Australian women have poorer health, lower incomes and less engagement in the labour force than men, a new report has found.
A health and wellbeing scorecard, published on Monday, has found that women’s economic equity and health have deteriorated in the past decade.
At current rates, “it will take 70 years to reach equality on full-time employment and more than 200 years to reach equity on income”, the report concluded. It found that in 2020, there was a 19 percentage point gender gap in full-time employment, a $23,767 annual income gap and a $44,746 superannuation gap.
The report’s key findings also include:
In 2020, women reported poorer health than men in all bar one domain, including in mental health, physical and social functioning, and bodily pain.
More women than men experienced elevated psychological distress, with rates since 2011 rising sharply in women aged 18-24 and 55-64.
Women’s social functioning, emotional and physical ability to perform their role declined between 2001 and 2020 – and was linked to financial inequity.
There are 2.7 million women missing from the labour force, costing the Australian economy $72bn in lost GDP annually – and also resulting in lower lifetime superannuation accumulations.
Led by researchers at the Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation, the scorecard will annually document progress in health and wellbeing outcomes in Australia over time.
Prof Helena Teede, the MCHRI’s director and a co-author of the report, said the scorecard highlighted the need for urgent structural change.
“Our workforce productivity is so profoundly affected by the very dramatic impact that childcare has in Australia, because we have one of the most expensive childcare systems in the world,” she said. “At the moment in Australia, having a family has pretty much no impact on a man’s income or their career trajectory; it has a very profound impact for women.”
Teede said there was increasing recognition from policymakers about the need to mitigate the problem, citing a federal government boost to paid parental leave, and the New South Wales and Victorian overhaul of preschool education.
But she called for more to be done at a structural level, particularly to assist older women. “Australian women live a long time after they finish working, and they’ve got a lot of chronic disease. They have, quite strikingly, much lower financial resources as they age.”
The MCHRI is calling for the establishment of a national institute that focuses on women’s health, wellbeing and equity.
The report was largely based on nationally representative data from the annual Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. It used only data up to 2020. Teede expects that in future scorecards “the devastating and disproportionate burden of Covid that fell on women will make [the inequities] even worse”.
