Carol Schwartz AO on paving the way for future trailblazers

Carol Schwartz AO is one of Australia’s leading business and community leaders, but she was never handed her opportunities. Instead, she carved her own path.

Image: Kristoffer Paulsen

Carol Schwartz AO was just 23 years old when she set up her first business.

It was the early 80s, and Olivia Newton-John ‘Let’s’ Get Physical’ was a massive hit.

Graduating with an Arts Law degree, Carol decided she didn’t want to be a lawyer and went travelling with her husband for a year instead.

They stopped off in Los Angeles for a month when the idea came to her.

“I went to Jane Fonda’s workout in LA and thought ‘we need a studio like this in Melbourne,” Carol said.

She arrived back to Australia armed with audio tapes and found an old building in Little Latrobe Street that she turned into three dance studios.

“I approached graduates from the Victoria College of the Arts School of Dance, because Jane Fonda only had dancers as her aerobics teacher,” Carol said.

“I became the owner and manager of an aerobics and dance studio called ‘Energetics’.”

Carol found a ‘funky little factory’ in the nearby suburb of Richmond to make sweatpants, leg warmers, headbands and leotards.

Today Carol continues to be a trailblazer in business, property and politics and is now helping the next generation of female leaders carve their own paths.

Entrepreneurial roots

Entrepreneurship runs in the family for Carol. Her grandmother was the founder of the retail business Sussan, which her sister now runs and her father helped grow.

“Entrepreneurship was never something that was scary,” she says.

“Female entrepreneurs were in my family in the same way male entrepreneurs were.”

After having her first child, Carol sold her business and decided to do an MBA, when she noticed she was in the minority.

“I started noticing, ‘hey there aren’t so many women around me, where are all the women’?”

Carol graduated from her MBA while pregnant with her third child and went back to work in a family business in property.

“The property industry was very obviously not an industry that many women were involved with.”

But that would soon change.

Changing the rules of the game

Carol became the first female president of the Victorian Property Council before becoming the first female president of the National Property Council.

“I really felt that I needed to be supporting women, because there were women who were on the fringes of the property industry, but not being included in a way that they should have been included,” Carol said.

An example she noticed early on was the council lunches that were held at clubs that only accepted male members.

“I said, well, we're not going to have lunches in those clubs anymore, because I can't be a member, I’m not going to support those clubs.”

Realising the tables were also dominated by men, she created a Presidents table where 50% of guests on her table were women she had invited.

“Then we found that a lot more women would actually attend the lunches, because they weren't worried about being the only woman in the room.”

Investing in female entrepreneurs

This was a theme that extended to investment in female entrepreneurship which Carol was determined to change.

In the late 90s and early 2000s a lot of female entrepreneurs were popping up.

“That was very exciting, but when we look at the data around the level of investment in female entrepreneurs, we see that a very large chunk of the investment dollars goes towards male entrepreneurs” Carol said.

Carol went on to found Scale Investors with fellow trailblazers Annette Kimmitt, Susan Oliver, and Laura McKenzie.

“Not only were we supporting female entrepreneurs and female start-up founders we were educating other women on how to be a confident investor.”

The organisation has since been taken over by a new generation of women who successfully raised a fund and are investing in female entrepreneurs.

Supporting female venture capitalist fund managers

Carol quickly realised that there weren’t many women making decisions around the allocation of capital for investors.

“I started looking at women who were setting up funds in Australia,” Carol said.

She found that women who were fund managers tended to invest in a lot more women than male VCs.

“I guess it's a natural tendency in some ways for men to support men, and it's lovely that, it's sort of coming out the same way, and you're giving women the opportunity to do so, but they’re naturally in female ventures.”

In the 2000s a lot of female creativity was being unleashed thanks to the internet, but men were missing the opportunities.

“They would put forward these ideas to male VCs and there wasn’t the same light bulb moment as there would be if they pitched the idea to female VCs because men couldn’t relate to the product in the same way women could.”

This led to Carol establishing Female Led Ventures, which invests in female fund managers and female founders for strong commercial returns.

Pathways in politics

Putting more women in positions of power also extends to politics.

Over a decade ago Carol started a national initiative called Pathways to Politics for Women with founding partners the Trawalla Foundation, Women’s Leadership Institute Australia, and the University of Melbourne to increase the number of women in Australian politics.

The proudly non-partisan programs are uniquely designed in collaboration with eight leading universities across Australia, with comprehensive practical training, workshops, mentoring and career-long support.

“We need more women making decisions and exercising power alongside men,” Carol said.

“And where else does one do that but through the political institutions?”

Carol wants to ensure as a society we have the sorts of laws that represent the population fully and effectively.

“We must have slightly more than 50% of the population sitting around the table, together with their male counterparts, making sure that those decisions are the right ones for us as a society. To me, that's a no-brainer.”

In the last decade, Pathways to Politics for Women has helped hundreds of women to run for office and achieved 97 electoral successes nationally across the political spectrum and at all levels of government.

And Carol’s not done with challenging the status quo yet.

“We’re operating in a system that has been set up by men for men for the last two and a half centuries.”

“And it's not until we have a critical mass of women in Parliament and in power for a critical mass of time that that's going to change. It's probably going to be two generations.”

Carol Schwartz is a panellist at this year’s Women in Leadership Dinner on Thursday, 26 November. Tickets are available here with registrations closing on November 10.