Katina Curtis: Annabel Crabb, Caroline Criado Perez opened my eyes to the barriers hindering working women

Sitting on the grass outside Central Station in Sydney in 2014, I read chunks of Annabel Crabb’s book The Wife Drought to my newish husband. I had long admired Crabb’s writing and the clever way she made the intricacies of politics relatable to her readers. I too shared a passion for politics and for baking — and once, as a junior reporter, thrust a piece of cake I’d made into a bemused Crabb’s hands during the Budget lockup in Canberra. But her book examining the structural barriers hindering working women sparked a feminist fire in me. It covers ground from childcare and paid parental leave, to workforce participation and household chores in her thorough but chatty style. Crabb’s premise that every woman needs a wife inspired me to start thinking differently — and, crucially, having conversations with my partner — about our division of labour. The flipside, that enabling women to step up in their work lives also means we need to enable men to step up in their family lives, has similarly inspired many conversations about cultural change. Proactively thinking about the issues, especially once we had children, has made us conscious of striving for equality. Five years later, a second fire was stoked as I rode a French bus on a work trip, listening to author Caroline Criado Perez interviewed on a podcast. I promptly sought out her book Invisible Women and again wanted to run around quoting chunks of it. Criado Perez spells out painstakingly how the lack of data disaggregated by gender means women miss out again and again. From car seatbelts not made to fit our bodies to medicines not tested on women to hiring practices that don’t take into account caring responsibilities, the same pattern plays out in every aspect of our lives. Once I saw one data gap, I started spotting them everywhere — especially through the pandemic. Filling those gaps will help uncover the structural and cultural changes needed, and conversations on those will (I hope) lead everyone to embrace equality.