Helen McCabe wants it all

In 2018, Helen McCabe launched her own company with a handful of staff and a big idea. She had left the world of magazines with a desire to create a new home for women. One that fit into the world they lived in.

Five years later, Future Women has become home to thousands of women and gender diverse people around the country, while helping more than 180 organisations each year. What began as a media company — delivering content and community to its membership base — has evolved into a professional development company. Today, FW runs evidence-based programs that help unemployed women and gender diverse people find work; and accelerate their careers once they are in work. While training male leaders to be better allies and guiding organisations to create more inclusive workplaces.

Here, Helen McCabe talks to FW’s Sally Spicer about the company’s evolution through a pandemic and a cultural reckoning — while shedding light on her ambitions for the future.

SS: When FW was founded in 2018 it was described as ‘Nine’s new women-focused digital subscription business’. In 2023, how would you describe FW?

HM: I would describe it as a business of two parts. We are a professional women’s membership business offering training and content. But we’re also now providing a solution to governments where they are looking for innovative, scalable programs to assist women back into the workplace. Today, we have two primary purposes; to help underemployed women find work and to offer a home for the two million professional women in Australia. These two audiences often have a lot more in common than you might think.

SS: When you look back, what are you most proud of?

HM: This is perhaps lacking in ambition but I’m proud that we’re still here. We launched with the momentum of the MeToo movement and there was a lot of commentary saying the timing was brilliant. But running straight into the pandemic when we only had four or five staff was an enormous blow. So I look at the business today and I’m proud that we are here, that we’re relevant to that audience that we’ve collected along the way, that we’re relevant to both the professional audience and also working women who are caring or raising families. I’m also proud of the diversity.

The FW team at a 2023 NAIDOC Week Breakfast Panel in Melbourne/Naarm (Photo credit: James Henry Photography)

SS: Looking back, I see two distinct turning points for the business, which were COVID-19 and then Australia’s cultural reckoning. Do you see that?

HM: While COVID was scary for the business, it is without a doubt what made FW what it is today. We had to get extremely creative and really dig into what the audience wanted and what people would pay for. And that cultural reckoning in the March4Justice rallies was stage one.

Stage two was the election result in 2022. Until that moment, the political class talked about professional women as ‘doctor’s wives’ – they were seen as women in wealthy homes in inner city suburbs worried about climate change. But by the end of the election cycle in 2022 we woke up to the idea that they were the doctors. They were professional women who were fed up. They had views – conservative, left, right, middle – and they were frustrated at the pace of change around equality. In a way, it just made it easier for me to explain who we were and what we were doing and that this is who we speak to. The landscape has changed forever. I don’t think any political party will ever take the female vote quite as much for granted.

SS: There have been an incredible number of women who have played a part in helping you bring FW to the point that it’s at now. Who are the women who have inspired you in the last five years and continue to inspire you?

HM: There are two components to this. There are the people I’ve watched and tried to emulate and then there’s the people that have just been there for me. I can’t talk about people who have inspired me without mentioning Jamila [Rizvi], who has been on the team from the beginning and went through two rounds of surgery in the very early days, which was incredibly frightening for her and her family and the FW team.

There are a whole bunch of people that just kept supporting me, people like Arabella Gibson at the Gidget Foundation. I have watched Kate Jenkins’ quiet, diplomatic detail-oriented advocacy, her ability to talk to anyone anywhere. I’ve watched Sam Mostyn from a very early age when I was in Canberra, and she was working for Paul Keating. In recent times there is Georgie Dent, again for her advocacy and her preparedness to go out on a limb and push for change.

SS: When FW launched you made the point that launching a startup is hard and having Nine is a bit of a safety net. How has that factored into FW’s success?

HM: They call startups an ‘overnight success’ when they have most likely been around for 15 years. I wasn’t doing this in my 20s so I didn’t have that kind of runway. I also knew how difficult it was to build a subscription-based business. So I thought having the backing of Nine was a good way to fast track things. It’s also given clients some peace of mind that if they are spending money with FW it’s probably safe because we’ve got such a strong backer. But even more importantly there’s a whole bunch of people at Nine that I can ring and go, ‘Hey, can I bounce this idea off of you?’ Everyone from Rachel Launders – the corporate counsel at Nine who is widely considered best in class – through to Victoria Buchan. And then the management support that came from Hugh Marks really early on and, of course, Mike Sneesby, Kylie Blucher and Rebecca Haagsma today.

The FW team gathers in Sydney for the flagship Future Women Leadership Summit (Photo credit: Mark Broome)

SS: The FW Jobs Academy isn’t necessarily what you set out to do. Has this changed the core of the business?

Helen McCabe: It was quickly evident if you could afford to pay $250 to be a Gold member of FW, then you had to have a certain degree of affluence. And that skewed towards a traditional city-based, white audience. I could see that internationally, companies like The Wing were grappling with that challenge and many female led brands were representing diversity in a superficial way. So it became clear there was a fundamental fault line in the concept. At first we sought out new audiences. Then we launched FW Jobs Academy.

What Jobs Academy did was look to solving a policy problem, which was finding a way to attract women who were interested in going back into the workforce through a program, which were normally run by governments. The federal government had committed funds but traditionally had trouble finding and encouraging those women to sign up. So what Jobs Academy did was appeal to a lot of women who did not necessarily have the investment to put into a membership. But they were looking for work, and didn’t know where to start. Many of them were also looking for connections, career clarity and the confidence to go for a role that they might not normally have gone for. And that group was from a much broader pool.  That was middle Australia.

So what Jobs Academy did was solve a structural business problem for FW, but also solve a policy problem that the Federal government was having. We appealed to a cross section of women looking for work and many of them were carers or women with disabilities, or living in remote and regional areas. The most exciting part was there was also a skills shortage so employers were also looking to engage with different types of people to fill the gaps.

There remains a ten percent differential in the workplace participation rate of men versus women, and we wanted to activate this group, whilst at the same time talk to employers about hiring potentially a different employee, a woman who has taken time out of work to raise a family.

The pilot program launched in 2021 and that was a crazy process because we were learning as we went. We got hundreds of applications so we actively prioritised women with different backgrounds and different degrees of disadvantage to test the program’s effectiveness with different cohorts and to make sure it was delivering value for the member, the taxpayer and the employer.

Now we have a really diverse community. However, on reflection I don’t think those audiences are wildly different. The JA audience might have a different profile in terms of household income. But I don’t know that they’re wildly different as members of the FW community. What we see is that regardless of employment status all women relate to the day to day struggle of work and family.  I think there’s a lot more work we can do to be more specific about how we talk to specific cohorts on certain topics but overall it’s an exciting, dynamic community to be a part of. It was a surprising route but this was the original vision for FW.

SS: What do you see the next 5-10 years at FW looking like?

HM: I think we will talk about ourselves less as Future Women and more as FW. And that’ll be a shift in itself and a bit of a recognition that the space is moving quickly. I think we will therefore have a much broader membership base of non-binary people and men in our community. We’re already working with men and I fully expect that will grow significantly. I think we will stretch into more intersectional disadvantages as we become more confident and grow our expertise and our capability in some of those areas. We can always do more.

At the moment we’re fully virtual, but I can see a world where we have an actual office space, bricks and mortar. What we do in the office spaces is still not clear but I have always thought that was in our future. I want the Netflix series too. I want to support more unique, highly-creative, highly-relevant content. So whether that be books, podcasts or documentaries, I think there’s scope for us to do it all.

*Answers have been shortened for clarity.