Why is women’s empowerment important?

The UN Global Impact says that empowering women in the workforce builds strong economies, improves the quality of life for women, men, families and communities, and creates more stable and just societies.

Women’s rights are close to our hearts because our customers are predominantly women, our branding centres around femininity, and our workforce is entirely made up of women.

To us, it feels only right to be transparent about how the principles of women’s empowerment and human rights guide our practices.   

Visibility

We deliberately seek the expertise and skills of women to work with us at Sugarberry Shimmy. Whether it’s graphic designers, website developers, researchers, makers or social media strategists, we chose to work with women every time. Women are a minority on freelance websites for technical work such as website development, so we help to increase their visibility by hiring them and giving them excellent reviews.  

Fair wages

A ‘living wage’ is a minimum income necessary to cover a worker’s basic needs: housing, utilities, food, clothing, transport, healthcare and childcare. Given differing costs of living and family structures, living wages differ by location and type of household. A living wage is different to a minimum wage, which isn’t designed to meet workers’ basic needs or quality of life.

We discover our contractors on worldwide freelancing websites and via friends of existing contractors. The problem with these freelancer websites is that they’re skewed towards the advantage of the clients. Freelancers often pay 20% of their payment to the website. Clients only pay a processing fee.

Therefore, wherever our contractors agree, we write up independent contracts and engage them directly. We pay them directly and they receive their entire pay without fees.   

We collaborate with our employees to set their own fees and determine their own earnings. Wages are fair, consistent and explainable.

Our design, research and website work is project-based. Contractors set their own price for each project we engage them for.  

Our jewellery making work is paid by the hour. We pay our makers a negotiated hourly rate based on how long each design takes to make. We pay for materials, tools and shipping.

Wellbeing

We look after the health, safety and wellbeing of the women who work with us.

Our contractors work when and where they want. We don’t put our contractors under any time pressure. They always know that they are free to produce their work in the timeframe that suits them. When we have big projects, we know that they’ll take time to come to fruition. If we need to, we engage extra contractors to help.

We take particular care to look after the health and safety of our makers, as their work is physical and repetitive. We educate them about the risk of repetitive strain injury and provide detailed information about prevention strategies such as best workspace ergonomic practices, taking rests and limiting hours per day, doing stretches to help avoid lateral epicondylitis (tennis elbow), and using lamps to avoid eye strain.

We make a conscious effort to make our virtual workplace enjoyable for everyone. We have great relationships with all our contractors and their happiness is paramount to us.

No child labour

This is a no brainer. All of our contractors are freely consenting adults who have negotiated their own rates and can stop at any time.