Name: Tori Barnett
Community, State: Kilmore, VIC
School: Broadford Secondary College
Age: 16 years old
Check out this amazing top 40 entry!
From primary school to Prime Minister, how can we create strong pathways to power for women?
I am here today not just as a woman, but as a woman with big ideas. I suggest that we try. We try to the very best of our abilities to push past these decaying, misogynistic barriers and pave the way to a future where we don’t see gender or race or any of that useless categorisation so commonly used today.
To kick start this revolution we should be offering equal pay to women, with such a huge pay gap of 15.3% I understand this is quite an obvious step, but it absolutely baffles me as to why this is still going on today – let alone why it began in the first place.
Secondly we should offer equal opportunities for job allocation to everyone, one way of doing this would be not having to include your name or gender on your résumé and simply be selected based on your prospects and abilities, because in the end isn’t that all that really matters.
What I have perceived as a young women trying to figure what to do with her existence, is that women have to work twice as hard in order to be seen as half as good so I am incredibly thankful for the overall recognition now of how women are perceived in the workplace. And knowing, that even just a little competition such as this one is opening the eyes of so many young women in regional and country areas to the problems we face as a society and allowing them the freedom and the voice to share their thoughts on how to solve them, is definitely the best step Australia has taken in a long time to overcome these outdated barriers.
I d like to end on one of the most memorable quotes from the 2010 film Inception “Never be afraid to dream a little bigger darling”. And that’s what I feel women everywhere should be doing.
Dreaming big and expanding horizons is the only way we are going to create strong pathways for women everywhere. The paths we pave will be followed and constantly be built up further by the generations of women to come, we just need to start mixing that concrete.
Thank you so much for allowing me to blabber on about my thoughts and hopefully this makes some sort of positive impact on the country and all the women with big ideas inside it.