Hello Women’s Agenda readers!
I am thrilled to be the new Contributing Editor here at Women’s Agenda, I’ve been a reader for a long time and I’m so excited about joining the team and being involved in the work Women’s Agenda do.
We have some great things planned for the next few months and I’ll be working on a series of articles about women, wealth and power. To kick off, we thought it might be a good idea for me to introduce myself to you and tell you a bit about who I am and what to expect.
My first job in media was as the founding editor of the now defunct King’s Tribune, which started in 2007 as a newsletter for our local wine bar and finished as a national online magazine about politics, media and pop culture.
Since then I have been working as a freelance writer for The Hoopla, Daily Life, Junkee, The Drum and Spook. I write about politics, media, family violence, the gender pay gap and occasionally make fun of my children for light relief.
As you can probably tell from the list, I like independent media outlets, I have always believed they are the places where writers have the most freedom and readers find the most value. So Women’s Agenda is the perfect fit for me and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be here. For the rest, I am a feminist, a champagne enthusiast, a progressive voter with no one to vote for, a mother, an Italian Greyhound’s human, a writer and a data nerd.
The data nerd, the feminist and the writer in me are going to get a great run over the next few months. The two subjects that are significantly gendered in Australia are wealth and violence, but they’re both such complex issues that it’s almost impossible to unpack them in stand-alone articles of no more than a thousand words each.
So I’m going to break them down into much smaller pieces and, over a connected series, take a detailed look at the data and explore what each small piece means and how it fits into the larger overall picture.
I’ll start with the gender pay gap and looking at what it really means – how it’s calculated and where it’s most manifest. I’ll be considering the prevalence of part-time work, the hourly rate compared to the total cash earnings, the variation across industries, the different forms of wage agreements and how the pay gap has changed over time.
I’ll also be looking at the wealth gap – particular home equity and superannuation – and how they impact on and are impacted by the gender pay gap.
The next series will look at violence – who are the victims and the perpetrators, what do we know about how and why violence is present in their lives, and what solutions are being offered. We’ll also consider wider questions like how the Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence will impact the rest of the country, where we find the tipping point for change, what changes are needed and who is going to drive them.
And of course, overlaying all those issues are the impacts of race, sexual orientation, disability and even age.
I’ll be doing most of the data analysis myself, but we’ll also be talking to experts and front line workers across all the country, people who can give informed insights and unique perspectives on the issues we’re trying to understand.
At the end we’ll draw it all together and hopefully finish with a much clearer picture of where and how violence and wealth are distributed in Australia, what needs to be changed and how we can push those changes along.
As well as providing the opportunity to look at all these issues in a more granular detail, the connected series approach also allows us to work more closely with you. Georgie Dent and I both want to hear back from you on how the series is going. Are there things that you want covered in more detail, questions that haven’t been answered or a point of view that hasn’t been considered?
We have a pretty clear plan on where we’re going with this series, but we also know the most valuable way Women’s Agenda can contribute to your understanding of these issues is if we collaborate with you, our readers, to build the resources you want us to provide.
So get in touch via the comments or email – I promise we will read them all, even if we don’t get time to reply to each one.
I’m really excited about this project, particularly about being able to do it as a member of the Women’s Agenda team, and about working with all of you to make it something unique and truly worthwhile.
Can’t wait to get started!
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @JaneTribune