Impact Gathering: Why Female-Led Is Different
On July 24th, Impact Boom and Mumma Got Skills hosted the first panel for Impact Gathering: Why Female-Led Is Different; a 6-part webinar series of Candid Conversations With Women In Impact-Led Business.
Panelists Lara Carton, Anika Horn, Stacey Ross and Elise Stephenson joined Carlie Dole to speak about the current issues surrounding being a female with strong impact, including building confidence, supporting each other and changing the lens of business for all.
The Panelists
Lara Carton
Associate Vice-Chancellor (Victoria Region), and Director Social Innovation, CQUniversity Australia.
Lara is responsible for the development and delivery of the University’s social innovation strategy including targets to embed social innovation skills and experiences across curriculum, research, social procurement and extra-curricular initiatives. Lara sits on the international Network Advisory Committee for Ashoka U, a member-based collaboration of universities dedicated to transforming higher education to create positive social change and impact.
As Associate Vice-President she is responsible for the management of the vibrant, city centre campus in Melbourne, and emerging educational delivery in regional Victoria. In her role, Lara works closely with local and state government, industry leaders and alumni to further the opportunities for the University and students in the region.
Lara has worked in the education sector for 12 years across a range of leadership roles. She previously led brand and design consultancies following an early career in Local and State Government.
Anika Horn
Founder, Social Venturers.
Anika Horn is on a mission to support changemakers build purpose-driven careers, organisations and ecosystems without losing themselves. Rooted at the intersection of systems thinking, social impact and storytelling, she helps changemakers lead impact-driven careers and meaningful lives by equipping them with thought-provoking insights, field-tested resources and a strong peer community at Social Venturers. Through her advisory services, Anika works closely with selected purpose-driven entrepreneurs in the areas of strategy, communications, personal and professional growth. She leverages her global network to raise the profile of ecosystem building for social change as a contributing editor for Impact Boom (where she covers Europe and the U.S.) and Ecosystem Builder Hub (where she heads up the national campaign Unsung Ecosystem of Ecosystem Building) as well as co-lead of storytelling at the ESHIP Storytelling Initiative.
Previously, Anika co-founded Unreasonable Lab VA (Virginia’s first mini-accelerator for social entrepreneurs), CO.STARTERS VA (a startup program for idea-stage founders) and Rebelle Con (a boutique conference for entrepreneurial women). At the same time, she worked with high-growth startups at nationally ranked accelerator program Lighthouse Labs and spearheaded the B Corp movement in Virginia as the state’s official B Keeper.
Prior to her work in North America, Anika earned a Bachelor of European Studies and Masters of Sustainability Sciences in Germany, France and Australia where she spent a decade working in journalism, non-profits, government and the private sector.
Stacey Ross
CEO, The Centre FOr Women and Co.
Stacey Ross is the CEO at The Centre for Women and Co. a NFP with a Social Enterprise arm, HER Platform. The service works to provide holistic domestic and family violence crisis support, women’s health services and empowering programs for families in the Redlands and across Logan in QLD. Stacey is also on the Board of the Logan Social Enterprise Network and a Director for Brisbane Housing Company. Working in the community and alongside her team is her absolute passion and she is totally on purpose.
Elise Stephenson
Co Founder, Social good outpost.
Elise Stephenson is an award-winning social entrepreneur and researcher from Griffith University, Brisbane. Elise is a recognised expert on gender equality and women's leadership in international affairs, awarded by the United Nations Australia Association, Foundation for Young Australians, and Women Deliver. She is co-founder of a social enterprise design and strategy studio, the Social Good Outpost, which strives to use the power of graphic and web design to create community change, working with clients to refine their communications and branding to be sustainable, increase impact and attract engagement.
Elise has travelled over 65,000km around Australia in the past 4 years to work with rural and regional communities. However, 2019 and 2020 has seen her take her entrepreneurship and advocacy global, curating public diplomacy programs around social entrepreneurship and gender equality throughout Southeast Asia, in collaboration with the Australian Government and regional next generation leaders. She is a passionate 'doer' and feminist bringing social change to Australia and the world!
Carlie Dole (Moderator)
Founder, Mumma got skills.
Carlie Dole is the Founder of Mumma Got Skills, a social enterprise working to provide Post Natal support through creative experiences. Carlie is also a specialist Arts Teacher and freelancer for Impact Boom in mentorship and communications.
Carlie has been on a journey since giving birth to her son to understand how women work, juggle, balance, thrive and survive in life and work. She is an advocate for Female leadership, Impact entrepreneurship and a new way of doing business for good. Impact Gathering is the passionate beginning of a greater project to come.
Highlights from the Panel
(listen to the podcast for full details)
[Carlie Dole] - Could you all please tell us a little bit more about your background in your words? Elise, can we start with you?
[Elise Stephenson] - A little bit about me. I finished my studies about five years ago and I was at that point in time with deciding where to go and what to do. This was when my sister and I actually started Social Good Outpost, and the drive behind that was that I had been doing a lot of work in the community, and my sister was the design expert who'd been working in the field for the last 10-15 years.
We felt that no one was really listening to and addressing the needs of people who are trying to make a social impact and social change in the community, and also no one was trying to do it from a feminist standpoint.
A way that respects women, but approaches them as equals, that values their knowledge, that works with their contributions, and looks to address some of the inequalities that we are experiencing in our world. We predominantly do web and graphic design, but we also do really cool big international events working with the Australian Government and our region. Over this time period I've been doing my PhD in women's leadership, and I really find that there's this really great intersection of "how do we empower communities?" We know that the data says you are able to empower women, [and] you are able to empower and lift up entire communities. That's really what our work involves, and we try to partner with people and take them through the whole process as partners in that too.
I love that Elise and you sound so passionate about what you do, which is exactly what we want. Let's hear from you Lara. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and what you're doing?
[Lara Carton] - Thanks very much Carlie. I'm in sunny Melbourne at the moment, which is beautiful. I'm Melbourne born and bred, and I live in Melbourne with my husband and young children. I sort of fell into the things that I'm doing at the moment. A lot of my early career was spent accepting roles that really just appeared in front of me, until I really set course and worked in client service roles within design and branding teams at Local Government and State Government levels. Later, I went on to lead private agencies around the $20 to $30 million turnover mark.
At some point along the way, I felt that there needed to be a little bit more purpose to my life. I went back and I started a Master's degree in my mid-thirties in business, which I found to be quite a life changing experience on many fronts, one of which was it introduced me to my husband. I gradually gained full confidence in the range of transferable skills that I had, and over time moved from a marketing consulting type role to work with one of my client companies who was in fact, an education provider.
That set me on a whole new course, and I reflect really strongly on the life changing power of education and just how satisfying it is to see our students go through that process.
In the last five years at CQU, I've been really fortunate to lead the Social Innovation Strategy and the Social Innovation team. CQU is accredited as Australia's only Ashoka change maker campus. We feel a really strong commitment to making sure that our students have opportunities to dive deep, to understand the social issues that they care about, and how they can individually play a role in bringing about positive social change. More recently we've been focusing on working with the social enterprise sector and introducing social procurement approaches to the university. We're really working on a whole lot of university strategy and it's a lot of fun and there's so many wonderful people in the sector, and particularly some wonderful women.
Stacey Ross (right).
Awesome. Thank you, Lara, so much knowledge. Stacey let’s hear from you a little bit more about what you’re doing!
[Stacey Ross] - Great, thank you! I started when I was about 17-18 with the youth service and fell in love with the community sector and working alongside young people. I've been in the industry for quite some time in and out when I've had children and got back into it through volunteering work and so forth. It was my work with young people where I really quickly recognised, they have so much to give and they are the next generation, and they are so passionate about change.
I really wanted to work alongside them and help them achieve their goals, and that's where I recognised that I wanted to, wherever I was, be able to empower people and help them achieve their goal but also be on purpose and really loving their work.
About five or six years ago, I stepped into working in women's services across Queensland, and oversaw a local women's health service. Then two years ago, we merged with a larger domestic violence service and The Centre For Women was born. In that time, we've grown immensely. We have just around 55 staff now, and we started off about 23. That's been amazing, and I just have the pleasure of hearing the most amazing stories from the women that we work with, and I am completely obsessed with what we do and the women's resilience and how they live their lives. They just want good things and they deserve good things, so I'm blessed to be able to work alongside the team that worked with the women and children. I could talk about that, just that little bit for ages but I'll stop at that point.
Thanks, Stacey. It's such powerful work that you're doing. Anika, tell us your story!
[Anika Horn] - I am in such amazing company and I am so thrilled to be here, thank you. Born and raised in East Germany, behind the iron curtain back in the day, I was very fortunate to figure out pretty early that I wanted to create some sort of social impact. I did what you do when you want to change the world when you're 19 years old, and it is I tried everything else. First, I worked for non-profits, international aid, government media, higher education, trying the different sectors. I really came up empty handed and felt like none of these were really making the impact that I was looking for to really make a difference. And then I came across social entrepreneurship and I was very fortunate to do my Masters in sustainability science and focus on social entrepreneurship.
I ended up working with a global accelerator program for social entrepreneurs in Hamburg, Germany, and met my now husband who is American. He whisked me away to the U.S. and we've been living between America and Canada for the last five years. I would say it’s part of that move here to the U.S. that I got really involved with the Kauffman Foundation, which is pioneering that idea of ecosystem building, and I'll probably throw that term in again later on.
It's an approach to thinking about entrepreneurship where entrepreneurs, especially social entrepreneurs, never succeed in a vacuum. It takes a whole ecosystem of supporters from mentors to co-working spaces, to amazing groups like Impact Boom and Mumma Got Skills to support the entrepreneur along their journey from the very early stages to fundraising.
I am borrowing that philosophy and building upon that in the social enterprise space, really trying to figure out how do we nurture ecosystems with social change, and with a focus on entrepreneurship. What do they need to really succeed? Part of that is back when I was living in a different state in Virginia, I was very fortunate to do a lot of mentoring, and the women that came to me for mentoring just kept coming up with the same issues of sort of holding themselves back and playing small. Not because they didn't have what it takes, but there wasn't really a blueprint for how you do this, be it as an entrepreneur or a corporate professional non-profit, it doesn't matter.
It was women across the board who had so many questions and thought there was some formula for success, if someone could just tell them what that was! A friend of mine and I started Rebelle Con to bring speakers from across the U.S. to our small town and just bring some of their wisdom and help women figure out what their definition of success is like. That was my commitment to helping other women thrive in my work at Social Venturers.
I really focus on ecosystem building for social change, that is women and men at the same time. As Carlie said in my introduction, I'm really concerned with how do we help change makers?
Be it social entrepreneurs themselves, be it people who support social entrepreneurs…
how do we help people in the social impact sector lead fulfilling lives while having great careers, making an impact, but not burning out?
That's why I'm here today. Really looking forward to our conversation.
Thank you so much, Anika. It's so true. This burnout, it's real. "Why, if you're doing good, does it have to come with burnout?"
I'm going to pose the next question to you Anika. In your work, what does female-led mean to you and how does that differ to simply being a female in business?
[Anika] - I thought about this quite a bit, because I'd never even made that difference between female-led and being a woman in business. I can't speak for Australia and other parts of the world, but I know that here in the U.S. for example, only 8% of venture capital goes to female led start up teams, and only 1% to African American women. That in itself is a problem.
If we look at the top 100 venture capital firms, only 7% of them have women on their board. That is the systemic level of if we're not represented by the institutions that are there to support us and help us move forward, our interests will not be taken seriously and will not be represented.
I think there's definitely that challenge of just an unequal representation of women and how we run things. I try to be very careful not to be overly prescriptive and say, "men do this and women do this." I don't want to create this dichotomy of us versus them, but there certainly are I think, still certain stereotypes and responsibilities that we just feel the tug of.
Maybe it's being a mum or being a caregiver of some sort. Definitely more so in the career field than a lot of the male professionals that I get to interview for Social Venturers. That's not to say that men don't take care of their kids and that they don't feel heartache when they're away from their families, they certainly do. But all of us have been born into this system where there's a very clear gender role for those who do work in the household, in the family, and in their career. I think for women to not only be employed in business, but actually try to take a leadership role, there are a lot of external factors that are systemic, that we need to change, all of us together. Then there's a lot of stuff that’s going on inside, where I feel like we still have to grow into owning that role of being a mother, being a woman, and being someone who wants to have a career and define success on her own terms.
Oh, the guilt that overruns a woman! Stacey, Lara, Elise, did you want to add anything to that point?
[Stacey] - I think that everything that you've said really resonates with how my own personal experiences have been. But what we see internally for our managers and team leaders that are working up through the organisation is we deal with that imposter syndrome, and do we really deserve to be stepping into that space? A personal experience that I've had is that I was appointed onto a board, and it was a really big board, and the men on the board were really lovely men. I agree [with Anika that] I really don't like to talk about men versus us and so forth because my experience coming into the women's sector is that there is a lot of history that I want to respect and acknowledge, and I really am grateful for what has been achieved in the years before us, but also acknowledge what is still there and those barriers.
For me, the first time I walked into that boardroom, there were six men in suits and two women that were really fierce in the way that they presented. I walked in and just went "oh I am not supposed to be here." But, I went, and I challenged myself every month. I never said a word. I barely said a word the first few months that I was there because I was so scared I was going to say something wrong.
But that whole imposter syndrome that we take on as women, and I try a lot of the time when I'm talking to my team and so forth, just around that empowering and that they deserve to be there. We deserve a space at that table, and I've definitely talked myself into that at the board level.
A couple of years down the track, I'm very confident in that space, and I'm so glad that I pushed myself and made some really great changes because of my lens that I bring to that space versus the historical stuff that's been there.
That's good, and I think it's like, unless we're fierce, do we deserve to be there? There's that real feeling of you either have to own it and be masculine, or you question yourself, I see it a lot.
There's some pretty blatant research that's coming out in reports like Advancing Public Policy for High Growth Female and Social Entrepreneurs that tells us that women just aren't levelling up in the business world. The recurring phrase, and I hate this, is "women have lower confidence."
Lara, I'm going to throw this one to you, because I'm wondering how or if this resonates with you, and what advice you would give to build confidence if it is such an issue?
[Lara] - I think that's a fabulous question. I think it's obvious just from listening to the panel that we've all been debating this men versus women, the gender roles, how much is true, how much is self-belief, or belief that we've had presented to us about the differences between men and women? I think this issue of confidence is a big one, and if I can share, just before our guests joined us today, we were all sitting here going, "oh, I'm a bit nervous." There's always that worry, even when we're invited to speak on these issues, of, ‘are we going to say the right thing?’ Or even, ‘is that going to sound the way I wanted it to (sound)?’ I love Stacey, that you found ways to just front up and find your voice in those environments.
Lara Carton and some of the CQUniversity team.
I don't doubt that confidence is an issue, but I do also think that's true of many men in business, and the number of men I've spoken to at senior levels who also have imposter syndrome. I suspect maybe men are less reticent to talk about it, and maybe women are more confident, or more capable of expressing some of that fear. I don't want to suggest that men don't also have some of those concerns. I guess how to deal with it though is the big one, isn't it? It's really interesting as the parent of boy-girl twins, I've got a sort of mini case study happening in my house already, just around how you parent different genders, and how you try and develop that confidence.
Hopefully I'm parenting a pretty feisty little girl, but also a feisty little boy. I think for parents those issues are really front and centre as well. I guess the issue around how you build confidence is a big one.
Anika Horn at Rebelle Con.
[Lara] - I was thinking when Stacey was talking about the sense that these women, seemed really fierce, I also know that often I go into situations and I expect people who are successful to be fierce. I expect that they will be daunting, and that I won't have enough to offer in that environment, particularly early in my career. I guess one of the things that I see as a challenge often for younger women starting businesses, is around that confidence to start networking and to bring that group of people. Anika referred to that ecosystem and the supports that we need to help get things off the ground.
How do you develop that confidence to go out and find the right people and ask them for help? My own experience of that is I needed to have a checklist of all of the things I needed to get through in a meeting, and also that I needed to know what value I brought to that. I think the point at which I got really comfortable in saying, "I can just go in and have an open and curious conversation about this person and their business and our shared values, and maybe some issues that we'd like to practice together," meant that I didn't put a requirement on myself for the meeting to have a very clear end point.
I could simply go in and be curious. From there, great things could happen. I was also confident enough to be able to say, "you know what, this has been a great meeting, I've really enjoyed meeting with you. But I don't think that there are any immediate opportunities for us to progress together, but can I keep in touch with you in case there are?" Then using that as the opportunity, 6-12 months down the track to introduce two other people together and say, "I just thought of the two of you and saw some commonality in what you're trying to do." Can I introduce you so that you can further those things together?
I think that developing that powerful group of trusted allies and networks around you is really important. I think men have traditionally done it very well through sporting and club type of environments.
I think that's something that women could particularly spend more time working on. I'll just comment quickly on one of the pieces of research that talks about women really underselling their capability. I think it's quite common of women to say, "I didn't really contribute that much in that situation.” Or, “it was a team environment”, or, “actually my inner voice is telling me I really didn't do as good a job as I should've done.” I think sometimes we again need to surround ourselves by people whose opinion we trust on a range of things, and when they tell us that we've done something well, [we should] actually try and believe that and understand what it was that they saw that we did well. Trying to let the little voice in the background just shut up a little while so that we can really just sit and think, "if that's how other people see me, maybe I have actually progressed." I can trust that I am developing it and doing things in a different way. If all else fails, fake it till you make it, because hopefully no one else will know that you're shaking on the inside.
It's so true, Lara. I take away from that that knowing your values is such an important part to having confidence and knowing your worth. Thank you, that was really great insight.
Interestingly, 68% of successful participants on Impact Boom's Accelerator Program for the past two years have been female-led. This signals the competitive edge in the impact-led space.
Elise, I'm wondering if you can tell us a time that gender has set you apart for positive or negative reasons in your career to date?
[Elise] - Absolutely, but I think I'll get back to it because I want to talk more on this confidence thing a little bit later. I think to start with the negative, because it's the thing that's really in our faces.
We can't ignore the fact that only 1% of procurement worldwide goes to women owned businesses. In Australia, it's around 4.5-5% for government and corporate procurement.
If you're looking at some of those stats as a baseline, you might not realise that you have been looked over for opportunities because you haven't been given those opportunities. I think there's an element of even if you've been lucky enough to go through your business journey or life perceiving very little gender challenges, they are absolutely there.
Even if we don't personally experience them, perhaps others of different inter-sectional identities from different ethnic backgrounds et cetera may be experiencing these issues. I'd just start with that, and actually there's some really great statistics out there about globally, if women owned small and medium size enterprises received the same amount of support that male owned, small and medium size enterprises received, it would boost the global economy by $5 trillion. There's just so much there about how much women's businesses are underfunded. There's a million things on that side, but on the positive side, gender has been really powerful for a number of things that we do in our work. There's two examples that I would give. Firstly, as we partnered up a few years ago and we continue this partnership with a national non-profit called Global Sisters, I'm sure many of you would know of it here in Australia. Through that program, we basically created a design incubator for women who were wanting to start their own businesses. I know they'd gone through this process; they were already ready to go and ready to launch.
For us, the really critical thing that we see is that you can have all the resources, you can have products and services, you can know what you're saying and how to say it. Yet, if you don't have a basic thing like a website or a logo, or anything visual, no one knows that you exist, and you are not competitive.
You can't communicate with people. Being able to go out there in the world and have confidence and actually say, "this is my product, this is who we are," that's a really big part of what we did, and being women, being able to connect with these women from very diverse backgrounds was absolutely foundational. I don't think we could have done it if we were not young women leading this charge.
The second thing, and I think this is a really interesting thing that I've been encouraged to seek out in all kinds of businesses that you might be involved in or engaged in is procurement. One of our biggest clients is the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and we're very lucky they've got some absolutely wonderful mandates around procurement, and also when Australia is out there in the world, we've got really great gender equality policies. You might not realise, but for instance, in Australia's overseas and international aid, we've got a requirement that 80% of our projects must have a gender focus of some kind. If you're looking at stuff like that, that's actually a really big opportunity for women owned businesses, and in the last six months of last year, we actually partnered up with Impact Boom as our media partners. But we went and worked with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade over across Southeast Asia.
We ran 49 events with just over 3000 people on everything from communication, to design, to social enterprise, social impact, and gender equality. How do we bring people and individuals together to create change?
Again, I don't know that we could have done that, and I don't think we could have reached the same communities if we weren't who we were. One example I'll use is when we were in Brunei, they've got the death penalty for homosexual acts, which was introduced early last year. As a proud gay woman, going over there and running these workshops on gender equality and social enterprise, I just would not have been able to connect with the same group of people. We both really benefitted from this interaction and collaboration. I think that's a special thing too.
Before I forget, I want to touch on this thing about confidence, and forgive my language, but it's ridiculous sometimes that we have to concentrate so much on women's confidence because actually the issues are structural inequality in our world.
The more that we focus on this concept of confidence, the more we focus on the individual, and unfortunately, the ‘individual’ kind of means that it's my fault if I don't succeed. But that's actually not true.
Elise Stephenson during the DFAT project in Asia.
If we go out there and we look at the statistics and the research in the world, the opportunities and barriers for an Indigenous woman in Australia, versus a white woman in urban Sydney, versus a LGBTI woman in the Pacific Islands, versus whoever, they're all so different.
We don't all have equal opportunities and we don't all have barriers. To me, it's much more useful to say rather than "do you have enough confidence? How can we boost your confidence?" It's actually "how can we actually create spaces", both respecting a myriad of backgrounds and myriad levels of confidence.
Exactly whom you are, how can we just respect that as it is? You open the spaces that have historically been closed to the group. That would also be my thoughts on it.
Elise, that is exactly what I'm wanting to get to. I think we're all nodding our heads vigorously. Thank you so much. I know we want to get to the Q&A, but Stacey, when we talk about being impact-led, do you see this as having a gender? We've just talked about how potentially there's an edge in this space for women, but do you think women are still up against those same patriarchal business barriers? Elise alluded to this, and if so, how can we as women challenge those?
[Stacey] - That's a massive question. Look, I think in terms of the first bit around the gender component, my personal experience is that I work alongside men who are driving impact organisations. I personally have not seen that in the entrepreneurial and impact-led side of what we do. I also work in the community sector where there is a rich group of men that work in this space as well, and we're done with talking about that. We just want to get on with the work and really drive it. Please Carlie, can you just sort of backtrack to the question again?
I definitely can. Maybe if I rephrase it, how do you see us moving forward, and maybe that's a nice way to end for everyone on the panel? I'll ask you each, how do you see us moving forward now as females in business?
[Stacey] - Well, I think for our service in what we've experienced and what we're looking at wanting to achieve is that it has historically been very anti-men. I've walked into meetings where I've actually had to walk out because they're being really aggressive around having men at the table. Now I know that this is a very personal feeling and thought around feminism, and what needs to happen in this space, because historically we've had women run, women led, and women founded for women only services. I guess my take on that and my experience is that we actually need men at the table. We as a service want men at the table because we want to do this work together.
We are stronger doing this work together, and I guess it's around holding them accountable as well and saying, "hey, for our service we see the impact that men have on women in terms of violent relationships and the mental health breakdown and everything that comes around that."
For us moving forward, we are very interested and wanting to step into more of a space around how we can work together to understand what's going on, to have less of a negative impact on the women that we are seeing. We can't do that without them actually being a part of that conversation. I think there is lots of work to be done around the patriarchal issues that we face, and we see and hear that all the time. But, at the same time, we are very much focused on what can we do differently because we can't keep on going down that road. I am loving working with Tom [Allen], and there's so many different men that are about impact and having a positive impact on the broader community. That is sort of my take on that.
Thanks, Stacey. It's an unconscious bias, I think for men and women now. It's not that men think that they're even working in it, women don't either. It's how do we shape business now into the future? Anika, final thoughts?
[Anika] - Number one on the confidence question, I highly recommend this book The Confidence Code. Definitely an American perspective and it really drills down into confidence, which goes back to what I started with. I think there are structural systemic barriers, and then there are individual challenges that some of us have to work on more than others, and that's totally fine. But in terms of building more confidence, one thing I took away from the book is a part of why confidence can be an issue is we are often raised to be good girls when we enter school. We're just ahead of boys! We're the ones that are expected to behave, to sit still, to be neat, to be quiet, to sort of keep everybody in check.
I think especially as some of us may be raising daughters, to hold ourselves accountable and Lara already touched on that. What do you do when you have a boy and a girl, do you treat them differently? Because the truth is, we probably weren't treated differently. Really being mindful of that as we bring up kids and those around us to let girls be wild and rambunctious, because that sort of helps us. They go into this in the book, but it just helps us to fail, get up and build resilience, and resilience is what helps us build confidence if that is something that you need or you want for the people you bring up.
The other thing is absolutely for women to support each other and ourselves, but also for males, like Stacey said, we need everybody at the table to be aware of how hard it can be if you have a child at home, but you have to go travel to that conference.
Who can stand up and say we need childcare, or we need to make arrangements so that a working mum is able to attend, is able to facilitate a session or whatever that is.
Really trying to be, I know it’s asking a lot, but especially for people who haven't been in this situation but trying to be mindful of what comes with being a parent or a caregiver and trying to accommodate them. Again, like Elise said, really creating space for that to be okay, and I think that actually allows us to bring our whole selves to work, to our communities, to our neighbourhoods and not leave the mum's side at home or the caregiver side, or the dad's side at home. We should be able to come and bring our whole selves, because that's when I think we bring our best selves. That's how you make social impact happen in the long run. Not just until you have kids or what's after school.
Books and Resources Recommended by panelists:
From Anika:
The Confidence Gap, The Atlantic
Starting a Revolution, Naomi Ryland & Lisa Jaspers
The Confidence Code, Katty Kay & Claire Shipman
The Moment of Lift, Melinda Gates
Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, Jacqueline Novogratz
From Stacey:
Principles, Ray Dalio
Bossy Pants, Tina Fey
From Elise:
Poverty and Power: Women's entrepreneurship in the Asia-Pacific Region
Covid-19 Responses: Why Feminist Leadership Maters In A Crisis
The End of Men (And the Rise of Women), Hanna Rosin
Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard
Fight Like a Girl, Clementine Ford
From Lara:
The Wife Drought, Annabel Crabb
Men at Work, Australia’s Parenthood Trap, Annabel Crabb
