Our Story

This is Women's Work

For most of history, "women's work" was shorthand for the kind of labour that society depended on but rarely thought to value: the cooking and the cleaning, the caring and the raising, the effort that kept households running and communities functional without ever showing up on a balance sheet or earning its practitioners any formal recognition. It was the work that happened in the background of other people's more consequential stories, and when venture capital arrived with its promise to fund the world's great ideas, it was not what anyone had in mind.

That changes here.

Female founders receive less than 2% of venture capital funding globally, a figure that has barely shifted in a decade and drops further still for women of colour and those from marginalised communities. The explanation most commonly offered is that the pipeline of female-led businesses is simply smaller, but that reading misses the structural point: the system that decides who gets backing was built by and largely for someone else, and it has functioned, with considerable consistency, exactly as designed.

What makes this particularly striking is what women are building regardless. The research on domestic labour is consistent: women carry a disproportionate share of childcare, elder care, and the household work that makes daily life function, and they do this while simultaneously running businesses, managing supply chains, handling customer relationships, and filing the same quarterly returns as everyone else. This is not a minor inconvenience that sits alongside the work. It is a second, largely unpaid job running in parallel with the first.

I know this not from research but from experience, from the particular arithmetic of building something in the margins of a life that was already full: the gaps between school runs and evening calls, the early mornings before anyone else was awake, the headspace that existed somewhere between someone else's need and something I wanted to make. Having built that way, what strikes me most is not how difficult it is but how many women do it regardless, and how good the things they build tend to be.

Women's Work was built to solve that. Not through institutional funding or venture infrastructure, but through commerce: finding the businesses that deserve to be found, writing about them honestly, selling them properly, and pointing the people who want them in the right direction.

That is why it is called Women's Work

The phrase carried baggage for a long time. It meant the domestic things, the invisible things, the labour the economy did not count because it did not pay for it.

The women on this platform are doing something else entirely. Building businesses. Running supply chains. Designing products. Managing the whole complicated thing. And doing it while the world still expects them to do the other kind of women's work as well.

We are using the name differently now. We own it.

I am not a guru. I am not here to sell you a personal brand course or teach you to grow a business by following someone else's system. I am a founder and a curator who got tired of watching brilliant women build brilliant things in near-total obscurity because the system was looking elsewhere.

Women's Work is my answer to that. A platform that finds the best women-founded businesses, tells their stories, and sells what they make. If you make something, this is where you get found. If you want to buy something and care about who made it, this is where you come.

Every brand featured here is women-founded. Every piece we publish is here because it is genuinely worth your attention. Every time you read, share, or buy, money moves directly to a woman who built the thing you are looking at.

That is not a movement in the way that word usually gets used, not a hashtag or a conference or a collective feeling that fades by Thursday. It is a business. One that works when you use it, and grows when you share it, and means something every time money lands somewhere it was earned. One wins, we all win.

The work has always been here. Now, so are we.

Lucy Chadwick, Founder