In collaboration with Government, Philanthropy and Corporate Australia, Global Sisters is running three demonstration projects to address the structural, systemic barriers to self-employment for women receiving income support.

These projects are designed to:

Ultimately, these demonstration projects are designed to reform welfare policies and systems to support self employment as an alternative to low-paid, unstable work or unemployment. They are about creating the permanent systems changes needed for a scalable, national solution for increasing women’s economic participation, sustainable work and financial independence.

Global Sisters supports all women who are unemployed or underemployed, however for the demonstration projects, we are focusing on groups of women most excluded from economic participation and the ability to be financially independent due to intersecting gender-based structural and systemic barriers.

The collective impact approach is bringing the following corporate, philanthropic and government partners together to solve this problem, now and into the future.

Gender inequality in economic participation has long-term, intergenerational adverse impacts on economic security for women, their dependents, and society. High employment statistics mask the low-paid employment and underemployment, particularly casualised and precarious jobs, that are too often the only option for women who cannot access full-time stable employment due to gendered individual and systemic barriers.

To increase women’s economic participation, income levels, financial independence and long-term economic security, we cannot continue to focus change efforts and investment into traditional solutions that were set up by and for men. That means we have to look outside mainstream employment and jobs.

The flow-on negative impact of gender inequality in economic participation and security is leading to what Global Sisters has identified as the top four gender issues facing Australia:

Self-employment is one of the most effective pathways to economic participation and financial independence, however the current welfare system works against women achieving this goal. Instead, it leaves them trapped on income support when unable to access adequate, decent work due to intersecting barriers formed by their circumstances.

The recommendations below will help women move off welfare, mostly at no additional cost to the government, and in fact, should save funding on welfare expenditure.

The Target Cohort: Single mothers on Parenting Payment Single (PPS)

The participants are women who cannot access sufficiently flexible, secure, adequate hours and sustained employment able to generate income to a level that keeps them and their household out of poverty. By nature of their primary carer responsibilities, the more traditional, rigidly structured, full-time employment opportunities are largely out of reach, leaving them to navigate options that typically are more causal, unstable, and short-term in nature, with fewer employee benefits and generally lower paid. As a result, these women frequently circle back onto social security payments and into welfare reliance or back into unhealthy relationships of financial dependence and control.

Mutual obligations (Job seeking), reporting requirements, and reporting fluctuating income puts their vase of financial security from which to launch and grow a business at risk. it disincentivises and prohibits micro business as a real solution to financial independence from welfare.

Early-stage businesses typically experience cash flow volatility, income unpredictability, and profitability challenges. For women in our cohort who experience intersection barriers and vulnerabilities, this means the “incubate” phase is often 18 months to 2 years.

In this period, they start generating their own income however, it is typically only from year 2 onwards that they are confident in their business model (built through a period of marketing testing and iteration). When our Sisters move to the “accelerate” stage they are growing and sustaining their income with much more predictability.