In 2022, at the newly elected Labor government’s jobs and skills summit, economist Danielle Wood put women in the workforce front and centre.
“I can’t help but reflect that if untapped women’s workforce participation was a massive ore deposit, we would have governments lining up to give tax concessions to get it out of the ground,” she said.
As the CEO of the Grattan Institute, Wood had long been a powerful advocate for women to create a more productive economy.
“Productivity,” she said, “might be easy to dispel as the niche fetish of econocrats and AFR journalists.”
Yet here we are almost exactly three years later, with productivity front and centre at the government’s economic reform roundtable.
In the room are the women who now lead Australia’s three most powerful economic institutions. Wood herself is now the head of the Productivity Commission, alongside the…
