‘What Happens Next?’: What Can Influencers Teach Us About Women and Work?

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Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts, what will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Kate Fitch: Women have long had a side hustle to supplement incomes to a main job, and so that's how many want-to-be influencers start. They're building a brand profile, they're developing an audience online, but it's often not their main job.

Olivia White: I threw myself into it and I waded my way through it, and yeah, was fortunate enough to turn it into a business but also something that I loved and enjoyed. Yes, so amazing.

Jo Stanley: I think it's wonderful that women have such freedom to find expression and creatively take a stakehold of something that really can be quite lucrative for some, but mostly really fulfilling, I think.

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Susan Carland: As I'm sure you're painfully aware, we're living in interesting times, and by that, I mean times of tremendous uncertainty and social upheaval. It's not easy, but it's also not the first time.

Maybe we can think of it as a growing pain, an uncomfortable period on the way to progress. The late 1960s and 1970s displayed social and economic unrest too, gradually transforming attitudes and laws for the better.

One example of this was the Quiet Revolution, a slow shift in attitudes and opportunities for women in the workplace leading to increased gender equality and expanded roles for women.

Before the Quiet Revolution, traditional gender roles prevailed. Women's participation in the workforce was limited to certain acceptable professions, such as nursing or teaching, and the prevailing societal norms dictated that our primary role was as homemakers and caretakers. But women began to enter the workforce in larger numbers after World War II, and the second wave of the feminist movement played a crucial role in challenging those norms and advocating for women's rights and opportunities in all aspects of life, including work.

Progress was made during the Quiet Revolution, but gender inequality in the workforce has by no means been eradicated. Often, the labour women perform is hidden or discounted compared to the jobs men perform. And as emerging technologies generate new career paths, many of those same old gender roles have stuck around.

Last week, we explored the world of influencer culture, including its connection to gendered labour and the tricky dynamics of one-sided or parasocial relationships between content creators and their audiences.

This week on the podcast, our guests will unpack the work that needs to be done in this area to challenge societal norms and how progress in digital spaces can help us build a more inclusive and equitable future offline too. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Susan Carland: For a job with such a superficial stereotype, there's much more to influencing than bikinis and brunch. Between the behind-the-scenes work to capture the perfect shot, the endless admin that comes with running a business, and the invisible labour inherent to establishing and maintaining emotional connections with an audience of thousands, influencers put in the hours.

And of course, because we live in a just world where labour is compensated appropriately, that means the women running these accounts are raking in the big bucks... right?

Kate Fitch: Male influencers are paid more.

Susan Carland: Really?

Kate Fitch: Yes. On current industry rates, they're paid about 30 per cent more than female influencers. But it can vary by platform and what they're doing in that the pay gap is even higher on some platforms. And also, as influencers are often stigmatised as frivolous and superficial, male influencers often strive to be recognised as content creators or digital creators rather than influencers.

Susan Carland: Dr Kate Fitch is a senior lecturer in Monash University's School of Media, Film, and Journalism. Her research examines public relations and promotional culture through various lenses, including feminist and social justice perspectives.

Do you think that influencers themselves can do anything to promote gender equity or to flip gender expectations?

Kate Fitch: They can certainly flip gender expectations, but in terms of gender equity in this kind of workforce, I think pay transparency is really important, but that's hard to manage or enforce. We're not talking about a particularly unified or unionised workforce, but an industry where payments are negotiated on an individual basis, often brokered through a talent management agency. So although it's useful to understand the shifting dynamics around work afforded by social media platforms, it's a fairly precarious business model where you're reliant on corporate social media entities that can introduce changes overnight that fundamentally change the user experience or where a tweak to the algorithms might result in lower engagement. So there's great precarity in this kind of work, and as I said, it's not a unified workforce and everything's negotiated on an individual basis. That's very hard to change structural inequality that results in this gender pay gap.

Susan Carland: The usual risks of self-employment are exacerbated for influencers. Beyond the lack of industry standards ensuring pay, content creators are at the mercy of social media algorithms that can change overnight how quickly they can book their next gig and the entire internet's opinion of them. Here's influencer and content creator Liv White. Do you ever find it stressful?

Olivia White: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Susan Carland: What's stressful?

Olivia White: The fact that I'm an overly anxious person. I'm probably fitting to have on this jumper.

Susan Carland: For those that can't see, Liv is wearing a jumper that just says “overthinker”.

Olivia White: I don't want to speak for everyone in the space because it is different.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Olivia White: But for me, having done it as long as I've done it, one, I know what it's like in any media landscape. I'm just happy to still be here, still be relevant, still be able to make an income. But also the ebbs and flows of the industry of where is your next job going to come from or how much work do you have booked? Because I, just like everybody, want to earn an income and that's something that's forever on your mind.

Susan Carland: Do you ever worry about being cancelled?

Olivia White: Oh, 100 per cent, especially in this day and age when you see sometimes the... The whole thing of cancel culture, I think about it so often and you look at things that happen to other people and the reasons that they're cancelled, and look, sometimes I get it. There are people out there who make very, very damaging claims and stuff and absolutely we need to hold people to account.

But a lot of the time, the stuff that I see or see the things people being pursued for, yeah, I think going back to that original comment, is sometimes rooted in its own issues and problems. Because if we can't have these conversations and we can't... I definitely have censored myself a lot more purely out of the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, but also still want to be myself and still be true to myself.

But yeah, 100 per cent. I think it's a concern for... If it's not a concern for you, then you're probably the person that's going to get cancelled. So maybe that's a good thing.

Susan Carland: Here's Dr Kate Fitch.

Do you think then that influencer culture, does it reinforce or does it challenge traditional gender roles?

Kate Fitch: It can do both. I think they perform a function that women's magazines and other media traditionally targeting women or once did, disciplining people into certain gender norms and expectations around bodies, emotions, behaviour. But it is more niche now and more targeted and there's much greater gender diversity in gender roles than previously. I think my concern here is how influencers are often brand ambassadors, so there's often a commercial element that frames content and interactions. For example, influencers have played a major role in the growing demand for Ozempic as a weight loss drug. We have the same social stresses playing out, but very amplified within these platforms.

Susan Carland: And do you think that influencers, particularly female influencers, face pressures or limitations on themselves because of these gendered expectations that are put on them?

Kate Fitch: Absolutely. I think they do. So female influencers tend to dominate three sectors, lifestyle, beauty and fashion, where they primarily deliver a female audience. They tend to be aspirational. There's a lot of social mobility amongst influencers. They tend to be cool, trendy, fashionable, so they're defining aesthetics in a certain way.

And there's a lot of pressure to keep posting and, importantly, to increase, continuously increase engagement to generate income. So I think there are particular pressures on their online presentations and what they do, and often that's commercially driven by their talent management agency.

Susan Carland: The very communities these influencers build often unconsciously add to the pressure they're under. We want to peek in on every waking moment, and as fans, we love drama. But it can come at the expense of creators mental well-being. Broadcaster and performer Jo Stanley has spent her career in the public eye.

Jo Stanley: I do sometimes think the term vulnerability is really misunderstood, particularly now. I love Brené Brown and the work that she's done there, but for a time there was this suggestion that we all should be going into workplaces and being really vulnerable and we love leaders who are vulnerable. And I'm like, “Yeah, I don't want a leader who's bursting into tears.”

Susan Carland: Every day, every day. Yeah.

Jo Stanley: And you do have to be psychologically safe around that. And sometimes I see people who share, they share parts of themselves that almost the sharing feels performative. And I start to think where actually is the moment in which you are just you by yourself being rather than being through a lens. They're constantly seeing themselves from the balcony rather than being in the ballroom.

Susan Carland: In the ballroom, yeah.

Jo Stanley: Yeah.

Susan Carland: Yeah. It is tricky when if you are a content creator, you have to see your life as content, so it has to be performed.

Jo Stanley: And there's never a moment when they don't, which again, that's one of the reasons why there's no way I could do what they do because weird. I mean, where's the off twitch? Where are the moments where you...

Susan Carland: Where's the inner world?

Jo Stanley: Yeah. Yeah. Which is, for me, my inner world is... That's how I stay mentally well, is to spend a lot of time in my inner world.

Susan Carland: The pressure from parasocial relationships with fans who expect you to constantly generate content can be grating and occasionally downright frightening when your own vulnerability can leave the ones you love vulnerable, too. Here's Liv again.

You mentioned how you started as a “mummy blogger,” which I hate that that also is a term that has negative connotations.

Olivia White: Yeah.

Susan Carland: How interesting that it's always these jobs that women have that seem to be seen with derision.

I want to ask you though, if it's difficult to balance being open and authentic with keeping things private for yourself and has it ever been hard to make the juggle or the decision between what you share and what you don't and how the audience feels about that? Have people ever felt that you owe them information you don't want to give them?

Olivia White: Oh, absolutely. Especially in the early days when I was much more, I guess, open and honest about the trials and tribulations of motherhood, and especially when you are in that space and you are going through it and you're experiencing. I had postpartum anxiety and depression. It was something that I talked about quite openly. As I've gotten older for two reasons.

One, obviously experiencing the negativity online and how people can feel like you owe them this and you owe them that. My kids are getting older, which it's funny because that is another thing that is on my mind every day.

When I started in this space and what I've learned coming through it, I remember, oh, it would've been a year or two ago, it was around the same time that Cleo Smith went missing, and I just remember one night I could absolutely not sleep and I went through my entire Instagram and deleted every single solo photo of my children as babies and toddlers. I don't know what it was. I just was like, “No, we're going to delete that.”

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Olivia White: I know that there's stuff out there, there's photos of them and stuff. But I was just like, “No, we're done with that.”

Susan Carland: Closing that door.

Olivia White: Closing that door. And I'm so mindful now. They're getting older. I've always been considerate of whether they want to be in content or not, and now they're getting older they very much have an opinion on that. Some things they do, some things they don't. When I was younger and when we first started out in this space, you didn't know.

Susan Carland: No.

Olivia White: You only know what you know.

Susan Carland: It was very different. The internet was a different place 10 years ago.

Olivia White: It was and you only know what you know. And it's one of those things I have evolved so much online. My content has evolved. I've evolved as a person. I've adapted definitely since the introduction of reels and short-form video content. I feel like that has been my thing.

And I'm like, “Oh, I love this so much more than doing the heavy writing and really giving so much of myself.” I can give the same themes, but in a short-form, humorous video. And I love that because I feel like I'm still giving, but not giving as much of me because it was taxing, really hard.

So yeah, you can only do what you can do and learn and evolve and you can change your mind and how you feel about things. So I feel like I'm okay.

Susan Carland: So with all this in mind, those of us outside the industry should take a hard look at the way we think of and shrug off the work being done by female influencers. This isn't a simple hobby or even a part-time gig. It's a billion-dollar industry powered largely by women.

Kate Fitch: Women have long had a side hustle to supplement incomes to a main job, and so that's how many want-to-be influencers start. They're building a brand profile, they're developing an audience online, but it's often not their main job when they start out or sometimes they already have a media profile for other things. So there's this long history, I think, of influencer culture and women's labour.

Susan Carland: Jo sees a high level of skill in this line of work that's easy to overlook if we don't interrogate our prejudices too closely.

Jo Stanley: I have been in situations, spent time on holidays or junkets or wherever with really good content creators on Instagram. They are incredible. There is no way I could do what they do. And they spend a lot of time and a lot of... It's a very creative kind of endeavour. But I don't think that people see that behind the scenes because the skill is making it look like it is really easy.

Susan Carland: What did you see when you were with them that made you think this is really impressive? What was it?

Jo Stanley: Well, they understand story. They understand for their audience what is the heart of something that's going to connect. And at the end of the day, the only thing that connects a content creator, whether it's in radio, TV, on social media, is story. They just understand the creation of content that communicates a story in the space of 30 seconds or two tile that really connects with their audience and allows that, I suppose, the bonding between what an audience sees in you and wants from you in a way that feels very real. Again, that's exciting to me. I think it's wonderful that women have such freedom to find expression and creatively take a stakehold of something that really can be quite lucrative for some, but mostly really fulfilling, I think.

Susan Carland: And in the early days of the internet, female content creators, writers, photographers, academics, comedians, and more carved online spaces out for themselves because there weren't opportunities in traditional media. While we wait for television and radio to catch up, emerging media is offering women shots they've never been able to take before.

It's so surprising to me to hear that there is such a gender issue in radio because if you look at the top podcasts in Australia each week, just on the iTunes one, the Apple one, the two top ones always are Mamamia Out Loud and Shameless. And there's often all female voices in the lower 10s as well. So obviously people want to hear this, and particularly women, but I'm sure there are male listeners as well and other people. Why do you think radio bosses are so reluctant to pay attention to what the audience is telling them?

Jo Stanley: I think that that's an unconscious bias, I suppose. They get used to listening to what reflects their own experience. And it's very much a, I feel as though it's a world in which this is the way it's always been done, and so this is the way we will continue to do. However, this is why podcasting is such an incredibly exciting, new, it's still a new medium, because it is really underpinning the democratisation of content, that if you want to sit in a room such as you and I are right now and create content and find an audience for yourself, then you're not reliant on whoever is holding the keys to those larger platforms anymore. It's really exciting.

Susan Carland: The Quiet Revolution isn't over. As new horizons open, including increasing access to education and career opportunities, women will continue to make remarkable strides in the workforce and reshape industries.

But until each of us takes a close look at the work we've categorised consciously or unconsciously as belonging to one gender or another and sincerely examine our own biases or inherited beliefs, we're a long way from equality. It may be a little uncomfortable. Change for the better often is.

Thank you to all our guests in this series, Dr Kate Fitch, Jo Stanley, and Olivia White. You can learn more about their work by visiting our show notes. We'll be back next week with an all-new topic.

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