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My mum died on a Sunday morning. Two days later I stood in front of seventy people and ran a sold-out workshop. Not because I was okay. Not because I wanted to. Because when you run a service-based business and you are the business, nobody is coming to tap you out when your life falls apart. It’s almost two years now. I can write that sentence without my chest collapsing, which feels like its own small betrayal. Mum had early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed in her fifties and died at sixty-nine, after years of our family grieving her in instalments while she was still alive. By the time the phone rang just after midnight that Sunday, I genuinely thought I’d done the hard part. I thought the long goodbye was a kind of preparation. It isn’t. Nothing is. What I remember most clearly about the days between her death and that workshop isn’t grief, exactly. It’s logistics. Funeral photos chosen between emails. A eulogy rehearsed in the car. The strange administrative calm that settles over you when there’s nowhere else for the grief to go. I was answering client DMs the morning of the funeral. Not because anyone made me. Because I’d built a business where stopping felt more frightening than continuing. This is the part nobody warns you about when you go out on your own. There’s no bereavement leave for sole traders. No one covering your shift. No manager saying take the week, we’ve got this. If you stop, the income stops. Your clients don’t suddenly stop having launches. Your inbox doesn’t pause out of respect. The mortgage doesn’t care that your mother just died. Most of the women in that workshop knew. They’d followed me online for years and watched our family live through Alzheimer’s in real time. I opened by telling them straight: my mum died on Sunday, I probably won’t be my usual eccentric self, but you’re here to learn and I’m not going to let you down. I’m not going to let you down. I’ve thought about that sentence a lot in the two years since. It tells you everything about the contract women in service businesses have quietly signed. We don’t let people down. Not when we’re sick, not when we’re heartbroken, not when our kids are imploding behind the Zoom background. We keep replying. We keep performing. We keep being “professional” – a word that, the more I sit with it, mostly seems to mean _do not inconvenience anyone with the fact that you are a person_. Grief inside a service business is strange because there’s nowhere to put it. Your calendar still exists. Your clients still need you to show up as the version of yourself they paid for. So you compartmentalise, which is a clinical word for the deeply unclinical experience of crying in the shower and then doing your eyeliner for a 10am. I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because we have built an entire cultural mythology around female entrepreneurship… the freedom, the flexibility, the _being your own boss_ , and almost none of it accounts for what happens when real life arrives. When someone dies. When your body gives out. When the person you’re caring for needs more than your evenings. We talk about resilience like it’s a virtue. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just the only option a woman has been left with, dressed up in language that makes the rest of us feel inspired by her instead of furious on her behalf. I ran the workshop. It went well. People told me afterwards I was brave, and I smiled and thanked them, and drove home, and didn’t get out of bed properly for about a week. The version of that story we usually tell stops at _she showed up anyway_. I want us to start telling the rest of it. The cost is real. And pretending it isn’t is how we keep handing the next woman the same impossible script. **_Image: Maree Sortino (left) alongside her mother (right)._** Share this business ownersentrepreneursgriefsole traders by Maree Sortino 2 days ago ## Stay Smart! Get Women's Agenda in your inbox * Email * Name This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ ## Latest news ### Brittany Higgins appointed Executive Director of Vida Fund as organisation ramps up gender equity campaign ### From ‘Ditch the Witch’ to inciting rape this is what the normalisation of misogyny looks like ### Blood-stained front page sparks global conversation about period poverty ### ‘Masculinism’ unites the right in the US against women. Is Australia experiencing the same trend? ### Meet the internet movement trying to tackle the manosphere. It’s called BreadTube ### How an International Court judge thinks about hope

Journalist Helen Lewis outlined how “masculinism” is now the single most important force uniting the right in America in her piece “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote”, published in _The Atlantic_ last month. She describes the 2026 version of this force as “bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasts and fanboys.” This unruly gang ignores their differences to unite on one clear cause: fighting the gains of feminism. Concerns about the gains of women are so significant these individuals and groups can overlook where they hold massive disagreements elsewhere, such as regarding the war in Iran, the rise of big tech and AI and immigration. There’s a wide spectrum of concerns at play – including legitimate concerns regarding male loneliness at one end, and Helen Andrews’ viral 2025 argument that women’s workforce participation has weakened institutions and undermined risk-taking culture. The spectrum extends to more extreme suggestions about “breeding gulags”, and Nick Fuentes’ grotesque comments that women are “our No. 1 political enemy.” Further, Lewis quotes Douglas Wilson, a pastor who was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon, and wants to repeal the 19th Amendment to return to household-based voting, where men vote on behalf of families. Given recent events in Australia, including backlash against key leadership appointments and the rise of One Nation, Lewis’ unifying force of masculinism is an idea we should further consider in light of some of the trends taking hold here. Masculinism is taking hold across Australian political, sporting and cultural narratives, uniting our own broad spectrum of conservatives, columnists, gym bros, influencers, and elected officials against concerns about just what women have gained in recent years. Indeed, one such columnist raised concerns about a “preference” for appointing women to key leadership roles and declared that Treasurer Jim Chalmers should never have drawn attention to the fact that women are now leading some of Australia’s biggest institutions, including the RBA, the Treasury and the Productivity Commission. Chalmers had merely pointed out the historic context of the “firsts” achieved for women, but his comments stirred subtle suggestions of a conspiracy of women taking the helm at the expense of more qualified men. And such backlash was evident across some of the sexist and gendered hate posted in response to LT Gen Susan Coyle being appointed as the first female Chief of Army. In 2026, we’re seeing a familiar pattern of backlash that emerges when women are perceived to have taken on too much power. Only this time, it’s far less subtle. Alan Jones once declared that women were “destroying the joint”, referencing the fact that we had a female prime minister and female Lord Mayor of Sydney, and in other key positions of power at one point. Around the same time, then Opposition leader Tony Abbott addressed a rally in front of a “Ditch the Witch” sign depicting then Prime Minister Julia Gillard. It’s telling that the same “Ditch the Witch” trope has emerged this week in Victoria, this time depicting Premier Jacinta Allan and this time paid for by a local businessman (he owns a brothel), with the sign touring the streets of Melbourne. Recent ANU research found that the proportion of Australians who believe gender equality has gone “too far” had doubled to 19 per cent, while its research published in February 2026 found that younger generations of men in Australia are increasingly shifting to the right just as more women are shifting to the left – a local edition of the political polarisation that Lewis documents in her essay as occurring in the US. Meanwhile, we cannot overlook the rise of One Nation in Australia and its opposition to certain women’s gains, despite the party having a female leader itself. One Nation employed a convicted rapist and then lamented the fact he had to be stood down due to concerns raised by key Liberal men. One Nation has also managed to attract other candidates and members sacked from elsewhere for breaching family violence prevention orders. And Hanson herself has a particular talent for cultivating support from extreme men’s rights activist groups. And various forms of Helen Lewis’ spectrum of masculinism is reaching into Australian schools, with Monash University finding that ideas of male supremacy in Australian classrooms were “rampant among women teachers interviewed”. The teachers noted an increase in sexual harassment and overt displays of authority and dominance toward women teachers. A January 2026 study of 107 teachers found a noticeable shift since 2022, aligning with the rise of the manosphere. Victoria recently announced its first Minister for Men and Boys, specifically to address the manosphere, seeing the state government formally acknowledging a policy problem serious enough to warrant ministerial attention. Like in the US, the spectrum of masculinism in Australia is wide, ranging from legitimate concern on issues like male loneliness and poor mental health (which shouldn’t be confused as being caused by women), to ideas that Australia’s response to domestic and family violence has gone too far, to false narratives about reproductive rights, and to full-blown public, misogynistic claims about women in leadership. It fits with Lewis’ description of masculinism playing into a “perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo – whatever that currently is.” In 2026 Australia, the grievance machine spans a wide range of issues, including the cost of living, housing affordability, a lack of opportunity, and the fuel crisis. Various groups get blamed — like Immigration for housing (despite the evidence) and lefty inner-city hippies for rising energy costs. But beware a common rising enemy that becomes the perfect vehicle for parking all such blame: women. Share this backlashBacklash ConversationsMAGA by Angela Priestley 12 hours ago ## Stay Smart! Get Women's Agenda in your inbox * Email * Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ ## Latest news ### Brittany Higgins appointed Executive Director of Vida Fund as organisation ramps up gender equity campaign ### From ‘Ditch the Witch’ to inciting rape this is what the normalisation of misogyny looks like ### Blood-stained front page sparks global conversation about period poverty ### Meet the internet movement trying to tackle the manosphere. It’s called BreadTube ### The Serena Williams comeback we didn’t know we needed ### How an International Court judge thinks about hope