Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Women's economic empowerment is one of the issues that I care about and have cared about for many years. I have been searching everywhere for silver bullets to close that gap once and for all. What I have found from all the work that I've done and the work that so many other people have done on this topic is that there is no silver bullet. It is the complicated intersection of policy, legislation, business practice and Australian culture that is holding women back. That complicated soup of causes is what we need to address as we consider how to continue to close that gap.

Let's start with facts about why we have this gap in women's economic empowerment. KPMG recently did some work to disaggregate the gap. What they found was that a quarter of the pay gap at least in hourly earnings was due to the career choices of women and men, with women going typically into jobs that are less well paid on the hour compared to men going into mining and construction and women more strongly represented in the various caring sectors. Secondly, about a third of the gap is represented by women stepping out of the workforce or having fewer hours in the workforce and the fact that women in Australia take on more part-time work. You see in the average Australian family that men spend about 36 hours a week working and five hours caring for children or disabled or elderly relatives, while women spend around 25 hours working and about 11 hours caring. Frankly, those numbers do not quite add up with my own personal experience. I don't know how anyone gets away with only 11 hours caring, but that is how it really feels, I think, in many Australian families. The third explainer of the gap is around the age of women in the workforce compared to men, with women typically being younger in the workforce than men and on an hourly basis are being paid less. Finally, and probably most concerningly, there is a third gap, which is about a third of the difference—about 36 per cent of the difference between men and women's pay—that is put down to gender discrimination. It is 'other'. It can't be explained by career choices and it can't be explained by years in the workforce; it is basically just the gap that you get for being a woman that cannot be explained by anything else.

Those are just the gaps when it comes to hourly earnings. You also see additional drivers when it comes to the differentiation of women's wealth and women's overall earnings over their lifetime. For instance, on wealth, when you look at, say, the support for women's start-ups, you see that start-ups involving women as one of the founding CEOs only get seven per cent of the share of investment funding—only seven per cent out of 100. Women currently are only six per cent of Australia's ASX 300. So you can see that opportunities to build wealth are reduced for women. Also, similarly, you see a situation where women's financial literacy is around a third lower than men's financial literacy. That also affects how the wealth and economic empowerment of women has evolved. We have all these different challenges that women in this country experience in terms of getting to that economic empowerment. The question is where to, and how do we, fix this?

I acknowledge what the government has done in terms of stepping up on women's economic empowerment. I think, frankly, this has been a key priority of the government, and I particularly acknowledge the work they have done on child care and paid parental leave, including making parental leave more shared between men and women. But if I was going to pick one thing to focus on even further, that's what I would be focusing on: how do you share the caring more? Currently women have a 55 per cent what they call 'mothers tax', a motherhood penalty where women's earnings are reduced by 55 per cent in the first five years after parenthood while men's—when they join the parenting lot—aren't reduced at all. The other key areas we need to continue to focus on are child care—how to reduce the cost and increase the availability—and how we work with women around career choices and how we improve financial literacy.

Finally, it is up to all of us to drive the cultural change. That missing third comes down to gender discrimination—that is, women leading from the front and men sponsoring women from the front as well so that we can close this gap once and for all.

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