39th ARC - The Future - Presentation by Kate Roffey

foreign thanks Josh it's really it's really fascinating and it's great to see that diversity and inclusion is being included on the agenda here because it's such an important topic and I think it's one that's very easy to overlook are just out of interest in the audience here put your hand up if you've got the cool ticked off none no so we've missed that boat so I'm not going to talk about the use but I'm going to talk about diversity and inclusion and I'm going to focus on women because I've been asked to focus a little bit um on women and how we bring them more into our various sports but diversity inclusion I think it's really important to be very aware in your organizations it isn't just gender I think we're doing reasonably well comparatively on the gender aspect of things we are not doing so well in other areas such as people of differing abilities uh racial background people from different ethnic backgrounds of finding it very difficult I think to find their way up the corporate or the board ladder still it's a big issue for us in most sports young people we really don't understand them I'm going through this with my staff in my CEO role at the moment actually trying to teach them what appropriate dress is and why and so we're trying to not inhibit them in the way that they dress but to make it appropriate which isn't to not have your underpants label showing as you're walking around the office they actually don't understand that and it's become a bit harder in the post-covered time as well to get people to actually understand what we're expecting as organizations so I just want to make really very very clear that when I talk about diversity and inclusion I am not talking only about females but I am actually just going to talk a little bit about women and what we've done in that space and what we need to do going forward in that space because I've been asked to focus a little bit on that I interestingly um as David said I was involved with harness racing uh Victoria I was on their board for six years I was the only female at any senior level in that organization at any senior level we're talking other than administrative staff in the organization there was one female and that female was on the board it's not unique to your sector I chaired a board that looked after shipping here in Victoria well as well and I was the only female in that organization I was the chair the board there wasn't another female in the organization other than administrative levels so it is a big issue it is changing slowly but I think the process to go through changing all sorts of diversity means that you have to recognize what you are not and I think this is a really difficult thing for organizations to do we're very very good at sitting there and saying we are whatever we think we are we're diverse we're inclusive we're technologically savvy we're up with the times but it's a much more difficult task and a much more I think honest sort of task to sit there and actually say what are we not because then you have to have a look at yourself and say if we realize that we are not something we have to take steps to change what we are not if we want to improve and we have done this at Melbourne football club for example we are recognized as the oldest professional sporting club in the world a club that had a constitutional structure 163 years it took before I became the first female president of the Melbourne football club I will point out we hadn't won a Premiership for 57 years I won one in my first year so so if you think um if you think that women aren't making a difference then think again because obviously that was um all due to me but um being serious the the fact that we finally had a female president in our club didn't come through a deliberative decision to put a female into that role it came through a process of me being Nanny female on the board at the time we needed to make a change um in our succession plan on an active succession plan and my fellow directors said to me um it has to be you you are the person just with the skill sets and and the personality that we need for our club at the moment it wasn't until after we had been through that process and I thought about uh what it meant to be a president of an AFL Club particularly as a female and I would say that anytime you take on a role like this you get to do fantastic things I mean here those who are Victorian and understand what AFL is like in Victoria I've sort of already been canonized in winning that Premiership for Melbourne football club um it it's it's held in such high regard AFL here it's quite extraordinary but um the process of going through um selecting me or asking me to step up I actually said let me think about it because in saying yes to that I say no to a lot of other things that I don't have time to do I don't have the opportunity to do and I get great opportunities to do fantastic things um in my role as a president of an AFL Club but one of the other things I really sat there and thought about is now that I am elevated into such a public position and a position that is watched intensely here in Victoria as AFL is it now becomes my responsibility to do something more about diversity and inclusion and to do something more about getting more females along this path that's part of my job and when I look at being a president of an AFL Club it is at least 50 of my job if not more and we have fabulous railing Castle who um had a much tougher gig than I did because she was involved as the CEO of NRL but I think as females if you're not prepared to go in with that mindset of part of your job being bringing on others part of your job being forging the way to make it easier for others to come through then you really have to go back and reassess why you're doing what you're doing because at the moment it still is a very big part of that diversity and inclusion process of when you get there you have to be responsible for bringing other people on how does it happen you can have an some kind of internal almost engenders um process within your organization where you just realize you get enough feeling in there that things have to change and it sort of happens organically almost and I think that was what happened at our club it was almost an organic change an organic understanding that we just needed to be better and the people who started to come to our club were people who wanted to be better so if you're fortunate enough to have a culture and your leaders leading in that sort of space without fronting up and actually saying we have to do this you're in a fantastic position but a lot of organizations aren't in that position and in that situation I think you then need to make a deliberative effort to make a change and this is where I go back to that thing of looking at your organization and saying what are we not and this is what Josh was just talking about are we not relevant to young people and I know from harness racing my experience there um we're not in AFL we're trying to be more relevant to more young people we're trying to be more relevant to women as well like most sports are are we relevant to people from diverse backgrounds and we have a very diverse group of people in this room we've just heard some fantastic speakers from other countries so that's fantastic but within within your organization is that diversity in the all-specific country in which you live as well or as a little bit of a closed shop still so if you need to go through the process of deliberatively doing this how do you actually undertake that task to make change I think the first thing is that you have to actually understand what you're trying to do I would say too many times people start off with what we call a strategy and I sort of say it's like inviting you over to my place for a drink after the conference and a lot of you are not from Melbourne I'm sure and I'll say I live in yarraville come over for a drink and that's it would you then start the process of trying to find get in your car and just driving around in the hope that you might see yarraville on a signpost somewhere and uh further to that that I might be standing in my front yard as you drive past we don't do that we actually say Where am I specifically going and how am I going to get there but too often we start with the strategy and we sort of have an idea of what our goal is but it's not clearly defined no one else can understand it and we don't actually have a plan of how to get there so if you want to go down this path of increased increasing diversity and increasing inclusion you have to actually have a clearly defined endpoint a clearly defined strategy what are we trying to do and then you have a plan to get there once you've got that you've got to get people to buy in to actually deliver on your plan if you have a situation where you're asking people to change asking people to be more diverse you're asking people to be more inclusive and they don't genuinely believe that I should be or they don't genuinely believe in the strategy it just is not going to happen and that happens in a lot of organizations it happens in situations where governments for example step in and say you must do XYZ and we saw this with quotas um here in Australia in particular where it came in and said all government boards have to have 30 female representation on their board simple thing to do if anyone anyone in this room is struggling to find highly overqualified female directors to come on to any of their boards come and see me I have a list of at least 100 women who had more than capably fill those roles but when it became a forced directive it then became a pushback situation where people say there aren't women out there they're not skilled enough we're being forced to do it and it became a very negative process and we will see that with any sort of inclusion it doesn't matter what it is if you're forced to do it then your immediate reaction is new joke response I don't want to I'm being forced to do something I don't want to do but when you buy into the strategy and when your whole organization actually believes we are doing this because it's the right thing to do diversity inclusion is a great thing it brings different thinking it brings different perceptions you're not very going to get very far with your digital and I.T strategy if you don't have young people sitting in your organization and so many people now on boards are looking for young digital and I.T experts to come and be part of their boards and governance structures that's something entirely new usually you get onto a board when you're 65 you've retired and you've been around for a long time so we're changing that process so think to yourself if you generally want to go down this diversity inclusion pathway and we've done it for example at Melbourne football club with our indigenous um inclusion process so we're on our third reconciliation action plan now and that digital indigenous inclusion is driven by the staff so each year last year I went to the Northern Territory I hopped on a little light plane with our Premiership cup and we took it out into Community places that you would not believe even exist they are so remote we took our cup out there that was something that was driven entirely by the staff they organized it they asked me would I go when you get that kind of willingness in your organization to include then you do fantastic things if you don't have that willingness it's not going to happen I'm going to talk about I was asked to talk about that very double-edged sword quotas and whether or not I believe in quotas uh I do and I don't I'm sit squarely on the fence in this and I say I don't believe in them where they're not required and I think in most situations I hope very soon to get to a place where we don't require quotas at all equator is a forced uh inclusion requirement and people genuinely don't respond too well as I said to being forced but I do think we need quotas in situations where there is deliberate bias to having more diversity and inclusion in your organization and we'll go back to that point of saying think about what you are not as an organization if the first thing that Springs to mind when you talk about um having potentially a quota forced on your organization is your immediate reaction to that a negative one or is it one that says yeah that's actually a good way to get us where we need to go so in cases where this deliberate bias yes I do think there is a very strong very strong need for quotas and I think quotas will serve a fabulous purpose in bringing greater inclusion and diversity and not only that bringing greater understanding of some of the myths and misconceptions that are out there I.E this misconception that there just aren't enough women out there who can take on board roles that women who haven't played at AFL for example and haven't won a Premiership in the men's league can't coach a men's AFL team they're starting to break down those biases but it's taking a very long time I don't think we need quotas in situations where there is no bias and there is a deliberate and well understood belief that inclusion and diversity is a good thing you don't need a quota then because people who are the best skilled people have the best cultural fit have the best attitude or fit people will then find their way into the right spots in the organization I would love to be in that place because then it doesn't matter if you're male or female gender becomes completely irrelevant as would rice as would any of the other ability anything else that would become irrelevant because you're purely purely traded on your skill sets your abilities and your cultural fit I don't think there are many organizations that are close to that as yet one of the areas that I do think we are doing quite well in is the board level and you again can judge for yourself whether or not you think your particular organization is doing well at the board level and I'm talking in a corporate sense now because we have had a situation particularly here in Australia where we've had recognition and we have had Force inclusion at the board level and there are many many many uh women who are highly skilled Executives who've gone through the company directors course for example here and have those Covenant skill sets I think we're doing quite well there in many of the sports um and I would include racing in this from my experience at harness racing obviously I think coming through the executive levels we're still struggling a little bit to get women up into those higher level executive roles and again I challenge your organization to think about whether or not that's a deliberative thing or whether or not you're not bringing enough people through because I'm pretty certain that there would be enough women out there skilled enough to take on the executive roles so again it's that inclusion question how inclusive are you being how much are you trying as an organization to actually deliver on greater inclusive and greater inclusiveness and greater diversity with your within your organization I've touched on a couple of things I'm a horse rider I grew up on a farm I don't really follow racing and to some degree I have the same sort of feeling that a lot of other people uh feel particularly not so much flat racing the steeple chasing um I don't really like uh because I get the welfare element of it and that's not casting any uh negative um mindset on the the racing industry it's just something that that I feel and as I said I grew up on a farm uh riding horses chasing sheep and cattle doing pens and flags and Barrel races and those sorts of things so I'm wondering and you may be able to answer this better than me I'm wondering if this is a gender delighted thing I'm wondering if more females feel anti-gambling if more females feel anti horse welfare and I say that in a negative way Angie horse welfare then then males do I'm not sure it'll be really interesting to see some statistics on that but Josh just spoke about it before if it is and I can see a nodding head there so I suspect that um notionally you just say yes I think women certainly gambling I think um we we and be interesting in other countries how are you going with regulation but we here in Australia are heading to or you are heading to a very very very steep Cliff face which is the Cliff face that says it's become so socially unacceptable to gamble that you're going to really struggle in the gaming industry going forward and I wonder how far away that is I mean think of that in your sector is it 10 years away is it 20 years away it's changed so much regulation-wise since I was even in the Sector 10 years ago um we've just moved out as a Melbourne football club for example we own two gaming venues we just sold them both um because we don't want to be associated with gaming um there's betting in in AFL I wonder how long that will last so that's a real concern for you and I think it's a real concern for women in general so that's one issue I think you have to tackle more broadly but particularly think about how it becomes a positive conversation as Josh said with women and with young people welfare with young people is very very different a difficult issue for them to deal with particularly when it comes to animals I think so there's some challenges for you in your sector you have to make it as easy and as approachable as possible your sector and that's a difficult thing to do when you go out and think to yourself if you go out um to a Christmas party a New Year's party a birthday party and you say I work in racing what's the response that you get if you're not with a group of if you're not a conference like this where you're with a group of races I can see all the women certainly not in the head guy it's a difficult it is a difficult thing because it's um you would be getting hammered like the people for example who are doing Road Works in Melbourne anyone who's tried to drive around you would be getting hammered I would think on worrying racing it's unfair it's that you would get that so how do you actually create a an area for your conversations to be more positive and how do you actually create that culture within your organization for racing to be considered more acceptable for young people for women for people of diverse backgrounds whether it's within the line wire within the swim line of actually working in an executive being on a board being a jockey being a trainer how do you actually create that Comfort space for people from diverse backgrounds to be included in racing I think that's one of your biggest challenges along with all the others that Josh spoke about so good luck for the next 10 to 15 years in the racing um industry I think there's some of your challenges that you really do have to deal with because it'd be interesting to hear from Arlene about her thoughts on NRL which I think is quite different from AFL in terms of the diversity and inclusion space as well we're sort of moving along slowly but I think for you as a sector and viewers individual groups in this room today the question is how quickly are you moving are you near those that are at the front of the pack and can you actually take steps to get yourself ahead of the rest of the package to have said you don't want to be in a situation where you're just trying to catch up because I know we work hard on it at AFL and we're going to try and keep going on and on ahead so I think there's big challenges I think it's huge opportunity because as as you would know there's limited diverse inclusion I would think in in racing and it doesn't make sense because you don't discern what horses can and can't race usually based on whether they're mares or stallions or buildings or Phillies or Cults sometimes you do but usually not at the higher end we don't at the Olympics men and women compete evenly uh in dressage in jumping and three-day Eventing because it's a horse and ride accommodation are they getting the same equal opportunity to be involved at other levels of your sport be it on the field off the field at the board table at the executive table as they do on the field because in a fabulous words of the wonderful Michelle Payne if you don't believe women can do it you just can all go and get stuffed foreign