Australian women retire with about $51,000 less in super than men. That is not bad luck. The system was not built for them. Women take time off to raise kids. They work part-time more often. They get paid 13% less. Super was designed for someone who works full-time for 40 years straight. Almost no woman does that. Women also lose more unpaid super. $15.5 billion over ten years. COVID early release hit them harder too. From July 2025, the government pays super on parental leave. That helps new mums. But it does not fix the pay gap. Or the part-time penalty. Or the decades of lost compounding already gone. A woman retiring today gets less money that has to last longer. That is not a gap. It is a design.
A woman retiring this year has about $51,000 less in her superannuation account than a man the same age. She probably stopped working earlier. Her money needs to last longer. And the system that produced this outcome has been running for 34 years without a serious attempt to fix it.
The numbers are plain. The Super Members Council puts the median gap at roughly $51,000 by the early sixties (Source: SMC Australia, 2026). The Australian Retirement Trust reports women retire with about 25% less than men. Average balances at age 60 confirm it: men sit on $430,000 to $450,000, women on $330,000 to $350,000.
Built for someone else
Superannuation started in 1992. The idea was straightforward. Employers put a slice of wages into a fund. The fund invests it. Time and compound returns do the heavy lifting. The longer you contribute, the more you finish with.
That model assumes full-time, continuous employment from your early twenties to your mid-sixties. It fits a lot of men. It fits almost no women.
Australian women take an average of five years out of the paid workforce for childcare and caregiving. They are far more likely to work part-time. They earn about 13% less on average than men, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (Source: WGEA, 2025). Each of these reduces super contributions. Together, they compound into a $51,000 shortfall at retirement.
How the gap builds
When a woman takes time off to raise children, her super contributions fall to zero. No employer payments going in. No returns compounding on those payments. Five years out at age 30 does not just cost five years of contributions. It costs everything those contributions would have earned over the next three decades.
Women are far more likely than men to work part-time. Lower hours mean lower earnings, which mean lower employer super contributions. A woman working three days a week on the same hourly rate as a full-time colleague gets roughly 40% less in super payments. Over a career, that runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Five years out at age 30 does not just cost five years of contributions. It costs everything those contributions would have earned over the next three decades.
Then there is unpaid super. Women missed out on $15.5 billion in unpaid super over the past decade, according to the Super Members Council (Source: SMC, 2025). They are over-represented in the industries where unpaid super is worst: hospitality, aged care, retail. Casual and part-time workers, who are mostly women, get hit hardest.
COVID made it worse
When the Morrison government let Australians pull money from super during the pandemic, women were over-represented among those who applied. They already had less. They withdrew a bigger share of what they had. The ATO’s own data showed younger women were among the heaviest users of the scheme (Source: ATO, 2020).
The damage compounds harder on smaller balances. A $10,000 withdrawal from a $15,000 account wipes out two-thirds of someone’s retirement savings. The proportional loss is brutal, and it lands on the people with the least capacity to recover.
The policy response, such as it is
From July 2025, the government started paying super on government-funded Parental Leave Pay. Twelve percent of the PPL rate, paid into the parent’s super fund by the ATO (Source: Services Australia, 2025). This is genuine progress. New parents, who are mostly mothers, now get some super going in during their time off.
From July 2026, Payday Super arrives. Employers must pay super on every payday instead of every quarter (Source: Fair Work Ombudsman, 2025). Since women lose more to unpaid super than men, they stand to gain the most from this change.
The Superannuation Guarantee rate is now 12%. Higher than ever. Higher contributions mean more compounding. But a higher percentage of a smaller base still produces a smaller result. The gap narrows in percentage terms. It stays wide in dollars.
What is not being done
Super on parental leave covers government-funded PPL only. It does not extend to employer-funded leave, which many women depend on. It does not cover unpaid caregiving after the paid leave ends. And it started in July 2025. Women who raised children before that date get nothing. No backpay. No top-up. No acknowledgment that the decades they spent raising the next generation of taxpayers carried a real cost.
The gender pay gap has shifted slightly over the past decade but remains in double digits. The super system sits on top of that gap and turns it into a retirement gap. No current policy addresses this directly.
There is no super contribution for unpaid care work. No way to top up women who spent years looking after children or ageing parents. No acknowledgment that this time out of the workforce has a dollar cost that super compounds year after year.
The ASFA Retirement Standard says a single person needs $630,000 in super for a comfortable retirement (Source: ASFA, 2026). The average woman at 60 has $330,000 to $350,000. She is not just $51,000 behind men. She is nearly $300,000 short of comfortable. The $51,000 gap is the distance between her and a man. The real gap is the distance between her and security.
The question nobody asks
Super has been running for 34 years. The gender gap was there from the start. It was predictable. Women were always going to take time off for kids. They were always going to work part-time at higher rates. They were always going to earn less. None of this surprised anyone who thought about it.
What is surprising is how little has changed. The system assumes continuous full-time employment. The people who fit that profile retire with enough. The people who do not, and that is most women, retire with less. This is not an accident. It is a design choice made in 1992. Left uncorrected for more than three decades.
A woman retiring today worked under this system her entire career. She paid into it. Her employers paid into it. The money grew. But it grew from a smaller base. With more interruptions. On lower earnings. And with more of it stolen through unpaid super. The result was predictable in 1992. It is still predictable now. Women will keep retiring with less. The system needs to account for the working lives women actually have. Not the ones it was designed around.
Sources
- Time to secure a dignified retirement for more women - Super Members Council, 2026
- Women and super - Australian Retirement Trust
- Mind the Gap: How unpaid super is deepening retirement inequality - Super Members Council, August 2025
- The gender pay gap - Workplace Gender Equality Agency, 2025
- Paid Parental Leave scheme changes - Services Australia, 2025
- ASFA Retirement Standard: Super balances needed for comfortable retirement reach all time high - ASFA, February 2026
- COVID-19 Early release of super - Australian Taxation Office
- Payday Super: New rules starting 1 July 2026 - Fair Work Ombudsman, 2025
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