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Plain-speaking Jane QUOTES

Plain-speaking Jane QUOTES

1 " The famous Howard and Heidi experiment (referred to by Sheryl Sandberg in her 2013 book Lean In) shows that the higher men are rated on skills, the higher they are rated on likeability. The higher women are rated on skills, the lower they are rated on likeability. Neat, isn’t it? "

― Jane Caro , Plain-speaking Jane

2 " Oh, and just an aside here, but it drives me nuts when I hear the current federal education minister, Christopher Pyne, say that the people who benefited from free university education in the 1970s were almost all from the ranks of the better off. What he doesn’t say is that they were also mostly women who had been denied the chance of a university education by their fathers, who had preferred to pay the fees for their sons rather than their daughters. Whitlam’s higher education reforms were hugely important for women from the generations before mine and that has had equally important positive results for them, their daughters and our whole society. We should not forget that. Rant over. As "

― Jane Caro , Plain-speaking Jane

3 " think this is what’s now called ‘diversity’ and is believed to deliver richer and more creative results. It wasn’t seen that way by the advertising ‘creative’ community back then. Far from it. Choosing judges from a larger pool of eligible candidates got me into all sorts of trouble. Even though the highest percentage of women I could get (on the print jury) was 40 per cent, the guys in the industry went into orbit. The list of judges was printed in the industry trade magazine, Campaign Brief, with all the women’s names in pink and all the men’s names in blue! There were editorials written excoriating me for not choosing judges on – ahem – merit! The irony of that was entirely lost on these supposedly clever men. None of them had ever wondered how it was that women had so little merit and men, particularly men just like them, had so much. Maybe they thought they were just naturally superior. I "

― Jane Caro , Plain-speaking Jane

4 " It is hardly surprising, as we are brought up in a society that preferences men in almost every area you care to name, particularly when it comes to wealth, power and prestige. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Liz Broderick, describes misogyny as being like asbestos in the walls; we absorb it without realising it. That is why sexism is not just something men do to women; it is also something women do to one another and, most damagingly of all, to themselves. The result is that we unconsciously assume that men – particularly white, middle-class men – have merit until they prove otherwise. I have seen this over and over when very ordinary men get promoted far beyond their level of competence, not just once or twice but continuously. Most of the bosses I have had who failed at their job were kicked upstairs. That rarely happens to incompetent women. This is because that same unconscious misogyny leads us to assume that women don’t have merit until they prove otherwise. "

― Jane Caro , Plain-speaking Jane