached equal pay or opportunity, but there’s no denying we have progressed dramatically over the decades.

Some of us are old enough to have lived through huge changes, but even then we tend to forget how different life used to be for women until reminded.

If you are as old as me and grew up in the seventies and eighties, chances are the marriage and lifestyle of your parents was vastly different to how you live now.

For instance, my mother didn’t work for the first 15 years of my life. She also didn’t drive. her home-time dress code was an a-line mini skirt and rollers in her hair in readiness for her husband to arrive home. She served up the obligatory meat and three veg at precisely 6 o’clock on the dot so it would be piping hot when Dad walked in the door. In stark contrast, I work, I drive and my standard home-time dress code is pyjamas and two inches of regrowth in my hair. Greg and I share the housework and cooking duties, and more often than not when it’s my turn we are getting home delivered chinese.

It is somewhat hard to imagine now, a world where women were not allowed to vote. and although we were leaders of sorts by being the second country to “allow” it (hello New Zealand at #1) we didn’t allow aboriginal women to until much later. On that note, aboriginal men couldn’t either, but that’s another story for another day.

Women were once not allowed to open a bank account without their husband’s permission; therefore they couldn’t take out loans or have access to their own savings. My head hurts just typing this!

Far less women had jobs or an income, and prior to the contraceptive pill being introduced had little alternatives on how their life would be played out.

Did you know that back in the day if you were a female and enjoyed an alcoholic beverage, you’d be seated in a “Ladies Lounge” at the pub because women were banned from entering the public bar?

My grandmother used to tell me about when my grandfather was courting her. Many of their “dates” consisted of her sitting in a tiny room of the pub, lovingly knitting him a scarf (along with several other girlfriends doing the same) while the blokes they hoped to marry drank up a storm in the main bar. can you imagine!

Thank goodness those days are gone and on March 8, its a great time to reflect on how far we’ve come - because it is proof that change can and does happen.

We need to harness that drive for change and work together with males to create further change in important issues such as domestic violence.