2025 Clare Burton Memorial Lecture

Join us for the 2025 Clare Burton Memorial Lecture.

Hear from trailblazing journalist, commentator, and best-selling author Dr Anne Summers AO, as she delivers a Report from the Future: Addressing progress in women's equality.

The Clare Burton Memorial Lecture commemorates the influential work of Dr Clare Burton in advancing gender equality and organisational change. This biennial event is a catalyst for conversation and change, bringing together community, academia, and advocacy to reflect how far we've come, and how much further we must go to achieve true gender equality.

Dr Summers' lecture will address progress in women's equality in three key areas Dr Burton worked on: pay equity, monitoring of women's equality in employment, and employment of women in the Defence Force.

• EVENT: Free public lecture, followed by light refreshments. All welcome.

• DATE: Tuesday, 19 August 2025

• TIME: Doors open at 4.30pm, event 5.00pm - 6.30pm
  
  

About the speaker

Dr Anne Summers AO is a journalist, commentator and best-selling author of nine books, including the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police, first published in 1975, and still in print. Her most recent book Unfettered and Alive, a memoir, was published in 2018.

Anne is Professor of Domestic and Family Violence in the School of Business at the University of Technology of Sydney. She has been awarded substantial funding by the Paul Ramsay Foundation and UTS to continue her innovative data-based research into domestic violence in Australia. Her recent report The Choice: violence or poverty (2022) used previously unpublished ABS data to reveal the far greater prevalence of domestic violence than was previously known, and especially the shockingly high incidence among women who have become single mothers as a result. The report argued that the federal government is responsible for the ‘policy-induced poverty’ that is the fate of more than 50 per cent single mothers who are forced to rely on government benefits as their sole income.

Previously, Anne has advised Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, run the Office of the Status of Women, been Canberra Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review newspaper, been editor-in-chief of America’s leading feminist magazine Ms., editor of Good Weekend, chair of the Board of Greenpeace International and a Trustee of the Powerhouse Museum.

She has been an activist in the women’s movement since its inception and in 1974 was involved in establishing Elsie Women’s Refuge the first modern shelter for women and children escaping domestic violence.

She was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia for her services to journalism and to women in 1989; had her image on a postage stamp as an Australian Legend in 2011 and in 2017 was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.

About the Lecture

The Clare Burton Memorial Lecture commemorates the significant contribution made by Dr Clare Burton (1942 – 1998) to gender equity and organisational change. Clare was a leading researcher, public sector administrator, academic, consultant and writer on employment equity. In 1989 she was appointed as Head of the New South Wales Equal Opportunity and Public Employment Office. In 1992 she was appointed as Commissioner for Public Service Equity in the Queensland Government. As a consultant she reviewed gender equity within universities, the Defence Force, and other bodies. Her work as a social theorist contributed significantly to the industrial relations agenda in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s.

The Clare Burton Memorial Scholarship

In 1998, Dr Burton’s family, friends, and fellow workers in the fields of gender and equity established a fund to commemorate her life and continue her work by providing a scholarship in Clare’s name. QUT is proud to manage the fund, which is open to students of all Australian universities who are undertaking research degrees at the master and doctoral levels. More information is available here.