SECRET WOMEN’S BUSINESS

Are female entrepreneurs the key to Australia’s economic recovery after Covid-19? Annie O’Rourke believes so. Here, she argues why politicians and those in positions of power need to harness this collective in 2021 like never before.

In 2002, Treasurer Peter Costello asked Australian women to have more babies: “One for mum, one for dad and one for the country”, and so do our bit for the economy. Perhaps he was striving for his own ‘Team Australia’ moment.

At the time, I was at the start of a 10-year climb that would take me from the most junior political Opposition staffer position to a senior adviser role in the Prime Minister’s office. I found this announcement staggering. As a young(ish) woman at that time, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in asking whether growing the population really was the only activity women could do to help the national economy.

Nearly 20 years later, in the face of a major recession, we are going around again. Our current Treasurer has repeated Costello’s call for a “baby-led recovery”. Now, running my own successful strategic communications agency from Byron Bay in regional

New South Wales, I thought: “Huh, wait, what?! Are we still here, asking women to stay home and reproduce? No!”

To paraphrase another treasurer (Paul Keating), every galah is talking about the need to rebuild the Australian economy, to innovate and embrace digital disruption and so on. Yet no one is talking to female job creators. Women are far more experienced at working from home, being agile and managing employment disruption than men (and yes, this is said with much exasperation). So where are the women leading truly innovative taskforces to figure out how to do things differently in this different world? While we have clearly made plenty of progress, it’s indisputable that women remain several rungs below men on the economic and jobs ladder. While female workforce participation for those aged 15 to 64 years here in Australia has reached almost 75 per cent, the persistently stubborn gender wage gap is still 14 per cent. In almost every organisational structure, women remain a distant second in terms of representation, remuneration and recognition.

Ever the optimist, I started this new decade with the hope that we could get there within a generation. I even hoped that my two young boys would never experience the skewed gender imbalance when they enter the workforce. My fear coming out of Covid-19 is that if we don’t take concerted policy action, this event and its recessionary impact has the capacity to set womens’ status in the workforce back yet another decade.

Within the space of just months, the economic impacts of Covid-19 have removed hard-fought opportunities for women everywhere, wiping out decades of financial and workplace gains for women across the world. Countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Brazil, Germany, Nicaragua and New Zealand have seen women’s workforce participation rates inching up for years, and before Covid-19, Australian women (at 61 per cent) were well ahead of the global participation rates of 47 per cent. Paid parental leave introduced in the UK, Canada, Sweden and Australia had started to lift the barriers to women’s return to work after having children. All this is now at risk. Some have called it a ‘she-cession’. Women have faced far greater job losses and cuts to working hours than men in 2020. Between March and April 2020 in Australia, women lost 10 per cent more jobs than men in our major capital cities and 43 per more jobs in other locations. So if you are a woman in a regional area – double whammy.

The first jobs to go were in the female-focused sectors of retail and hospitality. Other decisions like the early removal of JobKeeper from the female-dominated childcare industry and reintroduction of full childcare fees before an economic recovery had even started have created justified concerns that a fatal body blow is being dealt to women’s workforce participation.

“We need more women with a voice in those meeting rooms of power to ensure a diversity of interests”

Sadly, the economic disempowerment of women is nothing new. It just sucks when you’ve begun to make progress only then to see it whittled away. As a nation, though, we’ve come too far to accept this. Social and economic upheavals can burn away old norms and bring unexpected new opportunities to reshape societies for the better.

As we start our economic recovery, we must ensure that the ‘Team Australia’ effort doesn’t effectively leave half the team behind. A key tenet of our successful recovery will be seeing and understanding that Australian women are capable of delivering economic growth – not just through their contributions to population growth.

It makes no financial, social or economic sense to allow the momentum achieved in increasing female workforce participation and its resultant economic output to turn, overnight, into a sunk cost. This is especially true in regional areas where women are increasingly setting up their own enterprises.

If we act now and see women as job creators, this economic crisis can hold the seeds of the next wave of women’s economic empowerment – and with it, the driver of the next wave of Australia’s economic prosperity.

We need to provide the enablers and remove the barriers to assist more women into positions where they too control the levers of economic and financial power. The fact that today women hold only six per cent of ASX 200 CEO roles is simply unacceptable.

Of course we need more women in leadership positions in the engine rooms of our largest firms and enterprises, but just as importantly, we need more women starting their own businesses. Only then will we truly have economic influence.

There is no better time than the aftermath of Covid’s wreckage to start this journey. Now is the time to genuinely help women start, grow and prosper in their own businesses – and we can’t stop until we have a critical mass of female business owners.

Recent data shows us that when women go into business themselves, they are nearly four times more likely than men to start up a business in health and social care. These are also industries where research tells us that investment is likely to generate more overall employment than in male-dominated industries such as construction. To get more female entrepreneurs into the driver’s seat – not just passenger seat or back seat – of our economic recovery, we should:

so that women’s primary caring responsibilities don’t limit their startup capacity. Currently, women with a child under five years of age are only half as likely to start a new business as men in the same situation, and 25 per cent less likely when they have a child over the age of five.

– and perhaps even review the curriculums so that it is more inclusive of women’s business interests. Despite having much higher enrolments across higher education in general (58.4 per cent compared to 41.6 per cent), women still only represent 46.6 per cent of students in management and commerce, putting them behind the eight ball.