☕️ Instagram announces 'Teen Accounts'

Here is today’s riddle: Two people are born at the same moment, but they don't have the same birthdays. How?

Answer is in the tidbit!

“We’ll wait and see.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the possibility of holding a federal election for all of the seats in the Senate and House of Representatives, in order to secure enough support to pass housing and environmental bills. The Government doesn’t have a majority in the Senate.

1 in 10
The proportion of men in NSW who have faced police or legal proceedings for a family and domestic violence offence, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology.

1837
Tiffany and Co was founded, originally as a stationery and fancy goods emporium. Its first store opened in New York City.

The number of women CEOs at Australia’s largest companies has gone backwards, according to new data.

Chief Executive Women (CEW) has released its annual tracker of women in leadership positions at ASX300 companies — the 300 largest companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

Despite incremental improvements over recent years, CEW said progress for women’s representation in executive roles stagnated in the 2023/24 financial year.

As at 1 July 2024, 91% of ASX300 CEOs were men. 25 ASX300 CEOs were women, down from 26 in the 2022/23 financial year.

Executive positions

Women hold three in 10 executive leadership positions in ASX300 companies. This includes CEOs and managing directors, chief operating officers and chief financial officers, as well as some legal, HR and strategy roles.

One in eight people appointed to a CEO ASX300 role in 2023/24 was a woman, down from one in four the previous year.

All ASX300 CEOs appointed in the last year previously held ‘pipeline roles’. These are feeder roles (like CFO and COO) that often lead to a person becoming a CEO.

Women hold 12% of these pipeline roles. This figure has not changed since the previous CEW report. 46% of ASX300 companies have no women in CEO pipeline roles.

CEW said this “stagnation” will “continue to bottleneck gender equality in Australia’s top jobs.”

CEW President Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz said: “At the current pace of change, it could take another 54 years to achieve gender parity in CEO roles and 16 years to achieve gender parity in Executive Leadership Teams.”

A co-ed Catholic high school in NSW will permanently implement a four-day face-to-face week for some of its students.

It follows a year-long trial program at Chevalier College in the NSW Southern Highlands.

Under the school’s flexible learning model, some students in years 10 to 12 will be able to study from home on Mondays, with no scheduled in-person classes.

The independent school said the model will better support students for the future.

Chevalier College – a high school near Bowral NSW – has around 900 students.

The school has revised its schedule to introduce an optional, at-home day of learning for its year 10 to 12 students.

Students will attend face-to-face classes from Tuesday to Friday.

Mondays will be for self-directed learning set by a teacher, and school events like retreats and excursions that typically disrupt regular classroom time.

The decision comes after a year-long trial at Chevalier College.

Students must complete a “micro-credential” course to be eligible to learn from home.

The school said the course “takes approximately 3-4 hours to complete”.

Parents of eligible students will then be required to attend a workshop at the school.

“The third step will be an assessment by the parents, guided by the College, of the space in which the student will be working at home,” the school said.

The final step will be parents granting formal permission, “with a clear understanding of how the College will facilitate and direct learning.”

The school argues the traditional five-day face-to-face learning model fails to adequately prepare students for the future.

It said: “The world has changed, and education needs to move with it. This requires a more flexible, adaptable and personalised approach to education”.

Ahead of the decision, Chevalier ran a flexible learning trial.

A research team monitoring the trial’s progress found the program increased student awareness, self-regulation, and productivity.

More than 80% of students felt they were organised, making effective decisions about their learning and tasks, and managing their time well.

However, 39% of students who participated in the trial said they were distracted. Less than half said they felt like they learned a lot on Mondays.

The school said four families had decided to leave the school due to concerns about the changes.

Chevalier said it had initially considered extending the remote learning option to Year 9 students, but decided against it after “ongoing concerns” from some parents.

Reporting by Chloe Christie.

Tinder Launches New Consent Course

Tinder’s new Consent Course, with Chanel Contos, WESNET and The Relatables, is now live on School of Swipe!

What you’ll learn:

Why take it: Become a more respectful partner and improve your relationships and intimacy.

The prize is awarded to an English-language novel voted the best of the year by an expert panel. To be eligible, authors can be from any country, but their books must have been published in the UK and Ireland.

This year’s shortlist features six authors, five of whom are women — the most ever nominated in one year. They include Australian author Charlotte Wood, who wrote the novel ‘Stone Yard Devotional’. Wood is the first Australian to make the shortlist since 2014.

The last women to win the Booker were Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, who jointly won in 2019 for their books ‘Girl Woman Other’ and ‘The Testaments’, respectively.

Want more good news? Sign up to our weekly Good Newsletter here - we promise it’ll make your week better!

Reporting by Nandini Dhir.

Amazon employees will be made to return to the office five-days-a-week next year.

CEO Andy Jassy shared a memo with staff saying that he wants Amazon “to operate like the world’s largest startup.”

Jassy said this new arrangement, starting on 2 January, will strengthen workplace culture “and the effectiveness of our teams.”

How would you feel if your workplace mandated a five-day in-person work week?

Reporting by Nandini Dhir.

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Riddle answer: They were born in different time zones.

The most powerful media family in the world are facing off in a secret courtroom battle in the U.S.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch wants his son Lachlan to have control over the vast media empire’s future, but his other children are trying to block that from happening.

In today’s TDA deep dive, we look at who Lachlan Murdoch is, why his family are engaged in a real-life succession drama, and why it matters for democracy.