Confessions of a Working Girl

(June 3, 2026) When I published a blog called Your Working Girl from 2009 to 2019. I’d hear, What’s with the name? What do you mean by that? What are you trying to say, exactly?

Well, fair’s fair.

I get that “working girl’ can be used as a euphemism for people who trade sex for money. And me being a feminist and all that and working for women’s rights most of my life, it could be taken the wrong way. My answer was: I understand I am trading something for money.

The justification for the name – in case that’s necessary in the year of Our Lord 2026 – lays in the fact it indirectly describes the way I make my living. I’m more than that, of course, in totality. I have a rich inner life and am no slouch in matters of the heart. But I live in Toronto, the city of work, and when someone asks what you do, it means for a living. Not watching re-runs of Vera on Britbox or Pilates three times a week.

We work in this town, hard. Hard is a word we like because everything we do is hard and we just deal with it. We pay gargantuan rent, we use underfunded public transport, take UBERs, line up, eat out, have our pick of major league sport, see shows, visit High Park in the spring when the cherry blossoms are in bloom. And someone has to pay for all that, non? So, we work. Thus, your working girl.

But being a working girl is more than just working, due respect to the waged-work sisters. It’s a way of being in the world and I can recognize another working girl a mile away.

She’s about the hustle and she has incorporated a projected calm into her persona no matter what her bank balance. She knows desperation is a turn-off for new business. Anything can happen forcing the working girl to get on the hustle again. It’s not relaxing. She might have regular, stable clients, but it’s a tricky trade.

There is no payroll being deposited into the working girl’s bank account every two weeks. Due respect to automatic payroll deposit. Nothing comes easy to the working girl. She has to price her own services, be adjudicated as having provided those services, invoice for them and, the coup de grâce, get paid. And she has to constantly show her work. Prove herself. Be accountable: from cleaner to artist to hair stylist to people like me, that’s how it rolls.

You must prove you’re good enough for every single project and every single contract, every single time.

The waged worker, on the other hand, has to get the job (not easy, I know) and keep her head down enough to not get fired. Due respect. I understand how working with the same people all the time has trials of its own.

But heaven truly help the working girl who gets pregnant. The only maternity benefit she’s eligible for is the one where she pays into EI for one year (no employer contribution) and then allows herself to get pregnant in due course. Provided she does this all in the right order, she or the other parent can get 55% of prior income for about 61 weeks, currently capped at $729 a week.

And do you want to know how many women currently having babies are making use of this benefit? One thousand, one hundred and forty (1,190). That’s .11% of all people receiving EI benefits as of May 17, 2026. And that’s not me saying this. That’s real time data from Employment and Social Development Canada, updated weekly. That’s a fact.

I remember having my second child by emergency caesarean section. I had left my job at the women’s shelter by that time and was working ‘for myself’, receiving no maternity benefit. In fact, I was paying someone to look after my clients so I could take two months off. I still remember the dryness in my mouth caused by the Tylenol 3s they used to prescribe for pain in those days. As I was sitting in front of the computer dealing with some problem, my four-week son was on my lap, fussing because I wasn’t giving him the focused attention he needed. So hard. So guilty.

But “this is the business we have chosen,” Hyman Roth says to Michael Corleone in Godfather II (1974), “I didn’t ask who gave the order.” And, up to now, I’ve mostly agreed with that.

But in creating her own job – and women do that for tons of reasons including a scarcity of options – must a working girl lose the rights waged women take for granted? Is that … what’s the word for it … fair?

Of course, now I realize working girls like me have another name – and it’s called being self-employed women.

Of course, now I realize working girls like me have another name – and it’s called being self-employed women.

And do you know what? There’s one million of us. Who the fuck knew that? Not me. I’m telling you. And I consider myself, you know, canny in a certain way.

But I will tell you who did know that – the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce (CanWCC) knew that. And its CEO Nancy Wilson knew that. She’s an accountant, a CPA in fact, and very smart. (I’m going to do a whole column on Nancy herself because well … you know … I’m obsessed.) And my old friend Judy Rebick was working with Nancy and CanWCC as a strategist. She said I know someone who can help us. Her name is Gail Picco.

Well, hello.

And here I am. Directing a national campaign on behalf of self-employed women and gender diverse workers (Working Girls).

The opportunity to make the lives of one million women—and their families’ – better is a once-in-a-life time thing. In all my life, I’ve never had this chance.

And this Working Girl/Self-employed Woman is not passing up an opportunity like it. When I mean business, it’s time for business.

The foundation of my commitment is the eight years I spent at Interval House in my 20s (see pics on the About page). Day after day after day, women recounted their suffering at the hands of men they loved. And the impact on the children? You don’t want to know.

But I know because I saw it with my own eyes. And without economic equity, women will continue to be vulnerable to violence, diminishment and threat. And I’m back – with CanWCC and the campaign team – to finish a job I started when I was twenty-one years old.

When we talk about systemic change, this is it. The real deal. So, I’m all in. You understand, I’m sure.

Because I’m a Working Girl. I was then and I am now.

See you next time.

xo

g