By Uschi Schreiber | 14 May 2013

In 2001, Christine Nixon made history by becoming Australia’s first female police commissioner. Now retired from the force, she tells Uschi Schreiber about her long career in the police force and the reality of life as top cop in the state of Victoria

Christine Nixon has never been one to take a backward step. Her innate self-confidence, twinned with a strong sense of curiosity and determination to make the most of her abilities, put her in good stead during what was a meteoric career in the male-dominated Australian police force, including eight years as Chief Police Commissioner for the state of Victoria. On taking up this role she became the first Australian woman to serve at this rank, 85 years after the appointment of the country’s first woman police officer.

“There were only 130 women when I joined the police and 8,000 men,” she recalls. “I was 19 years old and had just read The Female Eunuch, and I was at that phase of the feminist movement. I think I benefited from the government of the time, which was pushing for women to be there. I also came from a policing family (Nixon’s father and brother were police officers), and so policing wasn’t foreign to me at all. Having grown up with it, I knew very senior people and I knew very experienced people. That helped too.”

But the 1970s was hardly an environment that actively encouraged and enabled women to progress through the ranks. Maternity leave and other measures to boost flexible working were yet to be made available and structural barriers — such as the height of eligible recruits — made things harder still. “Equalities legislation was just coming into play,” says Nixon, “and the new laws were important, but there were still a lot of barriers. This meant that very few women were eligible to join and the field was pretty narrow. In terms of policing that was something that had to be addressed.”

Legislation matters — to a point

Nixon joined the New South Wales (NSW) Police Force in 1972 and rose to the rank of Assistant Commissioner. This period, which was broken only by two years’ study at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where she attained a Master of Public Administration, saw her steadily rise the career ladder, encountering obstacles man-made and otherwise along the way. It was her experiences as an officer that shaped much of her agenda as Victoria’s Police Commissioner, a role that saw her responsible for 12,800 personnel, including 9,700 sworn officers, in a state with a population of 4.6 million.

“In Victoria I was always trying to lift away barriers or remove those that others had tried to put back in,” she says. “I think you have to get a sufficient volume of women into an organization like the police, and this meant we were always aiming to get 40% of applicants to be women, in order to get that critical mass. Legislation set the right conditions, but it doesn’t remove all the barriers along the way, some of which are more visible than others.”

Such barriers ranged from physical obstructions to entry, such as an obstacle course test, to old-fashioned attitudes and the composition of interview panels for recruitment. “In NSW when I managed to change the system and make it more egalitarian and less focused on a small panel making choices, I noticed quite a change in the number of women who were able to get through,” she recalls. “The law helps but it does need a strong force within to drive it from the inside.” These changes, implemented when Nixon was responsible for human resources in the 1990s, also saw new measures such as an advertising campaign launched to attract women, particularly in schools. Nixon also sought to support a women’s network, which involved women police officers meeting biannually to focus on projects such as maternity leave systems and child care. The barriers she and her fellow women officers encountered, she believes, were the result of an entrenched and deep-rooted bias that is not as accidental as some might like to believe. “When you look at the bigger picture around women in the public service, it is not necessarily ‘unconscious’ bias,” she says. “I think they know. And it does require a constant knowledge and vigilance over the systems, processes and organizational mindsets to make sure we don’t slip back.”

Leadership lessons

Nixon was appointed Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police in 2001. She joined a police force huge in size and power, but one that failed to reflect the diversity of the communities it served. Attracting people from different ethnic minorities was obviously a part of the solution, but recruiting more women formed a key part of the new approach. “When I joined in 2001, I think they had about 16% of sworn officers as female,” she says. “Many of them had been serving for quite some time, but they really hadn’t progressed through to the higher levels. I set a target of 25% to be female. The union opposed me, but in doing that, in some ways they gave me more publicity. We also did some positive advertising showing women in charge of police situations, and this campaign drove up the numbers of women applying and getting into the organization.”

This determination and refusal to back down was a core aspect of her approach to being a strong and effective leader. “I wasn’t just after their hearts and minds,” she says. “Sometimes, you just have to say ‘this is what we are doing and this is where are going.’ I then made sure I held people accountable for delivery, irrespective of what the courts or union said we couldn’t do. And we made some good progress — there are now senior women in Victoria’s police force who have children, and they are particularly good role models.”

Such role models, she believes, are crucial for maintaining forward momentum. “Part of this whole thing is about the women themselves,” she says. “What we had to do with policing is convince women they could actually do it and be confident to do it well. This was easier when I was Chief Commissioner, as they see other women in senior positions. The more they see women doing these types of jobs, the more they will be convinced that they have the capacity to do it.”

Sustainability strategies

Nixon left the police force in 2009 to chair the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority, an organization created to rebuild communities following Victoria’s bushfires of 2009. Now employed in a variety of roles across the public and private sectors, she is a close observer of her former colleagues in uniform. Asked whether the changes she introduced have proved to be sustainable, she says that so much depends on senior people having a strong focus on making sure the reforms do not go into reverse.

“Watching NSW from afar, the number of women getting into senior positions is in fact slipping back,” she admits. “This is because of the kind of systems they are using to choose who are in these senior positions and the people making those choices. One of the things that sustains the kind of changes introduced in my time are the systems that are put in place. Previously, there were panels with external people, many of whom were trained interviewers, but now it has gone back to the old ways.”

Given that most governments have had, for some years now, a version of meritorious appointments and recruitment in order to minimize bias and to have clearer transparency around the recruitment process, it seems pertinent to ask what the rationale is for just using internal interviewers. It is clear Nixon is frustrated. “I used to have panels for all of my senior appointments that were made up of people from business and elsewhere they were our ‘stakeholders,’” she says.

“There was a requirement for a woman to be on most selection panels but the more senior you got, particularly in government, you ran out of time to be on some of them as there were so many and not enough senior women to be on them. We ended up paying women who were qualified to sit on these panels — a group of about 15 with multi-faith and multicultural backgrounds who were very happy to be on these panels. You need to make it mandatory to have this diversity. The difference you get when panels are diverse — you get a much better result.”

Nixon is more encouraged by the fact that more women are serving for a longer time in uniform — particularly as longevity of service is a key factor to promotions. “There is a natural time it takes before you get to a position in policing when you can then be eligible for taking on a more senior role,” she says. “You really need a minimum of 15 to 20 years to be eligible to be considered for more senior roles in a reasonably sized police force. The experience gained in this time means they are in a better place to perform well in front of the panels that decide promotion.”

Looking back

Nixon’s passion for policing, evident throughout the course of this conversation, also saw her through some tough times in the service, particularly toward the end of her time as Commissioner, when media opponents grew ever more vocal. Recalling those difficult days, she says that while part of it was due to the nature of her role in the public eye, the fact she was a woman was also undoubtedly a factor.

“There are so few women in senior positions that are public,” she says. “There may be women in charge of government departments but there aren’t many who have a public profile. In some cases I was treated well, but after about five years things started to change, and I think that was about a change in editorial policy. Senior women are held at a higher standard and receive a much more detailed analysis of what they do or don’t do. So it’s something you have to toughen up over — and don’t hand yourself over to the critics.”

This ability to persevere was perhaps one aspect that explains her success. Another was her self-confidence — something that she seeks to teach now. “Someone once said to me ‘Christine, they’re never going to appreciate you unless they have to pay’ and what that meant: don’t be someone’s handmaid, make sure you put yourself forward and create a role that recognizes your skills. Women don’t need to be afraid — they just need to get on, step forward and have systems and leaders that support them.”

Uschi Schreiber is Ernst & Young’s Global Government & Public Sector Leader. [email protected]

This article first appeared in the April 2013 edition of Ernst & Young's Citizen Today magazine.