Economists Nicki Hutley and Leonora Risse expose the massive gender impact and gap in Australia’s tax system.
Just over fifty years ago, the Australian Government established the Women’s Affairs Branch in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet: gender equality finally had a formal place in government.
A decade later, Australia led the world in introducing a Women’s Budget Program, designed to show how policy decisions affect women – both through initiatives aimed directly at women and through distributional impacts of policies.
The 2026-27 Budget had few women-specific initiatives. Its focus, instead, was on sweeping tax reform, yet the gender-disaggregated analysis of the proposed reforms didn’t appear in this year’s Women’s Budget Statement document.
It can be found, instead, in another Treasury document – the Tax Expenditure and Insights Statement (TEIS) for 2025-26.
The TEIS now provides a distributional analysis of the beneficiaries of the various deductions and concessions available through Australia’s personal tax system, such as the capital gains tax (CGT) discount.
This gender comparison reveals that men benefit more than women for all but 3 of the 13 tax items under analysis, with some gaps as high as 40%, as reported in this quarter’s Financy Women’s Index report.
When it comes to the CGT discount available for individuals and trusts under the pre-Budget policy settings, a similar number of men and women receive benefits, but the average size of the benefit is higher for men ($21,010) than for women ($15,930).
This equates to a gender gap of 24.2%. In total, an estimated $8.4 billion worth of CGT concessions in the annual Budget flow to men, compared to the $6.3 billion to women – a 58:42 split.
Under the Budget’s reforms, the CGT discount will change from 50% flat rate to a cost indexation rate aligned to the real gains of the asset.
These gender impacts in tax deductions obviously reflect gender differences in income.
Men’s higher taxable income means they pay more tax on average, while women’s lower income increases their eligibility for forms of income support such as pensions.
Men collectively contribute around 64% of Australia’s personal tax revenue, relative to women’s 36% share (based on 2021-22 tax data analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office).
But this tax contribution still comes out of a gender gap in gross personal income, across all income sources including investments, of around 30% (based on ABS Census data for 2021).
While women’s lower income means lower tax eligibility, it also spells lower financial independence, power and control over resources in the economy. And it reflects the gender gaps in opportunities to earn this income in the first place. Which brings us to housing.
The removal of negative gearing provisions for established houses is the biggest of proposed changes to housing tax settings, and is aimed at reducing competition faced by first home buyers from investors.
Treasury modelling estimates that dwelling prices will be around 2% lower (or $19,000 off a median-priced house) over a period of “several years” due to the combination of changes to negative gearing and the way CGT is applied to investment properties.
One could argue that improving housing affordability helps women more because they are already disadvantaged by having lower average incomes.
For residential property ownership, the gap is not large, at 62.7% of women and 64.4% for men.
But it still takes a women on average a year longer to save for a median-priced home than a man.
The housing measures are expected to give access to the housing market to around an additional 75,000 first home buyers over the coming decade.
Together with targeted improvements in the minimum wage and caring sector wages, it might be expected that the home ownership gap can narrow.
For investment properties, the ownership gap widens to almost three percentage points, with 14.2% of men owning an investment property compared to just 11.4% of women.
This gap adds to the disparity in long-term wealth creation that already exists, particularly in superannuation balances.
So what women gain in terms of greater potential for home ownership may well come at the expense of the opportunity to invest in housing.
Given women are more likely to be in precarious housing, the trade-off may well be deemed reasonable.
