The brutal business of putting yourself ‘out there’

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull launches Mia Freedman's book Work Strife Balance in Sydney. Picture: Jeff Darmanin

Malcolm Turnbull is my local member, meaning I occasionally see him around the ’hood, including one time in Coles at Westfield Bondi Junction in Sydney. This was before he became prime minister, or maybe it was during an election campaign. I can’t exactly remember. But he was standing by the deli section, dressed in a suit, looking kind of eager and, at the same time, kind of lost.

Later I found out he was there for the launch of the new kosher food section, and I can’t tell you how that made me smile. The seat of Wentworth has a high proportion of Jewish voters — I’ve got a shul down the road from my house — and there wasn’t one of those votes Turnbull wasn’t prepared to chase down.

And good for him. That’s how you win elections. That is, in fact, what the Coalition forgot last time around: you really do need to go house by house and street by street in the tight seats, connecting with people.

Anyway, the fact Malcolm is now the Prime Minister doesn’t preclude him from still showing up for stuff. Yesterday, for example, he showed up to launch Mia Freedman’s new book, Work, Strife, Balance.

Freedman is the founder of the Mamamia Women’s Network. We’re old friends, meaning I knew Mia when her empire was Mia in her pyjamas on her laptop. She now has more than 100 employees in Sydney and New York. Major success story, right?

When Mia was looking for somebody to launch her book, the Prime Minister seemed like the perfect person because, when you think about it, she’s exactly the sort of Australian he’s always going on about.

She’s innovative, she’s agile, she’s adopting new technologies, pushing into podcasts, making waves in digital. She’s savvy. She’s vigorous, the way he wants us all to be (although not, I hasten to add, in a “Netflix and chill” kind of way)*.

But it has not been easy. Like pretty much every other woman who works in the online space, Mia comes in for some pretty excoriating criticism. Bitter, angry rants. And she’s not alone in that. Ask any woman who puts herself out there — I’m thinking Clementine Ford at Fairfax, and Miranda Devine at The Daily Telegraph, and Catherine Deveny when she was at The Age (sacking her is probably one of the dumbest things the paper ever did) — and they’ll tell you what an ugly world it can be.

Anonymous trolls on Twitter saying they want to rape you and kill your children.

The approach of the most successful women, such as those named above, is to glide serenely above the spill. Not all the time, and not initially, and true, sometimes they bite back, but in the main they’re from the Taylor Swift school of thought: shake it off. Because what’s the point of trying to engage with a troll?

Mia is not trying to win anyone’s vote. She’s trying to build a business. Create some capital. Employ some people. Train some new journos, who 20 years from now will still be telling wide-eyed stories about what she was like to work for: how she’d come into the office in her seven-year-old daughter’s glitter-bomb sneakers, having forgotten to send said child to school; and how she has been known to chew on a piece of pizza while walking on the treadmill, in her “A Woman’s Place is in the White House” singlet.

The Prime Minister waxed lyrical about her, and why not? Despite 100 years of progress on the feminist front, Mia remains a rare bear: she’s a hugely successful female entrepreneur, still in her early 40s, still based in Australia.

And that’s why her book is valuable: block by block, she breaks down how she did it.

The scale of the empire, the sheer grunt involved in building it, is eye-opening.

Mia’s book captures the energy of a start-up — the inability of an entrepreneur to just walk away, even when every instinct tends towards diving under the doona — absolutely perfectly.

The “most valuable lessons” stuff in the first third of the book is going to be gold for anyone trying to start something similar: the importance of building slowly; hiring people who can do what you can’t; accepting that some ideas will fail.

It shimmers with good advice, too, like don’t take flowers to a woman hosting a dinner party. She’s got enough to do — feeding her own kids, feeding you — without having to go looking for a blasted vase. You’re not going to find a gem like that in Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal.

Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking: why aren’t there more books like this? Toolkits for women in business, and women who want to build professional careers?

The reason should be obvious: there aren’t enough of them. Plus, it’s brutal out there.

A couple of weeks back, I went to the launch of Tracey Spicer’s new book, The Good Girl Stripped Bare. The energy in the room was palpable. Tracey’s story is different from Mia’s: she grew up “bog standard Australian working-class poor” and like many women often felt grateful just to have a job. She talked about never in 14 years asking for a pay rise.

Fourteen years.

Then she was “dropped like a hot rock” when she got married, and had kids because, she says, she’d become, in the minds of men who did the hiring, the “tired old mum”.

Men don’t become that person when they have children. Not in their minds and not in the minds of their employers.

I know it’s an old drum but it deserves another bang: women still do most of the housework, most of the child-rearing and most the volunteer labour that makes the country hum, and that’s mainly out of love.

Love is a powerful emotion, and there’s no shame in being a slave to the love one feels for family members. But there’s also no shame in building a business or indeed a career. Men have always done both. Now perhaps it’s our turn.

*“Netflix and chill” is American slang for a little canoodling on the couch. Turnbull seemed not to know that when he airily told a couple of radio DJs last week that he and Lucy do it all the time. Thank you, Mr Turnbull! We did not need to know that but hey, good for you.

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