How a united company purpose is reinvigorating Bauer Media’s portfolio of magazines

In late 2017, Bauer Media embarked on a research piece executives at the company saw as a “side hustle”.

Teaming up with British trend forecasting agency, Future Laboratories, the publisher commissioned the Female Futures study. The research looked at how far women had come in terms of achieving gender parity and how much further there was to go with the findings highlighting that Australian women had reached a tipping point.

More than half of all Australian women have become the major breadwinner in their household, up from 39% in 2006. They also outpace men in obtaining higher education. And 34% of all small business operators in Australia were now female, a figure that had increased by 46% in the past two decades.  

Despite these findings, women still have a long way to go. As Jane Waterhouse, general manager of Bauer’s insight-led brand entertainment division, Story54, told the Mumbrella360 conference in June, “This sentiment is reflected with some very sobering facts. One of those facts is that the global gender pay gap will take 216 years to close if we keep going the way that we’re going. In 2017, across the categories of health, education, politics, and economics, that pay gap actually widened. That’s the first time that’s happened since records began about 11 years ago.”