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Taking notes is often seen as a gendered, secretarial role—something to be avoided at all costs if you were a young woman hoping to make an impact early in your career. But Mary Wooldridge (MBA 1994) saw it differently. “If you are holding the pen, there is a huge amount of power that comes with that and, of course, all your ideas end up on the whiteboard, along with everyone else’s,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “You become the person facilitating the conversation, and you are the one taking the notes in terms of the record of the outcome of the meeting. I used that as a strength rather than a weakness.”
Wooldridge has been working to subvert gender imbalances ever since. In May, she was named director of the Workplace Gender and Equality Agency (WGEA), a government entity devoted to promoting and improving gender equality in Australian workplaces. Her career includes stints working for McKinsey in London and New York; most recently, she served as MP for the Victorian Parliament from 2006 to 2020, in addition to roles as Victoria’s Minister for Mental Health and Community Services and Minister for Women’s Affairs.
At WGEA, Wooldridge will take on the challenge of closing Australia’s gender wage gap, which shows that women earn 14.2 percent less than men. COVID, she notes, has highlighted the need for greater flexibility, inclusion, and equality in the workplace. “From a company perspective, it’s getting harder and harder to recruit talent,” she said. “We have closed our borders, people aren’t mobile, so being high-impact in effectively valuing women and men equally is good for how [companies] do business but also good for the way they attract talent.”
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