From the Principal
International Women’s Day 2021
Last week, MLC School students and staff celebrated and acknowledged International Women’s Day. My congratulations to all involved in hosting and organising the wide variety of events.
Perhaps never before has the theme for International Women’s Day been as appropriate to a particular time and place than this year’s theme for 2021 – Choose to Challenge.
As part of my preparation for an address that I gave at the Strathfield Rotary Club International Women’s Day Dinner, I accessed some of the school records, so carefully researched and documented by our Archivist Barbara Hoffman. In doing so, I was reminded of just how central ‘challenging on the behalf of women’ is to the story of MLC School and I thank Barbara for sharing her work (to which I refer below).
In December 1886, with an enrolment of 54, MLC School held its first Speech Day in the Burwood School of Arts. Delivering his first Principal’s Report, Reverend Prescott said he believed:
“that between the mind of a boy and a girl there is no great difference… for mental discipline much the same course of study is the best.”
To put his comment in context, this was prior to women having the right to vote, (which was still some decades away) and just a few years after Sydney University became one of the first in the world to admit women. To suggest that the minds of boys and girls were equal and that the best education for girls was to offer them the same subjects as boys would have been revolutionary and to some, quite provocative.
Over the years MLC School continued this revolutionary approach, with a number of significant firsts in education and in particular education for women;
- We introduced the first Trinity Music examinations to Australia in 1887
- In 1891 MLC School was the first school to erect a kindergarten building expressly for the purpose of the education of young children.
- On 3 November 1906, MLC School held the first Athletics Sports Carnival for girls in Australia.
- We introduced Physics to the curriculum in the 1920s and were the first school to have girls sit Physics in the Leaving Certificate.
- The School’s involvement with computer technology commenced in 1978 when our first Apple Macintosh computers were purchased.
- And, MLC School was one of the earliest in NSW to offer the International Baccalaureate Diploma to all students in Years 11 and 12 as an alternative to the HSC.
In 2021, not only do we continue to benefit from the vision shown by our founders, unlike many women in the world legislation protects our right to be treated equally. However, there is still work to be done by us all in order to achieve true equality.
Within the workplace, many women continue to face a range of unconscious biases such as the assumption that what they wear or how they look is somehow relevant to how well they are able to perform a role. As Hillary Rodham Clinton said “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.” You may also remember that TV presenter Karl Stefanovic wore the same blue suit on-screen for 12 months and nobody noticed – his motivation was to point out the sexism that his female colleagues faced. “No-one has noticed,” he said. “But women, they wear the wrong colour and they get pulled up and judged.”
In some organisations there is still a belief (often unconscious) that in order to be effective, women need to lead like men. The assumption that females need to lead like a man in order to be effective is one that we must keep challenging – there is no one way to lead. It is not just about women learning to ‘lean in’ as some books suggest, it is about recognising that there are different but equally effective ways to do the job. I am sure that you are aware of the statistics around how under represented women are around the Board table of our leading businesses. I was also quite surprised to read that the number of women running the country’s top 200 ASX-listed companies has fallen over the last four years, according to a the 2020 ASX200 report.
So, while acknowledging the position of relative privilege that we enjoy and just how many opportunities have become available to women as a consequence of the bravery and vision of people like Reverend Prescott, we need to continue to choose to challenge so that we harness the strengths and capabilities of all and in doing so build an Australian committed to the equality of women in every way.
– Lisa Moloney
Principal
