How is it that Australia can be located so close and be so culturally similar to New Zealand yet be lightyears apart in performance terms when it comes to gender equality?
Australia is now ranked 50th on a global list for gender equality and ranks even worse on political empowerment, according to the World Economic Forum.
By contrast New Zealand ranks 4th, behind Iceland, Finland and Norway. All of these country’s have a much heavier presence of women in politics than Australia.
When I analyse this WEF data it shows that if it were not for our large number of women studying some form of education, Australia wouldn’t be able to claim much success at all in terms of women’s progress.
In short Australia has a problem. It’s a big one and we need the right solution.
Disappointingly despite the federal government’s promise to improve the level of women participating in paid work, the amount of growth has been abysmal on a global scale. Check out this screen shot.
For many years, Financy, like many organisations, have been working to keep various levels of government informed on women’s financial equality and I have some hope that the upcoming National Women’s Safety Summit in July will at least air some of the most talked about issues.
Financy will be doing whatever we can to put forward many of the key issues to government including the seven key gender gap areas we cover quarter through the Women’s index, such as the gender pay gap, superannuation gap, unpaid work gaps, education to careers gender gap and various others around career progression.
The challenge however remains that despite there being news of this National Women’s Summit it remains unclear as to whether there will be direct focus on women’s financial insecurity over other important matters such as domestic violence.
It is important to note, that there is a direct link between financial domestic abuse and domestic violence and you can not address one without the other. Let’s just hope that government understands this otherwise our world rankings will tank further.
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