Category: Inequity

Equal Pay Day 2023 | WGEA

Equal Pay Day is on August 25, 2023.

In 1969 Australian women earnt the right to equal pay for equal work. But something is still missing.

On average, women in Australian earn less than men. This is called the gender pay gap.

Equal Pay Day marks the 56 additional days from the end of the financial year women must work to earn the same average pay.

How you can support Equal Pay Day 2023

Sometimes you don’t notice something until it is no longer there. This Equal Pay Day we’re encouraging everyone to get involved on social media and your websites.

Add WGEA’s countdown clock to your website

WGEA’s website now has an Equal Pay Day countdown clock on our homepage and the top of this page. 

You can add this clock to your own website to join our campaign.

Women facing increased risk of homelessness while on bail and parole, Sisters Inside advocacy group says – ABC News

Crusading lawyer Debbie Kilroy from Sisters Inside says it’s “horrific” a woman on bail had to ask a Queensland court to send her back to jail, after she couldn’t find suitable housing.

The housing crisis was laid bare in Toowoomba when 34-year-old mother Debbie Jane Richards asked the Supreme Court last week to revoke her bail and send her to prison as she could not find suitable housing.

Ms Richards had been on bail while the charge of being an accessory after the fact to murder went through the courts.

“Prison has become the default response for homelessness and that’s the reality,” lawyer and Sisters Inside chief executive Debbie Kilroy said.

Professor Dennison said she suspected the issue was greater for women going through the criminal justice system than men.

“About a third of women coming into prison have been homeless in the year prior to going into prison and about a third expect those conditions to continue when they’re released from prison.

“They will also be more likely to have experienced domestic and family violence, have mental health problems and have a whole range … of needs that they need to address when they come back out into the community.”

Source: Women facing increased risk of homelessness while on bail and parole, Sisters Inside advocacy group says – ABC News

Combating the (ever-pervasive) gender pay gap in law – Lawyers Weekly

While women won the right to equal pay in 1969, the gender pay gap still exists – while progress is being made, firms are being urged to implement various policies to help address it.

Despite female solicitors continuing to outnumber their male counterparts and dominating in every area of the legal profession, the gender pay gap still exists in law, with many indications that women are leaving the profession earlier than men, who make up the majority of leaders within the profession.

Source: Combating the (ever-pervasive) gender pay gap in law – Lawyers Weekly

Daughters short-changed by bank of mum and dad

Daughters are less likely to get help from parents to buy their way into the Australian property market and women will bear the most pain from the Reserve Bank’s sharp increase in interest rates.

Research to be released today from the Australian Housing Monitor shows the proportion of women drawing on their parents or their partner’s parents for financial assistance to buy a home has declined over the past six decades.

Between the start of this century and 2019, daughters received two-thirds of the assistance that was delivered to sons.

Last decade, more than 47 per cent of men received a handout from their parents or their partner’s parents. Thirty per cent of women got help.
“The gender gift gap identified in our Housing Monitor is shocking, but perhaps it shouldn’t be: there’s lots of evidence that suggest that sons often receive more through inheritance and more financial help from their families than do daughters, in Australia and internationally,” he said.
For those who bought in the 1980s, about 15 per cent of people tapped the bank of mum and dad but the gap between sons and daughters was much narrower than today.
Even among more recent generations, the research found large gender differences. While almost 33 per cent of male millennials received parental handouts, 21 per cent of females in the same age group had help.

It found more than 45 per cent of men are keeping up with their mortgages without difficulty compared to 31.5 per cent of women.

Almost one in four women say it is a constant struggle to keep up with repayments while 18 per cent of men are in the same predicament.

“What is clear is that women, who are already less likely to own their own home or benefit from investment properties, and more likely to be trapped in unaffordable private rental properties throughout their lives, will be further disadvantaged in our housing market as the gender gift gap gives their brothers a bigger boost to buy their first home,” she said.

Source: 12ft | Daughters short-changed by bank of mum and dad

These women are closing Wikipedia’s gender gap – ABC Radio National

More than 80% of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors are male, and this gender bias is reflected in its articles: less than 20% of published Wikipedia biographies are about women. We meet two Wikipedians trying to close this gender gap, one profile at a time. Guests:Dr Jess Wade – Physicist and Research Fellow at the Imperial College London. Annie Reynolds – Wikimedian, WomenInRed project member, family and local history researcher.

Source: These women are closing Wikipedia’s gender gap – ABC Radio National

Australian women are exercising for 60 minutes less than men each week. It’s called the ‘gender exercise gap’

Recent research has indicated women are doing much less exercise than men each week – it’s called the “gender exercise gap”, and it’s been highlighted in the ASICS State of Mind Index, a research project that also points out women are potentially missing out on the positive mental and physical benefits that come with doing more exercise.

The index shows that globally, women exercise, on average, for 140 minutes per week, which is 40 minutes less than men, who generally exercise for 180 minutes. In Australia, this gap between men and women  jumps to 60 minutes.

In Australia, there was a disparity of 9 points between men (66/100) and women’s (57/100) State of Mind. Alarmingly, this gap was the 2nd largest disparity between genders out of the 16 countries that were surveyed. The United States was the only nation to have a larger gap.

Indeed, research from The Australian National University (ANU) in 2022 showed that for those in heterosexual relationships, men tend to “borrow” free time to exercise from their female partners, who get less opportunity to focus on their health, with their time being squeezed to manage their jobs and family.

The researchers found that women’s physical activity dropped when their paid or family work hours increased, or if their paid work was less flexible.

Source: Australian women are exercising for 60 minutes less than men each week. It’s called the ‘gender exercise gap’

Friday essay: ‘I trained to be an engineer … now I am a pickle seller’. What does migration do to a wife?

Migrant women come to Australia with high hopes but their husbands’ careers often take precedence. Farjana Mahbuba spoke to Bangladeshi Muslim women, finding stories of isolation and under employment.

According to 2021 census data, 51,491 people in Australia were born in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi Muslim women here have significantly higher educational attainment than the wider Australian female population. The data shows 19.71% of Bangladeshi Muslim women in Australia have a postgraduate degree, compared with 5.41% of women in general. Overall, 22.75% of Bangladeshi Muslim women have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 15.87% of women across the board.

The same census data shows the unemployment rate to be 5.31% amongst Bangladeshi Muslim women compared to 2.21% in the wider female population. Salma Bint Shafiq, in her research into Bangladeshi migrants in Australia, has found non-participation in the labour market is much more common for these women (30%) than it is for men (2%).

I see a pattern emerging. A pattern where a migrant woman’s financial misery starts at day one of her journey to Australia; the day she steps into an unknown world, where her only bridge to this world is her husband. A husband who himself is often extremely busy earning enough money to support his two families; the new family in Australia, and his own parents and siblings back home in Bangladesh.

Intentionally or not, the wife is left alone, isolated and uninformed. She gets lost. And the impact lasts for many years to come. Financially and otherwise, she gradually becomes totally dependent on her husband.

For some couples, it does not take long for the husband to turn his wife’s financial dependency into a tool to control her mobility. Spousal financial abuse thrives when one partner starts manipulating, deceiving or coercing to create or maintain the other partner’s dependency.

Source: Friday essay: ‘I trained to be an engineer … now I am a pickle seller’. What does migration do to a wife?

‘Serious rental stress’: Essential workers are unable to rent by themselves

Essential workers would need to spend two-thirds of their income on rent to be able to afford to live alone, according to a new report, with aged care workers, early childhood educators, and hospitality workers among the hardest hit.

The findings come from a new report published by Everybody’s Home, which compares the award wages of essential workers across 15 categories with average rental prices in Australia.

Everybody’s Home suggests that essential workers in Australia who live alone are likely to be in “serious financial distress”, with little to no savings, while those who live with a partner are likely to be financially dependent on their partner’s income.

There are concerns that essential workers have been priced out of housing in their own communities.

Source: ‘Serious rental stress’: Essential workers are unable to rent by themselves

What happened to the Senate inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women?

Public inquiries are held to inform the public of misconduct and begin discussion on how to address issues. So why have we heard nothing about the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women?

The Senate inquiry closed public submissions last December. There is no known future schedule of public hearings, and the inquiry’s methods and ways of working have not been made known to the public. Only one media release – announcing its formation – has ever been issued.

The inquiry itself seems to have gone missing, which worsens the crisis it aims to investigate. This silence speaks to the conditions that make it possible for so many Indigenous women to go missing and be murdered.

In our submission to the inquiry, we highlighted that missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and gender diverse people are never simply “missing”. They do not just vanish from their homes, families and Country. They are violently disappeared.

This is significant because when we examined police investigations into the disappearance of Aboriginal women, the term “missing” seemed to bring with it a pattern of inaction. Missing Indigenous women are typically framed as responsible for their own disappearance.

They do not get afforded the same effort and attention in media and investigations afforded others.

Because of this inaction, there is rarely accountability for violence against Indigenous women. This sets a dangerous pattern where perpetrators know they can get away with acts of violence. We argue this is the underlying cause of the high rates of all forms of violence experienced by Indigenous women.

Source: What happened to the Senate inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women?

The Lesbian Project

The Lesbian Project is a new initiative that highlights and champions the experiences, insights and sensibilities of lesbians in all their diversity.

Led by Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock, The Lesbian Project intends to give voice and influence to women whose stories are too often overlooked. The Lesbian Project works to build a knowledge base about lesbian lives, promote sensible and evidence-based policy, and contribute to building lesbian community in the UK and internationally. A not-for-profit organisation, The Lesbian Project is non-partisan.

Source: The Lesbian Project