Empowering our younger selves this International Women's Day

We asked five of our female, senior leaders about their childhood dreams, the people who helped them aim high and what we can be doing, today, to accelerate action.

By the age of five, girls start limiting their ambitions and dreams.

Research from NYU, Princeton and University of Illinois found girls around this age stop believing they can achieve anything, based on societal expectations and gender stereotypes, and start making their dreams smaller.

This ‘dream-gap’ highlighted by the Mattel project, has life-long impacts on our interests, choices, and career paths.

So how can we encourage our girls to dream bigger and see roles for themselves beyond what society tells them are possible?

We asked five of our senior female leaders at Melbourne Business School about their childhood dreams, the people who helped to lift them up along the way and what more needs to be done to accelerate action this International Women’s Day.

What are the biggest barriers to gender equity, in 2025? 

Professor Jenny George, Dean, Melbourne Business School: The very biggest barriers that we have to gender equality is our imaginations.

Associate Professor Jody Evans, Program Director, Women in Leadership: I wish that people knew that making room for women didn't mean less room for them.

Professor Tava Olsen, Deputy Dean, Academic: Small microaggressions, the implicit bias which is so much harder to see.

Anita Arbogast, Executive Director, Centre for Business Analytics: For me, I feel like participation is a huge one only 10 per cent of CEOs in Australia are female to start with.

Libby Ward-Christie, Director, Centre for Social Purpose Organisations: I think we've still got a long way to go with some level people assuming that roles responsibilities are gender determined.

What were you like as a child? 

JE: As a child I love to read I have many memories of getting in trouble at home for bringing the torch under the doona. So as a child I think I was very earnest.

JG: I was a fairly precocious kid. I liked talking with adults at primary school, I was the leader of my class um I was the class captain.

AA: I was very shy in public and and with people I didn't know, but with the family I was really the loudest one amongst me and my brother. So it was always a lot of fun and a lot of noise in our house.

LWC: Little kid? I was pretty energetic. I was probably quite cheeky. I was the school swimming captain, girls captain and there was a school swimming captain, boys captain. But it was assumed when we won the district swimming carnival that the boy would make the speech, not the girl.

TO: One of my school reports said that I was a sunny child who talked too much. So I guess I was a cheerful chatter box. And most of my skiing was with my older brother, so it was keep up or be left behind.

What was your childhood dream? 

JE: I had quite a big dream of wanting to be a writer, to be a published author.

AA: Career aspiration I actually had was to be an interior designer.

TO: I wanted to be a doctor was because it was a very good answer to give. People would give a lot of affirmation, right? They’d smile at you. You want to be a doctor yeah? That's good, that's a good thing.

JG: I thought about becoming a politician, I thought I might become the Prime Minister, and the usual teacher, nurse – many different things that little girls I think are encouraged to think about.

Who was someone that inspired you throughout your life? 

JE: I had a professor in marketing in my undergraduate. He encouraged me in my final year to do an Honors degree. This amazing man, Don Bradmore, saw a bigger future for me than I saw for myself and I've never forgotten his words around you can be more. And that that was a major changing point in my life – it's why I went on to do the PHD.

TP: My father's parents were really quite inspirational. My father's mother didn't get to go to high school because her father didn't believe in the education for women, so even though the Headmaster came over to their house and said you know she's really talented she should go to high school. ‘No, no, what what's the point in sending a woman to high school.’ They really were sort of self-made couple but they were also very supportive of us grandchildren in terms of what we wanted to do. They listened.

LWC: My dad is now 92. He was just always extremely inspiring and supportive and really believed in me, and gave me space I think to speak out and speak up.

JG: I tend to think that probably most things that I imagine I can do, I probably can do. And that's something that I think was a big part of the way my parents encouraged me to think as a child. My father always believed that I could do anything. He was kind of a feminist before his time. He would even have called himself a feminist. He firmly believed women could do anything and he encouraged me to think about that.

How would you describe your younger self? 

AA: I went to school, thought I was like everyone else and often times you would hear you know racial slurs that I didn't understand, or potentially be confronted in situations. And I think that actually has made me stronger.

JE: I would say particularly in my generation it was very important for girls to be nice. And I think the subtle difference in that is that when you're nice it's often about putting your needs last. I would probably raise my younger self's awareness that that tendency to please other people doesn't always serve you.

What needs to be done, to accelerate action towards gender parity? 

TO: Processes really, really matter in terms of if you want to give everybody a fair shot. So before I moved here in our academic hiring, we moved to blind CVS that actually made us less likely to hire women because who has unexplained gaps in their CVS? Well, women. I mean I can look at my own publishing CV and say there's daughter number one, and there's the gap for daughter number two. But if you don't know someone's a woman, you just see these gaps and you think oh they might have a bit of a productivity issue and they're less likely to make the short list.

AA: Leaders, regardless of gender, need to be allies and find those individuals who might be self-doubting or lack the lack the confidence to say I'm going to apply for that job.

JG: One of the things that you can do as a leader is to encourage people to think bigger than they are.

LWC: At the moment enabling social policies have a big role to to play. We don't get change right without leadership.

JE: The need for leaders to move beyond rhetoric and into reality. Stop giving purple cupcakes for International Women's Day. Stop just only talking about this you know one week or one month a year and meaningfully commit to change.

JG: I think that the more we believe that we can do something, the more likely it is that we'll see real gender equality. When I saw women doing things that made me suddenly think actually a full professor roll is completely possible, being a Dean is completely possible, being a CEO is completely possible.

JE: We have to just keep going it's not over and you know kind of thinking back to that writing analogy the story isn't finished unless you stop writing.