The Tide
Changing The World For Women.
SideBlooms is a social enterprise. It exists because of what happens to women’s money in this country — quietly, in the ordinary run of a life, to women who did nothing wrong.
What Happens To A Woman’s Earnings When She Has A Child.
If you have children, or you will one day, this is what is happening right now. In the first five years after the first child arrives, a woman’s earnings fall by 55 per cent on average. A man’s do not change at all. And it does not close quickly — the gap is still there ten years on, for women who had one child and women who had several, and for the woman who was the household’s main earner just as much as the woman who was not.
Not because she became worse at her work. Because she left it, or cut her hours, and the money never came back to where it was.
Australian Treasury, Children and the Gender Earnings Gap: Evidence for Australia — Bahar, Bradshaw, Deutscher and Montaigne, using HILDA and Australian Taxation Office records.
And What It Looks Like Thirty Years Later.
Women reach retirement with far less of their own, and the women with the least are the ones renting. Of single retired women who rent in Australia, nearly four in five are living below the poverty line.
She worked her whole life. She raised the people who are running the country now. And she is choosing between the heater and the chemist.
Grattan Institute, Renting In Retirement, February 2025.
Which Is Why We Take Ourselves Financially Seriously.
Economic power decides how much of your own life you get to choose — where you live, who you live with, what you do on a Tuesday, and what you do if everything changes.
No one gets to decide that for you.
One Is A Sidebloom. A Hundred Thousand Is A Shift.
One woman with her own income is one woman with her own choices. A hundred thousand of us is a country that works differently — where a daughter grows up watching her mother paid for work she loves, and never has to be told it is possible.
That is the tide, and it is already turning. It turns faster the more of us there are.
When Women Have Economic Power, We Change The World.
It’s about you and your future — but together, we change it all.