Glass Ceiling Stereotypes

“I want my daughter to have as much opportunities as my son”, cried Julia Gillard in her Misogyny Speech five years ago today. Tony Abbott, not yet a Prime Minister, scoffed Gillard then, saying “Yes, but what if men … are more adapted to exercise authority or issue command?”. Read: a huge nope-not-happening to gender equality.

While Abbott was sacked from the prime ministership two years ago, a woman didn’t need him to know that life was unfair; she would have felt the sexism cold and hard in the corporate world, where the glass ceiling reigns.

The glass ceiling is a stop sign before the upper rungs of a corporate ladder that women, over-qualified or not, cannot bypass in a hurry. It prevails in Australia not because women are born without aspiration or talent (as Abbott would’ve loved to believe), but because mostly no one, including the women themselves, believes in women. Anna Bird, acting chief executive of the Fawcett Society, points out that “outdated stereotypes about men and women’s different roles in the workplace have an insidious effect on our cultural attitudes about who should do which jobs”, so it is “hard for both women and men to imagine women running the show”. In short, society expects women to conform to their

A melting pot of nationalities and cultures, Australia should symbolise mateship, harmony and fairness; Australia should be as egalitarian as it is home. However, while we Australians may unanimously point the finger at Donald Trump when he says, “You have to treat ‘em [women] like sh*t”, fuming at his ‘American sexism’, we should also point the finger at ourselves, for we are the hypocrites. Who can say Australia isn’t sexist? If Australia is egalitarian, then why does the glass ceiling prevail? Why do male surgeons receive more pay than female, why is the sexual abuse on women escalating in number, why do women suffer seven times more domestic violence than