A brewer, a hotelier and a CEO shared the floor on International Women’s Day to discuss how each of them has embraced change to break the bias within their own organisations. Pernod Ricard’s Emma Baldwin deftly facilitated the conversation with each participant contemplating how far they and their businesses have travelled and discussing where the road to gender equity must go from here.
Being the Change – Jayne Lewis – Two Birds Brewing
Jayne Lewis is the change we want to see in the world of brewing. She has the trophy to prove it and an unwavering social commitment to actively improving the world of brewing for women, as well as other minority groups.
Ten years on and Two Birds Brewing is still the only all-female founded brewery in Australia. When a job performance review suggested that she brought “a little less Jayne” to the role, she decided to do her own thing.
She and business partner Danielle Allen set up their own brewing business, self-funding the business with a contractor making the craft beer according to Jayne’s recipe at the very beginning. The road to independence was staggered as they slowly brought everything in house.
Two Birds Brewing was sold last year. Twice. First to Fermentum – “one of the biggest decisions we’ve made in our life. We’d done all that we could to take the brand to where we felt it needed to go,” said Ms Lewis. Fermentum was then bought by Lion in December. Ms Lewis now has a boss which is “super weird”. And a big boss.
She said, “Change is another opportunity to look at things differently; to see what you can learn, to see what is out there; to try something different…Being a part of Lion is about trying something that I have never tried before and leaning into that and the opportunities that it presents.”
Ms Lewis also launched the Australian chapter of the US founded Pink Boots Society, empowering women in brewing and creating an opportunity for connection and education.
In 2010 during Good Beer Week, she organised the first chapter event which was attended by ten women. When she handed the organisation over a few years later to focus on her business, Pink Boots counted between 500-600 women in its chapter.
During the rise of voices in the #metoo movement, Ms Lewis explained that she fell into a deep depression at the thought of how attacked, harassed and unsafe so many people had felt at work.
organisation: Beer Agents for Change.
The organisation is intended to support “diversity, inclusion and equity throughout the brewing industry and be a voice for those who are repressed…Any part we can play where we make that go away, that is my ultimate goal.”
Citing Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame and their call for respect, safety and equality, Ms Lewis said, “It’s not that hard and yet it is that hard.“
The organisation is currently working to raise funds so that Beer Agents for Change can work to ensure that any minorities, a person of any background, can have a safe working experience”.
Leading the Change – Bryan Fry – CEO & Chairman
Bryan Fry keeps the house of Pernod Ricard tidy. For him, there is no room for sexism nor racism and gender equity is led from the top. He said, “Get it right at the top in terms of leadership and buy-in and then lead the case for change from there.”
To create the path to change starts with arguing the case for it anchored in evidence, before designing and running the change management program, getting the team management on board, and measuring it.
“If you don’t measure, it doesn’t exist,” he said.
One definitely has the sense that change for the better is actively and consistently sought out at Pernod Ricard.
For Mr Fry, his professional years in Latin American, where the dominant trend from graduates was to seek opportunities with large multinationals meant that Pernod Ricard Brasil had the best pick of all talent, and importantly the top female talent. When he moved to São Paolo to become President and CEO, the management team mix was a 70/30 split which moved quickly to 60/40.
It was clear and very obvious, he said, that it was a “much better environment: the way we discussed problems, the way we did strategic planning, the way we actually dealt with problems – both with employees and business – and that was a big step.”
“The numbers just stack up. Companies that embrace a much more diverse leadership and management style, quite simply they outperform on profitability,” he said.
Bias comes in three forms, explained Mr Fry:
Conscious: the easiest to identify.
Structural: To address this bias means looking at things like gender pay equality or developing programs to keep people on parental leave connected to the office. Not just a bottle of wine and some Thai takeaway once a month as was the case five years ago, he suggests.
“We’re much better at keeping in touch now,” he said.
Pernod Ricard is committed to pay equity and the business was certified by WGEA as an Employer Of Choice for Gender Equality last year as well as a Family Friendly Workplace.
For Mr Fry, the business will be working to ensure they hold tight to those two certifications over the next year, backed by thorough policies, modelled in their corporate behaviour and promoted through education programs.
Unconscious: Mr Fry said that this is the toughest one to change. First the unconscious biases need to be identified - measured - and then programs need to be developed and implemented to address those biases. It means building the program you want to implement, and tracking towards the change that you want to achieve.
For example, Pernod Ricard is developing new programs to keep female staff so that they are not lost once they start having babies, generally between 30 and 40 years of age.
“People have a career journey that has different stages of life. Starting out when you’re young and you’re as hungry as hell, to having kids and schooling at home. And if you don’t adapt the organisation, you’ll see a mass exodus of female staff and skills between 30-40 years,” he said.
He concedes that the business – and industry as a whole – lost the last generation of women. There are not many women over 45 going through to retirement, he observed.
“That’s the mistake that was made. What we did not do years ago because a lot of them have left and we cannot afford to make that mistake again,” he said.
This means becoming more sophisticated in career planning and starting to work on better quality career planning conversation with employees, “earlier than when we find out that they are going on maternity leave”.
Creating the Change – Craig Laundy – Hotelier
Craig Laundy has been working in pubs and hotels since 1989, starting out at the Two Willows in Bass Hill as a glassie on the floor, with the “barmaids behind the bar” and no security in sight.
The third generation Western Sydney publican says that behind the scenes, the key people were – and still are – women doing the accounts, accounting and running the bottle shops.
Back then, women could not have been in charge, he says, it was too physically dangerous. But there has been “truckloads of change” since then.
Returning to the family business after working in federal government, what interests Mr Laundy now is creating structural change. And that is exactly what he is doing.
The Laundy Hotel Group is working closely with the University of Western Sydney and employing young female graduates in the pubs while they are completing their degrees. He and his family want women to know that working in venues, working in pubs, bars and restaurants, can be a rewarding long term career, and rewarding both in terms of personal, social and community achievement as well as financially.
“Pubs are big business and provide pathways for female grad students to not only do their grad work at uni, but also are a career path to follow,” he said.
“And that’s really a key thing and it is low hanging fruit because it has never been there before.…the early discussions are extremely exciting.”
In days gone by, pubs would lose their university employees to five star hotels.
Mr Laundy advocated for the same kind of structural change when he was the Member for Reid from 2013-2019. He challenged the Liberal Party to consider a quota system to boost its female representation.
“I was absolutely belted from pillar to post. Because in the Liberal Party there is still this mindset that it is ranked purely on ability, it’s not viewed through a gender prism, however there is no acknowledgement that there is serious structural deficiency in the current system that needs to be addressed and short term solutions to do that shouldn’t be ignored,” he said.
When young, female Liberal party members join an employer or an organisation after university, and then when they start to get married and have children, the Liberal Party loses touch with them.
“There is no place to stay in touch. It’s a structural issue and those take longer to change,” he said.
But, now that he is back in the family business, he is extremely well-connected, has far more autonomy and he is going about creating a structural shift where those undergraduate women working in the Laundy bars are being supported to become tomorrow’s licensees.