Her Financial Journey Unveils Key Insights into the Australian Gender Wealth Gap

The rise in wealth inequality remains a key threat to financial security, freedom, and prosperity for women in Australia

31 May 2021, Melbourne – Her Financial Journey, one of Australia’s leading advocates for financial gender equality, recently completed an extensive literature review which revealed that the wealth gap between women and men continues to grow year on year.

The current gap stands at 22.8% which means that for every dollar that an Australian man owns, an Australian woman will own just 78c.

Real values have been calculated by deflating the mean values of assets and debts by using CPI taking 2002, 2006, 2010 as the base year. This is the sum of wealth stored in the primary home, other property, superannuation, business, financial instruments, vehicles, and collectibles. Source: Siobhan Austen, Rachel Ong, Sherry Bawa, and Therese Jefferson, “Exploring Recent Increases in the Gender Wealth Gap among Australia’s Single Households,” The Economic and Labour Relations Review 26, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): https://doi.org/10.1177/1035304614556040

The review also uncovered:

1. There are 12.79 million women living in Australia, of those from single female households, had, on average, $46,900 AUD less than men in the same circumstances. Demonstrating a gender wealth gap of 22.8%.
2. Within OECD countries, Australia has one of the largest male-female financial literacy gaps.
3. Research into male-female education gaps shows that male students outperform female students at all grade levels.

Sara Trimboli, Founder of Her Financial Journey stated;

“The Gender Wealth Gap has far reaching consequences within our society, not only for women but also for our Australian economy overall. It goes beyond the consequences of the gender pay gap, and yet the GWG is rarely spoken about”.

The review also uncovered that the data currently used in Australia to estimate the gap is insubstantial meaning that not only could the gap be far worse than estimated, but that we lack a meaningful understanding of the issue, its causes and its consequences.

Why does it matter?

Rising wealth inequality not only has pervasive consequences for women, but hinders economic growth in all factions of society. The GWG means that half of Australia’s economy is not reaching its full economic potential and if more women began to work towards a greater personal net worth, for instance, through labour participation, entrepreneurship, and investing, then we could see Australia’s economy revitalised.

Why is there a Gender Wealth Gap?

This is not well understood, but from what has been researched, the longstanding and growing differences in wealth between men and women appears to be sustained by:

1. Numeracy gaps in early childhood education,
2. Which then generate gendered gaps in adult financial literacy.

“We need to better understand the extent of the gender wealth gap, we need to further investigate the causes and we need to establish mechanisms to mitigate the gap.” Trimboli said.

How we conducted the review

The review was conducted during March–May 2021 by Grace Rayner, Graduate Student at Monash University, under the direction of Sara Trimboli.

Acknowledgement goes out to Dr. Samanthi Gunawardana – Senior Lecturer, Politics & International Relations at Monash University for her guidance in collaborating with Monash University and in the review process and her belief in HFJ’s mission, as well as Prof. Therese Jefferson – School of Accounting, Economics and Finance at Curtin University for her support, input into and interest in our review.

Access the reports

PDFs of the briefing note and literature review are available for download;

1. Briefing Note, The Gender Wealth Gap - May 2021
2. What are the characteristics of the Australian Gender Wealth Gap during the 21st Century? - Grace E. Rayner, May 2021

Read more about the Gender Wealth Gap.