A Number More Australian Women Need to Hear

I want to start with a number that I think more Australian women need to hear.

These are not women who made catastrophic financial decisions. They are women who lived conventional lives, worked, often raised children, and arrived at retirement without enough to sustain themselves. The crisis is structural. The decisions that created it were made decades before retirement, and most of the women living through it did not see it coming.

How It Starts: The Lifetime Earnings Gap

The gender pay gap in Australia sits at 11.5 percent as of 2026. Women take home on average $12,376 less than men per year — approximately 50 full working days of unpaid labour in dollar terms. Over a 30-year career, that gap compounds into a dramatically different retirement position even before career breaks and caring responsibilities are factored in.

Super contributions are a percentage of income. A lower income means lower contributions at every stage. And because super compounds — the growth builds on itself over time — a lower starting contribution in your twenties does not just mean less super at 40. It means tens of thousands less at 67.

The Saving Calculator will show you what the difference between two contribution levels looks like over 30 years. The gap that starts as a few hundred dollars a year becomes something far harder to close.

The Career Break Multiplier

The Australian Women’s Budget Statement has noted that women do nearly 4 hours of unpaid labour every single day — valued at approximately $771 a week. Much of that unpaid work directly displaces paid work. Career breaks for caregiving, reductions to part-time hours, choices to prioritise family over career advancement — these are not personal failures. They are rational responses to the structure of Australian family life, in a country where women still carry the overwhelming majority of unpaid domestic and caring responsibilities.

The Retirement Drawdown Calculator will show you how long a given super balance lasts at different spending levels. It is worth running your own numbers — not because the result will necessarily be alarming, but because knowing where you actually stand is far better than not knowing.

Why Homelessness Is the Outcome

The path from a lower super balance to homelessness is not dramatic. It is gradual. A woman retires with less than she needs. She draws down her super at a rate that keeps her comfortable for a decade. Her balance depletes. The Age Pension covers the basics but does not cover rent in a private rental market that has increased significantly in recent years. She is asset-poor, income-poor, and without the housing security that home ownership provides.

The women most at risk are the ones who rented throughout their working lives, who did not accumlate property as an asset, and whose super balance was never enough to compensate for the absence of housing security. Renting in retirement adds $20,000 to $30,000 a year in fixed costs that the system was not built to absorb.

What Reframes This as an Urgent Issue

The most important thing I want to say here is this: retirement planning is not a problem for your future self. It is a decision your present self makes, every year, about whether to act or to wait.

The free Super Series covers the key moves in plain English — salary sacrifice, the government co-contribution, consolidating accounts, choosing the right investment option. None of them require a financial adviser. All of them require understanding how they work, which is what the series is for.

What There Is to Do

• Know your balance. Log in to myGov right now and check every super account linked to your tax file number. Consolidate any accounts you had forgotten about, after checking the insurance attached to each one. Confirm your investment option is appropriate for your age and time horizon.
• Understand the co-contribution. If you earn under $58,445 in a financial year and make a personal after-tax contribution to your super, the government adds up to $500 on top. It is a direct government contribution to your retirement and most women who are eligible for it do not claim it.
• Make a plan, not a hope. Most women I have worked with who were worried about retirement had never actually run the numbers. Running the numbers is the first step toward closing the gap. The financial calculators on the site — the retirement drawdown, the future value, the saving calculator — are free and do not require a login.

The statistics on older women and homelessness in Australia are confronting. They are also the result of decisions that can still be changed, for most women reading this, if the decisions are made now rather than later.

About the Author

Jen Richardson

Jen is an accountant, business coach, and former financial planner with 30+ years in financial services. She founded jenrichardson.co to give Australian women the financial education they were never taught — straight-talking, no-BS, and built for real life.