For a while, staying in the workforce made no financial sense.
Not in the way people assume. I never stopped working. But for a stretch in the early years of building my compnany Visual Domain, I was putting in a full week and coming out only a few hours ahead financially. On paper, it made no sense.
I kept going anyway. Fifteen years later, Visual Domain employed over 100 people nationally before being acquired by News Corp.
That trajectory started with a decision to stay in the workforce during the years when the numbers didn’t stack up. I had access to childcare. That access changed everything. Staying in the workforce during years when the numbers barely worked meant I could keep building. One hundred jobs and a News Corp acquisition later, that decision to stay compounded in ways I couldn’t have predicted.
I’m also co-founder of Her Tech Circle, a community of over 10,000 women in tech across six cities. And I can tell you, the story I just shared is not rare. Not even close.
Women in that community have stepped back, stepped out, turned down promotions, left industries they were brilliant at. Not because they wanted to. Because they couldn’t find care, or couldn’t make the numbers work, or both. These aren’t women who lack ambition or capability. They’re women who ran out of options.
The sector that delivers that care is under enormous pressure.
ACECQA estimates Australia needs 85,000 additional early childhood workers to meet rising demand. Turnover sits above 30% annually in some states. Services are turning families away not because demand has dropped, but because they can’t staff the rooms. Every family on a waitlist is a parent, usually a woman, making impossible calculations about whether she can afford to stay in her career at all.
The Federal Government’s Child Care Subsidy reforms were designed to fix the demand side. That investment matters. But demand-side reform only works if there’s a workforce to deliver the care. Right now there isn’t enough of one.
This is the problem I’ve stepped into as CEO of Workinitiatives. Our first platform built specifically for the early childhood education and care sector launches this week, connecting employers, job seekers, and training providers in one place. Not because it’s a natural fit for a tech company. Because you cannot fix female workforce participation without fixing the workforce that enables it.
The gender participation gap currently sits at 7.2 percentage points according to the ABS. Closing it isn’t just a fairness question. It’s an economic one. And childcare is the infrastructure that determines whether it closes at all.
I know that because of a stretch of years where the maths barely worked and I stayed in anyway. A lot of women don’t get that choice. That’s what keeps me going.