Women in NSW 2012 - The Workplace Gender Equality Agency

Chapter Four:Work andfinancial securityAccess to paid work is acornerstone of women’s financialand social independence. More thanhalf of NSW women are workingin the paid workforce, although41 percent of employed womenwork part-time and 28 percent areengaged as casuals.Women now make up 45 percent ofthe paid workforce. However, theyare still not paid as well as men forequivalent work. Women continueto volunteer in the community morethan men and are still doing the bulkof household work.Women workers are largelyclustered in sales, communityservices and clerical andadministrative occupations, oftenworking in health care, educationand training, and retail services.While the weekly wage gapbetween women and menin NSW has decreased by4 percentage points since 1995,men still earn 14 percent more eachweek than women. This is betterthan for women across Australia,however, for whom the weekly wagegap with men is 17 percent.Women’s financial security is moreprecarious than men’s againsta number of indicators: moreretired women than men in NSWrely on government pensionsand allowances as their mainform of income; NSW womenhave on average $12,000 lessin superannuation assets thanmen; and more than 60 percentof older single person householdsexperiencing rental or mortgagestress are female.Chapter Five:Leadership andrepresentationLeadership gender equality hasincreased in recent decades;however, there are areas whereprogress has been slow, very recentor has stalled altogether.In public life, women in NSWhave made their greatest gains inleadership positions at the level oflocal government and the AustralianSenate. Forty percent of NSWseats in the Senate are now filledby women. However, women’srepresentation at other tiers ofgovernment remains low, at around25 percent.In the private sector, as of April2012, 17 percent of all NSWdirectorships were held by women(compared to 14 percent nationally).Around 29 percent of boardmembers are women within the notfor-profitsector; in the NSW publicsector, 37 percent of board andcommittee members are women.The professions of law andeducation are approaching agender-balanced workforce, butwomen form a distinct minority insenior roles.Chapter Six:Safety andaccess to justiceWomen are far less safe in NSWfamilies and communities than men.Women are more than twiceas likely as men to experiencedomestic violence and five timesmore likely than men to be sexuallyassaulted and have the assaultperpetrated by their partner. In the12 months to September 2011,nearly 20,600 women were thevictims of a recorded domesticviolence-related assault in NSW,but surveys suggest the actualincidence is far greater. Womenmake up 70 percent of peopleprotected by ApprehendedDomestic Violence Orders.Women are less likely than men tobe victims of some crimes: robbery,non-domestic violence-relatedassault and murder; and violenceagainst women varies significantlyacross regions, both within Sydneyand across the state. There hasbeen a decline since 2003 in therate of Aboriginal women who arevictims of domestic violence.The reporting rate for sexual assaultis 20 percentage points lower thanfor robbery, and the attrition rate ofsexual offence cases is high, with lessthan 10 percent of recorded incidentsinvolving adults proven in court.The data provides some surprisesregarding women’s sense of safetyon and around public transport,which at least during daylight hours isequivalent to or greater than men’s.viiiWOMEN IN NSW 2012 | EXECUTIVE SUMMARY