While Australia has made significant gains towards gender equality, inequality still exists in a range of areas across people’s lives. Working for Women explores these inequalities across the 5 priority areas. The Working for Women Baseline Report provides point-in-time data on the status of gender equality in Australia at the time of the strategy’s release in March 2024, and the annual Status of Women Report Card includes a snapshot of the most recent available data and analysis on the social and economic equality issues facing women and girls in Australia.
Existing inequalities, as well as norms and attitudes that can drive inequality, mean that even when a proposal seems gender neutral it can still impact people differently or disproportionately based on their gender. The gendered impacts of proposals can be unintentional due to pre-existing gender gaps across Australian society, communities and the economy. This means proposals can have unintended consequences, exacerbate or perpetuate existing inequality or fail to achieve their intended outcomes.
Example: Tax cuts – revealing gendered impacts
Exploring data and evidence can reveal gendered impacts and differentiated outcomes. For example, recent reforms to reduce tax rates since 2024 may appear at first glance to have no gendered impacts as they do not create specifically gendered tax rates. However, distributional analysis found these tax cuts particularly impact women (compared with previous tax settings) who are more likely to be part-time and lower income earners. The tax cuts are expected to increase total hours worked by 1.3 million hours per week, equivalent to more than 30,000 full time jobs, compared to 2023-24 tax settings. This increase is mostly driven by women, who are expected to increase their labour supply by 900,000 hours compared to 2023-24 tax settings.
Gender analysis supports policy makers to identify and explain gendered impacts, and design actions to deliver improved outcomes for gender equality. In this example, the tax cuts targeted all tax payers but were also found to reduce disincentives to women’s workforce participation.
What is gender?
The language used to refer to gender is important. Sex and gender are commonly used interchangeably, including in legislation.
Sex refers to sex characteristics while gender is about social and cultural difference in identity, expression and experience.
A person’s sex and gender may not necessarily be the same. Some people may identify as a different gender to their birth sex and some people may identify as neither exclusively male nor female (gender non-binary) (ABS, The Standard for Sex, Gender, Variations of Sex Characteristics and Sexual Orientation Variables, 2020).