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Gender and Cultural Diversity Matters |
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Page 4 of 4
To Beijing and Back
Government policy has its place here too in ensuring manageable
transitions for women in and out of the workforce. Unfortunately things
lately seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. For Sandra, part of
the extraordinary experience and privilege of being an Australian
delegate to the 4th UN Conference on Women in 1995 was seeing a number
of pledges get up that were going to be enormously beneficial for women
in developing countries as well as at home. But Australia had a change
of government shortly after and pledges have not exactly been honoured
in the way that the delegation perhaps imagined. NGOs and advisory
bodies are still fighting very strongly for these causes, but the level
of government commitment is low. "We seem to be distancing ourselves
from the UN and international treaties and I feel very sorry about
this," she says.
In her paper on conversations, Sandra talks about different
conversations that ought to be happening but have either stopped or are
not taking place at all. Republicanism was a heated conversation that
took place a few years ago, although it was not perhaps the exact kind
of conversation that the majority of voters in Australia wanted to
have. Reconciliation is another example of a conversation that has not
really begun: what we have is "damaging, divisive, and seemingly
endless dialogue" but no real attentive listening. Globalization is a
conversation that business and government are yet to have. Perhaps
Beijing is a conversation that has stopped?
As Sandra suggests, there are high risks involved in not conversing on
whatever issue. "Our loss of nerve will come back to haunt us," she
says.
Intellectual Diversity
How might we get conversations going again? Obviously, as Sandra
states, "we need to engage all our stakeholder groups in conversation."
Perhaps this also means we need to take on board the relationship
between vibrant conversations and intellectual diversity?
In another paper entitled 'Diversity, Innovation, and the Future of
Australian Business,' Sandra helps us to think through this notion of
intellectual diversity. In this paper, Sandra sees ideas as a bottom
line issue for business since the companies most likely to succeed in
the new economies will be those with an ideas-driven skills base. And
since good ideas come from everywhere and not just from the one place,
an ideas-driven skills base necessarily means a diversity of people
with bright ideas.
Sandra writes:
"Good ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, but they are least likely
to come from those who have been socialised into conventional business
behaviour. Those of us who have been working in the social justice area
have been saying that for decades, of course, as the rationale for
creating places at the economic table for women, indigenous
Australians, people from non-English speaking backgrounds, people with
a disability, people from different cultures, or less common sexual
orientations, alas, with a singular lack of impact".
Just like business, then, we can see how international and national
conversations such as 'the plight of women', or republicanism, or
reconciliation, or globalization, each need their measure of
intellectual diversity too - so that those of us who want to be
included in conversations can be, but also so that we continue to
listen to the different things that we each have to say.
A planet of multi-faceted 'professional conversationalists' with
wonderfully different ideas for the twenty-first century- not a bad
image to hold on to as we face the challenges of business, governance
and personal life.
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