Episode 160: Women in Super
In this episode of The Grass Is Greener, Tim is joined by Jo Kowalczyk, CEO of Women in Super, an organisation that has spent more than 30 years advocating for better outcomes for women working within the superannuation industry and, increasingly, for better retirement outcomes for all Australian women.
Jo explains why the gender super gap is closely connected to the gender pay gap, lower-paid and part-time work, career interruptions and the disproportionate amount of unpaid caring work still undertaken by women. The conversation challenges a common way of thinking about women and retirement: that women simply need to save more or start earlier.
As Jo explains, individual action can help — but it cannot completely solve what is fundamentally a structural issue. Tim and Jo also discuss:
• What Women in Super does and how the organisation began
• Why women continue to retire with less super than men
• The long-term impact of career breaks and unpaid caring work
• Why compounding makes time out of the workforce particularly significant
• Positive changes including the removal of the $450 super threshold and superannuation on government-paid parental leave
• Whether unpaid carers should receive superannuation contributions
• Why caring needs to be recognised as a valuable part of our economy
• The interaction between super, housing, the Age Pension and retirement security
• Why traditional measures of retirement adequacy may not reflect the reality of many women’s lives One of the strongest messages from the conversation is simple: The gender retirement gap should not be treated purely as a savings problem requiring women to fix it themselves.
As Jo puts it, we need to look at the systems around women’s working lives, caring responsibilities and retirement — and build a retirement system that better reflects how people actually live.
Connect with Jo: