Female founders shaping the future of work
Changes to how work is structured are already unfolding, helping women and minorities compete more equally, while helping families live their best lives. Here’s who’s making it happen.
Pivoting my career to freelance journalism just over two years ago opened two big doors in my life. Firstly, working remotely and flexibly means minimal stress at home. The nursery run doesn’t have to compete with racing to the office suited and booted for 9am. Chores like washing, dinner prepping and other life admin can be fit in during work breaks in the day, conserving precious free time.
Secondly, as I’ve intentionally leaned more into covering how the future of work is unfolding right now, gradually eliminating the barriers that hold women back, particularly after having children, I’ve met and featured some truly inspirational female founders. Like me, they’ve not been happy with the status quo and have sought to change it.
Many of these changemakers have taken their lived experience, come up with the solution to what was broken, and delivered on their vision of extending this to the countless other women who have until now swallowed an all or nothing narrative. That to have it all - big career and happy home life - your mental and physical wellbeing needs to suffer - ideally in silence. Or the other option being to make a sacrifice in one area - usually work - and suck it up.
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
As I prepare to become a mother for the second time, I feel reassured that having women like these working tirelessly to build a fairer, more equal future of work is a win for us all. So in my last newsletter for the foreseeable - this year at least - I wanted to pay tribute to the female founders who have shaped my work both editorially and principally in terms of the work-life I want to lead.
Roleshare - Sophie Smallwood
When Sophie Smallwood returned from parental leave in 2018, she considered job sharing. She was keen to make the most of family life without taking a backwards step in her tech career that featured work with enviable brands like Facebook, eBay and Trip Advisor.
But finding both necessary elements – the right job and with the right sharer – proved impossible. “It led to me launching Roleshare because I didn’t want to be a statistic and to help other women avoid becoming one too,” Sophie told me.
Roleshare has since been recognised by the World Economic Forum as a “pathway to economic transformation”, creating more opportunities not just for women, but for those who want to work less without compromising on ambition or purpose.
Read more of my coverage of Sophie:
“The marketers making job sharing work”: With marketing being an industry still tarnished by an overall gender pay gap of 23% - the chasm at its widest at the top level of business - increasing the adoption of job sharing could be just what is needed to level the playing field.
“How to harness the rise in job sharing”: Job sharing has the potential to be a leveler of workplace gender equality, but current statistics tell a different tale. So what’s holding it back?
“How job sharing is boosting careers for women in tech”: The tech industry can only benefit from attracting and retaining more women, but some companies still miss the value of supporting job-sharing.
“The co-CEO: can two heads be better than one?”: Having double the experience and inspiration is making the co-chief executive an attractive model for some companies, but can it really achieve more than the typical way of doing business?
BlckBx - Kath Clarke
With a lens on working parents, BlckBx founder and CEO Kath Clarke believes that by targeting employers to offer its personal virtual assistant (VA) service as an employee benefit, it can help alleviate the so-called “motherload” of family responsibilities that often fall to women.
Rather than drown in a sea of life admin, working parents can delegate time consuming personal tasks to their BlckBx VA, giving them more focus at work and freeing up more family time. The best part is that dads are actually a significant primary BlckBx user, signaling a shift in gender stereotypes both at home and at work. The demand Kath and her team are seeing for BlckBx across industries like finance and legal that typically haven’t been female or family-friendly is particularly promising
“We need to change the structure of the workplace that’s not been built for modern families. There’s a massive conversation around women dropping off the career ladder after starting families, but we’ve been talking about it for 20 years, and nothing’s been done,” Kath told me.
Read more of my coverage of Kath:
“Companies offer virtual assistants as work perks to help offset gender inequalities caused by pandemic”: More companies are now adding VA services to their employee benefits packages as a highly prized work perk.
“I'm a father of 2, and getting a virtual-assistant service has given me back 10 hours a week to spend with my family”: When we got a virtual assistant, it changed everything. Now we outsource our chores. In turn, we have more time as a family.
Growmotely - Sarah Hawley
Digital nomad, serial entrepreneur and remote work advocate, Sarah Hawley’s remote jobs platform Growmotely is helping companies create more equal and diverse environments by hiring talent from anywhere, and setting them free from geographic boundaries.
What I find really intriguing about Sarah is how she effortlessly combines work, family and travel. Sarah, an Australian expat living in Austin, Texas, and her husband Joe, 34, a former US NFL player who now runs his own personal growth consultancy, split their time between homes in Austin and Colorado, spending up to two months at a time touring the US in their camper. They spent August in Australia and Bali, then had a stint in Croatia as guests of the Zagreb Tourist Board’s Digital Nomad Ambassador Project staying in the country’s capital for a month. Sarah’s also recently returned from the Volcano Innovation Summit in Antigua Guatemala.
When they travel as a family, the Hawleys’ nanny often joins them, but when she doesn’t, Sarah and Joe each split their respective days into childcare and work shifts - role models for parenting goals!
Read more of my coverage of Sarah:
“The rise of digital nomad families”: Digital nomads used to be 20-somethings in beach bars. But now some families are taking the plunge, working and learning as they explore new places.
‘Workcation Retreats’: Tourist destinations offer remote-working packages including personal assistants, to attract visitors”: The remote-working trend triggered by the pandemic is paving the way for more professionals to mix business and pleasure from exciting, exotic destinations.
Na’amal - Lorraine Charles
When Cambridge University research associate Lorraine Charles began to scratch the surface of the potential for remote work to change refugees’ fortunes, inject millions into crisis-stricken economies, and boost employment rates, she faced many closed doors when it came to funding further research to build her case.
But Lorraine’s passion for helping refugees realise their potential led her to co-found Na’amal, a social enterprise which partners with relevant organisations to support refugees and other underrepresented communities through skills training, mentorship and connecting them with remote work opportunities.
Na’amal has collaborated with US institution MIT’s Refugee Action Hub to train 136 refugees from 22 countries, and with Techfugees in Lebanon training 30 learners. It has also recently partnered with freelance platform Upwork to help companies hire what they describe as “displaced talent”.
Remote work, Lorraine told me, can help refugees achieve their goal of securing meaningful, formal, legal work, taking the pressure and friction away from forcing them to find work in their local community, that is often undervalued and underpaid - game changing stuff.
Read more of my coverage of Lorraine:
“Freelance platforms create work for people in crisis-stricken economies”: Creating more remote opportunities for this talent pool could help plug skills gaps and inject millions into crisis-stricken economies, all while boosting employment rates.
Boundless Life - Rekha Maghon and Elina Zois
Boundless Life - a family travel offering combining accommodation, co-working space, childcare/education and community in wanderlust-worthy destinations like Portugal, Greece and Italy - was the solution my travel enthusiast husband and I were looking for. We were lucky enough to spend time with the Boundless Life team and families in the majestic Portuguese hilltop town of Sintra this past summer, embracing the extended travel opportunity remote work provides.
All being well, we’re hoping to live the Boundless Life again next year, taking a super summer break where we know our four-year-old son will have the time of his life with his Boundless Education friends and teachers, while his father and I balance work with adventure - oh, and take turns to care for a 10-month old :).
Boundless Life is the vision of four co-founders who are experts in different fields but united by their passion for filling a gap in the family travel/digital nomad markets which is severely lacking in all-in-one solutions and childcare/education facilities, especially ones that translate across markets the way Boundless Education does.
Rekha Maghon (pictured above, top row second right) brings her experience as an award-winning edtech entrepreneur to realise Boundless Life’s vision of delivering an education curriculum that opens children’s minds in a global sense and equips them with future ready skills like problem solving, empathy and resilience, not to mention making the most of the nature and culture which surrounds them.
Elina Zois (also pictured above, bottom row, first left) meanwhile, is leveraging her background in hospitality and marketing to ensure the customer experience remains seamless across an operation that has the potential to become quite complex when you factor in the high quality of customer service Boundless Life guests expect. Elina’s experience managing more than 700 Marriott International properties and being recognised in the “Women to Watch in Hospitality” list gives Boundless Life an edge in the travel space.
I hope more families get to experience it. Since participating in the Boundless Life Sintra cohort this summer (full transparency, as a media guest) I’ve become part of their referral program, meaning that if you book a stay and use the code “MaryLou”, you’ll receive a discount. This page features a breakdown of costs too.
Read more of my coverage of Boundless Life:
“Remote work for digital nomads – and their kids”: Less hostel partying, more primary schools – as remote work opens up to new audiences, businesses like Boundless Life have started thinking about the whole family.
“Digital nomads are living their best lives by taking their kids on ‘workations’”: Family workations involve work — but also yoga, hiking, wine tasting, beach trips, castle tours and surf lessons.
“Can global, flexible childcare rise up to meet the ‘work from anywhere’ demand from families?”: What if a global, flexible childcare and education market emerged to cater to working parents who want to take advantage of working abroad for periods throughout the year — the ‘workcation’ trend — without worrying about how their children would be cared for or educated?
“Welcome to Sintra, Portugal’s hottest new hub for digital nomads (and their kids)”: In the mountains just 25km west of the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, magical, medieval Sintra is welcoming a new breed of digital nomads.