Dr Jackie King

Dr Jackie King is Executive Director at JDK Research, where she collaborates with clients to co-design, deliver and manage projects, programs, people, strategies and frameworks. With a focus on innovation and solving complex social problems, Jackie works across sectors and within organisations to accelerate impact through human centred design and systems change.

Jackie is deeply committed to a variety of organisations working to advance gender equality, within and beyond the Jewish community. Since 2016 she has been a director on the board of the National Foundation for Australian Women, an organisation that advocates to advance the status of women and represents the interests of women to government by applying a gender lens to social policy and budget. She has also been a member of Public Transport Access Committee advising the Minister of Public Transport since 2016.

In 2014 she co-founded Project Deborah, a capacity building platform for women which has included a professional development program, financial literacy program, mentoring, advocacy and peer to peer support. It aims at empowering women to bring their best selves forward to fulfil their ambition.

Learnings from Project Deborah have permeated every aspect of the lives of participants, including hers. She is committed to transforming the drivers of gender equity around behaviours, social norms, roles models and unconscious bias, and supporting organisations on their gender equity journeys. ‘Project Deborah was as much a reflection of my own journey and desire to support other women in theirs, to fulfil their potential, invest in themselves, their careers and community.’

Family and background

I was born Jackie Erenbom in 1975 in Melbourne. I’m one of two children – I have a younger brother. My parents met when they were very young, at a party in Melbourne. Neither of them finished school. Dad’s parents lost almost all their families in Europe during the Holocaust. My mum’s mum still has a lot of close family in London. She was evacuated during the war.

Dad was born in Israel of European parents. My grandmother went to Palestine in 1936 in an arranged marriage. My paternal grandfather was born in Odessa. He was sent to Siberia as part of the Polish Army; his division was sent to fight in Iraq. From Iraq he defected to Palestine. He lived next door to my grandmother who already had one child with the man who brought her out from Poland; by then they had divorced. The two got married and then my dad and my late Auntie were born. My grandmother and grandfather immigrated with my Auntie and Dad and arrived in Melbourne when my dad was ten, choosing Melbourne because there was already family here, a sister. They left Israel because they didn’t want my dad or auntie to go into the army, after my uncle was shot in the back during the Suez crisis.

When they arrived in Melbourne they lived in St Kilda and Brighton. My grandfather was a cement truck driver and my grandmother worked in a clothing factory. They were drawn into an established, Yiddish speaking, Polish community.

My mother was born in Adelaide. My grandmother came to Australia from London; she grew up in London, and had the full experience of the Blitz as an eight year old, before being evacuated to Scarborough. Her father was in the admiralty and was posted to Adelaide. My maternal grandfather was in a labour camp during the war. He came to Australia as a displaced person and arrived in Adelaide. He had to spend two years working in the Snowy River scheme – the army structured his social and community life – but there was a very strong Hungarian connection.

My parents were very young when they met and married. My grandmother was forty-five when I was born and I feel very fortunate to still have one grandmother alive. My late grandfather knew six generations of his family, which is extraordinary, given that his parents died in the death marches to Auschwitz.

I was very interested in stories of the Holocaust. I made a huge effort starting around the time of my Bat Mitzvah to investigate family history. The refugee experience is part of my understanding of where my family came from. There is a big chunk of my identity that is wrapped up in what came before me. That sense of otherness has permeated my decision making. My grandfather would answer questions about the past when asked, but he didn’t talk a lot about it uninvited. Talking with him helped me to understand some of their adult behaviours.

Education and learning

I had a religious education but my family wasn’t particularly religious. I went to Yavneh College, up until the end of year 10 and then to Bialik College for year 11 and 12. I grew up with a sense that my Jewish education was very much about preservation. I am still not sure about the value of that education, but I understand my parents wanted me to have the knowledge and understanding to be the Jewish person I want to be. As a parent, I feel a bit different about what a good education requires. Two of my three children go to non-Jewish schools.

For my Bat Mitzvah, my mum’s parents took me to London and Budapest. I met my extended family and saw the landmarks of my grandmother’s youth and learnt about her experience of the East End of London. I took my daughter to London for her Bat Mitzvah and followed my grandmother’s early paths so she would understand what came before her as well.

When I was in grade 3 we moved to a farm in South Gippsland (Nyora), where I lived up until the end of my year 12. Mum drove me to Elsternwick every day and back to South Gippsland every night. I did my homework in the car. As I grew older, I spent a lot more time with my grandparents in Toorak. I feel my parents were trying to give me the best of both worlds. Now that I am a parent, I take my hat off to mum for her dedication.

What did getting a Jewish education involve for me? Prayer, understanding the rituals, studying the texts, learning Jewish history, Hebrew, celebrating the festivals, understanding the day to day practices. Girls and boys were certainly treated differently. It was an orthodox school so the girls were encouraged to understand but there were limitations as to how they could participate. There were leadership opportunities at school but I didn’t get involved in them. Girls and boys had equal opportunity to lead; they could be school captain and members of the SRC. But girls’ participation was limited on the religious side of things.

On reflection, I think that the focus on the ritual elements of my Jewish education did not equip me to be Jewish in the non-Jewish world. So when I got to uni and made non-Jewish friends, I didn’t know how to explain my decisions and my life in a way they could relate to. I had deep knowledge of Jewish religion but no understanding of how to translate that into living in the non-Jewish world.

I was the first person on both sides of my family to receive a tertiary education. I studied arts/law at Monash University and then did a PhD on refugee policy. I qualified as a lawyer in between, but had a very gendered experienced as an early practitioner, and didn’t want to continue in the law.

Gender, youth, feminism and Jewish identity

As a young adult I wanted to preserve a strong Jewish cultural identity but didn’t necessarily want to live along traditional Jewish gender roles. I experienced the discomfort created by the juxtaposition of the different roles that women assume in accordance with the different facets of our lives. Women are the ones who must reconcile this multi-faceted cultural identity and conflict.

I think we do need to solve this challenge for women. Because I had a religious education, I am not coming from a point of disruption but of conciliation. I am trying to have an integrated approach to how the various identities that people have can be integrated. I think you have to be respectful of religion, it’s been there for thousands of years and I want it to be preserved, even though there are challenges with it. I think there needs to be a bit more flexibility within the religion, though, to accommodate changing understandings of women’s role in society.

When we were in Israel a few years ago and we went to the western wall, my daughter asked why there was so little space for the women and so much for the men. I guess that question is pretty telling. The issues that I think need a more flexible approach include: the role of women in orthodox services, and the voice of women in the learning and educational part of pastoral education, as well as the divorce process. I think the responsibility of the woman for caring functions within the home and family needs to shift. The encouragement of orthodox women to fulfil other ambitions is still an exception rather than a rule in certain parts of the community.

There is no strategic plan or vision within the community of what the Jewish community in Melbourne might look like in the future. There is a lot of fear of loss of legacy as well as siloed operations. This isn’t in the best interest of the community moving forward in a sustainable fashion.

Project Deborah and generational change

There needs to be an acknowledgement of the need to be relevant and impactful. We can’t just keep doing things a certain way, just because that’s always the way it’s been done. So that’s the premise upon which Project Deborah was based. The more I got involved in the Jewish community, the more I spoke with women and friends, the more I realised two things. Firstly, Jewish professional women have a huge amount of capacity to give, especially when they are at home with young children. They are an entirely underutilised resource. Secondly, when you invest in women, you are investing in their families and in the future of the community.

That realisation, combined with the knowledge of how poor governance is in community organisations, led me to put in an application for seed funding for a program. It was really about governance initially. I got the funding and I pulled together an advisory group to talk about what the program might look like. Out of that advisory group came an eight session course that was part understanding branding and networks, part governance, part MBA, that we thought professional women like us would want to participate in to positively affect their trajectories and give them the confidence they needed to fulfil their own ambitions. We then put it out verbally to personal contacts and through Facebook. We had fifty women apply in a week, so we knew we had hit upon a need. The seed funding covered the cost of the program – so we could offer it for free.

We then went about interviewing each one of those fifty women. We knew that as a pilot it was a good opportunity to bring together a diverse range of women who would not otherwise have met; women from across the political and religious spectrum, independent of existing organisations.

The first course ran in 2014. We selected twenty-five of those women and we created and curated the program. It was an extraordinary experience in observing what – despite the difference of opinions and experiences within the group – the peer to peer support and the safety of being a group of like-minded women brought out in each of them. Skills were gained, relationships created, a really robust discussion about the issues women faced in the community was had. Out of that project, a mentoring program was established. A financial literacy course, a branding and social media workshop, a writers retreat – these were some of the projects that were seeded through Project Deborah. We offered support, strategies and encouragement to establish a clear pathway for how to get involved in other organisations. This has led to some of the women getting involved in committees and becoming chairs of other organisations. We talked about leadership that is non-hierarchical and that is different to traditional notions of community leadership.

Women telling their own stories can’t be underestimated as an influential learning tool. The importance of women’s voices and the lack of them in communal organisations was a very important learning from Project Deborah. We need the voices of relatable peers to tell their stories. The stories of prominent women in public life are important and inspirational, but we normally don’t see them talk about the day to day challenges of how they got to where they got to. We learn what not to do or say, but not what to do or say instead. We see them once they have adult children, and are at the top of their game. Working with Project Deborah, we made sure that the participants heard the back stories of successful women; the stories of what it took to get them there and what they sacrificed to get there. Being vulnerable about what leadership means and what it costs is important.

The first program went for almost two years, and then we set up a second pilot. We charged this time, wanting to test the viability of it. Then we went through the process of designing a business model to find out if it was replicable in other communities. At the end of the day, we decided it wasn’t viable, given that the key premise of operating in a face to face safe space would be mooted if it was digitised.

During the time I was working on Project Deborah, I got involved in women’s advocacy. I was fortunate to attend the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which gave me some insights into the world of gender equality advocacy and policy at an international level.

Challenges going forward

Women’s representation on boards and on panels is essential. There is an acknowledgement that gender parity is important in public and community spheres: women are currently at about 30% of representation, with government policy aiming to get to 50%, but diversity within that binary gender classification for woman is not great. We need to work on recognising diversity within gender and all the intersectionalities that define someone.

There are generational aspects to this – women over fifty are the ones still represented. Project Deborah was designed to encourage the non-usual suspects to put their hands up. It is one thing to empower women to do this, but the legacy organisations need to be open to accept these women.

There are some particular challenges and barriers to younger women’s leadership. Firstly, the existing expectation of women that they are the carers and the homemakers. Traditional gender roles create a cultural barrier. There is also the economic exclusion and limitations to economic participation of women having children and stepping out of work. For those that do work there are many barriers around childcare; the flexibility, structure of the working day, outsourcing childcare makes it unachievable for many.

If I had a magic wand a key change I would make would be creating better understanding in homes of what a partnership should be in personal relationships, which includes understanding who does what around the home. There needs to be a cultural shift around the voice and contribution of women. This means that there must be a greater understanding of the value of care. Is it different for Jewish women? Possibly. For instance – aftercare is limited in Jewish schools because the vast majority of mothers are not working full-time. This leads to a reliance on family and grandparents to step in which, in turn, makes things harder for people who don’t want to rely on people, or can’t. The infrastructure isn’t there for those women who want to have full-time careers.

The issue I am most passionate about within the gender equity context is economic empowerment for women. There is a massive gap around female entrepreneurship and start-ups and venture capital to support women in that space. I’m interested in supporting women who have great ideas but don’t have the traction to obtain capital investment to develop their vision. There is great potential for women’s entrepreneurship, which is currently under resourced. A young mum with three little kids has a great idea, but a lack of funds, or care demands stop the development of the idea into a viable product. Support for women at that point in their lives would see some interesting things developed – and that support doesn’t exist at the moment. Non-interest loans and micro-finance could also be developed and offer really important support.

But it isn’t just women who need to act. Men need to be involved too. There was certainly a role for them in Project Deborah and we made sure there were male mentors and facilitators. Men have got two roles; firstly, they need to create a space for women to shine rather than compete or be threatened by it. They must also work on their own sense of masculinity, cultural norms and unconscious bias so that women’s progress isn’t a loss for them but a gain for everyone.

Dr Jackie King was interviewed by Dr Nikki Henningham on 23 March 2018 for the She Speaks project. PHOTO: Leigh Henningham