Confronting the superannuation gender gap

As a mid-level manager at a light-filled aged-care home in the goldfields region of Victoria, Rosemary helps members of her community spend their final years in comfort and safety. At 60 years old, she worries about how she’ll afford her own old age.

“I’ll have to work for as long as I can,” she says. “However long an employer will keep me.”

With minimal superannuation saved and facing a future of financial uncertainty, Rosemary’s life path resembles those of many Australian women approaching retirement age. She took 10 years out of the workforce to raise her children. “Then their father left,” she says.

“I was a single mum of five for about five years, working contract and part-time as much as I could. When you’re looking after your family and doing a little bit of part-time work, you can’t really generate the kind of security that you would like at this age.”

Rosemary married again, twice, and was the primary breadwinner both times. Her second husband, who died, “was not a great provider but a good person”. She feels less positive about her third husband, who took advantage of her generosity and left her worse off financially when the relationship broke down. “Women quite often aren’t in the position of power to be able to claim what might be due them by partners,” she says.

A new report launched by the Super Members Council shows a clear gender gap in superannuation wealth and points to experiences such as divorce, informal care and family violence as major drivers affecting the ability of women to save towards the end of their working lives.

Women have less superannuation than men across all age groups, but the gender gap widens in the years after childbirth. Between the ages of 40 and 44, the disparity reaches almost 30 per cent, or about $53,000. At 60-64, when many Australians have started to retire, women do so with an average of $51,000 less than men in their super accounts. They are about 10 per cent more likely to have no super at all.

That explains why women rely more heavily on the Age Pension to survive, as a 2016 Senate committee report titled “A husband is not a retirement plan” pointed out. Experts agree that the Age Pension is insufficient to keep all elderly Australians out of poverty. According to research from the Grattan Institute, retired home owners may be protected from relative poverty by the Age Pension, but half of retired renters are not, and Commonwealth Rent Assistance is insufficient to make up the difference.

In consequence, women face higher rates of poverty than men at all ages, and those rates increase with age. At age 60, about a quarter of women live in poverty, compared with 21 per cent of men. By age 80, more than a third, or 36 per cent, of Australian women are living in relative poverty, says the Super Members Council report.

The superannuation guarantee, introduced in 1992 to promote self-funded retirement, ties retirement income to work income – rewarding continuous, high-earning careers. “Super will just reflect how much you work and how much you get paid,” says Joey Moloney, deputy program director of the Grattan Institute’s housing and economic security program. “Women spend longer out of the workforce for care and are paid less for the same work.”

A range of later-life events often conspire to leave women even more disadvantaged. Women typically retire from paid work at much younger ages than men. While they’re slightly more likely than men to retire for health reasons, women are much more likely than men to retire due to the ill health of a family member – or to care for children. They’re two-and-a-half times more likely than men to face primary caregiving demands between the ages of 45 and 65. According to Super Members Council modelling, those demands are alone responsible for an average of $28,600 less in super by retirement age.

“Super will just reflect how much you work and how much you get paid. Women spend longer out of the workforce for care and are paid less for the same work.”

“This report shows there is more to do to make super truly super for every working Australian,” Super Members Council chief executive Misha Schubert tells The Saturday Paper.

Some progress was made this week. Though Treasury backed down on its proposal for additional taxes on superannuation balances above $3 million, new adjustments were made at the bottom of the income scale. On Monday, Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced a boost to the low income superannuation tax offset (LISTO) – one of the key recommendations of the Super Members Council report.

The increase in the government concession, Chalmers said, would “help deliver a more secure retirement for 1.3 million Australians, of which around 60 per cent are women”.

The payment will rise from $500 to $810 from July 1, 2027, and the eligibility threshold from $37,000 a year to $45,000.

“The function of LISTO is to ensure low-income earners get a tax break on their compulsory super contributions,” says Moloney. “It had not kept up with the increasing compulsory contribution rate nor change to the income tax system. This change to LISTO does just that.”

Superannuation is a major part of Australia’s retirement model, says Moloney, but a person’s balance isn’t the only determinant of their financial condition in retirement. Inequality and the poverty rate for elderly Australians are a function of a range of policy settings, with the Age Pension and Commonwealth Rent Assistance being two of the most important.

The means-tested Age Pension rectifies much of the inequality baked into the superannuation system, Moloney argues.

“Because it’s got this aggressive means test, it will offset a lot of that inequality by giving dollars directly to the people who have fewer assets and income.”

The question is whether the pension can stop the poorest retirees from falling into poverty.

Moloney points out that whether or not the Age Pension is adequate is “a bit of a subjective question”, but based on Grattan’s research, as well as peers such as the ANU Centre for Social Policy Research, the consensus is “if you own your own home and you’ve paid off the mortgage, then the Age Pension looks like an adequate standard of living”.

“Obviously,” Moloney says, “it’s a housing story.

“By the time you pay rent, you’ve clipped so much of your Age Pension and your rent assistance that there’s not much left over. And then when you look at that cohort in the data, that’s when you see the high rates of poverty: the high rates of financial stress and the low rates of financial comfort.”

That is why both the Super Members Council and the Grattan Institute recommend boosting Commonwealth Rent Assistance above and beyond the increases at the past two federal budgets. This, they say, would ensure retired renters can afford the cheapest 25 per cent of homes across capital cities. For Moloney, it’s the top reform in this debate.

Rosemary was driven out of Melbourne in search of cheaper rent, but she hasn’t found the regions all that much easier. “I was a bit naive. I assumed that country rentals would be cheaper,” she says.

She landed a job in Castlemaine, 130 kilometres north-west of the city, before looking for a rental. After months of looking, she found a cheaper place in a nearby town, Kyneton. “So I moved there. That’s $450 a week. That’s the cheapest I could find anywhere. And if I was on an aged pension, I would not be able to afford that.”

According to Grattan research, 12 per cent of retirees are renters, and two thirds of them will fall beneath the poverty line. A further 10 per cent of retirees live rent free, such as with family, or in aged care.

“So, if I didn’t go into residential care when I retire, my options are to move in with family, if that’s amenable to them, or to do share housing,” Rosemary says.

She sees the rental market as “a massive, massive problem in this country”.

“It’s gone from being able to afford a decent, nice place for your family for a reasonable amount, to seeking the cheapest, rather nastiest, sort of places, because that’s all you can afford.

“It affects your self-esteem and the way you look at yourself, and the way you think that other people will look at you. That is all part of a cascade effect, crushing you. Just slowly, slowly sucking all the confidence out of you. You’re working … even harder now, and earning more money now but living in less,” Rosemary says.

“And that’s very soul-crushing.” 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
October 18, 2025 as “Super-charged gender gap”.

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