Status of Women Report Card 2023

This Status of Women Report Card, released on International Women's Day, draws on the rich data available to provide a picture of what life looks like for women in Australia in 2023.

The report card shows the challenges women and girls in Australia face through youth and young adulthood, in careers and working life, through parenthood and families, and in later life. It looks at education, economic outcomes, health, safety and wellbeing, housing and gender norms.

This is just some of the data available – but we also know there are data gaps. The National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality will look at these issues, as well on ongoing data collection and reporting to support us to track progress.

The Government will release a Status of Women Report Card every International Women's day to shine a light on where progress is slow and more effort is needed.

Expanded data

Australia is ranked 43rd for gender equality internationally.

Women in Australia

Women in Australia are diverse, educated and hard-working.

• 3.9 per cent are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, 28.3 per cent were born overseas and 48.5 per cent have a parent born overseas.Note 1 (expanded data), Note 2 (expanded data)
• 29.4 per cent are under the age of 25 and 18.0 per cent are 65 and over.Note 3 (expanded data)
• 17.8 per cent are women with a disability.Note 4 (expanded data)
• 28.4 per cent live in regional or remote Australia.Note 5 (expanded data)
• 4.6 per cent identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.Note 6 (expanded data)
• 79.9 per cent of one parent families are single mothers.Note 7 (expanded data)
• 63.3 per cent hold a qualification outside school and 35.2 per cent hold a bachelor degree or above.Note 8 (expanded data)
• Australia has the 4th highest level of tertiary educated women in the OECD.Note 9 (expanded data)
• 59.9 per cent of women over the age of 15 are employed.Note 10 (expanded data)
• On average, women aged 15 to 64 years do 55.4 hours of work a week, 2 hours more than men. 34.7 of these are unpaid.Note 11 (expanded data)

Youth and young adulthood

• In the last 10 years, there has been a three-fold increase in intentional self-harm hospitalisations for young girls.Note 12 (expanded data)
• 79.1 per cent of heterosexual women and 86.6 per cent of lesbian, gay, bisexual or women of another non-heterosexual orientation have experienced online sexual violence facilitated by dating apps.Note 13 (expanded data)
• Further, 35.4 per cent of heterosexual women and 49.5 per cent of lesbian, gay, bisexual or women of another non-heterosexual orientation have experienced in-person sexual violence facilitated by dating apps.Note 14 (expanded data)
• Occupational segregation emerges at school:
  • 37 per cent of university and 16 per cent of VET STEM enrolments are women.Note 15 (expanded data), Note 16 (expanded data)
  • 25 per cent of university and 23 per cent of VET health and education enrolments are men.Note 17 (expanded data), Note 18 (expanded data)
• A gender pay gap emerges immediately after graduation, full-time starting salaries for women average $67,000 while salaries for men average $69,000.Note 19 (expanded data)
• Young women are more likely to report experiencing sexual violence in their lifetime: 51 per cent of women born 1989 to 1995, 34 per cent of women born 1973 to 1978 and 26 per cent of women born 1946 to 1951.Note 20 (expanded data)
• Young women are also more likely to report a recent experience of sexual harassment: 38 per cent of women aged 18 to 24, 17.4 per cent of women aged 35 to 44, and 7.1 per cent of women aged 55 and over.Note 21 (expanded data)

Housing

• 62 per cent of social housing tenants are women (38 per cent are men).Note 22 (expanded data)
• Family and domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women (40 per cent of women cite it as the main reason).Note 23 (expanded data)
• 25 per cent of women who want to leave a violent partner are unable to due to a lack of financial support.
• 15 per cent of women who returned to a violent partner did so because they had nowhere else to go.Note 24 (expanded data)
• Single women are the majority of rent assistance recipients (45 per cent, compared to 30 per cent single men, and 20 per cent couples).Note 25 (expanded data)
• The fastest growing group of people experiencing homelessness is women over the age of 55 (increasing by 31 per cent from 2011 to 2016).Note 26 (expanded data)

Career and working life

• Women and men largely work the same jobs they did 35 years ago: caring and clerical professions remain dominated by women while construction trades and labouring professions are dominated by men.
• Women worked: 96.6 per cent of hours worked by child carers, 86.9 per cent of hours worked by registered nurses and 79.9 per cent of hours worked by primary school teachers.
• Men worked: 91.5 per cent of hours worked by construction managers, 96.0 per cent of hours worked by truck drivers and 82.3 per cent of hours worked by software and applications programmers.Note 27 (expanded data)
• Women are less likely to participate in the workforce (62.1 per cent) than men (71.0 per cent), and more likely to work part-time (42.9 per cent) than men (18.8 per cent).Note 28 (expanded data)
• A gender pay gap exists in hourly wages and full-time wages, reflecting the impact of gender discrimination and that lower-paid occupations tend to be women-dominated.
  • Hourly earnings pay gap is 11.6 per centNote 29 (expanded data)
  • Full-time weekly pay gap is 13.3 per centNote 30 (expanded data)
  • Total annual taxable income gap is 29.2 per centNote 31 (expanded data)
• Women are underrepresented in leadership: ASX200 boards are only 35.7 per cent womenNote 32 (expanded data) and only 14 ASX200 CEOs are women.Note 33 (expanded data)

Health, safety and wellbeing

• 1 in 2 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime.Note 34 (expanded data)
• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 13 men have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime.Note 35 (expanded data)
• 1 woman is killed by an intimate partner every 10 days.Note 36 (expanded data)
• Police reports of sexual assault has increased 33 per cent for women in the last 5 years, with no change for men.Note 37 (expanded data)
• Rates of family, domestic and/or sexual violence are higher for Indigenous women (34 times as likely to be hospitalised as non-Indigenous women)Note 38 (expanded data) and women with disability (25 per cent experienced sexual violence since the age of 15 compared to 15 per cent without disability).Note 39 (expanded data)
• 1 in 5 women (20.7 per cent) and 1 in 6 men (16.4 per cent) live with multiple chronic conditions.Note 40 (expanded data)
• Women are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders.Note 41 (expanded data)
• Approximately 1 in 9 women suffer from endometriosis.Note 42 (expanded data) It takes an average of 5 years to receive a diagnosis after first seeing a doctor.Note 43 (expanded data)

Parenthood and families

• Women's earnings fall by 55 per cent in the first 5 years of parenthood, while men's stay the same.Note 44 (expanded data)
• Women of all ages spend over 9 hours a week more than men on unpaid work and care (31.6 hours for women compared to 22.4 hours for men).Note 45 (expanded data)
• Women do more unpaid housework than men even when they are the primary breadwinner (24.1 hours for women compared to 19.1 hours for men, a gap of 5 hours).Note 46 (expanded data)
• Women take on the mental load of planning and coordinating activities for children in 78 per cent of families, despite only being the primary carer in 52 per cent of families.Note 47 (expanded data)

Attitudes

• Compared to the global average (21 per cent), more Australian men (30 per cent) believe that gender inequality doesn't really exist.Note 48 (expanded data)
• More Australian men (28 per cent) believe that women often make up or exaggerate claims of abuse or rape, compared to men from the US (17 per cent), Canada (13 per cent), and the UK (13 per cent).Note 49 (expanded data)
• Nearly a third (32 per cent) of young men believe that 'a lot of the time, women who say they were raped had led the man on and then had regrets'.Note 50 (expanded data)
• There is a continued decline in the number of Australians who understand that men are more likely than women to perpetrate domestic violence: 74 per cent in 2009, compared to 64 per cent in 2017.Note 51 (expanded data)
• Of young men aged 16 to 24 years, 22 per cent believe that men should take control in relationships and 36 per cent believe that women prefer it this way.Note 52 (expanded data)
• Fathers are less likely to feel comfortable with the idea of their sons playing with dolls, or crying when sad (75 per cent), compared to mothers (87 per cent).Note 53 (expanded data)

Later in life

• Women approaching retirement have 23.1 per cent less superannuation than men of the same age.Note 54 (expanded data)
• Initial analysis suggests that 28 per cent of postmenopausal women in Australia will have moderate to severe symptoms that impact their workforce participation, however more work needs to be done to understand barriers to women participating in the workforce when experiencing menopause.Note 55 (expanded data)

References

International gender equality ranking: World Economic Forum (2022). Global Gender Gap Report 2022, released 13 July 2022.