Financy Women's Index
The Women’s Index measures the progress of Australian women and gender financial equality
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Financial inequality is a major obstacle to the progress of women, families and future generations
About Financy Women's Index
How we’re tackling Financial Inequality
The Financy Women’s Index™ (FWX) is a quarterly measurement of the economic progress of women and time frames to gender financial equality in Australia.
The FWX provides a snapshot on equality across 7 critical areas and includes both drivers and indicators of progress.
The drivers are Education and Unpaid Work. The indicators are Unpaid Work (dual), Employment, Underemployment, Pay, Board Leadership and Superannuation.
The purpose of the Women’s Index™ is to help drive fearless discussion and action among women, men and key decision makers in the public and private sectors.
The Index is an independent initiative of Financy Pty Ltd, which is advocates for gender financial equality and provides the IMPACTER software to improve organisations performance on diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Index is supported by the FWX Advisory Committee members; Dr Shane Oliver, Simone Cheung, Prof Roger Wilkins, Dr Leonora Risse, Bruce Hockman, Rhiannon Yetsenga and Nicki Hutley.
The Index is proudly sponsored by NGS Super, the Ecstra Foundation, Aspire Planning, Seven Consulting, Bespoke Co and PritchittBland Communications.
Creative works are produced by We Are Why Pty Ltd.
Ultimately, the purpose of the Index is to help inspire women to live more courageously and confidently – to be Fearless.
Lastest Results
What do the latest results tell us about economic equality?
Australia needs to do more to challenge outdated gender norms, which continue to contribute to a “two steps forward, one step back” rate of progress on gender financial equality, according to the latest Financy Women’s Index (FWX).
The FWX, which tracks timeframes to economic equality every quarter, slipped to 77.5 points in the June quarter of 2024, down by 0.2 points from a revised 77.7 points in March. Despite the decline, the Index has improved over the past 12 months, gaining 2.36 points from 74.8 points in June 2023.
The headline FWX score for the June quarter was buoyed by a record-breaking improvement in the national gender pay gap, which fell to 11.5% in May as reported in August. This improvement, reflecting increased wages for early childhood educators and aged care workers, helped lift the FWX Gender Pay Gap sub-index to 88.5 points, up from 88 points in March.
However, this progress was overshadowed by setbacks in employment outcomes for women relative to men, particularly in monthly hours worked and underemployment. The FWX Employment sub-index, which reflects the gender gap in monthly hours worked, fell to 75.4 points, down from 75.6 in March, as female hours declined by 0.3%, compared to a 0.1% decline for men.
Key Results
- Progress to gender equality stalled in the June quarter of 2024 with the FWX slipping by 0.2 points to 77.5 points out of a score of 100.
- A record improvement for the Gender Pay Gap and a steady result for ASX 200 Board Leadership helped to offset much of the weakness in Employment and the Underemployment R
- Overall, the Index is tracking 2 points higher for the year to date and shows a long-term trend in progress towards gender financial equality.
- As we look at the progress towards gender financial equality, it’s interesting to note that whilst gender norms remain challenging in the workforce, and indeed a major barrier to closing gender gaps, women’s sport provides us with good reason for optimism as evidenced most recently by the Paris Olympics.
- FWX Timeframes to gender equality include a best case 5.2 years for ASX 200 Board Leadership, 17.7 years in Superannuation, 20.2 years in Underemployment, 22.6 years in the Gender Pay Gap (as the median timeframe to gender equality) and 24.6 years in Employment, 45.5 years in Unpaid Work and, a very pessimistic, 389.2 years in Education.
Financy Women’s Index by Quarter
Financy Women’s Index by Year
Years to Economic Gender Equality
The median timeframe to achieving total gender equality in Australia is 24 years. But the largest timeframe is 139 years based on progress rates in Education.
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Past Reports
Meet the FWX
Advisory Committee
The Financy Women’s Index is supported by an Advisory Committee, who believe in gender equality and the importance of measuring women’s financial progress. The Committee meets regularly to discuss the data findings and the best way forward for the Index to ensure it is as reliable and informative as possible.
The FWX Advisory Committee
Rhiannon Yetsenga
Manager Deloitte Access Economics
Dr Leonora Risse
Senior Lecturer in Economics at RMIT University
Leonora is an economist who specialises in gender equality. She is a Research Fellow with the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia and a co-founder of the Women in Economics Network in Australia. Her research focuses on evidence-based strategies to close gender gaps in economic outcomes.
Dr Shane Oliver
Chief Economist and Head of Investment Strategy at AMP
Nicki Hutley
Independent Economist
Simone Cheung
Partner in Deloitte Access Economics and leads the Health Economics and Social Policy team in NSW
Bruce Hockman
former Chief Economist of the Statistical Services Group at the Australian Bureau of Statistics
