Today is publication day for my article, ‘A life in the shadows’: Australian women and family business succession, 1910–2018. I am not ashamed to admit that I was inspired to look into this primarily due to becoming a wee bit obsessed with HBO’s Succession in the first half of 2023. Happily, it found a home as part of an upcoming special issue of the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review on ‘Gendered Enterprise: Australian women in business history’ (more on that later).
I often say that when we think about corporate leadership, we often think about the rich kids. The Packers, Murdochs, Myers, Baillieus and so on feature heavily in the Australian imagination, and are both revered for their savvy entrepreneurialism and despised for undermining the Australian notion of a ‘fair go’. Although I have, elsewhere, debunked the idea that Australian corporate leadership is made up of these ‘fat cats’ (here and here), family companies are also an important part of Australia’s corporate history. The subject is often neglected by business historians in favour of studying Chandlerian managerial conglomerates, so in this article I make some initial forays into understanding their nature and progress. I find that family companies were relatively prominent in the early- and mid-twentieth century, with Australia’s economic uncertainty, isolation, small size, and ethnic homogeneity amongst British colonisers encouraging a business community built on personal relationships and inter-firm co-operation. Over the course of the twentieth century, large companies slowly adopted modern governance and organisational structures, with the consolidation of Australia’s national corporate market, the growth of large, complex, diversified operations, deregulation of company financial arrangements, and democratisation of shareholding increasing the reliance on specialised management and governance skills. Family companies were largely seen as antiquarian, and their proportion amongst top companies declined, either through natural attrition from the cohort of top firms, or through adapting to managerialism by separating family ownership from control. This process of converting family companies to managerial structures presents, I think, an interesting future research opportunity.
Next I examine the extent to which these large family companies provided an enabling infrastructure for female family members. This requires considering not only Australia’s gender history, but the intersections between gender and class. Australian women have, of course, always worked, and have always operated businesses. However, for women in large family companies, their membership of the upper class presented distinctive gender constraints, specifically strict moral and gendered behaviours to maintain the group’s exclusivity. As such, women in family companies were often educated and wealthy (via inheritance), but control of the firm was exclusively held by male family members. Male succession was seen to serve the maintenance of the family company’s long term, sustainable, intergenerational vision. As a result, family entrepreneurs expended enormous effort (including recruiting cousins and sons in law, and providing significant financial incentives) to ensure succession via the male line. Meanwhile, female family members performed the basic marriage, reproductive and caring labour of ensuring male successors, as well as the ‘shadow labour’ of maintaining the corporate family. Women internalised the restrictive structures of daily life through elaborate codes of conduct, with good hosting seen as a marker of wealth and prestige. They were also responsible for the family’s volunteering and philanthropic work, invoking the wealthy ‘Lady Bountiful’ by combining their class status with an extension of the unwaged labour of mothering.
Most women were content to meet these expectations of their gender and class, though some wished for a more active business role. For example, Mary Elizabeth Fairfax was primarily considered a caretaker for the boys and men in her family, though she was regularly found in the halls of the family newspaper, the Herald, in the mid-twentieth century and held “jealous regard” for the paper’s reputation. Sidney Myer’s second wife Merlyn Baillieu, similarly, took an “active interest” in the department store Myer Emporium after Sidney died in 1934, becoming the symbolic ‘Mother of the Store’ by attending openings, presenting awards, or officiating staff dinners. Merlyn sought an official role in the family company, appealing, unsuccessfully, to her nephew Norman (who succeeded Sidney) for a board seat.
Merlyn Baillieu wished for a business life outside of mothering the next generation of successors.
As the twentieth century progressed, women’s place in Australian society changed dramatically. Following second wave feminism in the 1970s, women’s education and workplace participation expanded, and women were able to progress in ‘corporate’ professions such as accounting and law. Policies to address equal opportunity in hiring and promotion improved women’s presence in management roles, and women began to take their place in executive and board roles of top Australian companies. Women in family companies did not enjoy the same career opportunities, resembling their early twentieth century counterparts by being side-lined for succession. Male family members were prepared for succession by working in the business from a young age, with women, if anything, appointed as caretakers through family board voting blocks. For example, one of the first female board members of a top Australian company, Janet Calvert-Jones was appointed because her brother Rupert Murdoch “wanted a family member” as his “Aussie lieutenant”. The lack of training or preparation restricted her effectiveness, and she recalled that “the best I could do was to get around and see people and […] tell them they were valued”. In 1989, Rupert similarly appointed his wife Anna Murdoch to the board of News Corporation, primarily as “someone […] he could trust” and as an “insurance policy” while his successor Lachlan was still “untested”. In the Packer family, Gretel was initially given some training in the family business, but had “known her whole life that her father did not want her to play a role in the business” and was side-lined the moment her younger brother James came of age and took his place at their father’s right hand.
Gina Rinehart is the exception that proves the rule. Management of mining company Hancock Prospecting passed from Langley ‘Lang’ Hancock, mining magnate and the ‘King of the Pilbara’ to his only child Georgina ‘Gina’ (nee Hancock, then Hayward, then Reinhart). Her status as an only child, with no competition from potential male successors, rendered Gina more fortunate than other women in family business, as did her styling, by herself, her father, and the press, in a similar way to male successors of the time. Indeed, Gina was expected to be born a son (named ‘George’), and Lang referred to her as ‘young fella’ and ‘my right-hand man’ in her early life. Lang’s ‘alter-ego’, Gina was prepared to succeed the vast Hancock mining enterprise from a young age; notably eschewing university education in favour of instruction from her father. By the age of 28, Gina was the main manager of the mining and prospecting business, and when Lang died in 1992, she inherited a company with significant debts, though one that enjoyed royalties from iron ore mining in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. As with male successors, Gina’s corporate value was the maintenance of a long-term, sustainable, intergenerational vision, as she was seen to be “very much her father’s daughter”, a “chip off the old block”, taking on “all her father’s free enterprise anti-protectionist and anti-Canberra hues with a vengeance”.
Ultimately, I find that family companies in Australia did not provide a congenial congenial environment for women’s corporate leadership. Gender was the most significant determinant of succession, with family corporations perpetuating the primogeniture criterion by aspiring to a long-term sustainable vision maintained through male lineage of management and governance roles. Outsourcing professional expertise to salaried managers, male family members were considered naturally suitable for management of the corporation, while women were considered naturally unsuitable. Differing from experiences elsewhere, Australian women resembled ‘corporate wives’ rather than potential successors. This aligned with societal expectations of upper-class women in the early and mid-twentieth century, though persisted long after the second wave feminist Women’s Movement altered the fabric of Australian society. As such, the experience of women in family companies differed markedly from the experience of Australian women in the labour force, the professions, and small business entrepreneurialism. Although family scholars sometimes argue that women have an entrepreneurial advantage through proximity to business skills, knowledge and contacts, I suggests that proximity is relatively meaningless unless family members are prepared to succeed.