Women don’t make as much money as men. Full stop.

That’s true in a very short-term, dollars-to-donuts way– in Canada, as of 2021, a woman makes 89 cents for every one dollar a man makes. In real world terms, this means that if a man has to work 1,000 hours to make enough money to pay for something–a car, a piece of clothing, rent–a woman has to work 1,110 hours to purchase the same item, an amount that comes out to an extra 2.75 40 hour work weeks. 

The matter only compounds when you account for other intersections: as a racialized woman makes approximately 59 percent of what a white man makes, only 16 percent of women with a disability report being paid fairly compared to their peers and trans women make, on average, one-third less after transition than they did prior. 

The larger problem however, is that the buck, as they say, doesn’t stop there–these upfront short falls, along with social expectations and responsibilities around motherhood, caretaking and the culture of wealth and investing itself all conspire to create a situation where women not only earn less on the dollar than their male counterparts, they take longer to catch up and longer to accrue wealth, and are less likely to take “aggressive” investment options to maximize returns,  says says Kristine Beese, founder and CEO of Untangle Money. 

All this, says Beese, not only contributes to the wealth gap between men and women, but can have big impacts on women–who tend to outlive their male partners by a significant margin–on their quality of life and financial stability when it comes time to retire. 

Untangle Money, Beese says, strives to correct for this imbalance by creating “financial plans specifically designed for women and their lived experiences.” 

Cool–so what does that actually mean? 

Beese, who got her start in more classical financial management working for Bay Street firms in wealth management and investing, says it means looking at the actual culture of financial planning, which isn’t geared towards real, everyday women, but to wealthy, largely white and cis, men–the exact demographic that makes that 11 percent more on the dollar, and makes it earlier on, for longer, than women. You can’t take that tool, she says, and just try to slam women–especially women of colour, or women with disabilities, or working class women–into it and expect it to work for them. 

“The first step is to define your financial goals–but you have to remember that a traditional financial plan is geared towards people who already have money,” Beese says. “When you have money, it’s great to define what goals you have for yourself…but when we start with clients and they define their goals, they (say) things like ‘well, I’d like to have a car, I’d like to go back to school,’ things like property, education–things which, for the middle class, are actually very (financially) tight.” 

When you look at these goals and the income of the average woman and put it into the usual investment and financial planning strategies, it often looks like they not only can’t afford to meet these goals, they “can’t afford to retire,” says Beese. “I think that really shows what happens when you inadvertently take a tool that was designed for really wealthy people and try to apply it to the average person,” she says. 

Instead, Beese asks clients to create realistic portraits of their “now money” and set expectations around that. 

“So, we (Untangle Money) says ‘okay, here’s what you’ve told us about your money, here’s where we envision you’re going to be able to go with that, and here are the drivers that go into that picture–and so we’re trying to get your money to work harder to you,” she says. 

One facet of this is understanding that women have consumer needs and spending that men don’t have, and pay more for basic consumer goods–women’s clothes, for example, cost an average of 8 percent more than men’s clothes, and toiletries like deodorant or razors cost an average of 13 percent more, even when they’re chemically and practically the same product. This is important to think about, because that markup had to be adjusted to account for the lower earning power women have in the first place–that dress shirt that costs 108% instead of $100 was already 11 per cent more expensive for a woman even we account for gender-based inflation, because is only making 89 cents on the dollar in the first place. 

Moreover, “women’s spending is often seen as frivolous,” Beese says; both scotch and manicures–for which Beese herself has been “lambasted for getting” in the past– are consumer goods with social cache, but while scotch is seen as serious purchases, manicures are seen as silly. There are also social ramifications, Beese notes, for not being able to engage in certain kind of spending for women–’attractive’ people make between 10 and 15 percent more than people perceived to be ‘unattractive’ in the same position. While this is true for both men and women, to meet this standard, women have to put in more time–and spend more money–in order to avoid the ‘beauty gap’ standard, which makes these purchases, to a point, personal investments, as opposed to consumer luxuries. 

“There’s nothing more discerning about getting your nails done than buying a fancy bottle of scotch,” Beese says. 

“One can actually (see nails) as an investment, but when I talk to a financial advisor, they see that as a discretionary spend.”

This is more true of some industries, such as customer service or sales, than in others, adding that, for example, when she was a server she actually had a contract that said she was required to meet a certain standard of grooming in order to keep her job. This is especially true for racialized women, who–in some unfair, racist, and biased workplaces–are often expected to meet a white-centric “standard” of beauty around their hair for example, which has additional social, economic and temporal costs. 

“When we talk to black women, for instance, and they talk about all their hair maintenance, that is not discretionary (spending),” says Beese. “And so (Untangle Money) includes recurring hair maintenance as part of the cost of living that you incur (in your financial plan).”

Lower earning power and higher costs of living aside, women have another big problem when it comes to their financial and retirement goals, which is the culture of investment and finance itself. Women, says Beese, are culturally perceived to be less successful with money and investment than men–but we aren’t talking about anecdotal evidence, we’re talking about numbers, and the numbers say that not only is that not true, but that women are, overall, better with their money than men in the long terms, says Beese. In fact, when men and women invest at a similar level of risk, women’s investment portfolios outperform men’s by 1 percent; essentially, at a certain risk level, if a stock is expected to give a 4 percent return on investment in a man’s portfolio, women are seeing 5 percent–which is a bigger deal than it sounds, because that 1 percent return is compounded annually. 

What does that mean, in real world terms? Imagine you have 100 cows and your friend has 100 cows. After selling calves to meet your costs, you have four cows extra in your herd to start off next year, but your friend has five cows–a four and five percent increase for each of you, respectively. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but after five years you have 117 cows and your friend has 121; after 10 years, you have 142 cows, and your friend has 156. 

This one percent overperformance is so significant that, for a professional investor like Beese, it would be “career defining.” 

“If we consistently outperform the market by one percent, that makes you an incredible investor,” she says. 

Women, however, tend to be attracted to–and steered towards–lower risk, lower reward investment strategies, says Beese. On the surface, this seems like a safer bet–and one which might offer a cash-first safety net, even if it comes at the cost of paying off interest heavy debt–but have long term repercussions, especially when you consider that women make less, start generating investable wealth much later, and will live longer than their male counterparts. Part of what Untangle money does, Beese says, is take these things into account and give women all the information they need, including options that might look riskier up front, but have higher payoffs to help generate the cash needed to close that gender pay gap and shore up funds for the future–investment strategies women may have been taught to consider to “aggressive” for their own portfolios, but which men are encouraged to make. 

Upfront, women-focused financial planning aside, Untangle Money has a social, as well as economic focus, says Beese. For one thing, the company only creates financial plans – it doesn’t sell you any stocks or other investments, because that creates situations Beese feels can lead to “conflicts of interest.” For another, the company–acknowledging that their primary clientele is middle to upper middle class women at the moment–has several tiers of access in order to try to make their services more widely available to a broader set of income brackets, although only one of them is up and running at this time. 

Untangle Mini ($500+HST), the entry level program currently available, offers the “basics” for middle-class women looking to take control of their finances, plan for the future and get grounded in the basics of investing. Untangle Maxi ($2,500+HST) is a more advanced program with greater focus on investing and long term planning; it’s not currently available, but should be ready for purchase soon. Untangle Auto is an app that will provide all the same tools as Mini and Maxi, but with more capacity for the user to proceed at their own pace, checking in annually to observe their progress and set up notifications to make sure they are meeting their goals. 

Beese says she hopes to have Untangle Auto up and available by next International Women’s Day. At $50, the app is geared to a more lower-middle or working class bracket–the group of women Beese says she most wants to reach and help take control of their finances. Beese says she recognizes that the Maxi and Mini programs aren’t really useful to these groups, because in order to invest money, you need to have money to invest, and the Auto program is designed to make that easier and more realistic for a broader set of women. 

“Our goal is to get a financial plan into the hands of every woman in the world,” says Beese. 

As an entrepreneur, what’s your time worth to you? 

Now, what’s having control of your time worth? 

For most people who own their own business–especially small businesses owned by women–the answer is a lot. Studies show small business owners regularly work more than 50 hours a week, with 68 percent of those hours spent just managing daily tasks, such as emails or phone calls, and only 31 percent of that time spent actively growing their business. Moreover, in a 2021 survey, 41 percent of small business entrepreneurs reported being called away to handle a work-related matter, even when they were actively trying to take a break.

These are the kinds of problems Toronto-based Jennifer Hazel of Curate Concierge has set out to solve. 

Essentially, Curate Concierge helps entrepreneurs design and implement tightly curated, streamlined, technology-enabled work flows so that founders spend more time on their business rather than in their business. 

“My services appeal especially to growing small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to scale their systems operations to fit the budget, the needs, and the projection of their own growth,” Hazel adds. “ Our solutions are also really customized, scalable and agile– ones that can adapt.”

Similar to the way a scientist needs carefully crafted, systematically controlled research practices in order to conduct a successful experiment and gather the most accurate and useful data, small businesses too, need efficient, personally tailored operational and data gathering  systems to be successful.

Everyone knows this. But there is seemingly never enough time. And few founders go into starting a business dreaming about building a starship enterprise style operating system or healthy approach to work. They figure out the importance later on. 

This is a story Hazel knows well.

After returning from a maternity leave, Hazel says she returned to a job in which her duties were so “dramatically altered that I couldn’t really work it anymore.” With her young daughter at home and dependent on her, Hazel, who had initially been studying to be a lawyer, found she had to “make a shift very quickly,” and went into a retraining program to be a paralegal. 

Why Entrepreneurship?

“It wasn’t like I chose to be an entrepreneur at that point,” says Hazel. “Paralegal seemed like a good middle ground and timing wise, it fit. I was relying on a childcare subsidy that I absolutely had to keep – but you absolutely have to be employed or in school or…you have to be working.”

When she finished the program, however, Hazel found herself in an awkward position–she couldn’t work as a paralegal yet, because she was waiting for her licensing to come through, but was severely over qualified to be an administrative assistant. Hazel began thinking about the practice management skills she had learned during her certification as a paralegal, and that’s when the idea of running her own business “started to gel.”

Taking the Busy out of Business

Entrepreneurs–particularly women and especially women with kids– come up against “structural barriers” within contemporary work culture that not only make it harder for them to succeed, but create an emotionally and professionally damaging environment. 

Hazel soon realized she had skills which could help other entrepreneurs not only build less “busy” time sucking businesses, but better lives., Hazel’s business, Curate Concierge started as a business admin company for “twenty bucks an hour, in between (her) daughter’s naps and after she went to bed.”

“I think I posted an ad or responded to an ad (for work) or something in a Facebook group for East End Toronto mom entrepreneurs,” she says. “These were all women with businesses who, a lot of them, were on maybe their second mat leave, or were in between jobs or had recently left their place of work because (the job) didn’t work for them–the hours didn’t work for them, or the work was not aligned (with what they needed). 

Despite the freedom on being an entrepreneur, “They (the women entrepreneurs) were burning the fuck right out because, I mean, insert any one of a million reasons why the traditional job market is hostile to women working parents– and, you know, add in any other intersectionalities on top of that–and you just start to find yourself lower and lower down in the economy.” 

From these experiences, Hazel conceived Curate Concierge–although it certainly wasn’t easy, she says, noting that in the beginning she was under charging for her services and over extending herself personally–things she seeks to help her clients overcome now. 

“It cost me in the beginning way, way more to offer my services than I ever made from it,” she says. “I started learning the lesson (that I) had to value my time–that came very very quickly.”

That lesson became even more important, she says, when she and her partner split, taking her from a dual income parent to a single one–an incident that helped guide her to incorporate feminist ideology into her business, albeit “by accident.”  

“That split came, and suddenly the stakes got so much higher–I had to support myself and two little kids by myself as a solo parent…Toronto is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and I found myself tied here in a co-parenting relationship.”

Although this was difficult, Hazel says the split was ultimately good, because it allowed her to see herself and her work from new, feminist-oriented perspectives. 

“The imbalance (in my work life) started, really, when my children arrived–or, really, if we go back a little bit further than that, the fact that I got knocked up before I could even start my career,” she says. “This was where my life was at the time, and these were things that were not as smack-in-the-face prominent to me at the time, when you start to realize the gender imbalance in the home and in the workplace.” 

“The only reason my new business could take off,” Hazel adds with a laugh, speaking of the unpaid  domestic and emotional labour she juggled prior to her separation,  “is the fact that I wasn’t cleaning up after after a quote unquote  ‘third child’ in addition to my other two actual children.”

Beating Toxic Productivity Culture

The idea that you have to be constantly on and constantly available as a worker–or as a business owner–is a toxic one, says Hazel, and something she works hard to recondition both systems and her clients to fight against. One client, for example–a lawyer who was used to always being “on”–was getting ready to take a vacation for a week, and asked Hazel to watch her inbox for her, even though no one was in litigation and she didn’t really need someone to be paying attention to her emails–she was just so accustomed to being available that she assumed she had to be, even though it wasn’t necessary. 

“I said, ‘Okay, does the auto responder work on your email? Then why don’t you just turn it off, save yourself the money and enjoy your week at the cottage?” she says. “It was honestly so unheard of for her, and she wrote back to me in such shock at such a simple suggestion…those are really common stories that I get with clients.”

Hazel says helping her clients see and beat these toxic patterns is incredibly rewarding for her, especially when it leads to realizations for those clients about creating better and more balanced lives –and businesses for themselves.  

“This is exactly why I went into business for myself,” Hazel says.

Burned out and done, dietitian Jillian Walsh needed a change. Seeking to create a better life for herself, her family, colleagues and improve client outcomes, Walsh set out on her own, starting up Change Creates Change (CCC), a series of private care clinics specializing in treating eating disorders with a feminist focus. 

In addition to coping with heightened emotional, social and financial pressures of her own during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Walsh found the public health care system overwhelmed, leaving people struggling with eating disorders to fend for themselves. The system was also unable to meet her own support needs as a professional, partner, and new parent within that system.

Even before the pandemic, eating disorder care has been a female-dominated health care specialty – in Canada, about 95 percent of dieticians identify as women, and about 80 percent do so in the US –with a chronically high burnout rate.  Walsh adds that despite being women-led, the profession offered poor flexibility and low work-life balance, especially for new mothers. The current framework – based on the traditional western medical system, which is rooted in misogyny and patriarchy – simply doesn’t work for many women in the field, herself included. It results in poor mental health, which in turn, negatively impacts the quality and effectiveness of care they can give clients. 

“A lot of the staff at CCC can’t work 9-to-5, Monday to Friday. We can’t put in seven hours straight on, using telehealth or in an office, but those were the demands put on us,” says Walsh. 

Creating a Feminist Enterprise

For Walsh, building a new, more feminist work environment “was about the flexibility and the autonomy to be able to meet our own professional care needs, versus having to assimilate to the traditional culture of the work environment,” noting that this means some of her staff work in the morning or evening, depending on what works best for them.

“A lot of us work with our kids on our laps – I had my five-month-old baby in a carrier all the time. I’d never be able to do that in the public system, but I was able to do it over here (at CCC) and still do the work I want to do.”

Walsh also strives to build an environment where people communicate regularly and feel safe expressing themselves when maxed out. Several times a year, staff are entitled to ‘think weeks’, which are periods when they don’t necessarily have to come into the office or see patients, but they’re doing other things, like catching up on research papers or working on other aspects of their professional life – something significant in her field, she says, because of the ‘emotional toll’ working with people struggling with an eating disorder can take on a professional caregiver. 

“We’re exposed to secondary trauma each and every day, and sometimes we become traumatized ourselves,” says Walsh, noting that awareness of this and making space and time for it was “Something that was really lacking in our past positions and experiences.”

Eating disorders constitute a broad category of diagnosable illnesses, which often require treatment for both physical and mental health. CCC predominantly works with kids and youth up to around 25, says Walsh. This puts most of her company’s clients squarely in the Gen Z demographic – an age range which is the queerest in recent history, with about 20 per cent identifying as members of the LGTBQ+ community and around 15% of those identifying as ‘queer or transgender.’ This is important as queer people – particularly trans and non-binary folks–are at a higher risk of disordered eating and experience it at higher rates than the general population. 

At present, none of the staff at CCC openly identified through the website as anything other than cis, and all are women. A lack of access to trans-informed, gender-affirming care is a recognized barrier to healthcare for gender non-conforming folk.

Likewise, the overwhelming majority of CCC’s staff is white. This is, again, notable, particularly in an industry which has come under criticism for practices which exclude, ignore or vilify non-white body types, diets and experiences. As a result of these ingrained biases, dietetics as a profession hasn’t been traditionally friendly to non-conforming bodies, sexualities or non-white people, and studies show a lack of diversity is a problem among Canadian dieticians in particular. 

Walsh is aware these are problems but notes they aren’t specific to her company; the entire industry struggles with this and its history of practice. “The industry has historically also been ‘shitty’ because what it was traditionally trained its clinicians to do was “to tell people to lose weight” 

To combat this inherited bias, Walsh says her company is offering intern positions to folks from ‘non-dominant systemic identities,’ even if they don’t have the traditional academic training or if they choose not to stay on and work with the company in the future. 

“We want to train these folks because we want to hire them, but (at the moment) we have nobody to hire (in these demographics) because either they don’t feel safe to apply or they haven’t had the opportunities within dietetics yet,” says Walsh. “There’s been a big movement in the past five years… calling out white women in dietetics for taking up too much space– and we are taking up too much space.”

“We don’t need more white women as interns. We need to do our part in diversifying dietetics.” 

Eating Disorders Are Rising

The pandemic has fueled a documented rise in eating disorder diagnoses and relapses. Walsh thinks part of this is that parents have been home with their kids more and therefore more able to notice – and be alarmed by – unhealthy behaviours. 

“Before COVID-19, the wait times for eating disorder care within the public system was anywhere from three months to 12 months–and when we talk about the nature of an eating disorder, time is of the essence, because the longer it goes untreated, the harder it is to treat, the more difficult it is to overcome and actually the more damage it does to the body. Unfortunately with COVID-19, a lot of the public eating disorder programs got shut down and their staff were redeployed to vaccine clinics, to be the people at the door checking temperatures and stuff, so the virus) created a significant backlog where wait times were either doubled, tripled, quadrupled or just closed altogether,” says Walsh.

“Parents were in a lot of distress because they were noticing that their kids were extremely sick. They were going to the doctor and the doctor was like “Yep, this looks like an eating disorder – go over to the public system.” And the public system is like “Yep, absolutely. We’ll see you in 12 to 24 months.’”

As a result, the need for care for eating disorders has ballooned, putting even more stress on an already strained arm of the healthcare system, and creating more demand for private care clinics like CCC–care which costs around $150 an hour. 

From a feminist perspective, a private care clinic model poses a problem. Can a health care business that provides essential, potentially life-saving medical services only to those who can afford to pay for it, either out of pocket or by insurance – the demographic which, by Walsh’s admission, makes up the majority of CCC’s clients – really be said to be feminist? 

Walsh admits that, yes, the private health care model does pose a problem from this angle – one she hopes to address in the future. 

“We’re only in month 18 of operations. We’re only now being able to find our feet underneath us to start to put more time and energy into the equity pricing models so that we can actually offer services to everyone, not just folks that are privileged.”

That might include something like a sliding scale or pay-what-you-can model, says Walsh, or a fund where wealthier patients can donate cash to help pay for clients who can’t afford it. She notes that the company isn’t tied to the ‘for profit model’ and moving to a not-for-profit model is something she might consider in the future. 

“We’re very new and just trying to see what governance model we need to fall under to be as sustainable as possible. “We’re trying to flip that model because the goal is not actually to develop a profit – it’s just to create sustainable employment for women in eating disorder care.” 

What was your favourite tv show when you were a kid?

If you’re an 80’s baby, it may have been Babar, Thundercats or Inspector Gadget. If you grew up in the 90s, maybe it was Lamb Chop’s Play Along, Pokemon or Gargoyles. If you’re Gen Z, you probably binged on Caillou, Teen Titans, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Whatever your favourite, you most certainly remember it. The shows we watch as children tend to hold a nostalgic place in our hearts – and have a formative impact on our minds.

Meet Maria Kennedy, executive producer and owner of media company Little Engine Moving Pictures, who is creating TV, film and interactive content for the next generation of “the young and the young-at-heart.”

Kennedy, who identifies as mixed race Caucasian and Filipino, grew up in “a small out port town” in “the heel of the boot” in Newfoundland, a community that was “almost entirely white,” she says. “Growing up as a kid, one thing was for sure – I did not see a lot of myself on TV or media. And so now I have an opportunity to change that.”

Her mandate? “To do something that makes an impact and is sort of transformative in the children’s and family space.” She describes the shows her company develops as “progressive, aiming to have “50-50 gender balance” and sexual, gender and racial diversity.

Kennedy graduated with an applied degree in fashion from Ryerson University. Her grandmother was a seamstress in the Philippines, and her mother sewed all the family’s clothes, so it came “somewhat naturally” to her, she says. She focused on costume design, which is what “got her in” with film students. She went onto work in set decoration, wardrobe and art departments then became an assistant producer, where she started “from the ground up” working on commercials, music videos and branded content.

“I was always keen to take on new responsibilities–I think part of being the offspring of an immigrant or coming from an immigrant family is that you are very work-oriented. I don’t know if that’s a survival thing or what, but I’m a very work-oriented person.

Kennedy started Little Engine in 2013 with her husband, Ben Mazzotta, a director, originally focusing on corporate content, but she really wanted to create kids programming. “We had young kids, and I was watching and researching the shows my children were watching – I had control of the remote at that point,” she says. “My parents were both educators. I liked the idea of curriculum-lead content that could be very entertaining and also progressive that had, you know, diversity and definitely gender parity, because there are so many kids shows where the main characters are little boys and not girls.”

So, they gathered some puppeteer friends they had met while attending Ryerson University and shot a “little six-minute pilot” in their dining room, what would become Now You Know, a science-based educational program geared to four-to-six year-olds. Says Kennedy: “I sent it to TVO and the head of TVO Kids liked it and she immediately greenlit it into production.”

Kennedy became sole owner of the company in 2016, when Mazzotta stepped back to focus on content for adults. The company now has a “growing team” of six that balloons to around 60 heading into production and strives to pay fair living wages and be inclusive in hires, both on camera and behind the camera. “If you look at our crew shots, we try to have as much diversity as possible. And I try to make that known.”

Although she did not set out to build an intentionally feminist company, Kennedy found that as she created kids shows and leaned towards working with female creators that her work became increasingly focused on “not only gender, but making sure there was equality.

“I think it was really just in the course of gaining experience as a business owner that made (the company) more of a feminist company. I evolved as a feminist. And it was really only in the last few years that I learned to use my voice and I (began) seeking out spaces where I could explore and learn more about being a feminist business owner.

“Everyone is talking about diversity, everyone is talking about gender parity and equity,” says Kennedy. “And that’s one of the first things that I’m going to talk about if I’m pitching a show, if I’m looking for a show to develop, you know. Those are among the first qualities that I’m looking for.”

For example, Little Engine is currently developing a “space-adventure comedy series” aimed at eight-to-12 year-olds called Starseeker, which features a strong female lead of colour and a racially diverse cast. A teen series in development, Local Heroes, features an openly lesbian lead.

Representation in kids programming has traditionally been white cis-heterosexual male focused– think about the way men and women are portrayed in classic series like He-man or the 90s X-Men, all barrel chests and heaving breasts, or the dearth of Princesses of colour in the Disney franchise (not to mention its reticence to just give Frozen queer-icon Elsa a freaking girlfriend already– although there are rumours they may rectify this in Frozen 3).This is an overarching problem in the industry even now; a 2019 study by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers found that children’s programming focused mainly on male characters and there was serious under representation of people of colour, women and characters with disabilities.

Despite this lack of variety, there appears to be a serious hunger for more diversity. Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is more of a re-imaging than a remake of 80’s She-Ra, which featured a scantily clad heroine; the updated version features openly homosexual relationships, including those between people of colour, strong female leads with a variety of body types, and neurodivergent and openly non-binary characters. That show wrapped up in early 2020 to glowing critical reviews and nearly a dozen award nominations.

So, what does long term success look like for Little Engine Moving Pictures? Kennedy says, for her, it’s a very practical thing.

“It really comes back to what I would want, as a team member, and that’s to have a fulfilling job and a career, one that’s financially viable,” she says, with a smile. “And, obviously, to tell kids stories that travel the world, that make an impact on a young audience so that it transforms them, in some way.

“That’s really inspiring to me.”

Publishers Note: Little Engine is a participant in Canada’s first feminist accelerator program for women in digital media, Fifth Wave Labs. The Fifth Wave is a year-round program offered by CFC Media Lab and its partners to support the growth and development of women entrepreneurs in the digital media sector in southern Ontario. All enterprise founders in the Fifth Wave community are selected for both their potential and commitment toward weaving intersectional feminist ideals of equity and fairness into sustainable and scalable business growth strategies. Fifth Wave Initiative is committed to 30% participation by members of underrepresented groups. The Fifth Wave is a LiisBeth Media partner and ally. Apply here.