Women's Health & Wellbeing Scorecard
The first Australian Women’s Health and Wellbeing Scorecard: Towards equity for women found that at current rates it will take 70 years to reach full time employment equality with men, and more than 200 years to reach income equity.
Women’s labour force absence alone cost $72 billion in lost GDP annually, driving health inequities and deterioration, prompting calls for urgent action.
Building on a successful Monash University partnership with Monash Health and over 100 other organisations, the Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation (MCHRI) will produce the scorecard annually. It was published in MJA InSight+.
Overall, The Women’s Health and Wellbeing Scorecard found economic indicators for women were improving but that a gender gap remains for all indicators except unemployment.
Some of the report’s key findings include:
- Women’s average income and superannuation balances increased from 2001-2020, but women continued to have lower income and less superannuation than men.
- In 2020, there was a 19-percentage point gap in full time employment, a $23,767 annual income gap and a $44,746 superannuation gap between men and women.
- Women’s social functioning, emotional and physical ability to perform their role, declined from 2001-2020, linked to financial inequity.
- In 2020, women reported poorer health outcomes than men in every health domain except general health.
- Around two thirds of women report poor physical functioning, low levels of vitality and poor general health and mental health.
- Women’s health in many domains is going backwards; most reported poor health in mental health, physical and social functioning, emotional and physical ability to perform a role, vitality and bodily pain.
- Low-income women had poorer health than high income women in every domain of health assessed. There was a more than 20 percentage point gap between lowest and highest income women for most domains.
- The largest gap was for physical ability to perform a role where 61% of women in the lowest income group experienced poor health in this domain; but only 26% of women in the highest income group did. Similar differences were seen for general health, physical and emotional ability to perform a role, physical functioning, and bodily pain.