Caitlin Paroczai: Women need strong male allies in workplaces, startup sector to call out bad behaviour

Welcome to the 21st century, where some women working on mine sites still don’t have easy access to female toilets.

Where women need to have each other’s backs in meetings to ensure their ideas are being taken seriously by the men at the table. Where female entrepreneurs are propositioned for dates by male investors or asked whether they’ll be able to run a business while — God forbid — supporting a child.

It’s a wonderful place to be, right?

These are the types of stories I hear time and time again from women that I speak to, many of whom are anxious about coming across as “man haters” for fear of upsetting the wrong people or putting potential investors offside.

But they do not hate men. They are simply sick and tired of dealing with deeply embedded cultural and systemic issues that do not seem to be changing at the rate they ought to be.

It certainly does not help that women remain under-represented in leadership positions across the country.

According to the latest data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, women in Australia only held 17.6 per cent of chair positions and 31.2 per cent of directorships.

On top of that, 22.3 per cent of boards and governing bodies have no female directors. By contrast, only 0.6 per cent had no male investors.

That is not to say that there hasn’t been any improvement at all. The proportion of women on ASX 200 boards reached 34.2 per cent at the end of November 2021, compared to 21.7 per cent in 2015.

Progress should undoubtedly be celebrated. However, the fact that we’ve come so far does not mean that we get to be complacent about the very real issues still affecting women in workplaces and the startup sector.

And the responsibility should not be placed on women to continually call out poor behaviour, nor should advocacy groups have to exist in WA to combat the lack of support for female founders.

Rather, the onus should be on men — who generally have more influence or resources — to step up, assess their own behaviours and become strong allies for their female colleagues and industry peers.

I can’t count the number of occasions women in business have told me how much they valued male mentors who took the time to help them progress their careers and advocated on their behalf.

The next time a man dismisses a woman’s ideas in a meeting or behaves inappropriately, it should be up to another male in the room to call it out.

If it makes them uncomfortable, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.