Page 941 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017
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I also note that women’s roles in our society are not confined to the home—our female majority parliament is a great example of this—but division of labour remains one of the major issues facing gender equality today. The 2011 census data shows that 60 per cent of Australian couples with children under 15 have a father who works full time and a mother who either works part time or not at all. However, the inverse of this statistic is that families with a mum who works full time and a dad who works part time or not at all make up only three per cent of Australian couples. Seventy-six per cent of full-time working dads have a partner who works part time or not at all. This partner conventionally does unpaid work looking after children, cleaning and preparing meals, and this partner is typically a woman. The work of women in the home is economically undervalued. This seems a pessimistic and regressive view to take, but it does describe part of the contribution many women make to the economic and social fabric of Canberra.
For the hours women spend doing paid work, the situation is equally dissatisfying, especially for the 81 per cent of single parents who are women. Australia’s national pay gap currently sits at 16 per cent. That means that if you are a woman who works full time, on average you will do more than $1 million in unpaid or underpaid work. Things fare slightly better for women in the ACT, who earn only 11.5 per cent less on average than their male counterparts. However, if you are a woman of colour, a transgender woman or a woman with disability, you can expect to earn even less.
Research done right here in the ACT at the University of Canberra’s National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling means we are able to forecast the progress people are likely to make over their careers. A 25-year-old woman with a postgraduate qualification who works for 40 years is expected to earn $2.49 million over her lifetime. This does not sound too bad until we find that a man exhibiting the same demographic characteristics can bet on earning $3.78 million over the course of his career, which is an additional $1.29 million than the woman who sat beside him in class.
Economic disadvantage is evident in the housing market, where women are disproportionately less likely to own their own home. They are more likely to be the subject of family violence and they are more likely to experience poverty. This demonstrates the cyclical and systemic nature of disadvantage.
The ACT government understands many women experience multiple disadvantages and how outcomes for health, safety, education, housing and economic prospects are often interconnected. Much of the economic strain on women is exacerbated at the end of their life. Without the pay rise associated with being male, women’s super upon retirement is devastatingly low. With an average of half the superannuation of a man in retirement, women receive half of the security and half of the autonomy. Some of this can be attributed to time taken off to have children, but the current establishment exacerbates the already lower income of one gender for the preference of another.
For women with children, economic disadvantage compounds over their life course, starting with the pay gap, and becoming exacerbated through years with children and
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