Last week, we met with a group of incredible women who are working to invest in other women. 

In Australia, we chronically under invest in women. In 2023, only 4% of total $3.5 billion venture capital funding went to 100% women-founded businesses, and only 26% of total funding went to businesses with at least one female founder, while 70% went to male-founded businesses.

This group of women, who ran everything from venture capital firms, to family offices, to seed funding, want to rectify those statistics. They want to help women owned organisations thrive.

So many of the topics we talked about resonated with what the Better Together Party is working on. Collaboration, trust, ego-less structures. 

The main theme of our conversation was breaking down made up structures. We talked about how so many of the systems we operate in are based on made up structures, designed decades ago to suit the needs of whoever designed them. And let’s be honest, that was usually men.

We talked about this in the context of working structures. The way we work - 9am to 5pm, in an office, in the city, was designed in the 1950s, with the rise of professional services work. At this time, most of the people who went to work were men, with stay at home wives to do the child rearing, housework and chores like going to the post office, which needs to be done in the suburbs between 9am and 5pm on weekdays.

Since the 1950s, the way we educate and think of the role of women in our society has dramatically changed. Women are now more educated than men in Australia, and we tell little girls that they can do anything they want to do in their careers.

And our lives have drastically changed. We are contactable 24/7 in the palm of our hands. We can send an email from the park or do a call in the “car office” (trust us, we do it all the time). 

Men, also, want to spend more time with their children. They want to be active caregivers who are physically and emotionally more present.

And yet - and yet - we are clinging desperately to this made up structure we have created of a workplace. The 9 to 5, in an office. Some workplaces have gotten so much better. They are allowing greater flexibility in not only where people work, but also when. 

But there is so much more work to be done. 30% of women in the private sector work part-time and yet only 7% of management roles are part-time. We are capping these women’s careers at the knees - punishing them because they don’t want to accept the made up structure of how we think about work.

It’s time we recognise that the original creation of a workplace was made up. If it was made up to begin with, guess what, we can make it up again! We can create a different type of workforce, where everyone can work in different ways and that doesn’t have to limit how far their career can progress. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be part-time. It just means there needs to be more options to do so.

It was so energising to be in a room with a group of women who had the imagination, openness and stamina, to be working towards the same thing. 

As we look to the 965 (!!) people who have now signed up for the Better Together Party, we feel equally energised that there is a growing group of people out there who also want to challenge the status quo and say we can, and should, do better.