If you can spare 5 minutes, we’d love for you to take this important survey in partnership with Good Shepherd that looks at the impacts of repeated national crises and what’s at stake for women. You can take the survey here.
There’s been a lot to reflect on since Women’s Agenda recently marked its 14th birthday a couple of weeks ago.
When we launched in 2012, Julia Gillard was prime minister and Australia was yet to see her misogyny speech. Donald Trump was nowhere near the White House. AI wasn’t a mainstream concern, and the “manosphere” certainly wasn’t a word we were regularly using in our coverage.
The issues facing women have changed. Or perhaps more accurately, the list of issues we’re covering has grown.
Over the past 14 years, we’ve reported on a pandemic, increasingly frequent climate disasters, the rise of the far right, growing concerns around online misogyny and the radicalisation of boys and young men, global conflict and now the rapid arrival of AI into our workplaces and lives.
And every new crisis seems to arrive before the consequences of the last one have fully disappeared.
Women are still dealing with the economic fallout of career interruptions and increased caring responsibilities during the pandemic. The cost-of-living and housing crises have intensified. Family violence remains a national crisis, and the longstanding inequalities around pay, care and retirement savings are still very much with us.
Which has left us thinking about what happens when these pressures don’t just exist alongside one another, but start to compound.
Along with Good Shepherd, we’re exploring this idea of the “crisis stack”, and how multiple economic, social and global challenges can pile up, and what that means for women and families.
Does one crisis make it harder to withstand the next? How do these pressures widen existing inequalities? And how differently are they experienced depending on where you live, your income, your caring responsibilities or the other barriers you’re already navigating?
We want to better understand it, and that’s where our new survey comes in.
Take our confidential five-minute survey here.
The findings will help inform a report we’re developing with Good Shepherd, to be released later this year. Thank you!