32. 5 to 9 – Dolly Parton 2021
Working 5 to 9, making something of your
own now
And it feels so fine to build a business from your
know-how
Gonna move ahead, and
there’s nothing
that you can’t do
When you listen to that little voice inside you
Yeah 5 to 9, you’ve
got passion
and a vision
Cuz it’s hustlin’
time, a whole
new way to make a livin’
Gonna change your life, do something that gives it meaning
There’s a current boom
of female entrepreneurs.
We’re literally
taking care of business – working 5 to 9, as Dolly puts it. However, as
discussed in Post
19, we’re a long way of parity. But as we take on entrepreneurship full
steam ahead, traditionally female dominated fields in the 9 to 5 world, such as
education, still tend to have men running the show.
I mean, as
I went through school in the late 80s and early 90s I had countless female
teachers, a handful of male teachers and just one of four female principals. So
if teaching is a female dominated field, why were females not progressing
through to being principals? Even today, females make up more
than seventy percent of the education and training sector’s workforce, and according
to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, education and training has been one of
the industries with the highest proportions of women over (at least) the past
decade.
According
to the OECD
in 2018 only 40% of principals were female. This is much higher than the
25% female principals I experienced going through school, but there is still a
strong bias towards male career progression. No wonder ‘Oh my God! Women!’
are opting for entrepreneurship rather than an employed career.
That said,
I had a pretty amazing great aunt who was a pre-modern woman. She was a career
girl – not just nurse, but matron – that travelled the world, didn’t get
married or have kids and owned her own house. Similarly, my grandmother – on the
other side of the family – was also a pre-modern woman who did the unthinkable by
gaining a driver’s license to do her bit for the WWII effort by driving the
troops to and from training exercises at Kapooka, and then became a qualified
and practicing podiatrist. These two forged their own paths rather than
following the expected norms of marriage, house wife, kids.
As a final
note, during Australia’s recurring Covid induced lockdowns female
dominated industries such as retail, hospitality, and now childcare, keep
getting shut down. Meanwhile male
dominated industries such as construction, mining and transport/freight
have largely been allowed to continue. I’m not saying that there’s a patriarchal
conspiracy at play here, and I’m not passing opinion on which industries should
or should not be allowed to operate during these crazy days. Just pointing out
another observation with a skewed gender based impact.
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