29 September 2018

Paige Taylor

Kirstin Ferguson says she was raised to believe she could do anything — she gives credit to her parents for this. But in her book Women Kind with friend Catherine Fox, Dr Ferguson says the ­reality her parents created for her underwent “radical change” when, at 17, she joined a male-dominated military environment.

The new acting chairwoman of the ABC board is from a family that has never been afraid to move around — Dr Ferguson’s grandfather was a British officer in the Indian army during the last days of the Raj who became a major general in the Australian Army. His wife, Dr Ferguson’s grandmother Millie, left home to marry him when she scarcely knew him.

As a widow, Millie drove around Australia 17 times by herself in her Red Honda Jazz.

“If I inherit some of her spirit, I will consider myself very fortunate,” Dr Ferguson wrote in Women Kind.

The Australian Defence Force Academy is where Dr Ferguson completed her first degree, after early years in the NSW township of Maianbar, which then had a population of no more than 500. She and her younger brother went to school deep in the Royal Nat­ional Park, and spent their days playing in the bush, swimming and sailing in Port Hacking.

“My mother, and importantly my father as well, never made me think my gender was something to prevent me from succeeding,” she writes in the book.

Dr Ferguson graduated as dux of her Australian air force class. The priority for her was fitting in so she could succeed, she writes.

At a panel of women leaders convened by The Australian in 2016, Dr Ferguson already had years of experience as a chief executive and on the ASX100 and ASX200 boards as well as on private company and government boards. She said then that Australians wanted to believe in merit “because it’s easy and comfortable to say that everyone has achieved on merit”.

“When I started my career, I firmly believed that if you worked hard and got yourself educated and you sought out opportunities, then you would achieve the same as someone alongside you, whether they were male or female.

“But that clearly is not the case,” Dr Ferguson said.

She then pointed to research on companies that called themselves meritocracies “but which actually provide greater benefits to men over equally qualified women because they’ve got blinkers on”.

“So I think we need to ­challenge how helpful being a meritocracy actually is as a country and as a business because it’s not giving us the sustainable factors for success we actually need and want,” she said.

Link to original