Professor Hannah Piterman

Professor Hannah Piterman is Professor of Practice at Deakin University in the Faculty of Business and Law. She consults to an eclectic client base in the corporate, public and not for profit sectors in the areas of governance, leadership and healthcare reform. As the principal in her own business, Hannah Piterman Consulting Group, she designs frameworks for good governance, conducts board evaluations, undertakes organisation reviews, advises on diversity and coaches executives across a wide range of industry sectors.

Hannah is a strong advocate for gender diversity in business and organisations and the benefits that flow from its achievement. She is the author of Unlocking Gender Potential; A Leader’s Handbook, a two-year research initiative sponsored by big business, government and academic organisations launched by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) in 2010.

Hannah is leading a research team from Deakin University to undertake a follow up research study to progress the Women in Leadership. She is concerned that, despite the progress in terms of rhetoric about the need to elevate women’s voices and an increase in their presence in higher management and at board level, progress has been very slow. ‘We are looking at what is going on in organisations that sees very little female presence at the top’.

As well as working in the corporate world, Hannah has been very much connected to NGOs, community and Jewish communal organisations that support the rights of women and marginalised groups. She is on the advisory Committee for the Committee of Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), a member of the corporate committee of the Jewish Museum of Australia and a member of the Project Advisory Committee for InTouch supporting culturally and linguistically diverse women who are experiencing family violence. She is a past Chair of the advisory board of Project Deborah, an education initiative for women in leadership, past member of the Domestic Violence Partnership Committee at Monash University and past member of the advisory board of the Anti Defamation Commission.

Hannah is proud to have been involved in grass roots organisations like Project Deborah, because they provide a safe space for women in the community to practice leadership. She understands that there are complex reasons for this, both structural and personal. ‘Women lack confidence to step up, ‘but it isn’t only about confidence,’ she says. ‘I think there are many environments that don’t cherish women’s voices. And that diminishes women.’ She points at the treatment of Prime Minister Julia Gillard as an example of how this operates in the political environment. Why would women set themselves up for that sort of treatment?

So, she understands how hard it is for young women to get involved, for a number of complex reasons. ‘I would like them to be involved, but I think the pressure on young women today is enormous because a lot more are working,’ she points out. ‘And just because they are working does not mean they don’t have to come home to household chores and looking after children. Yet we need their intelligence and their capability more than ever.’

Family and background

I was born in Israel in the 1950s and arrived in Australia in 1957. My parents were Helena and Israel Blass.

My father came from a very wealthy Warsaw family. He was what could be described as a dilettante who really didn’t have profession. But he had money, which helped him to get out of Europe in 1939. He was able to bribe his way and get the visa from the Japanese consul in Lithuania who was handing out visas for a price. He was able to get out through Vladivostok to Shanghai. As bad as things were in the ghetto in Shanghai, they were nowhere near what it was like in the concentration camps in Poland. He would have stayed in Shanghai but Mao Tse Tung threw out westerners after the Chinese revolution. My father arrived in Israel in 1950-51.

My mother came from a middle class family in Krakow. Her family was wiped out in the Holocaust and she was sent to concentration camps. In 1947 she was part of the exodus from Poland. She ended up in Czechoslovakia after the war, made her way to Marseilles and got on a leaky boat that was intercepted by the British. She was put into a holding camp in Cyprus before eventually getting to Palestine before it became Israel.

Both my parents came to Israel on their own after their entire families had been wiped out by the Holocaust. They talked quite a lot about their experiences; I think they were both damaged people because of what they had gone through. My mother talked about her experience in the camps, but she always had this sense of hope. She always dreamt of what it would be like once it came to an end. I think that is what held her together.

My mother could have been adopted after the war to her well to do American family who had left Europe in the 1890s, but she didn’t want to go anywhere except Israel. She was a Zionist. She met my father in Israel and shortly after married him. He was almost 20 years older. Life was difficult for everyone but for a man like my father who wasn’t suited to earning a living life in Israel was impossible. He had fanciful plans and dreams but they didn’t amount to anything. He went to Italy with an idea for creating a source of income but it turned out to be a harebrained scheme and he returned with nothing. He couldn’t make a living. My mother couldn’t feed us. So they decided to go to Australia where she had some family.

They arrived in Australia in 1957. We lived in St Kilda when we arrived, at the Bialystoker Centre for refugees. We weren’t technically refugees; but it was the place where people stopped until they could get their bearings, get themselves housed and get a job.

We spoke Polish at home. When we came to the Bialystoker Centre, it was a very Yiddish centre. When they heard my mother speaking Polish, they accused her of not being Jewish. They didn’t like Polish; they had a great antipathy to Poland and Poles because of what happened in Poland. So there was a conflation between Nazis and Poles in the mind of many Jews. Yet one has to understand that there e were good Poles and bad Poles like everywhere else. Anti-Semitism wasn’t a feature of Jewish experience in Poland – it was everywhere permeating most of Europe.

In Australia my mother must have learned a bit of Yiddish. Her parents had spoken Yiddish at home when they didn’t want their children to understand. My father spoke Yiddish; my mother sort of learned it. Yet Yiddish was the lingua franca of the new arrivals in Australia.

I grew up with a role model of a mother working to support a family. She was hard working and very close to her children. Mum struggled to get by. She was just surviving and trying to make a living. She worked at the Montefiore Home, and then at a restaurant my father established – she was cook, cleaner administrator, while he sat in the front of house being a bon vivant. My father was supposed to look after us. But really, he was just not able to. He loved to gamble; he was often at the races. He was just a character from another world. People liked him a lot because he was funny. But it was not easy growing up with a father who didn’t work and who gambled and who lived a fanciful life in fantasy as opposed to the tough reality of the times. As a child – I just thought that was what life was!

Judaism in the home was not a huge thing for us. My father went to synagogue. He’d go in the morning on the Sabbath but then go to the races in the afternoon. He wasn’t super religious. Sometimes they bought kosher meat, because he wanted it but my mother didn’t care. They weren’t particularly observant. We did identify as Jewish but there was no real religious basis to it. I think my parents identified a bit more as Jewish than Polish though we spoke Polish at home..

My parents weren’t really part of Jewish community organisations although they had some Jewish friends. They had a hard life and Mum was always working. Later in life she made all sorts of friends, after dad died. They weren’t particularly Jewish – they were Australian. She became very interested in education; she did a lot of U3A courses; she made friends from all walks of life.

Education and learning

I started school in Australia, speaking no English – my parents spoke Polish. I went to St Kilda Park State school (SKPS) and then went to Elwood High School. I remember racism and discrimination at primary school. I was referred to her as ‘the migrant girl’ and the head of the junior school did not like this ‘refugee riff raff’. I wasn’t called by name; I was just called ‘the migrant girl’. But I wasn’t alone – that was just the treatment we all got. ‘So I never told my parents of any education days. I didn’t want them there because they would speak Polish. So they never came, and the school rarely met my parents’.

Reflexively I understood that this was not a good thing, but I think I just took it in my stride. And I was very good at sport, so through that, I became an Aussie Girl. I played basketball, rounders, every sport – that was my life. I couldn’t wait to get to school with my friends. We were all sporty girls and we loved it. I would get to school early and get the basketball out or high jumping equipment out. And a girlfriend had a basketball ring at home so I would be at her place every day playing sport.

I did well at school. I was good at everything and particularly good at maths. But because I was a migrant I didn’t have confidence in English and subjects where expression was important. But I thought if I wanted to get a scholarship I would have to do languages and maths, even though I enjoyed humanities subjects. I would do subjects that didn’t involve essay writing. That was my migrant baggage. I didn’t realise then that I would find expression in writing in later years.

In my later schools years I had two groups of friends; my sporty friends and my Jewish friends at high school. They were different sorts of friends. My Jewish friends were like soul mates; we came from the same place, the same traumas. Everybody was dysfunctional. You all belonged to a dysfunctionality that was much the same.

I was confident in all sorts of ways. I was form captain, house captain, and prefect and I was very popular at school. I had that leadership capability and I was liked. These were all elected positions and I was elected form captain every year. I don’t know how it happened but now I realise how important that was for my confidence.

I did well as school and went to Monash University with a Commonwealth Scholarship. I chose Monash University because I had met my husband when I was fifteen and we married very young. He was at Melbourne University and I thought I wanted to have some university life that wasn’t associated with married life. I chose commerce because someone said to me ‘the future is economics.’ So I did maths and economics and associated subjects like statistics. So I didn’t have an education in history and politics. All those subjects that now I love. I embraced all of that in my thirties.. I didn’t get involved in leadership at Uni and that is something I do now regret.

Early working life

My first job was as an econometrician. I was the only woman working with nerdy men in economics. And I was being treated in a disparaging way by some of the men. As a woman in that environment I internalised being belittled. You become what you are seen as. It was the first time my confidence was shaken, simply because I am a woman.

This started me on the road to think about feminism. It was an organic process, it wasn’t anything particular but I knew that women needed and deserved to have a better deal.

In my early years of work I found ordinary men doing senior jobs – often they were not as good at their jobs as many of the women were yet women still had to pander to the men. The sexual harassment we are talking about now as part of the #metoo movement was on the go every single day. It was normalised. So as women, we had to navigate and negotiate that terrain. Men would say and do appalling things. You would reject them and they would use their power over you to punish you through lack of promotion or shifting you sideways. Most of them would be outed today because what they did was so blatant. I remember not liking it, but always having to manage it. You needed to take care not to offend them or upset them otherwise you would be marginalised and sidelined.

Career change

While I was having my children I lectured at university. I was teaching a postgraduate course in industrial relations and some of my students were doing studies in Organisational Behaviour. I found it fascinating. It was the tipping point that led to the change in the direction of my career.

I wanted to enrol in the Graduate Diploma in Organisational Behaviour and the coordinators wouldn’t let me, because they told me I had to be working full time to be eligible for the course. As a mother of young children working part time was my only option. So, I lodged a complaint and I was successful and could do the course. To have such a policy was a demonstrable example of direct and indirect discrimination against women.

I moved out of a career in econometrics and went into organisational behaviour as a career interest. I took on some big jobs with big companies and moved more into organisational change and HR. I became interested in society and organisations; in the operations of power and industrial relations and later did a PhD.

I became very interested in psychoanalysis. Economics is a fantastic discipline, and it helps explain the world in many ways. But it doesn’t explain what cannot be enumerated. What is counted counts more than what is not counted in world of economics. Yet there is much that is not counted that is of value. So, through my foray into organisational behaviour I started to learn about a world beyond numbers. Through a psychoanalytical lens I learnt to appreciate what makes people tick and how that expresses itself in organisational dynamics. I began to understand power. I began to understand negotiation, and some of the subterranean dynamics in organisations, which I found very interesting. When I began to see things through a psychoanalytical perspective it made a real difference to my thinking and understanding of organisations and society.

I don’t call it psychoanalysis, but when I am working with a board I really want to understand what is going on beyond the tangible. I might do an online survey – standard questions asking about strategy, governance, risk and so forth. But the real information I get is when I am sitting there talking to somebody and having the one on one interview/conversation asking them all sorts of questions about concerns present and future. And they give me a heap of information that I would never have received had I not been engaging at a deeper level.

Women, gender and subterranean dynamics

In 2005 I was talking to a number of corporations who were concerned at the difficulty they were having in attracting high quality talent including female talent. This led to a commissioned piece of research by the business community to better understand why there was a paucity of women in leadership positions. This was pre-GFC and the economy was booming and attracting high quality talent was a competitive imperative. I am repeating that research now under Deakin University’s umbrella because despite all the rhetoric and despite some glacial progress women continue to face barriers in attaining leadership positions.

What’s going on? The word unconscious bias has been in the psychological literature for years, but not in the corporate literature until more recently. And that came to the fore in the research – that perhaps there is some unconscious bias. But over time, I have started to think there may be more conscious bias than unconscious bias. I wonder now whether there is an environment that has provided a form of liberty to release this conscious bias – sort of a backlash against the minor progress that has been made. Privilege doesn’t want to give up its privilege, but I also think there is an aggression – an inner aggression towards women. The notion of being assertive has been coloured. Women who take up authority who act assertively are accused of being aggressive – no one likes that neither women nor men. Women are supposed to be nice (we are still trapped in that paradigm). Women have to be affable to get anywhere. But affability is perceived as softness and if they are a bit soft, then they are regarded as not being made for the tough world of muscular leadership. And that is what we are seeing today the rise of a very muscular leadership.

This has resulted in an awful, public liberty to be nasty to women. This nastiness against women – we saw this with the egregious behaviour directed towards Julie Gillard. You could say anything in the public sphere. And it wasn’t just the shock jocks who were taking liberties; it happened across the board. Anyone could have a go at Julia Gillard.

Behaviour directed against women that was shameful and traditionally hidden is no longer hidden. Now there is a whole political class – political libertarianism that says one can say outrageous things in the name of free speech! The libertarian values system has been perverted to serve a sexist and racist agenda.

But at the same time we have the rhetoric of equality and legislation to protect and promote women’s rights. The language of respect for women is being spoken. The bad jokes, the put downs, they are all being managed out of organisations. But what is going on underneath – I am not quite sure. You know women are still being killed and sexual harassment is on the rise. There’s a dissonance. That dissonance is what I want to explore in my new research project with Deakin uni.

We need to work with men to explore this dissonance because it affects their lives too. Younger men especially would be outraged by some of the antics of the baby boomer dinosaurs. They believe they have to be involved looking after children and doing domestic work. They get rewards for it too. But if you are a man and you want to work part time so that you can be an involved father forget about a promotion. There is the dissonance.

I also think men need to get much more involved in what are perceived to be ‘women’s issues’. Even large mainstream organisations still treat women’s diversity as a woman’s problem rather than as a business issue. As I have said on numerous occasions – women and the economy are one. How can you say that women’s talent and capacity and skills is not associated with the economy?’ Anyway business is getting it. But I remember having to fight a business case for promoting women and leadership programs. Now all big organisations have them. But still women and leadership is regarded as women’s issues rather than an economic, a societal and a men’s issue. Whenever there are women in leadership events in organisations you see barely any men in attendance. The real litmus test will be when men start to turn up to women and leadership sessions because they see it as a men’s issue as well as a woman’s issue that needs to be addressed.

Encouraging women to participate in public life

I was the chair of Project Deborah, which was a wonderful grass roots initiative to encourage women to insert themselves into public life. I got involved because I have had some experience with Jewish boards and I thought that some of them were boys club that could do with some female talent. I have also met some outstanding Jewish women who would never have thought of stepping onto Jewish community governance boards because nobody ever invited them, even if they felt sufficiently confident to offer their service.

Like women all over the place, Jewish women lack a degree of confidence. Furthermore, we are unlikely to push ourselves forward, because we get push back.

So when I was asked to be a chair, I was really, very happy to be part of this program to help install confidence in women. I was particularly keen to bring them together in a group setting. Today we are getting this brand of feminism now – where it is about the individual a la Sheryl Sandberg. And that has its limitations. I believe that a community of women supporting women is very powerful. So to bring these women together to gain strength from each other’s stories was wonderful. I was just blown away by how incredible these women were and what they had to offer. And they didn’t always have the avenue to offer what they were capable of offering. So this was a great opportunity to bring together a group of Jewish women who could contribute to the community and beyond. They were able to talk about their fears and fantasies and hopes and aspirations and actually realise them.

We brought in a lot of great speakers, including the Hon Linda Dessau AC (prior to her appointment as Governor of Victoria) and Catherine Fox, former deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review as well as other fabulous female role models. It was a very powerful initiative. We gained strength from the collective. The women speakers not only shared stories of their successes but also were able to tell the stories of failures and vulnerabilities. This was so important. Successful women often feel they have to tell stories of a one-dimensional pathway to success. That can alienate other women – they are perceived to be mega people but they are not mega people. In this way the women gained strength from other women’s stories rather than feel depleted by comparisons.

Identifying the barriers in community

We need more women and more diversity of thought, culture and experience

All men committees and boards can create a competitive boys club culture. Not that women don’t have egos which can be a problem as well! But I do believe that when women and men work together, respecting each other, the potential for that ego stuff gets reduced. So you have better governance. Not only does it enhance governance of community organisations but also it gives women an opportunity to engage which gives them the confidence to move beyond community organisations if they so wish and into the broader domain thus enhancing diversity in mainstream organisations.

Encouraging women to get involved

I would like more women to be involved. But I think the pressure on young women today is enormous because a lot more are working. And just because they are working does not mean they relinquish other tasks such as childcare and household duties. Yet more than ever community and wider society needs the intelligence and capability that women can offer.

We have to excite women into engaging with community organisations. Having meetings at night when people are exhausted isn’t a great idea. We have to find times that will suit women. If we are really interested in tapping their intelligence and getting their involvement then we have to create some sort of supportive environment to encourage those women to step out.

If you are alone and you’ve got kids and you have a job, you aren’t even thinking of joining community organisations. It might just be about getting together. So having forums where women can start having the conversations with one another in a safe environment – talking about what we can do, what we want to do, where we can take what we want to do. What community organisations can we approach to listen to our voices? We need to work at getting woe men together, a collective women’s voice and engaging more with some of those community organisations. We need to reinforce the importance of female voices.

You need a rewarding environment. You’ll step out if there is a rewarding environment. So you need to create a rewarding environment, where women will say, I want to step out; I want to go to this, because I am going to be heard.

We need to work on building confidence. One of the things that has struck me in my experience, whether it be to step onto a board, or to get a promotion is that women lack confidence. But it isn’t just a lack of confidence; it’s an environment that doesn’t cherish women’s voices. And that diminishes women’s self-conception. It is a deficit environment when it comes to women, and that effects women individually. But when they are in a collective and they are discussing that dynamic, they begin to understand that the nature of the bias against them, the nature of being seen ‘in deficit’ which has nothing to do with them – it’s out there! That gives them strength. When you are outside the collective and you are experiencing being seen as not good enough, you internalise the societal attitudes to women. And then you lose confidence. And its then you say, ‘oh, I’m not going to go on the board, or I’m not going to apply for that job. I’m really not good enough.

You can still get moments of sisterhood. If you can create that environment when women can be together, be themselves and talk about what is important and have others truly listen to them and have their ideas taken up and worked with, women gain an enormous sense of self. And that builds their confidence, so that they think they can step out into a world, knowing that they have a support system of women.