With women making up approximately 39 per cent of Australia’s councillors, more work is needed to increase representation and improve their experience in local government.
Coral Ross, Treasurer of the Australian Local Government Women’s Association (ALGWA) and Chair of the Australian Gender Equality Council (AGEC), has been advocating on behalf of women in local government for more than 20 years.
Originally from the UK, Ms Ross was a political journalist before coming to Australia, where she became the Australian correspondent for one of the Fleet Street papers. Ms Ross has had an esteemed career in the local government sector since that time, and in 2021 she was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for her for significant contribution to local government and gender equality.
She was a local government councillor at the City of Boroondara in Metropolitan Melbourne for more than 18 years and served as Mayor of the City of Boroondara three times. Until October 2020 Ms Ross was the President of the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) and was on the board of the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA). She has also served as a Director of the National Rural Women’s Coalition.
Additionally, Ms Ross has been the National President and the Victorian President of ALGWA before moving to National Treasurer, a role that she serves currently.
In 2018, Ms Ross was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to improve gender equality in local government. A Churchill Fellowship offers successful applicants the opportunity to travel overseas for four to eight weeks to learn more about a topic or issue that they are passionate about.
A Churchill Fellowship can be undertaken on any topic, provided it presents some kind of benefit to Australia and its communities by the sharing of knowledge or skills gained.
In an interview with Council, Ms Ross said that each year, more than 100 Churchill Fellowships are given out across the country.
Ms Ross said that her project was focused on the need to increase the number of women councillors.
“We’d worked out that at our current numbers at the time, it would be 2063 before we’d reach parity. We needed to see if there was something out there that we could utilise to try and speed up that process.”
Ms Ross explained that it was the work she was undertaking as part of ALGWA that encouraged her to undertake this particular project through the fellowship.
Increasing the number of women councillors
As part of her fellowship, Ms Ross travelled to the US, Canada, Sweden and Germany, and met with more than 50 different organisations or individuals in the local government sector over the course of eight weeks. Her findings were then published in the 2018 Churchill Fellowship Report by Coral Ross.
Ms Ross said that, through her research, she found that to make meaningful changes to the representation of women in councillor positions, the sector would have to undergo significant cultural and even structural change.
“There are lots of equality programs out there that we could introduce, but unless we change that culture and structure, it’s going to be like a revolving door where you get women elected, but they’re not going to stay. You have to change the systems for that to happen.”
Ms Ross explained that she spoke with an academic in Germany, Dr Uta Kletzing FES Director for Women in Politics, who said that in her 20 years of experience in the sector she had seen that the majority of gender equality programs were ‘all about fixing women’.
“It’s not women that need fixing. It’s the system that needs fixing, it’s the culture that needs fixing,” Ms Ross said. “Unless we change that culture or that system, it’s not going to make a difference.”
Changing the culture
Ms Ross said that one of the primary means of improving gender parity is creating a shift in the culture of politics. In her report, Ms Ross outlines a number of ways that this shift could be supported.
Much of her recommendations involve improvements to education curricula across all states and territories, so that they would:
- Demystify the political system by explaining the topics of government, how decisions are made and the importance of policy
- Increase women’s political participation by building girls’ and young women’s confidence
- Shift the public perception of women, with particular focus on those standing for office
- Acknowledge and celebrate the positive contributions of local government to reduce public negativity toward elected councillors
“In Australia, we were a bit behind other countries regarding the poor culture and the poor systems. As an example, in the UK it was so severe that a female councillor from London set up a thing called Glitch, which was to deal with the online abuse that councillors were getting.
“I went there at the beginning of 2020, and we in Australia were getting some of this, but not in the same extent that they were in the UK. Then we had COVID, and that increased everything exponentially.
“We were behind, because we actually hadn’t experienced as much of that back in the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2020, and it got ten times worse with COVID.”
Getting women to stand for election
Ms Ross said that one of the major issues facing achieving gender parity is that far fewer women stand for office than men.
“It’s not that women won’t be elected when they stand. It’s getting them to stand in the first place.”
In her fellowship, Ms Ross said that she found that a lot of the time it is a simple matter of ‘tapping somebody on the shoulder’.
“There are these programs that they have in Canada, the UK and America called ‘Ask Her to Run’ or ‘Ask Her to Stand’, so that if, for example, I dob you in and say that you will be a fantastic councillor, there’s an organisation which will take that nomination and then you get a call from, say, ALGWA saying that somebody’s nominated you and said you’d be a fantastic councillor.
“That then gives you the encouragement to think about standing and to think, ‘oh, somebody else has tapped me on the shoulder and thought that I would be a good councillor’.
“And then ALGWA can come to you and say, ‘How can we help you? What tools, what advice can we give you? How can we equip you with the skills and knowledge that you need to stand?’”
Ms Ross said that another major barrier to women standing for public office was a lack of information regarding how to do so and what it meant to be a councillor. Ms Ross referred to a Knowledge Hub program undertaken in Canada by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities that enabled the public to access this information easily.
“It didn’t just provide candidate information about how to stand, but it also had council best practice. The best policy documents, the best ways of doing anything that you can think of that Councils would do.
“I’d love to see an ‘Ask Her to Stand’ and a Knowledge Hub established here in Australia.”
Understanding why women are underrepresented in local government and why certain types of initiatives and programs do or do not work is a big step toward delivering gender parity in Australian councils.
Ms Ross’s work in this space delivers significant insight that will hopefully empower councils and state and territory governments to take actions that will support women to stand for election and create a political environment where they can serve their communities effectively.
