At an International Women’s Day panel hosted by Magentus in Melbourne this week, five health technology and enterprise leaders sat down to take stock.
The theme was “Balancing the Scales.” Panel moderator and Magentus CEO Rachael Powell opened with numbers she was proud of — 37% female representation across the Magentus workforce, 50% at leadership level — before making clear they were a starting point, not a finish line. “Balancing the scales isn’t just about optics. It’s about access to progression, sponsorship, and understanding where there’s an opportunity to really lean in and develop equality.” From there, the conversation turned to why progress, while real, remains so slow.
You can’t retrofit inclusion
Emma Hossack, CEO of the Medical Software Industry Association, has watched the health software sector since 2012. Change has happened, she said, but incrementally, and unevenly. “The goddess of justice holds scales, and we all know justice works very slowly.” The gender leadership and pay gap figures published that same week told the same story. Hossack’s framework for closing the gap was “equality by design”. The parallel she drew was to privacy and security in software consistently failing when treated as an afterthought.
Marianne Vosloo, Chief Customer Officer at Citadel Edge and former CIO of the Australian Federal Police, offered a case study in what genuine structural change requires. Under Commissioner Andrew Colvin, the AFP ran female-only recruitment drives for cohorts where representation had bottomed out, and commissioned Elizabeth Broderick to investigate the organisation’s culture – and to do so publicly. “He was comfortable to rip the bandage off,” Boslu said. The discomfort was the point and part of what helped deliver real change.
Biology is not a scheduling inconvenience
The panel’s most direct exchanges concerned the collision of women’s biological realities with workplaces and professions that were never designed with them in mind. Magentus Chief Medical Officer Dr Daryl Cheng described the structural problem embedded in medical training: specialist exams fall precisely in a woman’s late twenties and early thirties, the same window as starting a family, potential relocation, and navigating a partner’s established career. When he and his wife suggested to a struggling colleague that he might go part-time to support his wife through her physician exams, the idea genuinely hadn’t occurred to him. Six months later, she had passed. He had more time with his kids. The family’s stress had halved. The solution had been available the whole time.
Sidone Thomas, Chief Technology and Corporate Services Officer at St John of God, described the same dynamic playing out in talent management. When a team member suggested a high-performer on maternity leave “probably won’t be interested” in a new opportunity, Thomas asked the obvious question: had anyone actually asked her? The answer was no. Assumption had already made the decision.
Sponsorship does something mentorship doesn’t
Thomas traced her own career trajectory to a moment when an aviation CEO told her: “I believe you know how to run an airport, and we will help get you there.” That was sponsorship in action, with someone putting in the work, not just offering guidance from the sideline.
The panel returned to this theme in noting that women, broadly, tend to want to tick every box before backing themselves into a role. Sponsors lean in and help create the conditions for readiness. Hosak contrasted this with the problem of the “golden skirts”, a small cohort of highly visible women who cycle through the keynote slots, board positions and media opportunities while the next generation goes largely unsponsored. The challenge she put to those already occupying visible roles was to bring the next generation into the limelight as well.
Closing the panel, Powell observed what she saw shifting was more men joining the conversation, and a recognition that greater diversity benefits everyone. “I think it’s really important for us to all recognise that this is about diversity across multiple dimensions, and we need to continue to focus on that as well.”
