For immediate release: 30 March, 2014.

Optimiss Director Kate O’Reilly joins Ernst & Young Women in Leadership series

Successful women share their views on gender equality at work

Australia already has the female talent it needs to ensure women fill 40 per cent of senior executive roles in the near future – we just need our organisations to identify and remove the internal barriers keeping women from moving up through the ranks, says Optimiss director Kate O’Reilly.

Ms O’Reilly has worked in male dominated sectors where she was often the only woman in the room so has seen first-hand how organisations can want to hire and promote more women while being unaware of the hurdles they have in place preventing them from achieving their goal.

A former management consultant specialising in finance, Ms O’Reilly moved into advising companies on how they could attract and retain talented women after realising that most organisations thought the answer was to ‘fix the women’ so they would fit into the male dominated environment.

Instead, Ms O’Reilly says creating gender equality involves helping companies look at their own culture to identify and address barriers to female success such as having an unconscious bias towards male employees when promoting and rewarding executives.

In her work Ms O’Reilly meets many leading organisations “clamouring” for talented senior women as well as many confident and capable women prepared to “vote with their feet” if their employer fails to provide them with opportunities to progress in their career.

Ms O’Reilly is one of 27 women interviewed by Ernst & Young for its Women in Leadership series hosted on the EY Australia website.

The outstanding women interviewed for the series include Australia’s only female managing partner of a major law firm, Sharon Cook, politician Senator Penny Wong and senior executives and board members Belinda Hutchinson AM and Jillian Segal AM. The other women taking part have careers spanning science, banking, government, education, charities, community organisations and public institutions.

“I congratulate EY Australia for producing the Women in Leadership series. This high quality series should be shared by as many people as possible to encourage women to keeping stretching and challenging themselves especially those working in male-dominated fields,” Ms O’Reilly says.

Ms O’Reilly’s advice to women is to actively develop and manage their four “Cs” - their “commitment” to their job, their “capacity” to do the job, their “capabilities” and knowing their “champions”. (Champions are those people in a woman’s network willing to provide her with challenging projects and opportunities). She also urges successful women to take the time to encourage younger women as well as promote gender equality within their own organisations.

“I think there is a real responsibility for all women in the workforce to look backwards to make sure they are keeping that ladder down behind them to help other women along,” Ms O’Reilly says.

Senior women should use their position of influence to ask the tough questions such as why there are no women on a shortlist of candidates being considered for hire or internal promotion.

The other women sharing their experience with EY (and their organisation at the time of the project) are Carmel McGregor, Department of Defence, Jane McAloon, BHP, Rachel Slade, Westpac, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Museum of Contemporary Art, Ronni Khan, OzHarvest, Professor Carol Pollock, the Kolling Institute of Medical Research and the University of Sydney Medical School, Val Duncan, Energy Action, Annabel Spring, Commonwealth Bank, Thérèse Rein, Ingeus, Julie McKay, UN Women Australia, Nessa O’Sullivan, Coca-Cola Amatil, Jane Hemstritch, Non-Executive Director, Dr Cathy Foley, CSIRO, Lindley Edwards, AFG Venture Group, Tina Thomas, Woodside, Leah Armstrong, Reconciliation Australia, Linda Kristjanson, Swinburne University, Janine Garrett, CharmHealth, Jen Dalitz, Sphinxx, Renata Singer, Fitted for Work, Marion Webster, Fitted for Work, and Melinda Cruz, Miracle Babies.

View the full interview with Kate O’Reilly as well as all the other interviews here

To discuss gender equality at work contact Kate O’Reilly on phone: 02 8003 7672 or email:

About Optimiss

Optimiss Consulting helps firms increase the number of women in their organisation. We do this by focusing on strategies to retain, promote and attract female talent in an organisation.

We help companies build a vision and path with key stakeholders to improve their company’s culture, policy and leadership and generate collective energy for change.

We focus on increasing the numbers of women in senior managerial roles in businesses and improving the pipeline of women managers and directors ready to move to the next level of their career.