Experts agree that many of the barriers to equality are invisible and insidious – unconscious bias, gender stereotyping – and, as a consequence, so much harder to dismantle.
One quick – yet much-disputed – fix is quotas: just mandate the change. Demand that organisations appoint, hire and promote 50/50. Whenever quotas are discussed opponents clamour about the importance of "merit", as if old boys' networks and unconscious bias don't exist. On the contrary, quotas are a way of bringing women's merit out into the open, and have been shown to have ongoing impacts in terms of providing role models and shifting societal attitudes.
Emily Bitto won the prize in 2015.
Photo: Luis Ascui
But how else can you speed up the pace of progress towards gender equality – especially in cultural areas where artists are self-employed and quotas are less relevant?
In the field that I know best, the literary world, a group of women (myself among them) decided in 2012 to take a bold step and establish a major literary prize for Australian women writers – the Stella Prize – in order to combat the gender bias we knew existed.
Hard data proved that women writers were underrepresented in three key areas: as winners of the major literary prizes; as authors of the books that received the most review and media coverage; and as authors of the books on the school curriculum.
