The reporter concluded that in finance, “there are no old prejudices to break down from the old ascribed position in the kitchen”.īut this was way too optimistic. She had earlier worked with Charles Goode at his firm AC Goode. Jean Fraser was the general manager of First Federation Discount, a money market dealer and “on any day Fraser would control over $100 million in general operations”, we reported. She could stand for election as a member of the exchange, she said: “There’s nothing in the regulations preventing it.” She quoted Margaret Mittelheuser, with a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Queensland and a partner of broking house Ralph King and Yuill.
“Only in the past few years have the walls surrounding one of the last male strongholds – finance – been developing chinks through which women can pass,” wrote reporter Lyn Carroll.
Women breaking into stockbroking and the money market were featured in a May 1969 story. The Financial Review reported her resignation as director of promotion activities at the Australian Wool Board in 1968 and the launch of her consulting business Sanders Myer. We reported the launch of her consulting business Sanders Myer advising businesses trying to access Asian markets. Sanders never confirmed her rumoured £10,000 a year salary but claimed it was less than a man would have been paid for the same job. In 1968, we reported the resignation of Nan Sanders, who had been director of wool promotion activities at the Australian Wool Board for 10 years and one of Australia’s “highest paid women executives”.
Occasionally, professional women made a mark. In the ’70s, the ads became even more sexist and raunchy as the “permissive” society took hold. In the Financial Review of the ’60s, women appeared most often in advertisements – as secretaries poised over typewriters or as air hostesses welcoming passengers. In the 1960s, women remained rarities as politicians, but chief political correspondent Maximilian Walsh cheered the “uninhibited candour” of Zara Holt, Prime Minister Harold Holt’s wife, in September 1967 in his weekly Canberra Observed column, noting that she was “steadily stripping away the layers of cant and hypocrisy that permeate Australian politics”. Women now comprise about one-third of commentators in afr.com Opinion and, on a good day, in the newspaper’s Opinion pages. Her article did not set the tone for the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when professional women seldom appeared as opinion leaders in the Financial Review.
The first edition of the Financial Review carried an opinion article by Barbara Ward, formerly assistant editor of The Economist and later an adviser to US President Lyndon Johnson, advising the government how to counter inflation and expand the economy’s productive capacity. But often the masthead did little more than reflect the glacial pace set in the Australian business and politics. The Australian Financial Review has led reporting on issues of women’s equality and launched extraordinary initiatives such as the 100 Women of Influence and the Work and Family awards. She has furthered her career as a company director since 2000. CBA chairman Catherine Livingstone increased the value of Cochlear shares tenfold when CEO.