The Nightly On Leadership: How Future Women founder Helen McCabe took a bold leap to chart her own path

It was September 2015 and Helen McCabe was surrounded by Australia’s most influential women at an event she had organised at the Art Gallery of NSW.

The guest list, a testament to her influence as editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly, included Quentin Bryce, Ros Packer, Jesinta Campbell (now Franklin), Turia Pitt and Lisa Wilkinson.

Gladys Berejiklian was there, on her birthday, saying she would not have missed the event for the world, and Peta Credlin made a powerful, headline-grabbing speech just days after her boss Tony Abbott was ousted as prime minister by Malcolm Turnbull in a dramatic leadership spill.

As McCabe soaked up the palpable energy in the room, before hosting a panel discussion on leadership, politics, gender equity and opportunity, an idea started to form which just four months later would see the respected journalist walk away from one of the most high-profile media jobs in the country.

McCabe was six years into her successful, and at times controversial, editorship at the long-running magazine. Just a few weeks on from that 2015 Women of the Future awards night she would be named editor of the year at the Publish Awards, and was preparing to deliver the prestigious Andrew Olle media lecture.

It is fair to say she was at the height of her career, yet McCabe was fast coming to the conclusion she was on borrowed time.

“I was like, ‘what am I doing here?’ I was nearly 50, I had done print, television, radio, and I hadn’t really done digital, so I was heading towards being unemployable,” McCabe says.

“And I got to a point where I was super frustrated at the way magazines were being led, particularly at that time, by a bunch of men.”

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She was desperate to “run her own show”, and could see there was a market for premium, accessible digital content for Australian women.

“I thought, ‘I’ve really got to carve out my own path here’, and I didn’t want to be dependent on a 55-year-old media executive telling me I was too old to run anything, so that was a bit of a driver,” she says.

So in January 2016 McCabe took the leap and resigned.

The path she went on to carve out would be life-changing for not only her but also many others.

McCabe established Future Women, which she describes as a tech business helping women who work and those who want to work.

It was launched in 2018 as a premium digital space for professional women. Its subscription model gave members access to events, workshops, mentoring, job connections and content.

“It was for women who were starting to lead their own teams and juggle their family lives, who were not looking for just celebrity gossip and beauty tips,” she explains.

“I thought of the 25-year-old accountant who was eventually going to be CEO of a small to medium-sized company. What is she reading?”

McCabe had grown increasingly frustrated at the reality of women’s magazines, which meant “there were only four or five women that you could put on the cover and be confident the magazine would sell”.

“We had not developed enough female heroes, female stars, female leaders, and that’s partly because we didn’t appoint them,” she says.

“There are all these great women out there doing great things. I wanted to find them and tell their stories, and I wanted to appeal to them.“

McCabe had long been convinced that female readers wanted more from their content than “gossip, recipes and knitting patterns”, and had sought to push these boundaries at the Weekly.

And I got to a point where I was super frustrated at the way magazines were being led, particularly at that time, by a bunch of men.

Under her leadership the magazine featured more politics and news, while still offering up the expected glamorous celebrity shoots and British royal family features. This reflected her past experience in newsrooms at The Australian and the Sunday Telegraph, her long-held passion for politics and her time working in Canberra’s press gallery, which remains a career and life highlight.

Cover stars during her time at the Weekly included Anna Bligh, Rosie Batty, Julia Gillard and McCabe’s personal favourite, burns survivor Turia Pitt.

At times the direction caused a stir, and saw her butt heads with Bauer, the German owners of the magazine.

“There was this very, very widely held view that women weren’t interested in policies or politics or economics, and if you give them any of that nonsense, you’re not going to be successful,” she says.

“I had a visceral reaction to the idea that we should just feed women anti-ageing and diet (content), celebrity gossip, home-making recipes and knitting patterns, and that was possibly radical at the time.”

Ten years on, in a decade in which the media landscape has changed dramatically, McCabe says it’s almost unfathomable to think that female audiences were regarded in such a way.

“Today you’ve got women leading the Reserve Bank, Woolworths, Coles, Macquarie Bank; the Minister for Finance is a woman. I could go on and on,” she says.

“It is kind of incomprehensible that we ever thought that way, that ‘oh no, women aren’t interested in how the country is run, or in the future of their communities’.

“So yes, I struggled with it, but I worked within the boundaries of that, too, so acknowledging you can’t just produce a combination of The Australian and the Financial Review in a women’s magazine.”

Instead she tried to offer that magical mix of light and shade to satisfy rusted-on readers while at the same time winning over new ones.

It was McCabe’s desire for “a big life” and a natural curiosity that led her to decide, as a teenager, that journalism was for her. She was raised on the family farm in South Australia and inherited a love of politics from her parents. When a TV job came up in Canberra, she jumped at the opportunity.

“It was such a big stage and so competitive, and therefore very powerful in my career,” she says of her time in the press gallery.

“That was a wild experience. I love the contest of ideas, I love the shamelessness of politicians and their love of hearing their own voice.

“There’s no doubt I’m still drawn to Canberra.”

She also remains passionate about tabloid newspapers, having spent 12 years at News Corp working alongside “the stars of her generation” including David Penberthy, Annabel Crabb, Phil Coorey, Samantha Maiden and David Luff.

McCabe describes that era as a fun and fascinating time, but believes the adrenaline-fuelled life of a hard-news reporter is more suited to younger people. That doesn’t mean her role as founder and managing director of Future Women is without its own unique pressures, namely the stress of having staff whose livelihoods rely on you.

“Every staff member wants to be paid more, and every staff member wants a pathway to a better role, and that means the pressure is on you as the founder to make that business successful, so that you can support the ambitions of the staff that you kind of fall in love with,” she says.

The company’s mostly female employees work remotely, and McCabe says while the flexibility “utterly works”, she is monitoring the national WFH debate closely.

“If I want the best staff and the most committed staff, giving them flexible work works for the business model,” she says. “But come back to me in five years’ time, and if we had 200 staff, I might feel very differently.

“I can’t run a business just to be nice, so it has to work and make money and be profitable.”

Alongside McCabe since the early days of FW is another former journalist, Jamila Rizvi, the organisation’s deputy managing director, whom McCabe describes as the leading feminist voice of her generation.

“We see the world completely differently, we have exactly the opposite approach on any topic. We are, I think, a testimony to diversity of opinion, diversity of backgrounds, pure journalism, pure politics,” McCabe says.

“Working with her is extremely humbling, and I’m not being a classic female leader in saying this, but she can do almost everything better than me . . . (so) you know you should just get out of her way.”

FW was just two years old when the pandemic hit, stopping the fledgling brand event series in its tracks and forcing McCabe and Rizvi to pivot.

There was this very, very widely held view that women weren’t interested in policies or politics or economics, and if you give them any of that nonsense, you’re not going to be successful.

They used a Federal Government grant to build a program which now forms a major, and growing, part of the business. The Jobs Academy is a 12-month virtual pre-employment program aimed at equipping women with the skills, knowledge and connections to re-enter the workforce. It started with a pilot of 140 women, delivering a 73 per cent success rate of getting participants into study or the workforce, and has since had 11,000 applications for 4000 positions.

“It might be someone who was an accountant, had three kids, they run the house, one of their children had some challenges, and they’ve been immersed in all that and come out of it not wanting to be an accountant any more but not knowing how to do anything else,” McCabe explains.

“They don’t know how to do a CV, some might never have done an interview, or they’ve missed upskilling in the digital space; it’s a career blindness.

“The good news is it’s really solvable. For some women it takes a couple of months, some it takes a full 12 months. But if you’ve navigated the NDIS or run the home, your skills are quite extensive.

“You’ve got this educated, competent, ‘give a busy woman a job’ kind of mindset, and then you’ve got a skills shortage. So we plug those two things in.”

The Jobs Academy receives Federal funding and is connected with more than 100 businesses, including Salesforce, Google, Westpac and Deloitte.

Over the next two years McCabe wants to expand the academy to 10,000 women and plans to “ride that AI productivity wave” in order to help more women.

In 2021 FW introduced a program aimed at men, Change Makers, which provides tools for men to build inclusive and gender-equal workplaces. The idea came from former sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins, whom McCabe lists as one of the leaders she is inspired by.

She also mentions Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, “a political force” whose leadership style and resilience she admires; Turia Pitt, “she does what’s hard, digs deep and has prevailed after such extraordinary setbacks”; and long-time friend David Gyngell.

“He’s an unbelievable friend; the first person to call, the first to send flowers . . . his business brain is ridiculous and he is better connected now than he ever was,” she says of the former Nine group boss.

All are adept communicators, which McCabe counts as one of the most valuable qualities in a leader.

“What I really want women who are in leadership roles to understand is (the importance of) putting their hand up for taking the microphone or asking the question or identifying what their team has just achieved and telling the story behind that,” she says.

“Because if you think about the top leaders in this country, whether it be Michele Bullock, Katy Gallagher or Matt Comyn, what they’re really good at doing is telling the story or communicating and articulating the vision.

“And I find many female leaders talk about collaboration, they talk about empathy, and I’m not saying they’re not skills and they’re not important, but they’re secondary. I would just love to see women from early in their careers get good at the communication piece.”

The day before our interview, in early December, McCabe and the team received an email from a Jobs Academy participant who had recently secured her “dream job”; she said the program showed her there was “hope” and that now her career “feels like it has substance and opportunity again”.

You’ve got this educated, competent, ‘give a busy woman a job’ kind of mindset, and then you’ve got a skills shortage. So we plug those two things in.

It is feedback like this that drives McCabe, who wants to grow the Jobs Academy from 2000 to 10,000 women in the next two years.

At the same time, she has a personal goal to reduce her work hours and spend more time with her friends and family, in particular her beloved nieces and nephews.

“It is a luxury to be able to say I get to choose to do the work I want to do. I’m not great at the celebration piece, and partly because I see so much opportunity, so many more things we can do, and I kind of want to do them all at once,” she says.

“To be able to do work that, after all this time in my career, impacts women in this country, directly and positively, is pretty gratifying.

“But it means those days when I think I might retire early and backpack through South America, I know I’ve got a bit longer to go, because there is still more to do.”