Untapped women's workforce participation represents a major economic opportunity. Women now lead Australia's main economic institutions, offering different perspectives that can reshape labour, taxation, health, environment and public spending. Policy steps like boosting wages in low paid feminised industries have improved participation, but women still work about 50 extra days on average into a financial year to equal men's annual earnings. A national taskforce found many women want secure work and respect. Achieving substantial productivity gains requires advancing gender equality in the workplace across the nation.
In 2022, at the newly elected Labor government's jobs and skills summit, economist Danielle Wood put women in the workforce front and centre. I can't help but reflect that if untapped women's workforce participation was a massive ore deposit, we would have governments lining up to give tax concessions to get it out of the ground, she said. As the CEO of the Grattan Institute, Wood had long been a powerful advocate for women to create a more productive economy.
Productivity, she said, might be easy to dispel as the niche fetish of econocrats and AFR journalists. Yet here we are almost exactly three years later, with productivity front and centre at the government's economic reform roundtable. In the room are the women who now lead Australia's three most powerful economic institutions. Wood herself is now the head of the Productivity Commission, alongside the first ever female Treasury secretary, Jenny Wilkinson, and Michele Bullock as governor of the Reserve Bank.
As Assoc Prof Duygu Yengin has written, research shows that this provides an immense opportunity, in that male and female economists often think differently, about labour markets, taxation, health and the environment, and more broadly on public spending everything from welfare to the military. Labor has done some good work so far on the gender pay gap and participation by boosting wages in low paid feminised industries, but women still had to work 50 extra days on average into this financial year
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