Supporting female storytellers is supporting women
For a long time, I kept my creative life and my philanthropy in separate boxes. One was for the days spent writing, acting, and producing: the messy, beautiful, exhausting work inside rehearsal rooms and theatres and in cafes typing away at my keyboard. The other box was where I looked for ways to support women’s organisations. I volunteered, donated, fundraised, and thought of it as the "real" work. The older I get, the more those neat divisions have just sort of evaporated.
I’ve always been drawn to stories about women's lives and experiences, both real and fiction. In my own writing, I’ve leaned into stories of women overcoming adversities and tackled topics like street harassment, online privacy, domestic violence, fertility and motherhood. Seeing real, flawed women tackle challenges on stage, on screen and in novels, provides a mirror for us to look at the world around us and how we can make it a better place– if the character can get through that, stand up for herself, make a difference, overcome, then maybe we can too.
Writing and performing my play, The Culture, hammered this home for me. Every night when I stepped into the shoes of Katie, the outspoken, brave, charismatic woman who unfolded for me on the page, I felt the weight of her story. She was an unlikely victim; she knew the signs, was educated and bold in her approach to the world, and yet even she loses her agency under the pressure of a controlling partner.
When we took it to the stage, I wasn't trying to lecture the audience or tell them what to think—I just wanted them to feel something. And something wonderful happened. While I loved the performance each time, my favourite part of every show were the conversations in the foyer. Not once, or twice, but many times, people shook my hand, thanked me, and told me I had portrayed their story. They wanted to share their experiences. They wanted to stay and talk.
A play will never replace a crisis shelter, and a film won't replace a frontline legal service. Let's be completely clear about that—immediate, practical aid saves lives, and those services will always deserve our deepest support. But stories do a different kind of heavy lifting. Journalism, like Jess Hill’s extraordinary, groundbreaking work in Australia, lays out the facts, investigates the truths, and brings coercive control into the mainstream news cycle. It is so powerful that it changed laws. But fiction? Fiction changes hearts.
Stories give us the language for things we couldn’t previously name. For many women, realizing they are in an abusive or controlling relationship isn't a sudden, dramatic lightning bolt. It’s gradual, confusing, a slow erosion. We may not even realize something strange or toxic is happening in our own homes until we see it played out in someone else’s. Sometimes, watching a version of that reality on a stage, on a screen, or reading it in a novel, is the moment we see things clearly.
That is where creativity and philanthropy meet. When we support female writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and journalists, we aren't just funding entertainment—we are expanding the space for women’s real lives to be seen and understood.
The collective stories we choose to tell and the voices we champion reshape our cultural conversation entirely.