Published: 11 July 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Over the years, in hushed tones around a rushed coffee, in detailed analysis in diversity reports or in focused discussions, I have encountered the same questions now being asked about organised Jewish communal life. Why are women under-represented in senior professional roles, in opinion-shaping roles and in lay leadership? When women are in senior roles, why is it more likely those roles have more challenges and fewer resources?
Some readers will ask first if these questions are well-founded. And that raises a great point - we don’t have reliable data on these issues. The focus by the AJN on boards was a great start and it’s an area in which it is relatively easy to gather information. But we don’t know much about how women are doing in professional roles in the Jewish world because unlike the US, we don’t have dedicated research on these issues and the professional pools are small and therefore likely to be skewed.
But here’s something we can start with - the websites of the Jewish schools tell us that there are more male principals, deputy principals and heads of Jewish studies than female – particularly striking because teaching is a profession where the majority of staff are women.
Across Australian Reform and Conservative synagogues there are more male rabbis and paid cantors than female, and more men in senior rabbinical roles. And there is no good reason that women shouldn’t hold senior executive or professional educational and pastoral care roles in Orthodox synagogues, but that is not happening in meaningful ways in Australia.
Opinion shaping is similarly dominated by men. The clear majority of key-note speakers who come from overseas for fundraisers and conferences are men – particularly when the subject is Israel. And journalism in the Jewish community can feel pretty male dominated.
We don’t know much about how women are doing in professional roles in the Jewish world because unlike the US, we don’t have dedicated research on these issues and the professional pools are small and therefore likely to be skewed.
I accepted the invitation to write a regular opinion piece for The Jewish Independent on top of too many other commitments partly because I endorse its effort to have a diverse stable of paid opinion writers: as many women as men, and a representation of younger writers, things not regularly modelled in in other Jewish publications.
As to “glass cliff” theory – the hypothesis that women are more likely to be appointed to roles where the organisation is challenged or under resourced - there is indeed evidence that this happens more broadly. It would be good to consider its application in the Jewish world and to test the observation that organisations with the smallest budgets, the most reliance on volunteers, and the lowest profiles are more likely to be led by women.
Related to this is how organisations frame paid senior roles. Until quite recently, Jewish community organisations with CEO roles were generally headed by men, and women were more likely to be in Executive Director Roles, reflecting the lower salary, remit and status of those roles.
We do need to know why this is the case, and I expect that these issues have different underlying causes. Every organisation with predominantly male leadership will have plausible explanations about the quality and quantity of female applicants for roles. All of these issues have different and multiple underlying causes. Every organisation with gender imbalance in its senior ranks will have plausible explanations about the quality and quantity of female applicants for roles.
Research such as this by McKinsey in 2018 confirms that women are less likely to self-nominate for leadership even where they are well qualified and skilled and that women care less about the status of roles and more about the quality of the experience they will have in the roles.
Some of these behaviours are the result of factors at play long before women ever step into a workplace (or communal boardroom) but some are also a direct result of workplace experience - the study confirms that women are more likely to be subjected to demeaning comments at work, more likely to have to provide more evidence of their competence, and more likely than men to be mistaken for someone more junior.
It would be good to have qualitative research on those questions specific to the Australian Jewish communal experience to complement the broader research. But the more pressing things are why they matter and what can be done to improve things.
These issues are important because organisations that are led by more men than women are more likely to set agendas that don’t take account of women’s needs, organisations that continue to give men more senior and better paid roles are depriving themselves and the communities they a serve of a significant talent pool, and conferences and publications that give voice to more men than women are compromising on delivering diversity of opinion and insight.
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And it matters because Australian government data tells us that when it comes to earnings, the gender pay gap for full-time annualised total remuneration is 21.3% and that average superannuation balances for women at retirement (aged 60-64) are 42% lower than those for men, and at the least we should know how Jewish community employers measure on these issues.
Shaming specific organisations is not the way to make things better - because individual examples are less important than overall trends, because men in senior roles are usually doing great work and because these issues are complex, and culturally embedded and take time to fix.
But we should single out the organisations that do it well and ask what they did to improve things. We should give voice to women in leadership roles at all levels, and consciously turn to them for statements and opinions before asking men in similar or more senior roles.
We should praise organisations that consistently have gender balance in their programming, and that publish information about their volunteers (so often women) who keep things running, in addition to sharing information about people who sit on boards – because this discussion is also about bringing different perspectives on what constitutes leadership and influence.
Shaming specific organisations is not the answer. But we should single out the organisations that do it well and ask them what they did to improve things.
We should acknowledge the efforts of men who won’t sit on a panel without a woman speaker - and to be clear, a moderator is not enough when the panel is otherwise all men. When men refuse to participate this gives the messages to organisers to work harder to find women and that if there is seriously no woman willing and able to speak substantively on the issue, they need to choose another angle so that women can be included, or scrap the session.
We should ask questions about money and who is paid what, and support organisations that have the courage to publish average wage information through a gender lens even if it’s not a good story. Roof bodies could lead smaller organisations to work together on ways to do this in de-identified ways, perhaps using the services of a third party.
And we should keep talking about this without being intimidated into silence when people don’t like the discussion or attempt to deflect and reframe it.
There is more to diversity than gender, and our communities have a long way to go on many fronts – we need more diverse leadership in terms of financial standing, skills, political opinions, sexuality, ability and style. But a great place to start is women in leadership and on that front it seems pretty clear that we urgently need more data, more transparency and honesty about the problem and more real commitment to change.
Illustration: Avi Katz
