Duh! I hear you say, shaking your head.

Let me expand on that idea: Business, academia, the sciences, the arts, education, sport – all fields of endeavour – have been shaped, inhabited and controlled by men for millennia.

Makes sense. Traditionally, men have been the ones who worked outside the home while women worked inside the home. 

In the last 100 years or so, women have been inching their way into all these spaces. Some have earned themselves international accolades(think Marie Curie) or led nations - Indira Gandhi, Angela Merkel, and Golda Meir Others, like Elizabeth Gould, have been overlooked, overshadowed by their husband’s achievements (Elizabeth Gould was the illustrator for all of her husband John’s amazing ornithological publications).

But in all their endeavours, women have had to fit themselves into the shapes and structures made by men. They have had to ‘play’ by the accepted rules of the ‘sandpit’ without knowing what those rules were or really how to ‘play the game’.

And all this is understandable and is in no way a criticism of the structures and processes men have put in place. But making ‘space’ for women has been hard – both for the men, who can see this as a zero-sum game (I have to lose for you to win) and for women who have often bent themselves out of shape to fit in.

There is, however, another way that women have been finding for years but, at this point in history, are really making their own. It began with women like Melbourne’s Alice Anderson who, in the 1920s, ran businesses of their own - Alice established the first motor service in Australia run entirely by women, including car repairs and chauffeuring (an early Shebah perhaps?). And it’s gained super momentum during the pandemic as women, laid off more quickly than their male counterparts during lockdowns, established businesses of their own.

But it’s more than just building our own businesses and I return to my original statement: I’m convinced that women do things differently to men.

Women need to own their different ways of thinking – not better or worse than men, just different.

Women must learn to trust their different ways of thinking and follow up on their hunches and intuition – especially if all their lives they’ve been taught that the way men do things is the right way.

It takes courage to set up new ways of doing business.



And women are known for their courage.