Yesterday we awoke to the thrilling news that B&T had made the big time: we’d been ridiculed in the Oz’s mischievous Media Diary.
I was particularly struck by a few points made by The Australian’s scribe. Firstly that he’d never heard of Women in Media previously. We’ve been running B&T’s Women in Media for at least 12 years and the Power List has been around since 2014 if my memory serves me correctly.
For me personally, I’ve had a fascination about women in roles of authority or rather the lack thereof. Why? Well I guess it’s because I grew up surrounded by women in position of authority.
I was born in 1970 in the outer western Sydney suburb of Blacktown, which I can assure you was a very different Australia to what we find ourselves living in in 2025.
As the youngest of seven children, my mother had no time for niceties other than a quick hug or a kiss on the top of the head before she sent you on your next mission, which might be to go outside to play or grab a cloth and dust the hallway.
Perhaps we were the last of the agrarian families where more children meant more labour at your disposal. Either way, we all had a long list of jobs to do and slacking off meant coming into contact with the wrong end of a wooden spoon, an electric jug cord or whatever other implement mum had to hand. Her authority was absolute.
One of the reasons we all had household chores to do was that she, like my father worked full time. I was about two years old when I was unceremoniously dumped at a preschool and told to stop my nonsense as I howled in protest at such an early separation from my mother’s apron strings.
So for me, it was normal for both parents to work and household duties to be shared evenly among the horde of us living in our unairconditioned weatherboard home.
As I went to school almost all of my teachers, including the school principal Sister Catherine, were women. My second grade teacher, Sister Maree, to this day remains the single most scary person I’ve ever met.
Fast forward to my first full-time job in publishing in the early 1990s and I found myself at Consolidated Press and surrounded by very strong women ruling the roost like Nene King, Ita Buttrose and the like. They were fabulous times but it was an environment where women were very much in control.
It’s also probably no surprise, my wife is a strong executive woman who spends more time berating CEOs than anyone else I know.
So when I found an enormous disparity between the number of women entering the legal profession and those that made partners in 2003, we decided to launch an initiative called Women in Law. That means I’ve been pressing this particular agenda for more than 20 years, I’ve just jumped from law to media.
The other thing that struck me about our grilling in the Oz was that our long list was incomplete. That’s kind of the point. When we started the long list, we basically put down a starter kit of women we knew and asked the community to fill in the blanks.
From memory, we had about 50 women in 2014, which has over the years grown to the near 700 we have today.
And I’m confident, there’s loads of women out there we’ve never heard of who deserve a place on our list. That’s why we keep doing it.
Take Cherie Clonan for example. Last year none of us had heard of her, but thanks to her entering into the Awards, we discovered just how fabulous she was and brought her example of a neuro-diverse leader to the community.
We are super proud of Women in Media’s impact and its heritage, we think the industry is too. To keep that sentiment pressing along, please enter and show the Oz that B&T’s Women In Media, presented by Are Media really is something that they should keep a closer eye on.
