‘Too big to ignore:’ The reform area overlooked in roundtable discussions

Economists say that recent productivity discussions overlook an economic powerhouse: the missed economic potential of Australian women.

In 2025, Australian women made up just 39.6 per cent of full-time workers, according to the government. Almost half (43 per cent) of employed Australian women were in part-time roles, significantly above the OECD average of 28 per cent.

“Australia has unusually high levels of women working part-time, despite their level of education and skill,” Grattan Institute chief executive Aruna Sathanapally said in her keynote speech at the economic roundtable on 21 August.

“It’s not just a matter of the days or hours they work – it is the workplaces they end up working in, and it is the lower career progression and skills development that they experience, which is a type of labour market scarring with lifelong consequences. And if we care about productivity, we should care about that.”

Boosting Australian women’s economic participation could unleash millions of dollars in economic growth, government research has found.

“The underrepresentation of women in the workforce has a great impact on the Australian economy,” the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet wrote in a discussion paper.

“If women’s participation matched men’s, Australia’s GDP would increase by $30.7 billion, or 8.7 per cent to $353 billion by 2050 and create an additional 1 million full-time equivalent workers with post-school qualifications.”

University of Adelaide economist Duygu Yengin told Accounting Times that inefficient and outdated social structures, such as the mismatch between schooling and working hours, held back women’s productivity.

“After-school and before-school care is not available everywhere. So a woman cannot work until 5pm easily,” Yengin said.

“They have to match their hours to school hours, and that means they generally choose part-time work. But you cannot go for the high skill, high paying jobs if you are part-time, and that's a big issue of not utilising the skills of women.”

Mary Wooldridge, chief executive of the Women’s Gender Equality Agency, added that a culture of inflexibility in high-powered roles held working mothers back.

“We get a lot of feedback from women who say, ‘I'm working at a much lower level than I'm capable of because my organisation doesn't have a culture that supports being able to work in a way that's flexible at the more senior level,” Wooldridge told Accounting Times in May.

“Sometimes women are not able to work full-time, but most of the senior roles are full-time roles.”

Of the Australian women who wanted to work but couldn’t, nearly six in 10 (59 per cent) said that caring responsibilities were the primary barrier preventing them from working, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed. Only 7 per cent of men said the same.

The high cost of childcare was also a disincentive for mothers who wanted to re-enter the workforce, Sathanapally told the roundtable. Working mothers faced an effective marginal tax rate of over 50 per cent when childcare costs were factored in.

“If you think a top tax rate of 45 per cent is high, spare a thought for the two out of five women using childcare,” she said.

Changing the design of family payments and improving access to affordable, quality childcare could go some way towards addressing these barriers for women, Sathanapally said.

Yengin said that reforms to boost women's participation should go both ways – more alignment between working and school hours, as well as a focus on output over hours when evaluating workforce contributions.

“First, there should be more support for women to be able to take [high-powered] jobs, which means having more after-school care for children [and having] the societal systems match the work hours,” she said.

“I also like the direction where we are discussing four-day work weeks or having reduced hours. There should be less emphasis on just being busy all day, but more about what you contribute.”

Yengin stressed that the issue wasn’t just a ‘women’s problem,’ but an opportunity for economic growth that was too big to ignore.

“I think you have to adjust [workplace expectations] not just for the sake of women, but also for men, because they're also losing out. They are not spending time with their family,” she said.

“This is an economic issue as well. Everyone would be better off by making systems more efficient.”