Whenever cost of living pressures rise, women often pay the price.
Yet it is only by facilitating women’s equal participation that our whole economy can thrive.
Victoria’s economy has the strongest growth of any state with real gross state product growth at 27.4 per cent– eclipsing the national average of 23.2%.
But women need to have an equal stake in this growth, or we will lose their skills and economic activity, which every state needs for a thriving economy.
Victoria has created 880,000 jobs in the past decade, but women are overrepresented in the more precarious, lower-paid ones.
While part of gender equity is improving women’s representation in well-paid, senior roles, we also need better conditions for women spending their lives working in routine or manual occupations.
That’s why I am pleased the see the gender pay gap narrow as a result of the Albanese Government’s improvements to minimum wage, childcare and aged care.
Women are the majority of workers in these groups, the backbone that keeps our economy and society functioning.
The Allan Labor Government in Victoria has led the nation with our inquiry into economic equity for Victorian women, so we get our fair share of the strong economy.
The inquiry confirmed what women already knew: we are underpaid, underutilised at work and overworked at home. We can see this inequality in this report; progress has stalled for a second quarter in the Financy Women’s Index.
So as a result of this Inquiry, we developed our new gender equality strategy, Our Equal State, to address them.
In education, women’s fields of study lead to lower earnings than men’s – so we are working with traditionally male industries like manufacturing, construction and clean energy – all economic growth areas – to attract and recruit young women.
In my role, I meet businesses desperate for employees with these skills. I want women to capitalise on this and gain rewarding careers from them and, at the same time, build Victoria’s resilience to skills shortages.
That’s why we’ve launched strategies and funded programs to attract women to jobs they’ve been locked out – and will bridge the gender gap in the recruitment pool with our Skills Plan.
We’re making sure businesses retain women too. That’s why our jobs agenda will tackle inflexible working arrangements, paid parental leave, discrimination, sexism and sexual harassment.
Economic equality requires change in workplaces, but women can’t thrive at work without equality outside of it. Our Free Kinder program gives women, who still do more unpaid caring work, the chance to take more time for their careers after they have children.
We know family violence drains $1 billion from the Victorian economy – so we have enacted all recommendations from the Royal Commission into Family Violence, continuing this with our $300 million Women’s Safety Package and paid Family Violence leave.
Financy advocates for gender equity change through the Women’s Index report. We specialise in social impact Communications and Brand Strategy and leverage the power of our DEI tech IMPACTER to help drive performance.
