In the second part of our In Conversation episodes, the experts call for a gender lens to be incorporated across all issues, as current infrastructure and systems do not reflect the reality women face. Tania Farha, CEO, Safe and Equal; Jeanette Large, CEO, Women’s Property Initiative; and Dr Emily Porter, Senior Research Fellow, Brotherhood of St Lawrence outline the root causes and viable interventions in relation to the key issues women are currently facing.
This episode is a collaboration of Just Gold and the Melbourne Women's Fund.
Melbourne Women’s Fund is a Giving Circle that brings together members’ financial, intellectual, professional and personal resources to support non-profit organisations in Melbourne that address issues undermining the quality of life and futures of women and their families. It is a charitable fund account within the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Fund ABN 63 635 798 473.
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Grace Packer
This is a Just Gold podcast.
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Carley Bishop
Captured on the lands of the peoples of the Asian Cool a nation. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. This podcast was recorded live during a melbourne Women's Fund In Conversation event on Thursday, the 9th of June 2022. Just Gold Proudly supports the Melbourne Women's Fund. This episode is the second part of three from this event.
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Carley Bishop
The experts call for a gender lens to be incorporated across all issues, as current infrastructure and systems do not reflect the reality women face. Tanya Farha, CEO of Safe and Equal. Jeanette Lodge, CEO of Women's Property Initiative. And Dr. Emily Porter, senior research fellow at Brotherhood of St Lawrence, outlined the root causes and viable interventions in relation to the key issues women are currently facing.
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Carley Bishop
This In Conversation event is moderated by Julie Riley, AM, CEO of Australians Investing in Women. Now here's Dr. Emily Porter on Social Security.
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Dr Emily Porter
So I think that the two top two root causes of it with work is and women skills are valued and that support paid work and unpaid work. So women do a lot of work at home, provided terrible skills and that's not valued in our system at all. That intersects with a lot of systems that we have with that Social Security systems or workplace systems or childcare systems or transport or housing systems that don't actually have a gender one.
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Dr Emily Porter
So our Social Security system, if your partner earns over a certain amount, you can't access benefits, which means that women at the start of relationships or women in precarious relationships are really to have to rely on their partners. It's also not designed to take into account the realities that men with so many single parents rely on for the tax benefits.
00:02:10:17 - 00:02:28:24
Dr Emily Porter
But they also they have to estimate what their outside income is going to be, and that includes child support. So we're going to offer often in this difficult decision where they have to estimate what they're going to get in child support, knowing that if if the ex-partner doesn't pay up, they won't get the benefit and they won't get the income.
00:02:29:07 - 00:03:09:14
Dr Emily Porter
But if they underestimate, then they can get a massive financial incentive because the estimated income. So we have these systems that don't actually represent the reality. And it's the same with ensuring childcare is available to all women to access the labor market. So in terms of solutions, we really need to start tackling that complex solution, underlying idea of gender roles and the is why we also need to start designing workplaces and the systems that support public education and transport housing to actually recognize the reality that women face every day.
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Dr Emily Porter
Have a Social Security system that actually understands, that actually values this position so that women don't have to jump through hoops to access payment. So we are incentivized to stay with partners so women have enough income to actually leave. So as part of a webinar that we did last year, we spoke to a woman, Angela, who recently left an abusive partner, and she said, I only left because the coronavirus supplement made it possible there was no way I could would have the income to rent my own place and get far enough away.
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Dr Emily Porter
If it wasn't for that and I knew that I'd be there for six months so I could put something away. And that was because we didn't have an adequate Social Security system. And once that was reversed, she was like, I'm in constant stress about my rent. They might, because if it does, then I don't know what I can do.
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Dr Emily Porter
So I go back to my father. So I think it's a pretty startling system to actually support women that understands the realities that women.
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Carley Bishop
He is Jeanette Large on housing affordability.
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Jeanette Large
Well, I think I have to agree with the financial disadvantage for women and absolutely that's when they're employed. Are they not employed? The devaluing of women's work absolutely contributes so much to the economic insecurities of women. So I want I want to pace all of the things that have already been said. But for me, the root cause, the financial disadvantage for women.
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Jeanette Large
Absolutely. And and as we as I said before, it goes to that the whole life span and then the impact that the latter end of their life, whether it's superannuation, whether it's savings levels, all of those things. And the cumulative effect of that is significant. The and as I said before, the housing affordability, I mean, we need to really be addressing the housing affordability affordability issues.
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Jeanette Large
The private rental market is not it's not meeting the needs of women who need affordable housing when something in the private market is not meeting a need. Government really needs to step in and government needs to step in, in this case in a big way. And it needs to be the federal government as well as the state governments, not just the state government.
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Jeanette Large
I think we've probably got a better chance with the federal government that's just been elected. However, in thinking in knowing what their policies are, those 30,000 at this stage, a future fund that would deliver 30,000 properties nationally. When I've just said to you, you know, we have 60,000 households on our what's happening register or wedding list in Victoria that is still not going to meet the needs of the Eslake.
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Jeanette Large
So there needs to be a national housing strategy. It needs to be in place with the State Government's contribution. They need to realize there has to be huge investment in housing affordability and and the national housing strategy. Yes. It doesn't just cover social housing. It covers all of the housing spectrum. So that really has to be is the solution.
00:06:42:23 - 00:07:11:09
Jeanette Large
So that, you know, for women, absolutely financial disadvantage on so many levels. And then the housing affordability and the you know, the addressing of the financial disadvantage we the positions that women hold as far as it goes with the fact that they provide so much in caring voluntarily not paid. All of that has to be recognized.
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Julie Riley
This is not to jump in and just respond, if I can, because I'm wondering how many of you, my record companies or may know people who have vacant properties. And one of the really innovative things that one of the initiatives have done is created a property management system, a real estate agency that aims to let you sort of take it just briefly.
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Julie Riley
But if you know anybody who has properties that would like to manage and you can therefore spend the creation of more affordable housing.
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Jeanette Large
So the real estate agency is actually a for profit real estate agency. So it operates out there with all the real estate agents, but and it does property management and it does sense, however, 100% of the business profits come back into women's property initiatives, which then provides a revenue stream for us to be able to create more homes.
00:08:15:22 - 00:08:48:03
Jeanette Large
So the real estate agency itself is not housing disadvantaged women headed households. We women's probably can assist if you've got a property you want to do that, we can see that. But the property, real estate agency, property initiatives, real estate is a market market, real estate agency. And we look we established it in that way because there's many people out there who are very, very kind and wanting to assist in some way.
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Jeanette Large
But often they would ring us and say, Well, we'd really like to allow our properties to be rented to a disadvantaged women head household when we told them the rental return. But they would get, you know, they had mortgages against these properties or whatever, they had to get a certain return and they just said, oh, sorry, we, you know, we want to do it, but we just can't afford it.
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Jeanette Large
Well, this is another way that they can still get the market rate high, their mortgage or whatever it is, but they're still contributing to our organization because the property management fees or the sales commissions are coming back to women's properties.
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Carley Bishop
Now his Tanya Farha on gender equity.
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Tanya Farha
So I'm sure many of you have heard that gender inequality leads to family got to have had at work. So if you think about gender inequalities all the way starting from unequal pay, unequal access to services, all of that, if you think of violence against women as the most extreme expression of gender inequality along the spectrum, then what are those expressions of gender inequality so unequal power relationships mainly between men and women, but we know that there are all cohorts that that expresses.
00:10:02:14 - 00:10:35:13
Tanya Farha
And then what is it about that that leads to violence that this particular drive is there? So men's control of decision making in the heart, right. That's a particularly toxic period of male peer to peer relationships, some of those sort of more extreme kind of expressions around. So that's how we think about these. But then if you think about particular cohorts of women and you would have seen the statistics that Aboriginal women are 33 times more likely to experience violence.
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Tanya Farha
Why is that? Then then you go to adding that drivers around colonialism. Dispossession, because that's distinct. Interestingly, it's not Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men, it's mainly white men, you know. So let's remember that. So you've got even more forms of oppression happening in the in, in that cohort of relationships. So that's the sort of spectrum of gender inequality in the broader gender inequality.
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Tanya Farha
So the issues that Emily and Ginetta talking about here, they all create the context for those even worse expressions to be to emerge. Add on to that the social norms that we perpetuate in our society and allow violence to occur. So this is reinforced all the time at every level of society. Then you can see how you can very easily go from gender parity, no pay parity to something like violence and something it's really hard for people to see along the continuum, how that works, how that expresses itself.
00:11:41:04 - 00:12:05:16
Tanya Farha
So it's really important, I think, to think about some of those issues and how they express themselves and then think about those other drivers that add to that. And if you think about LGBTQ plus you thinking about primacy of transphobia, we saw that very nasty expression during the election around transphobia. So I guess in a way I'm happy to take questions and really interrogate this and explore this a little bit.
00:12:05:16 - 00:12:34:02
Tanya Farha
But that in a what is a very complex issue is is the basis of it. And so one so what would I do? Well, I can't go past housing for people who've experienced violence like absolutely it is at the core and great initiatives that you are doing. Janette So good on you. And we do. And we really back in the National Housing Strategy as well at the peak body because it is the only solution to this housing crisis.
00:12:34:02 - 00:12:34:23
Jeanette Large
Across the country.
00:12:35:03 - 00:13:00:15
Tanya Farha
And we should do it. But more broadly, what would I love to see? Well, I would love to see more dedicated primary prevention initiatives across our society. So they are the things that are stopping violence before it happens. So addressing things like toxic masculinity is addressing a whole range of things that in our society change the norms that lead to the beliefs and the behaviors that we've seen around violence.
00:13:01:04 - 00:13:24:12
Tanya Farha
That is the real critical and the way to do that, we have to do at every level. You would have all heard about respectful relationships, education in schools, not just one sitting people living. They go to their sports court, people go to their workplaces. What about in the family? What about when people first have kids? There are a whole range of things that we have to do to address this before it even starts to express itself.
00:13:25:13 - 00:13:40:24
Tanya Farha
So this is really what I would love to see situation initiatives around primary prevention, because otherwise we're just putting up really expensive Band-Aid on something we will never stop, you know? So that's a really important structural change.
00:13:41:10 - 00:14:04:05
Julie Riley
And hugely one that I think I see a lot of positive moves. But when we think about the centuries and centuries of the patriarchy and the cultural issues that have brought us to this point, it takes an awful lot of sitting around.
00:14:04:05 - 00:14:32:12
Carley Bishop
The Invisible Woman Project, funded by our Social Enterprises Impact Program, promotes awareness and actions for women and gender diverse people to age with dignity, security and safety. Find out more on Just Go Women Dot net or on our socials at Just Gold Women.
00:14:32:12 - 00:14:41:07
Kyriakos Gold
This was a just gold podcast. Find out more about our social enterprise at justgold.net