how Blak women are working to build safer workplaces

Blak women make up a growing part of the Australian workforce, with 57% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women aged 15 to 64 employed in 2022-23 (the latest figures we have). That’s a significant gain from 45% just four years earlier.

However, it’s still well below the Closing the Gap target of 62% employment. It’s also far short of the comparable non-Indigenous employment rate (79%).

My research in the new International Journal of Indigenous Business draws from interviews with almost 200 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees, 120 of them women.

They shared how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women often carry additional responsibilities, which are unacknowledged in most workplaces. One Aboriginal woman in her 30s, working in regional New South Wales, told me how even after her organisation did cultural awareness training, her managers leaned on her for unpaid, unofficial staff management:

I’ve had leaders ring me and say, ‘I’ve got this problem with this employee, quick deal with it because they’re Blak.’ I can’t deal with it. I don’t have the authority […] It is all well and good for the organisation to have diversity initiatives, but if they don’t have good policies and practices in place, then those initiatives are useless and cause more harm to Blak women.

My new research shows how Blak women are driving change towards more culturally safe workplaces in Australia, even after experiencing workplace discrimination and harm.

What Blak women said about work

The 120 women I spoke to ranged in age from 18 to 65, from urban, rural and remote parts of Australia. They were at varying stages of their careers: trainees and early career workers, to mature aged workers, managers and senior leaders. They came from six large organisations, some with sizeable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforces.

Being isolated and unsupported while facing multiple forms of discrimination were recurring themes. One mid-career woman in her 30s said:

Finding my place within a western workplace has been a struggle for me. As a younger person I worked for an organisation that racially and sexually discriminated against me. After a particular incident that left me mentally broken, with the assistance of my union, I gathered the strength to sue my employer [… Eventually they] settled out of court. The whole experience left me physically and mentally distraught.

These aren’t isolated stories. The 2020 Gari Yala (Speak the Truth) survey of 1,033 Indigenous peoples in Australia found:

• 59% had experienced racism

• 44% reported hearing racial slurs

• 38% reported being treated unfairly because of their Aboriginality

• 28% felt culturally unsafe at work.

Only one in three of those surveyed said they felt supported at work when reporting racism.

Reshaping work for the better

But my research found the woman in her 30s who took her former employer to court has since become a leader at a new workplace.

It planted in me the seed to want to change the system, to help others who were suffering in the same way. In my current workplace I am a union workplace delegate and every day I fight for rights to a culturally safe workplace.

Another woman, who described never fitting in as the sole Blak employee at work, got a different job. She reported:

I have been instrumental in creating positive change and a safer work environment, by surrounding myself with other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and creating something unique […] I feel that I am making a difference […] to grow the next generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women leaders.

Why structural change matters

My research found multiple examples of how, even when Blak women were up against systemic barriers, they still found ways to change workplace cultures for the better. But what came through in talking to these women was that everyday racism is not small – it is structural.

My workspace is primarily First Nations Peoples […] I feel safe in this workplace, safer than I have felt in a very long time, and I feel valued and productive at work […] However, outside my immediate workspace, in the wider organisation I am reminded of how systematic racism permeates.

Real inclusion at work requires more than training or representation.

For a start, it means recognising “cultural load” as labour. For example, this means not expecting Indigenous women to be unpaid, unofficial managers of other Indigenous employees, among other things.

More fundamentally, real inclusion means putting structures in place for increased “Indigenous governance”. This is where Indigenous workers and communities have an actual say about what works on issues affecting them.

What difference can that make in practice?

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Northern Territory government sent body bags to remote Indigenous communities. The government’s assumption? Fatal outbreaks may be unavoidable.

In contrast, Aboriginal-controlled health services adopted an Indigenous governance-style approach. They worked with communities on locally responsive measures, including community-led lockdowns. There was also coordinated action in some regional public health units, such as in the Hunter region of New South Wales.

That structural community involvement in health services’ COVID responses drove higher-than-expected early vaccine uptake. While vaccine hesitancy grew over time, researchers found that early action avoided hundreds of predicted COVID cases and deaths.

From our hospitals to offices and board rooms, Indigenous women are not asking to be included in colonial systems at work and beyond. We are asserting our right to transform them.