Image via Pickersgill Reef on Flickr

The comedy festival has finished for another year and I am sad but also quietly relieved. I’ve loved watching stand-up comedy since I first saw the Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala on television at the age of 14 or so. But festivals can be such a whirlwind and this year I struggled with the late nights more than before. Grandmotherly, I know.

This year I saw a bunch of shows as a Beat magazine reviewer. It’s a great deal, because I like comedy and writing and free tickets. But it also meant that I got asked this question a lot:

“So as a Christian, how do you feel about being a comedy festival reviewer?”

The short answer is, “pretty fine”. But sure, I see why you’re asking. Continue reading →

In other news, there is scientific evidence that you should wear an authority jacket:

“On page 27 of New Women’s Dress for Success, Molloy describes a “field study” in which women office workers were sent to other departments during lunch hour to make an emergency request (“I need the Smith files!”) to an underling while the boss was out of the office. In half the cases, the women wore “dresses, skirt-and-blouse outfits, and pants-and-blouse outfits,” and in half the cases, the women put on a jacket over those same outfits. The researchers then tracked how long it took in each case for the underling to complete the task the woman requested (in some cases, the request was completely ignored; in other cases, the underling waited for the boss to get back from lunch before even starting). The upshot? Women wearing jackets got their files 32% faster. There’s more:

“While putting on a jacket helped every group, women over forty years old, large women, and women wearing conservative dresses were helped least. Young women, petite women, voluptuous women, casually dressed women, and women wearing pants were helped most.””

Via the excellent Jen Dziura.

Image via epSos.de on Flickr.

Money can be an awkward topic of conversation. It’s perfectly acceptable to respond to someone who compliments your outfit with, “Thanks! It was $5 at the op shop down the road, what a bargain!” But it would be rude in most circumstances to ask how much that outfit cost.

If you’re thinking of moving to a new suburb, it’s also a delicate matter to ask friends who live there how much they pay in rent.

And the amount of money we earn is more or less a taboo topic.

I’ve been job hunting over the last few months and some of the editors who have interviewed me have asked how much I would expect as a starting salary. For example, at the end of last year an editor from a fairly fancy, corporate-sounding organisation asked that question. I didn’t know what to say. Should I have increased the figure based on the fact that I would have needed to move interstate to work for them? Or should I have kept it low to show I wasn’t grasping? In the end, I avoided answering.

Much later I realised that I needed to know the industry standard to have a professional conversation with prospective editors about it. I emailed about two dozen people I knew who had a graduate job or had had a graduate job in the last few years. I felt awful asking but most people were super helpful. I’m not going to break their confidences and reveal individual figures (sorry if you read this far in hope) but here is some aggregated information:

Almost every journalist I spoke to started on a salary between $35,000 and $47,000 a year, plus superannuation.

Some of the more prestigious positions are towards the upper end of that bracket, like you might be able to guess, or figure out from very clear job ads. And if you follow this kind of thing, you already know that in some cases the journos who get those “graduate” jobs (e.g. at the ABC) already have a couple of years’ experience under their belt. But there are also companies I’d fall over myself to work for that paid their graduates somewhere within the lower end (which no-one was complaining about). Jobs at country newspapers/broadcasters were often at the lower end too, but I guess rent is cheaper in smaller towns anyway.

I had a couple of responses that worked out lower than $35,000: one was working a casual job, one heard on the grapevine what their salary would have been if they’d converted from casual to full-time, and one started work more than a few years ago. I’ve also been made an offer that’s lower than that range, but like I said, it’s difficult to have these conversations without sounding grasping.

Someone I spoke to pointed out that how much interning and volunteering we’ve all been doing to get this far, which is true. I don’t think there’s any point turning down an honest-to-goodness graduate journalism job because we might not be paid as much as our friend who’s working for the public broadcaster. But doing some preparation doesn’t hurt.

Something else I discovered is that there’s law about this. Print journalists have an award which specifies legal minimum pay rates. If you’re employed as a cadet journalist straight out of high school and don’t have a university degree, the minimums are $23,362 in first year, $29,202 in second year and $35,043 in third year. If you’ve graduated from an appropriate university degree, you can either be employed as a graduate cadet if you’re doing some kind of training course on $35,043, or as a level one journalist on $38,937.

If you want to be a gazillionaire, probably go and study commerce. But if you want to write, I hope this helps a little bit.

This week I wrote an application to be a panellist at the National Young Writers’ Festival and the application form asked a lot of questions. A lot. 25-word bio, 100-word bio, ideas for festival events, and were there any writing skills I really wanted to brush up on like self-publishing a novel?

I’ve never written a novel, if you’re playing at home.

One of the best (and toughest) questions asked who I would like to see on a fantasy panel if time and money were no obstacles.

I decided that my dream panel would be on the topic of Lady Blogs. That is, blogs that are aimed at women that are also very good blogs. Not that one about how a push-up bra is a better investment than a PhD, that doesn’t count. Don’t read that. I mean the ones about being a productivity unicorn or how if you mess up you should apologise once and then stop apologising.

Here are my dream panellists:

Edith Zimmerman and Jane Marie

I’m not great at that moment where your friend comes to you and tells you all about a really terrible situation and then pauses and looks right at you because they are waiting for your advice. But in the last year or so, I have learned to deal with that moment slightly better, because I have started sometimes saying to people, “I read on The Hairpin that…” and giving them advice from people who had some kind of experience to base the advice on in the first place.

Seriously, these women edit a website that features Ask A Dude, Ask A Lady, Doll News, Women in the News, and pretty much everything else you could want. It was also the inspiration for my pencil skirt, so thanks, The Hairpin.

Jen Dziura

I could read Jen Dziura’s Bullish columns on The Gloss and The Grindstone all day. But that would be beside the point, because they are mainly about how to get more things done with your life. They have titles like Maybe Work-Life Balance Means You Should Work MORE, How To Make Money As An Artsy Artist Commie Pinko Weirdo, and 3 Romantic Mistakes That Young Women Make That Cause Weeping Among The Angels And Kittens.

I really want to try a Ladies’ Working Brunch some time. Let me know if you want in.

Molly Lambert

Formerly the editor of This Recording and current writer for Grantland, Molly Lambert’s background is in pop culture rather than Lady Blogs as such. She makes it onto this list because of her outstanding advice on how to be a woman in a boys’ club. If you haven’t read it already, why not?

Winners of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. Image via activioslo

Today is International Women’s Day – a time to to mark the economic, political and social achievements of women, and to remember the struggles of women worldwide.

It’s as good a time as any for feminists to think about the feminist movement and where it is heading.

In the west, we include the many and varied issues faced by third-world women in our list of reasons why we still need feminism. But we’re not always as good at accepting diversity among western women.

Let’s take last year’s winners of the Nobel Peace Prize as an example. Theirs are the kind of struggles and achievements that we should celebrate on a day like this. 

The award was given to three women from Africa and the Arab world for their peaceful struggle for women’s safety and women’s rights.

One of them, Tawakkol Karman, is a human rights activist in Yemen. She is also a Muslim.

The other two winners are from Liberia – president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and peace activist Leymah Gbowee, who brought Christian and Muslim women together to protest and pray for peace.

As another example, consider a movement in Argentina: the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. These women’s children “disappeared” during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s. In the search for their abducted children, they engaged in public protests to pressure their government.

Authors studying the movement found that these women were more interested in preserving life than challenging the gendered division of labour.

The work of these African, Arab and Argentinian activists is pro-women, pro-justice and pro-equality, whether or not they would identify as feminists themselves.

And it’s this kind of work that often gets invoked when we’re challenged about whether feminism is still relevant. Yes, we respond, feminism is still relevant in Australia. It’s great that we have a female prime minister, but women are still underrepresented in parliament. And feminism is still relevant because of global inequalities: think about the struggles of women in developing countries. It’s “beholden on women who do have equal rights” to fight for women in non-Western countries who don’t, according to one feminist musician performing at a Melbourne cabaret event tonight hosted by the International Women’s Development Agency.

But it’s an uncomfortable truth that those working to advance women’s interests in other countries don’t always take approaches that we agree with.

If the western feminist movement wants to include these struggles, if it wants to recognise them and argue for their importance, then it has a responsibility to be more inclusive of Australian women with diverse views.

Now, the feminist movement needs to stand for something. I’m not suggesting we should start letting girlfriend-basher Chris Brown into the club, should he care to join.

At its core, the feminist movement works for the good of women and girls.

But different women have vastly different views about what that might look like and how it might be achieved.

For Leymah Gbowee, it was achieved partially through prayer and interfaith dialogue.

For the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, it was about prioritising the preservation of life over debates about the division of labor.

To many Australian feminists, these attitudes may seem absurd or plain wrong.

But then, there are also many Australian women who want equality for their gender but get rebuffed by mainstream feminists.

Trust me. I was once accused of “dressing like a Christian”. Goodness. Last time I checked, the amount of skin I displayed was no-one’s choice but my own. And my faith doesn’t somehow stop me from being furious when the subjects of sexual assault get accused of “asking for it” because of their hemlines.

I’ve met smart, independent women who think they don’t get to call themselves feminists because they would like to be married one day.

I’ve met several young women who, when asked about their career goals, respond that they’d like to do this and that, but what they’re really keen about is being a mum.

At first, I was taken aback by this. I’m immensely grateful to the activists of my mother’s generation and those before who have ensured that I am able to choose a university education and a career. But my choice to study and work and risk waking up one day and realising that like Julia Gillard, I have no fruit in my fruit bowl is just that – a choice.

Becoming a mum is rarely seen as a feminist move – quite the opposite. But it doesn’t mean you stop believing women should be able to walk alone safely at night or you quit expecting your partner to help with the housework. In fact, it might even involve explicitly feminist work in the form of raising daughters and sons who value equality.

The feminist movement should be robust enough to sustain debates about how best to advance gender equality. It can only be improved by including women with different and creative ideas.

This weekend I entered a cake competition called Cake Off. I’m not really Australia’s next MasterChef but I like cooking and I like eating so I thought I’d give it a shot. Plus the lovely Maddie Crofts was hosting it and afterwards the contestants and spectators got to eat all the cake, so it was a pretty good deal. 

Do you remember the Women’s Weekly kids’ birthday cake book? I made the castle cake from that, except in chocolate instead of vanilla.

Later I made cake truffles by mixing the leftover cutout cake bits with the leftover icing.

Also it was Sophie Gyles‘ birthday, and she is lovely too, and I couldn’t face any more chocolate cake, so I made her a Persian love cake.

Now I am full. 

This is not my jacket. Image via Huzzah Vintage.

I own one proper, black suit jacket. Maybe it is better described as a blazer. I bought it in a hurry because I needed something to wear to the Press Club and while it wasn’t expensive, it was slightly more than I am used to paying for clothes from op shops and warehouse sales. But that is okay because I wear it all the time. 

Not literally all the time. I don’t wear it with pyjamas. And I’ve never had an office job (or even an internship) that was so super formal that I needed to wear a suit every day. 

Sometimes I wear it when I have a job interview, or I’m in an office where it’s cold enough to wear a jacket anyway. 

But mostly I wear it when I need to feel confident about myself. 

Big day ahead? Need to tell other people what to do? Want to be considered a Serious Human? It’s jacket time. 

It’s not that I’m some kind of blubbering mess without the jacket. I’m fine. But I notice that as soon as I put it on, I walk slightly faster and more purposefully, I lift my head slightly higher, and the little voice in my head stops saying but I have so many things to do and switches to drive it like you stole it and empires are not built on cake.

Do you have an authority jacket? They definitely come recommended.