I marked a belated International Women’s Day yesterday by watching a panel discussion featuring Sharon Winsor, Professor Teela Reid and Jarin Ingram Baigent.
Sharon is the founder of native food business Indigiearth; Teela is the Associate Dean (Indigenous Services & Strategy) at The University of Sydney Law School; and Jarin is CEO of Wyanga Aboriginal Aged Care, and founder of her own activewear brand Jarin Street.
It was a fascinating to hear them discuss the ongoing battle that Aboriginal women face to be respected as custodians of country, knowledge holders and leaders.
While Australia still has a long way to go to close the gender pay gap for women generally, it’s been a much tougher journey – and continues to be – for Aboriginal women.
When the first International Women’s Day was held in 1911, Aboriginal women’s rights in Australia were severely restricted and defined by state-based “protection” legislation that established government control over almost all aspects of life, including where they could live, work and whom they could marry.
By 1965 their situation was still pretty grim. Charles Perkins and other students from the University of Sydney’s Student Action For Aborigines group led a 15-day journey across Northern NSW called The Freedom Ride, to protest against racial segregation in public places such as swimming pools, picture theatres, hotels and RSL clubs.
Fast forward to 2026 and Aboriginals continue to have significantly lower life expectancies and much wider pay gaps. Plus Indigenous-owned businesses still represent just 0.5-0.8% of all Australian businesses.
Nationally, and in every state and territory, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who managed their own business are more likely to be male (63.9%) than female (36.1%).
Sharon, Teela and Jarin want to change that and it was amazing to listen to their stories … not to mention delicious to taste the morning tea served by Indigiearth.
I know I was supposed to turn away from the morning tea table, but it was too tempting …
I love that native food is becoming so popular among both Aussies and visitors – it’s such a great way to start conversations
I was pretty cranky to hear how the tangerine tyrant spent International Women’s Day … sending out a barrage of messages on X about it being not negotiable to get the Save America Act approved.
The Act would make it mandatory to show proof of citizenship to vote and would ban mail-in ballots.
As Heather Reese wrote on Facebook: “The President of the United States is now openly refusing to sign a single bill into law until Congress passes a measure that would strip the ballot from the very people whose rights have always been hardest won. Women. College students and Americans living abroad. Senior citizens. Black and Brown Communities. Low-income folks. Working Americans who can’t take a Tuesday off to stand in line for hours because they no longer have access to a mail-in ballot. The people who have always had to fight to be counted at all.”
She notes: “Noncitizen voting is already illegal. It has been for over a century. Study after study, audit after audit, has confirmed that it happens so rarely that it is statistically nonexistent. This is not about protecting elections. It is about rigging them, before a single vote is cast.”
Why does that rig them? Well …
“Each restriction sounds reasonable in isolation. Show an ID. Prove your citizenship. Vote in person. But stacked together, they form a barricade. Not because people aren’t citizens or because they don’t have the right to vote. But because they don’t have a passport, or because they never had or lost their birth certificate along the way. Or because their documents don’t match after a marriage, a divorce, or a name change for other reasons. And this disproportionately affects women more than most people realize. Women, far more than men, are required to prove every legal name they’ve ever had, from birth, through marriage, through divorce, through remarriage, creating a bureaucratic paper trail that’s expensive to maintain and nearly impossible to reconstruct on short notice. If a woman’s current ID doesn’t match the name on her birth certificate, or if a passport has lapsed, or if she can’t afford to request new certified copies of every document in the chain, she can be turned away at the polls. Every additional step removes more people. And the people it removes are not random. They are disproportionately young, elderly, low-income, and people of color. They are disproportionately women.”
It’s not just the tangerine tyrant who is eager to strip voting rights from women in the United States. In August 2025, the US Secretary of Defense reposted a CNN segment featuring Christian nationalist pastors who argued that women should not have the right to vote and that the 19th Amendment should be repealed.
How can women have come so far only to face losing it all to the insanity that is unfolding over there? It’s so mind-bogglingly stupid.
Is it because they are jealous? Women live longer than men. We’re better at multitasking. We have more grey matter. We have stronger immune systems. Our orgasms are stronger and longer … I could go on.
Men were once the heads of the household and the sole financial providers, but that’s no longer the case. And while the extremists in the US might bang on about how much better it would be for society if women returned to the kitchen, the reality is that most couples and families simply can’t afford it.
Among the many problems they face are terrible minimum wages, skyrocketing cost-of-living expenses and a lack of universal health care. Medical debt is a leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US, with studies indicating that roughly 66.5% of bankruptcies are connected to medical issues or bills.
You know things must be bad when even the families of celebrities such as Eric Dane are launching GoFundMe campaigns because medical care is destroying them. I can’t even imagine how terrifying it must be for the average person to develop a chronic health issue.
The Australian Medicare system might not be perfect, but it’s not going to bankrupt you.
Well, aged care is a major problem area, but that’s enough soap boxing from me for one day.
Song of the day: Eurythmics “Sisters are doing it for themselves”
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