Ethnic women must break through two barriers to the top.
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One is made of glass.
The other has become known as the “bamboo ceiling”.
Harcourts Victoria chief executive officer Sadhana Smiles has beaten both.
“Diversity in this country is being spoken about only from the white woman’s perspective,” Ms Smiles said.
“We’ve got to stop doing that because it’s not just about white women.
“White women have a leg up in the corporate world because they don’t have to think like anybody else but who they are.
“Women of ethnic backgrounds have to break their own cultural barriers, and then they have to break the glass ceiling in the workplace, and then they have to think like a white woman to actually get any further in business.”
In a cultural quandary termed “double jeopardy” by researchers from Diversity Council Australia and Deakin University, women of non-white backgrounds made up only 2.5 per cent of all 7,491 ASX directors.
That figure falls below well below the percentage of “non-culturally diverse” women (5.7 per cent) and “culturally diverse” men (27.8 per cent) and “non-culturally diverse men” (64 per cent).
“That speaks volumes of where we are,” Ms Smiles said.
“When you have leaders who all look the same, all look the same, all act the same, how are we going to get diversity and I think therein lies our problem.”
Ms Smiles – a 2016 AFR Woman of Influence and 2013 Telstra Victorian Businesswoman of the year – said leaders needed to recognise women from ethnic backgrounds faced dual barriers in the workforce.
“Our steps to get to where we want to get to are a lot harder and leaders need to understand that because when you look at two women of equal stature you actually don’t know their backstory and what they had to do to get to where they are.
“And sometimes we need to support women of a particular ethnic background more than we support others.”
A passionate advocate for closing the gender pay gap, Ms Smiles introduced the Walk a Mile In Their Shoes at Harcourts to raise awareness of violence against women.
The walk saw men don heels in a public walk for White Ribbon’s “Breaking the Silence” program and set a record for the organisations’ fundraising activities.
Ms Smiles spoke at Committee for Ballarat’s Connect Networking Conference on International Women’s Day.