LuAn Mitchell, Cheryl Macnoughton and Cheryl Womack of the Leading Women Entrepreneurs of the World

These sisters are doing it for themselves
By Natasha Robinson

As Canberra crunches the budget numbers today and family payments go under the microscope, some working mothers will be far too busy to listen.

Instead, they will be brainstorming their own solutions to the balancing act of working and bringing up a family - and they say politicians sitting in their suits in parliament provide only a fraction of the answer.

Sydney is playing host this week to the annual meeting of Leading Women Entrepreneurs of the World - a group that recognizes and raises awareness of the contribution of women in business globally.

Many of the women attending struggled as young mothers to establish their careers with little support from government or employers.

But now they are bosses themselves, they are determined to ease the path for the parents on their staff - whether mothers or fathers.

"We view employees as human beings first and workers second," said LuAn Mitchell, former chairwoman of Canadian gourmet food company Mitchell's Gourmet Foods.

Cheryl Macnaughton, a mother, grandmother and co-founder of Brisbane-based financial planners Whittaker Macnaughton, has been closely following the leaks ahead of today's budget that reveal the Howard government is shifting policy on work and family.

She brought up four children in the 1970s in Dampier, 1000km north of Perth in Western Australia, and set up the first childcare centre in the Pilbara.

Labeling the proposed increase in after-school care placed "tremendous", she singled out childcare as the area in which the Government could give working parents the most help.

But the onus was also on governments to make it easier for employers to cater for the needs of families within the workplace, by offering incentives such as tax breaks for companies offering worked-based childcare, said the chair of the Leading Women forum Cheryl Womack.

"That's the challenge," Ms. Womack said. "To me it's a no-brainer - you have to have daycare on site."