Not there yet - what gender inequality is costing us
In the lead up to International Women’s Day on Sunday 8 March 2026, Dr Jennifer Ervin and Assoc. Prof. Tania King from RMIT University’s Social Equity Research Centre share findings from their research that highlight the toll of persistent and compounding disadvantage faced by Australian women and girls on a range of fronts. Their work is a sobering reminder that despite substantial and consistent evidence of the private and public costs of gender inequality in Australia, the dial is stubbornly and frustratingly slow to shift.
Yes, you’ve heard this before. Women do more unpaid work than men. Women earn less than men. Women retire with less than men. It can start to feel like old news - the kind of headline that washes over us, familiar enough to stop registering.
The reason this news keeps coming up is because the bar on gender equality is stubbornly, frustratingly slow to shift - and that slowness has consequences that accumulate quietly across the course of a woman’s life.
Australia is a country that likes to think of itself as egalitarian – the place of a fair go. We’ve become quite good at speaking the language of equality, but not nearly enough -to enact it for millions of Australian women and girls.
So yes, this is a reminder. Not because the story is new, but because we are not doing enough to address gender inequality, and this inaction is taking a toll - not just on women’s time, but on their mental health, their careers, and their financial futures.
Five of our interconnected studies [footnotes 1-5} using Australian longitudinal data, drawn from nearly two decades of the HILDA survey, have now mapped this problem in detail. What they reveal is not a single issue but an interconnected pattern of disadvantage that compounds across a woman’s lifetime.
It starts with unpaid work - the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, the care of ageing parents. Women in Australia spend roughly twice as many hours on household tasks and childcare as men, equating to almost a full extra working week, every single week, on top of everything else. While some of this work is meaningful and even potentially protective for mental health (such as childcare), the sheer volume of it is not. Household work is associated with poorer mental health for both women and men, but women face far greater exposure. Caring for a disabled or elderly adult - work that also falls disproportionately on women - is significantly linked to worse mental health outcomes.
Yet the problem is not only about the hours, and our research has also found that perceived fairness matters just as much. Women and men who feel the division of unpaid work in their household is unfair - whether they believe they’re doing too much or too little - report mental health scores around four points lower than those who feel the split is equitable. This shows that the subjective experience of inequality is itself a health issue.
That unequal burden doesn’t stay in the home but follows women into the labour market.
Almost 30% of working-age Australian women are not in paid employment, compared to 15% of men. Of those who are employed, over 40% work part-time. Women are over-represented in casual and fixed-term work, with fewer than three in four employed women holding permanent, ongoing positions. This isn’t simply a matter of preference. Our research shows these patterns are driven, in large part, by the demands of unpaid work - women trading paid hours to meet care responsibilities that aren’t being shared equally at home. And the consequences for mental health are significant. Compared to women in secure full-time employment, those in highly precarious work score around five points lower on validated mental health measures. Those women who are not employed at all face similar mental health penalties.
Crucially, it’s not just objective insecurity that matters - it’s the felt experience of low job control and job insecurity that also appears to influence women’s mental health.
Most confronting is what happens over time, with our research showing that women who consistently carry high unpaid labour loads during their prime working years - those raising children, caring for others, managing households - don’t simply bounce back once the caring demands ease. A 17-year trajectory analysis found that women who spent their prime years with high unpaid labour loads were 2.7 times more likely to be out of the workforce later in life, 4.7 times more likely to be in part-time work, and 2.9 times more likely to be in casual employment - compared to women with consistently lower unpaid loads. Even women whose care demands eased as children grew older remained 1.6 times more likely to be working part-time, showing that the scarring effect of this high unpaid labour is real and lasting.
The downstream consequences are predictable: lower lifetime earnings, less superannuation, and greater economic vulnerability in older age. Australian women already retire with around 28% less superannuation than men, and the unpaid labour they performed decades earlier is a significant part of why.
None of this is inevitable, and we have the tools and knowledge to drive change. First, affordable, accessible childcare is needed. Second, we need non-transferable paid parental leave for both parents, encouraging a more equitable division of care from the start. Third, we need better support for those caring for elderly or disabled family members. And fourth stronger protections for casual and part-time workers and workplace cultures that treat flexibility as something for everyone, not just mothers.
International Women’s Day is often a moment of celebration, and rightly so. But it’s also a moment to be honest about how far we still have to go.
Australian women are approximately 70% more disadvantaged than men across key indicators of gender equality [footnote 6]. The evidence on why - and what to do about it - is now substantial and consistent. What’s needed is the political will, and the social commitment, to act on it.
Women’s equality isn’t just good for women. It’s good for all of us.
Dr Jennifer Ervin and Assoc. Prof. Tania King are researchers at RMIT University’s Social Equity Research Centre
References
Ervin J, Taouk Y, Hewitt B, King T. The association between unpaid labour and mental health in working-age adults in Australia from 2002 to 2020: a longitudinal population-based cohort study. Lancet Public Health 2023; 8(4): e276–e85.
Ervin J, Churchill B, Ruppanner L, King T. Unpaid labour and mental health - the role of perceived fairness and satisfaction in division amongst working-age adults; a longitudinal analysis using 18 waves of panel data. Social Science & Medicine 2025.
Ervin J, Taouk Y, Hewitt B, King T. Trajectories of Unpaid Labour and the Probability of Employment Precarity and Labour Force Detachment Among Prime Working-Age Australian Women. Social Indicators Research 2023; 169: 1033–56.
Ervin J, Taouk Y, Hewitt B, King T. The gendered associations between precarious employment and mental health in working-age Australians: A longitudinal analysis using 16 waves of the HILDA survey. Social Science & Medicine 2023; 339.
Ervin J, Taouk Y, Hewitt B, King T, Doan T. A longitudinal analysis of the impact of multidimensional precarious employment on the mental health of men and women. Scientific Reports 2024; 14(1).
Ervin J RL, Hewitt B, O’Neil A, Sojo Monzon V, Crammond B, Maheen H, Spittal M, King T. . IMAGINE Gender Equality Project Report. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2024.
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