Jenni

My name is Jenni Colwill. I am a small business owner, a mother, a grandmother, a wife and a partner in 2020women. My business, Leapfrog Leadership Pty Ltd, assists leaders to engage staff and manage their people by providing mentoring and consulting services. 2020women is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to collect and share the stories, wisdom and dreams of Australian women, to encourage and support Australian women in their life choices, and to provide women with information they need to support their choices in the future.

I was born in this country and spent my first 17 years travelling around the world and around Australia with my family. We moved to a new city or house every year, so I went to many schools and lived in many different environments. This upbringing was not conducive to following the normal education patterns, but it did give me a wide range of experiences, and an ability to thrive on change and challenge.

I married and had two sons in my twenties, but have continued to work throughout their lives, including during the early years of motherhood.

After a relatively amicable divorce, my life revolved around raising my children, but my career became more important again after I met my second husband, who  encouraged me to achieve more than I thought possible. I became a senior executive in the public sector, working in human resource management, and then moved back into senior roles in the private sector where I had started.

I now live in a rural location, and have the time to pursue my interests, which include supporting women, and painting. I have been on several Boards, and currently enjoy being a member of the Performing Arts Advisory Committee for the Canberra Theatre Centre.

My dreams for 2020 women

By 2020 I want women in Australia to have equal pay, employers who help and support women to participate in work at a meaningful level, a fairer taxation system for women and young people and a good system of national paid maternity leave, one that is much better than the one that is currently proposed.  Not a lot to ask?

In my opinion there are three major problem areas facing women in Australia, and I would like to see steps towards resolving all three by the year 2020.  The three problem areas are: Australian women's experiences in employment, their experiences as mothers, and dysfunctional cultural attitudes that accept and reinforce women's subordination to men.  Each of these problems covers quite a bit of territory.  

• Under the employment banner, I am concerned that Australia has such a low participation rate of women in employment compared to other western countries.  This has a wide range of causes, which are all problems in their own right and include women not being paid as much as men for similar work; lack of paid maternity leave; lack of part time employment; lack of suitable child care for pre-school children and for children after school hours; lack of recognition of women's skills in employment; and under-valuing the work traditionally undertaken by women. These issues also add up to increasing levels of poverty for women in retirement, something that would be less likely if the employment experience was more positive.
• There is also a lot of scope for improvement for women having children.  Maternal services and support in Australia is highly variable, and often lacking in important areas - for example, for Indigenous Australians.  This includes post-maternity services.
• Cultural attitudes are the hardest to fix, but probably the most important.  In Australia we still have a high level of violence against women, which I attribute directly to a culture that complacently accepts the problem.  This is reinforced by a lot of different signs in our culture.  For example, women are presented in the media in a way that is often demeaning - but with very little protest.  The prevailing sports culture is another sign of this problem; there is a strong link between so called 'masculine' sports and the act of demeaning women.  

I also hope to see women working together to address these problem areas.  My happiest experiences occurred when women have worked together to achieve something. My advice to women is try to sort out and enjoy your differences, and use those differences to make change a reality. Women have too much to do to ensure they are given a place in solving the problems of the world to waste time and energy on the small stuff.

People who have influenced me

The most important influence on my life has been all the members of my family.  Firstly, my immediate family.  I was a late starter in everything, but because I had my children in my twenties I was fortunate - I have learned so much from my sons. Then there is Bruce - his support and confidence in me have been such important factors in making me feel really alive.  Then of course, there is the whole of my family; not a large one, but one that is full of love.  We are lucky to have four generations in our family, and we are all different.  The result is an amazingly diverse bunch of people with a lot of different characteristics, but still a strong family. 

Unlike a lot of people, I am fortunate to have both parents as part of my life still.  They are now in their 90s and each day they become more precious to all their family. Having parents at this age also means I have been their child long enough to have sorted out all those childish conflicts that children have with their parents.

My parents are each their own person, with different interests. The strongest thing they share is a loving interest in their family. I did not really understand this interest until I had my own children, and then I understood it even more so when I married my second husband, my life partner.

I believe that no matter what you do in life, ultimately you come back to your family; they provide a link to your past and a bridge to your future.  I have also found that committing yourself to your true life partner is like giving birth, which is like giving away your heart.

Another inflluence on me was a friend I made in Alice Springs in the mid-1970s.  Kathy's influence on me was twofold. Because of my inability to overcome educational disadvantages (I went so many different schools that I can't remember the number; somewhere between12-16 I think) I had no formal educational qualifications and felt this pretty keenly.  Then Kathy persuaded her university to allow me to supervise her thesis, on the basis of the breadth of my experience. This taught me to value my experience, and to see it as a different form of education. It also showed me that academic studies are a subset of the study of life, and that missing out on that lifestyle wasn't all negative.

Kathy was a feminist thinker, who also inspired me to think more about women's issues.

As a young woman in the seventies, I had attended a meeting of the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) when I lived in Darwin, intending to join. I left when the discussion centred on the issue of whether or not tertiary qualifications should be a prerequisite for membership. The convenors of the meeting wrongly assumed that all those present held a Bachelor's Degree at least; they were totally unaware of what I regarded as a very elitist attitude.

A few years later, I trained counsellors for the Alice Springs Women's Refuge which was set up by WEL.  To my dismay I discovered that there was no intention to admit Aboriginal women into the Refuge.

I was disappointed.  The women who were calling themselves 'feminists' were excluding both women who were interested in feminism and women who were most in need of support from other women. But, as a result of Kathy's influence and encouragement, I decided that feminism is more of a personal position and proudly became one - by myself!

Kathy taught me that if you think outside the prevailing structures, nothing can stop you from achieving what you want.

My proudest achievements

There are two.  the first was devising and developing the Public Sector Management Course, a leadership and management education program for Australian public servants, developed as a joint venture with State and Territory governments, with a unique model of accreditation and delivery. After many years, the course has successfully provided an accessible management education qualification for thousands of public servants. It has also influenced tertiary management education, increasing availability of Australian courses on public sector management.

The second achievement is the support I provided to a women's organisation (NFAW) which successfully lobbied the government to introduce paid maternity leave in Australia.