AUTHOR Alice Pung's mother spent 20 years eking out a living in a backyard shed to allow her daughter to flourish.
The Cambodian migrant was illiterate in her first language, let alone English, so she used her hands to make her way in the world, painstakingly creating gold jewellery which she sold for a pittance.
But it was this role model which inspired Ms Pung, an award-winning Melbourne author, and the almost 2000 women who heard her story at a UN Women's Committee breakfast in Adelaide yesterday morning.
Aged 23, and eight months pregnant, Alice's mother lied about how far along she was to smuggle her unborn baby into Australia from a Thai refugee camp.
"My father likes to tell people that I was manufactured in Thailand but assembled in Australia with Chinese parts," she said.
Despite feeling "locked in" to her home by illiteracy, Ms Pung said her mother taught her how to "read people's faces" and judge characters by their "persistent traits" rather than by their words.
"So when we talk about economic empowerment and education, inspiring women are not just people who can tell you and show you what success looks like.
"Sometimes it's just a little 40-year-old woman in a backyard shed feeling a lot like a failure, working with half-broken machines, seven days a week, almost 12 hours a day, to send you to good schools and ensure you have ... a room of your own ... to think, to write and to speak."
Adelaide Senator Penny Wong told the breakfast Australia had made strides in gender equality but there was still a gap between what the legal framework set out and "lived" equality.
She said the most important step towards closing the gender wage gap was more flexible work arrangements.
Her comments follow a push by the Australian Council of Trade Unions to reduce "insecure" working conditions in female-dominated industries. President Ged Kearney said insecure work was the "hidden driver" of the pay gap, at 18 per cent.
(Thanks JL)
Source: Adelaide Now