…..and Left Women’s Work Without a Workforce
Australia is very good at building pathways for boys. From an early age, we identify aptitude, channel energy, and create trades that translate skill into income. Carpentry, electrical, plumbing, automotive, construction — these are not hobbies. They are recognised professions with training pathways, certification, procurement pipelines, and cultural legitimacy. They are framed as nation-building work. Yet when we look at where girls and women have historically applied skill, precision, repetition, and creative intelligence, an uncomfortable question emerges: where are the trades for women?
The dominant narrative tells us that women “naturally” gravitate toward creative pursuits, care work, textiles, design, and cultural production — as though these activities sit outside the economy rather than quietly holding it together. Creative work is framed as passion, not profession. Craft is treated as personal expression, not skilled labour. Women are encouraged to “do what they love,” while men are encouraged to learn a trade. One path leads to certification, wages, and superannuation. The other leads to unpaid labour, underemployment, and economic fragility.
This narrative has become so normalised that we rarely interrogate it. We celebrate boys for building things we can see — houses, roads, infrastructure — while ignoring the industries women have historically built with their hands, minds, and time. The result is not a lack of talent or effort from women, but a lack of foresight from systems that failed to formalise, protect, and scale women’s work as a workforce.
Through a Creative Women’s Association lens, this is not a cultural oversight. It is a structural failure. What we now refer to as the “creative economy” did not appear out of nowhere. It evolved directly from women’s trades — textiles, weaving, embroidery, garment construction, pattern-making, dyeing, illustration, botanical drawing, publishing, teaching, and small-scale manufacturing. For centuries, women were entrepreneurs by necessity. Textile production alone once sustained local economies, transmitted skills across generations, and generated export value long before the term “creative industries” existed.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women ran weaving rooms, lace workshops, millinery businesses, dressmaking studios, and dye houses. They managed supply chains, trained apprentices, priced goods, negotiated commissions, and adapted production to local conditions. These were not leisure activities. They were trades — highly skilled, time-intensive, economically productive trades. Yet as industrialisation and later professionalisation reshaped the workforce, women’s trades were systematically devalued, informalised, or absorbed without recognition.
What replaced them was not an equivalent system, but a void. As male-dominated trades were codified into apprenticeships and protected pathways, women’s creative labour was quietly repositioned as supplemental, domestic, or optional. Over time, this created the illusion that women’s work is inherently unstable or “hard to monetise,” when in reality it was stripped of the very infrastructure that makes any trade viable.
Today, we see the consequences clearly. Boys are still encouraged into trades with defined entry points and employment outcomes. Girls are encouraged into creativity without scaffolding. TAFE does not reflect the realities of hybrid, freelance, or micro-enterprise creative work. Universities increasingly demand time, money, and flexibility that many women simply do not have. And procurement systems overwhelmingly favour large-scale operators, leaving women-led creative enterprises invisible.
This is where the creative economy conversation breaks down. We talk endlessly about innovation, culture, and creativity, yet fail to ask the most basic workforce question: where are the trades? Where are the standards, certifications, inspection frameworks, and recognised pathways that allow women to build sustainable creative lives? Without these, the creative economy becomes a funnel that extracts value from women’s labour without returning security, status, or longevity.
The Creative Women’s Association reframes this gap not as a participation issue, but as an infrastructure deficit. When you remove workforce architecture, you don’t remove work — you remove protection. Women continue to produce, teach, care, design, and create, but they do so without the systems that translate skill into economic stability. This is why women dominate unpaid and underpaid creative labour, and why dropout rates spike precisely when care responsibilities and financial pressure increase.
Reimagining women’s creative work as trade-based is not radical. It is corrective. It means recognising that pattern-making is as technical as drafting, that weaving requires as much precision as joinery, that cultural production is not less valuable because it is relational or aesthetic. It means building provenance, certification, and procurement systems that take women’s work seriously — not as art therapy, not as side hustles, but as legitimate, skilled economic activity.
If we had applied even a fraction of the foresight used to build male-dominated trades, the creative economy would look very different today. We would see women entering certified pathways, progressing through recognised stages of mastery, and building enterprises that endure beyond burnout. Instead, we are left asking why women “can’t stay” in creative industries, when the truth is that no one built the structures to hold them.
This gap is not accidental. It is the result of decades of policy blindness to where women actually work. Naming it is the first step. Building infrastructure is the next.
Read the Full Article:
Creative Workforce Scoping Study
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