Last week I was reading the Women in Theatre report for my piece for artsHub, which has become part of its Special Report that went out today.

Excuse the slightly daggy headline but artsHub’s got a pretty tight character limit for title and you have to make it a bit catchy: Wherefore art thou gender-equity?

It was one of those rare reports you can read through from beginning to end and it had some fabulous quotes in it. The most saddening thing I found was how well I understood it, it did feel as though it was telling me what I already knew. My own career has followed a path that many of those interviewed for the report would find similar to their own.

When I moved from Sydney to Melbourne I found I had to give up my staff position at the ABC as there were no roles at Elsternwick I could transfer to. I held out as long as I could using up the last of my very large reserves of leave, but in the end nothing came up. Until about a month later that is when I was offered a contract, in a far less challenging job. Gone were all the leave entitlements, all the other benefits of being on-staff and it felt so had any prospects I had of furthering my career through internal training and promotion, though ironically it paid more.

I worked the six-month stint of the production and would have gone back for the next installment (after the required unpaided down time over Christmas) except for the sudden death of my father that made me reprioritise things for awhile. I got pregnant and once I’d had my daughter I knew I wouldn’t be able to manage the intense bursts of full-on work for several months followed by gaps. In Sydney there was on-site childcare and a very positive working environment for women, but it just didn’t seem to be the same in Melbourne. This is awhile ago, so things may have changed, but back then it felt like the cutbacks had dug everyone into their own little trenches and morale was awful.

I went to RMIT instead and did the Professional Writing and Editing course, regearing myself for a way to work more flexibly and from home. That all involved a long stint outside the workforce and even though I still love TV I wonder whether it would be workable to ever go back.

My career has meandered around temp jobs and admin, in and around advertising, IT, TV and corporate communication as I’ve sought to find my way into creative roles, always stuck behind the scenes instead of making them. I’ve even been an extra on Neighbours for goodness sake. I’ve rarely held down a job for long, chopping and changing, moving and taking long gaps for various reasons. Last year I finally gathered up all the bits of super I’ve collected over the years but they don’t amount to much. If I’d just got a job as an economist somewhere way back when I finished my degree it would all have been so much easier wouldn’t it?

Being able to say with some certainty that I now work as a writer is something I’m incredibly proud of and it feels like its taken me a lifetime to be able to assert I make a living from being kind-a creative. And after all that, I daftly decide to go freelance just to further worsen my chances of financial stability, so I can try and write with a clear consciousness and open heart – well that’s hardly worked out yet.

What I’m trying to say is I totally get what the women in the report were saying. My story is very similar to the ones being told in the report. I’m hopeless at networking though I don’t think that’s a gender thing. Maintaining a presence, building a brand and constantly getting runs on the board has become one of the most insidious aspects of the hyper-competitive work environment we now all endure. Balancing creative careers with families is hard. And I do feel we’ve been going backwards.

So this was a good report and a timely one and one that people should be discussing.