A note to financial services: fertility and being a woman are not ‘credit risks’

This isn’t about shopping. This is about the power you hold and wield every day with your wallet.

Every woman-owned purchase you make chips away at a system built to extract and reward exploitation.

Women build differently. And when we back them, we are not just buying products.

What happens when profit comes first?

Lovisa is a budget jewellery chain turned billion-dollar empire.

While founder Brett Blundy’s personal fortune sits at $3.95 billion and the former CEO pocketed $39.5 million in a single year, nearly 700 former staff have launched a class action alleging systematic wage theft, unpaid overtime, and denied meal breaks.

These weren’t isolated incidents. They were features of the business model.

Young women, some as young as 15, were rostered alone for seven-hour stretches. They were “very strongly encouraged” to spend their own wages on jewellery they had to wear to work.

Store managers were pressured to buy staff incentives with their own money. When workers stayed late to complete tasks, regional managers would manually change their timesheets so they weren’t paid for the extra hours.

As Yolanda Robson, director of Melbourne’s Young Workers Centre, put it:

“Lovisa clearly aren’t just underpaying their young workers, they’re bullying them. That’s not just wage theft. That is systemic exploitation.”

This is what happens when profit extraction becomes the only North Star. When companies are built to maximise shareholder value at any cost. When young women are treated not as humans with basic needs like bathroom breaks, but as expendable resources in service of an 82% gross profit margin.

Same pattern in banking

This week, yet another woman founder – whose products are stocked nationally in a major supermarket and account for 30% of the revenue in her category – applied for a business loan with a prominent Australian bank.

She was met with five words no man has ever been asked in a credit meeting: “When are you planning to have a baby?”

Not: “What are your growth projections?”
Not: “How do you plan to deploy this capital?”
Not: “What is your customer acquisition cost?”

Apparently, her reproductive choices were “critical” to assessing credit risk.

Then, the bank demanded collateral over two properties. Still not enough. They also wanted her husband’s business as security too.

Let me ask you: if the roles were reversed, would the same level of scrutiny be applied to a male founder?

We all know the answer.

And while this was happening, the finance broker – the person meant to be on her side – happily pocketed $5,000 upfront. No challenge. No accountability. No advocacy for a fairer structure. Why would he? His loyalty isn’t to her. It’s to the bank that pays him commissions on a pipeline of other deals.

The system is not broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

Women build for people, not just profit

Women-owned businesses operate differently. They circulate value.

Women are statistically more likely to:

• Reinvest profits into their families and communities
• Pay their suppliers fairly
• Hire other women and diverse staff
• Build for longevity, not just quick exits
• Design businesses around values, care and connection, not pure volume
• Create workplaces where people can at least use the bathroom

According to the ASBFEO, women now own 35% of small businesses in Australia, contributing billions in GDP each year. Yet 97% of these businesses are unfunded.

Pink-washing won’t fix this

The same banks blocking women at the credit desk are the first to plaster their logos on International Women’s Day breakfasts.

But behind the scenes?

They are still asking women if they are planning to have babies.

They are still demanding triple the collateral they would ask of a man.

They are still underwriting deals with outdated risk models.

You can’t say you “support women in business” when your lending practices are actively excluding them.

A different way to build power

Every sale is an act of redistribution—not through charity, but through commerce.

And it matters even more because the lending system is broker-driven, with opaque incentives that favour institutions over founders (Octet Finance Report).

Women build for the long game

Women are more likely to build businesses for sustainability, legacy and impact – not just valuation. They run leaner, debt-light operations. Focus on steady growth, not hyper-scaling at the expense of workers’ wellbeing.

And when they do access capital, they outperform.

BCG found women-founded start-ups generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar of funding, compared to 31 cents for male-founded start-ups. McKinsey found gender-diverse companies are 25% more likely to outperform their peers financially.

So why aren’t we backing them like it?

Every cart has power

The Lovisa class action involves 700 women who finally said: enough. Women who were told by the system to stay quiet, to be grateful for any job, to accept degradation as the price of employment – and who stood up and said no.

As one former employee, Tatjana Smiljic, put it:
“My goal is to make other retail workers understand that this is not the way your job should be treating you.”

When you shop woman-owned, you are backing founders who build the alternative. You are joining a movement that redistributes power from extraction to circulation.

Every cart is a catalyst, and every dollar is a vote for the kind of economy we want to build.

A call to action

The next time you are shopping – whether it’s skincare, fashion, food, homewares, or something small – pause and ask yourself:

“Where does this money go?”

“Who does this purchase build power for?”

“What kind of business model am I funding?”

“Does this company treat its workers like Lovisa, or does it build differently?”

Because if the system is built to extract, then every purchase is an opportunity to rebuild.

If Australia is serious about backing women in business, it’s time for:

• A ban on gendered credit questioning – fertility is not a credit risk
• Broker accountability and transparency
• Fair, modern lending models
• Alternative capital pathways built for women, not against them

Why we built F5 Collective

We are here to re-architect access to capital for women in business:

• Funding products designed for how women actually build, not outdated models built around factories and collateral
• Credit models that don’t penalise women for not fitting the old ‘bricks and mortar’ mould – or for having a uterus
• Capital paired with infrastructure: commerce pathways through The Store by F5 (launching November 2025), operational support, and community so women can scale without begging for permission
• Retail infrastructure that works – from soft-test placements to accessible costs for suppliers and third parties, as well as expert access – built for brands that don’t have millions in venture capital

The system that created Lovisa is the same system that asks women about their fertility in loan meetings.

And we have built something better.

Every time you choose to shop woman-owned – whether through The Store by F5 Collective or anywhere else – you are building it with us.

• Tracey Warren is CEO & Bree Kirkham, COO, of venture capital firm F5 Collective.