What is the women's sector?
The women's sector is made up of a diverse range of organisations covering a plethora of issues and types of support. While generic 'service providers' deliver services, the women's sector also focuses on empowering women and addressing their unique needs. It plays a crucial in promoting women's equality.
'Led by and for women'
​
The women’s sector, often referred to as the women’s voluntary and community sector (WVCS), is made up of organisations led by and for women, working to advance gender equality and improve the lives of women and girls. It includes grassroots groups, specialist services, campaigning organisations, and national infrastructure bodies, many of which operate on a not-for-profit basis.
​
Self-organisation
​
The sector has its roots in women’s self-organisation, emerging strongly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries through movements for suffrage, labour rights, reproductive freedom, and protection from violence. From the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s onwards, women’s organisations played a crucial role in making gendered inequality visible and politically unavoidable.
Many services that are now recognised as essential — such as refuges for women experiencing domestic abuse, rape crisis centres, and advocacy for equal pay and workplace rights — were first created by women organising collectively in response to unmet need.
​
Not just service providers
​
Today, the women’s sector continues to drive social change by combining frontline support with systems change. It provides life-saving services, builds women’s leadership and collective power, and acts as a critical voice in policy, funding, and public debate. By centring women’s lived experience, the sector identifies structural inequalities and works to transform the conditions that sustain them — not just for individual women, but for society as a whole.
