What I learnt by spending time with my friends’ daughters

It’s dispiriting but not surprising. Girls are not passive beings; their brains are sucking up information all the time as they watch the behaviour of adults and learn how women are expected to think, feel, behave and relate.

Girls see an Australia where the number of women chief executives in top companies is shrinking. An Australia where women do more paid work than before but still carry the overwhelming burden of unpaid labour. An Australia where care work is undervalued and underpaid. An Australia where far too many older women retire into poverty.

Fixing all of this is not – and cannot be – about fixing girls themselves. Just as solving gender equality isn’t about fixing women. Because women are doing everything they’ve been told to do. Women are graduating from school with higher grades, attending university in larger numbers and running headfirst towards those better-paid, male-dominated professions.

Yet still it is not enough. As Kristine Ziwica writes in her newly released book Leaning Out, and Catherine Fox before her in Stop Fixing Women, the choices and capacity of individual women don’t stand a chance without parallel organisational, legislative and systemic change.

To anyone worried that the next generation of girls doesn’t have what it takes to succeed, let me tell you, they are fine. Girls are fierce, fired up and ready to go, if only we don’t snatch opportunity away once they depart the safety of school for the wild west of the workplace.

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What really needs to change is the conversation we have with our boys. Because if we are not careful, it will be the next generation of men who continue to prop up a system that makes women second-class. Or it will be the next generation of men whose backlash against feminism is so violent and sudden, that equality is set back by much more than 10 years.

I had the privilege of spending time with many of my friends’ daughters. Between bushwalks and craft and games and running races, I asked them questions. Questions about what they believe and what they know, what they think and what they feel, what they hope for and what scares them most.

They are too young to properly grasp the inequalities between them and boys such as my son. Their minds too full of cartwheels and colouring-in, Bluey and birthday parties. But in 10 years’ time, those differences will be clear, and in another 10 their pay packets will be proof.

Unless, of course, we choose a different path.