From microbusinesses to boardrooms, women-only networks are essential to breaking barriers and addressing the unique challenges faced by professional women. Photos: Wollongong Women.
In my early career I avoided women-only networking opportunities. I didn’t see why it was necessary to gender a professional event. Something about it felt patronising and even performative. I still recoil at terms like #girlboss – a label that, to me, feels more infantilising than empowering.
Where did this ‘ick factor’ come from?
I think in part it felt like a marketing gimmick – and a low blow at that – with gender used as a tenuous thread the organiser assumed would be enough to bind us, but which offered little practical value in itself.
But now I wonder if this heavily gendered branding is a necessary evil if we are to meet men where they already are in the professional world because men are already doing this – meeting in closed circles – just not as loud and proud. They don’t need to declare it because the gendered exclusion is implied, inherited and rarely questioned. The old boys’ club is an antiquity, protected and preserved behind a veil of subtlety, if not outright secrecy.
Women’s networks, by contrast, are newborns! They need to be loud to survive (what was I saying earlier about feeling infantilised?)
The fact that professional women can significantly benefit from each other’s expertise, connections and referrals is a relatively new phenomenon. After all, women have only been meaningfully present in professional spaces for a few decades – and are often still the minority.
While women have long comprised a significant portion of the Australian workforce, their entry into positions of real influence has been relatively recent and remains limited.
According to the latest data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (2023–24), women now make up more than half of the workforce yet remain underrepresented in senior leadership across the private sector.
Just 21.9 per cent of CEOs are women, 42 per cent hold management positions, 32 per cent sit on boards, and only 19 per cent serve as board chairs.
In other words, we have well and truly arrived in the workforce, but are still struggling to move up the ranks.
We see a similar pattern in the world of business ownership.
Women-owned businesses constitute about 35 per cent of all Australian businesses.
A 2023 report into microbusiness by the McKell Institute showed that many of these women-owned ventures are microbusinesses – small-scale, often operated solo and with minimal financial backing.
It’s no surprise women make up a large share of microbusiness owners. The low financial barriers and flexible hours make it a practical choice, especially in a landscape where women often face greater caregiving responsibilities and financial inequality.
Microbusinesses are on the rise in Australia and are a significant contributor to our economy.
However, the report also noted that microbusiness owners face significant challenges when it comes to scaling up – including when it comes to accessing expertise in marketing and technology and the ability to raise external capital for their company.
Enter professional networks.
Women’s networking creates space for women to support each other to grow and rise, in a world where equality in leadership is still a work in progress.
Put simply, in both employment and entrepreneurship, women are finding ways in — but hitting the (glass) ceiling when it comes to scaling, rising, or positions of power and influence.
To me, this sounds an awful lot like women doing a lot of heavy lifting to prop up the economy, but not sharing in the personal rewards and riches.
Perhaps we’re only just reaching a point where there’s a critical mass of women in positions to make these networks genuinely constructive. And with a networking group only as strong as its members, the flashy gendered branding is necessary to generate the groundswell needed to get these communities off the ground.
Looking back on my previous hesitancy to engage with women-only groups, I think it also came from a sense of inequality. That’s not fair! Men could never run an event like that! cried my internalised patriarchy. But now I see it differently – as an important transitional period in our journey toward equality. Because men have been doing this forever, subtly – we have to play catch-up by doing it now, more assertively.
If we want more women at the top, we need to invest in the ecosystems that help get them there. That means showing up – loudly, proudly and cringe-free – for the networks that are changing the game.
