I gave her the answer I’d been preparing for this year’s IWD panels and interviews: I wanted to make space for the people who deserved the best of me. I wanted to do work that aligned – not just with my skills and my interests – but with the type of decisions and lifestyle I could be proud of. I wanted my time and energy to go to the things I actually valued, not just the things that would look good on a balance sheet.

What I also wanted to say was that while all of that might sound well and good now (years later with the advantage of retrospect), each time I made a conscious decision to decrease my work hours, turn down a job offer, or resign from a familiar and stable position, I was terrified. Each time I’ve decided to go against the grain and build a multi-passionate, multi-disciplined, portfolio career (long before I knew terms like “multi–passionate” or “multi-disciplined” or “portfolio career”), it felt like I was risking not just my salary, but my security, social capital, and sanity too.

So why did I do it? Because what felt riskier to me was the alternative: pouring the best of myself into a system that was never going to count most of what I cared about. That felt like the greater loss.

What I didn’t say to my niece in our interview, but what I’ve been thinking about ever since, is this: the reason it felt risky at all is because we live inside a system that has decided, very deliberately, what counts as valuable work and what doesn’t. And almost everything that makes life actually worth living sits in the column that doesn’t count.

The number that should stop us in our tracks

In late 2025, economist Leonora Risse published research that put an Australian dollar figure on women’s unpaid labour. The number was $427.3 billion per year.

Let that sit for a moment.

That’s not a global figure – that’s Australia alone. That’s the cooking, the cleaning, the school pickups, the sick days taken to care for children, fixing the internet or printer connection for elderly parents or driving them to appointments, the mental load of remembering everything everyone needs, every single day.

None of it is counted in our national accounts. Not a single dollar of it registers in the GDP figures that governments use to measure economic health, allocate resources, and decide what a productive contribution to society looks like.

When you add men’s unpaid labour to the picture, the total rises to $688 billion, equivalent to roughly one third of Australia’s entire GDP. And yet the men I speak with regularly tell me something that rarely makes it into the public conversation about gender equity: many of them want to contribute more at home. They want to be present for school drop-offs, sick days and sports carnivals, and contribute more to the important (but unglamorous!) work of keeping a household running. But the system makes it extraordinarily difficult to consider this as a valid option, let alone act on that desire. When one partner earns significantly more, and that partner is disproportionately likely to be the man, stepping back from paid work to share the unpaid load more equally comes at a real financial cost that many families simply cannot absorb.

The system doesn't just undervalue care work. It actively penalises the people who choose to do it. And until we change what we count, and what we reward, we will keep asking individuals to solve a structural problem on their own.

This isn’t a new problem, by the way. New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring was making this argument in the 1980s, documenting how the System of National Accounts, the framework that guides how countries define and measure economic production, was built to exclude any activity without a market price or paid wage. Care work. Community building. Raising children. Nursing the sick. Keeping households running. All of it invisible. All of it, by design, uncounted.

Waring called it what it was: a political choice masquerading as a neutral measurement tool.

Decades later, we are still living inside that choice.

It started as survival. Then it became something else…

I grew up in Western Sydney as the daughter of migrant parents, surrounded by women who worked harder than anyone I have ever met. My mum. My aunties. The women in my school community and at church. My sisters. Women who held everything together, who carried the invisible weight of households and families and communities, who made space for everyone else’s flourishing, often at the expense of their own.

I watched those women be underestimated, underpaid, and underrecognised. Not because they lacked capability, but because the systems they were working within had never been designed to see their full contribution.

So, last week, when I walked onto the Blacktown campus of Australian Catholic University, last week to speak at an IWD panel, I was struck by the full-circle weight of it. This ACU campus didn’t exist on that strip of road when I was growing up there - but I did travel to the Strathfield Campus in my senior years of high school. It was there I learnt about Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and realised there were many, different ways to be smart, and most didn’t show up on a test score. And 15-year-old me, walking between Blacktown Station and Westpoint, humming “Try Again” by Aaliyah to myself, lost in my big, uncertain daydreams, would not have predicted that she’d one day go back to that university as a speaker on a panel, and to be asked for advice about forging a path that looked nothing like the paths of the women who’d come before me.

But I want to be honest about something: the path that led me here wasn’t a tidy story of ambition and self-belief. It was, for a long time, an act of survival.

After I became a mother, I found myself sitting with a recognition I couldn’t ignore: I was pouring the best of my time, my energy, and my creativity into work that didn’t matter all that much to me, while the things that mattered most were getting what was left over. My family. My faith. My creative practice. The work that actually lit me up.

So I started to redesign. I sat down with my husband and had many raw and uncomfortable conversations about what we actually needed or wanted to change if I wanted to drop to a part-time salary. Then I dropped down to part-time work. Then, I started testing what other ways of working allowed me to spend the best of my time and energy with the people I loved most: freelance work, side hustles, a creative business… and the whole time I got a lot of questions from other people who didn’t quite understand why I wasn’t simply climbing the ladder I was clearly capable of climbing.

What I didn’t fully understand at the time, but understand now, is that I wasn’t just trying to survive. I was – quietly – refusing to let a broken system decide what my contribution was worth.

Choosing to value your time differently to the way the economy values it is not a lifestyle choice. It is a structural critique, lived out in the everyday.

And it is something more women, and more men, are doing. Not always by choice, and not always easily. But increasingly, people are asking the question I have asked myself over and over for years: what does it actually cost me to keep living inside a system that doesn’t count the things I care about?

Time poverty is real, and it is gendered

The research from UN Women puts it plainly: globally, women do more than half the world’s work, and nearly half of that work goes unpaid. Women and girls do 16 billion hours of unpaid care work every single day. And the consequence of that isn’t just financial invisibility. It is time poverty.

Time poverty is what happens when the hours required to keep life running leave you with no margin. No time to rest. No time to pursue the work that energises you. No time to participate in the civic and community life that builds connection and belonging. No time to simply be.

This is not an individual failing. It is a structural condition, and it lands disproportionately on women, and most heavily on women who are also navigating the compounding weight of cultural expectations, economic precarity, or caring for multiple generations simultaneously.

I have felt this weight. Most women I know have felt it. And yet we have been taught to experience it as a personal problem to manage, rather than a systemic problem to name.

So I’m writing about it… and I’m naming it.

What we’re really talking about when we talk about balancing the scales

The theme of this year’s IWD was “Balance the Scales.” It is a worthy aspiration. But I want to sit with what it actually asks of us.

Because if the scales we are trying to balance were built to make most of women’s contributions invisible, then adding more women to the existing structure is not enough. Helping women climb higher in systems that were never designed for them is not enough. Celebrating one day a year is definitely not enough.

What’s needed is something harder and more fundamental: a willingness to ask what we’re actually measuring, and whether what we measure reflects what we actually value.

Do we value care? Do we value community? Do we value the invisible, unpaid, unglamorous work that keeps families alive and societies functioning? Do we value the time and energy of the women who have been doing that work for generations without recognition or reward?

If the answer is yes, then the scales don’t need balancing: they need redesigning.

A few questions to sit with

This is Part 1 of a four-part series, and I want each post to leave you with something practical to hold – not just an argument to simmer over.

So here are a few honest questions worth sitting with this week:

• What unpaid work are you doing right now that nobody is counting, including you? What would it mean to name its value out loud?

• Where are you experiencing time poverty? And is it something you’ve been treating as a personal problem to manage rather than a structural reality to name?

• If the system you’re currently working within was redesigned to count everything you contribute, not just the paid hours, what would your contribution actually be worth?

• And finally: is the life you’re building one that reflects what you actually value? Or one that reflects what the system has decided is worth valuing?

Those questions don’t have easy answers. But I’ve found that they are the right ones to keep asking.

Next in this series, I plan to dive deeper into the narratives that shape what women believe is possible for them, and the cultural and generational messages that narrow the picture long before a system ever gets a chance to.

Want someone to walk alongside you as you work through what a redesigned life could look like? I’d love to connect. Book a discovery session at joyadan.com/contact.

Those people aren’t my people.

Don’t get me wrong: I wish those people well as they embark on their own journey, at their own time… but I also get to make the call about who gets to ride shotgun while I’m on mine, and some people haven’t made it on the crew list… and that’s ok.

We are often invited to share parts of who we are, but not everyone we come across in life is owed our most vulnerable and tender parts.

When I’ve taken the time to intentionally discern who I trust when I’ve set sail towards my dreams, not only have I made it farther than I’d originally thought possible, I’ve also felt safe even when the storms have hit. I’ve learnt… through many trials and errors… that despite their best intentions, not everyone deserves a spot on my boat.

Some people don’t actually want us to grow

Sometimes growing means leaving certain people behind on dry land because they’re not ready to be in our crew. Some people like us exactly where and how we are: they might benefit from our dependency on them, or our playing a certain role in their life, or they might enjoy feeling big while we play small. Most people around us probably aren’t even aware of this, but they’ll unintentionally slow our progress because, by way of connection and relation, our change requires their change… and just because we might be ready and willing to grow, it doesn’t mean they are.

Maybe they’ve got their own fears they need to overcome, or they haven’t felt the tug of adventure in their own heart… yet, OR maybe they’re still recovering from their own recent change journey and aren’t ready to get back on a boat... yet.

I’ve been thinking of the people whom I’ve left so that I’ve had the capacity, support and space to chase my dreams. The relationships I’ve outgrown, the individuals I’ve had to keep at a distance because they were hellbent on staying on their deserted island, or (maybe the worst), the people who’ve taken credit for the bounty from the voyage when they were the ones keenest to prevent me from going anywhere new in the first place.

It’s never easy saying goodbye, and there are some people I deeply wish were willing or able to journey with me… to be honest, some goodbyes still stir up a feeling of grief. Sometimes I miss the comfort and the familiarity of their presence and support, and sometimes – especially when the darkness of night makes the ocean feel enormous – I start to think that their words of warning were wise.

But despite the pain of their absence, I’ve never regretted setting sail.

Dreaming is not for the faint-hearted

There are plenty of people who laughed at history’s great artists, explorers and rebels. I don’t think the people who laughed or resisted were necessarily all malicious - sometimes we resist change because it’s easier to continue with what’s familiar and hard, compared to facing something unfamiliar and also still hard.

It takes courage, work and commitment to dare to veer off the known track and take a new route.

It takes faith to believe in our capacity to build a better world - whether what we build is for ourselves, the people around us, or the ones we leave behind.

Whether it’s trying something for the first time, learning a new skill, taking a career break or committing to a relationship, all change takes small - sometimes big - leaps of faith. It takes regular commitments of faith and courage to continue when the big waves come and threaten to capsize you.

So the people who’ve earned a spot on my boat have got to be brave. If I’m going to trust them with my dreams, they’ve got to believe in the value of the journey, and they’ve got to be comfortable knowing that I’m writing the map as I go. Not everyone is ok with the unknown, so not everyone that I meet gets the privilege of hearing my dreams or going on the voyage with me. My husband’s on my crew and I’m on his because I know he’s got my back, and he knows that I’ve got his. I also have a handful of friends (and some family) who, over decades or growing, changing and dreaming together, know that while we’re all chasing something different, we believe in each other’s capacity to get where we need to go.

And so we pat each other on the back when the waves start knocking us about and we find ourselves throwing up overboard. We’re ready for the storms because we’ve each weathered our own, and we put up with each other yelling over the thunder, screaming instructions through the rain, or (more often than not) shivering and crying in fear. We are ok with working through the hard moments, because we each know we’re better for it when we do.

And because of all that, these are the people who deserve to be by my side when the beauty of a sunrise breaks over the horizon.

Is your crew giving you energy or draining it?

Who is in your current circle of trust? Who is prepared to weather your darkest nights so they can sit beside you at dawn? Are the people you spend the most time and energy with putting wind in your sails or forcing you to anchor in a place you’ve outgrown?

Sometimes it’s worth taking stock of whether the people we’re surrounding ourselves with are helping or hindering our progress. This isn’t a call to cut ties - rather, an invitation to reflect on whose voices we allow to be loudest or nearest and votes we choose to count. Sometimes the loudest voices are turned up simply because that’s the default setting (eg parents, siblings, old friends)… but successful dreamers rarely succeed by doing the default.

Even though there are people in our lives who seem to want the “best” for us, their version of “best” might differ from our own, or their way of getting somewhere might not be the same route we’re called to take. And if we choose different, that’s ok.

• Who is willing to help you grow vs who prefers you to stay where you are?

• Who is comfortable – or at least willing to wrestle with – the uncertainty of change?

• Who has flexibility vs rigidity? What do you need and when?

• Who is going to cheer you on vs who is going to question you? What do you need and when?

As we navigate new seasons in life, we each have the right to discern, on our own terms, who gets the right to join us on board.

If today’s post stirred something for you, know this: you don’t have to journey alone. We’re all works in progress, and sometimes we need someone in our corner who believes in us when the waves feel high. That’s the role I play as a coach – helping you find clarity, courage, and confidence in your own direction. If that sounds like the kind of support you’d like, you can learn more at joyadan.com/coaching

I’m certain this won’t be the last time you’ll find me contradicting myself.

It’s not that I plan to. It’s just that I know that to test the boundaries and explore my own growth edges, I know I’ve got to be brave enough to be wrong, to sit with the discomfort of being sorely mistaken, and to dig around and discover the gore and glory of (what my son’s primary school teacher so aptly described as) the “learning pit”. In other words, this blog is both an experiment and an exploration of what it means to Do The Work. To be brave enough to suck at something new.

I love a good bit of wordplay, so here’s what I’m hoping to cover here:

The Inner Work

The reflection, healing, and self-awareness we do to understand who we are and how we want to show up in the world. I know so many of us (myself included) wrestle with perfectionism and burnout, while longing for belonging and a greater sense of wellbeing. In that sense, we are all works in progress.

We entered the world as minimum viable products and our identities, relationships, and paths are never finished – we are constantly iterating.

The Future of Work

The world of work is evolving and while some things are unchartered and unpredictable, other things are clearer than they’ve ever been. We’ve seen the pitfalls of the profit-first approach in businesses, as well as the virtuous cycle created for people-first companies who drive productivity and performance. But even if high-performance or profit isn’t on your agenda, this matters. If we want our work to be meaningful, if we want to leave a legacy or making a bigger impact, then it’s on all of us to reimagine how we lead, live and contribute.

Progress requires effort and intention. Individually and collectively, we all have a role in building better systems.

The Creative, Playful Path to Progress (not Perfection)

As a self-taught watercolour calligrapher and sketchnote artist, I know how frustrating a misplaced brush stroke or poorly placed diagram can be. But every time we give ourselves permission to pick up our tools and just start creating – whether it’s on paper, on screen, on canvas, on a table stacked with Lego pieces, in a garden bed, or a kitchen bench – we practice, hone and refine our craft. As a child, I hated practicing for anything. I wanted to be excellent immediately. But as an adult I’m learning to embrace that perfection is overrated and that practice can be play too.

And so..

“Work In Progress” is my “professional paint palette” – the place I bring together the many things I’m learning and tools I’m acquiring in what is a fun, multidisciplinary portfolio career spanning leadership, communication, marketing, creative art, coaching, facilitation and mental health. I’m hoping that by sharing it with some people who want to push the boundaries, lead with purpose, and live with intention, I’m able to do all those things regularly too.

If you are looking for an expert who has lots of answers, please click on – I wish you all the best in your search. ✌🏽

But if you’re looking for a person who has lots of questions, then by all means, stick around. This is the place where I’ll be raising, grappling with and testing the answers to many questions.