Recording: The cost of domestic violence to women's employment

Descriptive transcript

Colleagues, welcome to UTS and thanks for joining us today, whether you're online or here. I think we've got about 200 people online as well, so this is a terrific function to really mark the release of some very, very important work.

My name is Andrew Parfitt and I'm the Vice-Chancellor here at UTS. I think Professor Anne Summers doesn't actually need any introduction, but I will give it in a moment.

The extent to which her work is having a very, very significant impact in policy and elsewhere, and supporting women in particularly troubling and challenging circumstances, is so, so important. But I would like to begin by acknowledging that we're on Gadigal land. This university is on Gadigal land; the land has always been Gadigal land. I pay respects to Elders past and present.

We were to have had an acknowledgement here from our Elder in Residence, Aunty Glenda, but she's such a busy person, I think she's busily giving the Acknowledgement of Country at a range of functions around here. But I would like to call out Aunty Glenda for the incredible work she does across the university, building community, ensuring that we engage with the right issues.

In fact, UTS has a long tradition of working with and for First Nations people to shape the future of Australia that's reconciled, that we want to see, that provides benefits for all Australians, and especially for our Indigenous colleagues and friends. We know that women's economic participation is vital to our society. Next week, on the 4th of March, the 2025 gender pay gap data will be released for nearly 10,000 employers across Australia. I mention that because last year, the gap averaged 21.8%. That means for every dollar earned by a man, a woman earned just 78 cents. Over a single year, that difference amounts to $28,000 and a gap that compounds significantly over time. This is a sobering baseline to consider.

But what about women who are missing from the workplace altogether? Economic security is critical for women. Employment provides both financial independence—a crucial factor for those leaving violent relationships—and safeguards against domestic violence. We know that Australian university graduates are securing higher salaries and full-time employment at record levels, but the report released today reveals new data on how domestic violence prevents women from accessing a university education, shutting them out of the lifelong benefits.

To quote from Anne's report: "This report sets out in detail how large numbers of women have not joined the labour force, have reduced their working hours, or quit their jobs altogether, all because of domestic violence. The same is true in higher education." The report says, "We reveal new evidence that just as there is an employment gap—as the employment rate for women who've survived domestic violence is lower than for women who have never experienced such violence—there's also an education gap, referring to the percentage of women who fail to graduate and obtain a university degree because of domestic violence."

Anne will speak shortly to share her in-depth insights into these findings. I want to thank Anne and fellow researchers here at UTS and elsewhere for their work highlighting these critical issues. Gendered violence, including physical violence, sexual violence, emotional abuse and harassment, affects every facet of a person's life. As a university that proudly welcomes staff and students from all walks of life, we'll examine the report and its findings closely, as well as the recommendations for the university sector. UTS has a track record through education and research and training, student and staff support, and our connections with industry, community and government, of supporting efforts to achieve the national goal of ending violence against women and children within a generation.

It's an honour to have trailblazers like Anne leading this crucial work here. So it's my pleasure now to introduce Professor Anne Summers to present her findings. Anne Summers AO is Professor of Domestic and Family Violence at the UTS Business School. She's been awarded substantial funding, and we're very grateful for it, by the Paul Ramsay Foundation and funding from UTS to continue her innovative database research into domestic violence in Australia. Her 2022 report, "The Choice: Violence or Poverty", used previously unpublished ABS data to reveal the shocking prevalence of single mothers who left relationships due to domestic violence and the insufficient supports that meant many chose to stay with abusive partners rather than become a single mother in poverty. In showing the impact that research can have, the report influenced the federal government to make changes in the 2023 federal budget to the payment system for single mothers. Anne's long been a champion for women, with a history of advocacy as a journalist, activist, political adviser and researcher. Her work has an enormous impact, and so we're very pleased to welcome her today to talk about the findings of her latest work.

Thank you, Anne.

Thank you, Andrew. Hello, everybody. It's a great turnout today. It's so thrilling to see so many of you turn up today—I had to put out extra chairs, which is good. I'd also like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the lands of the Gadigal people, lands that were never ceded and which are and always will be Aboriginal land. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here with us today.

Thank you, Andrew, for that generous welcome and introduction. I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank you for the support that you have shown our work, most especially the way you threw your weight behind the ELSI conference last year. Your underwriting of that conference ensured that it went ahead and was an outstanding success. Thank you very much.

This report, which we have called "The Cost", and which we are here to present today, would not have happened without the generous funding of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, as Andrew has just acknowledged, which has given us sufficient money to undertake this report and a second, even more consequential project, which we hope we'll be able to present to you later this year. We also want to thank the Federal Office for Women, whose one-off grant enabled us to commission a customised study from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that provided the figures that make up one of the key findings of our report. And none of this would have happened without the brilliant work of my co-authors and collaborators, and I would ask you to stand as I mention your names.

Thomas Shortridge—Thomas, where are you? Thomas, stay standing. I haven't finished. Thomas did amazing research, in addition to taking responsibility for the production of a report that turned out to entail some very complex work. Christian Solbeck—Christian, stand up. Christian was on secondment to us from the Tax and Transfer Institute at the ANU for a year, and whose genius with econometrics opened our eyes to a truly shocking situation with university students.

Emeritus Professor Bruce Chapman—where are you, Bruce? Do you want to stand up? Okay, he's, in theory, standing up. Professor Bruce Chapman of the ANU and his colleague, Professor Lorraine Dearden of the City University of London, who together were able to extract key findings on domestic violence and women's employment from HILDA, a feat no one else has managed in the 20 years that survey has existed.

There are so many others who should be thanked, but if I did that, I wouldn't have time to present the results, so I ask that you read the acknowledgements section of the report. A piece of work like this has many creators and enablers, every one of them necessary to the final product. And finally, thanks to you, the audience. We have been literally blown away over the past few weeks as the registrations rolled in—literally hundreds of them from all over the country, from unions and churches and corporations and local governments and government departments and groups we'd never heard of, as well as many of our many friends in the domestic violence sector.

Today we have almost 200 in the room and an amazing 478 streaming this event. I think that number might have gone up since I wrote that. I thank each and every one of you, but I want to send out a special mention to someone who's listening from her farm just outside Melbourne—the indefatigable Rosie Batty. No one has done more to put the issue of domestic violence onto the political agenda and to rally people to talk about it and do something than Rosie. Let's give her a big cheer for her dedication.

I look forward to hearing Rosie and Jess Hill and several others speaking next week at the Sydney Opera House on this subject. We have a lot of figures in this report and they are important, and most have never been published before. They give us grim insights about the continuing growth of domestic violence in all of its forms and its consequences. But the bigger picture is also important. Numbers matter, but so does context.

The context here is that the great achievements in women's economic progress in recent decades—in employment, in education and in financial security, as well as individual agency and autonomy—are being eroded by domestic violence. This potentially has catastrophic consequences. This report has two key overarching findings: one on education, one on employment. Both, of course, have huge impacts on financial security and individual agency and autonomy. Let's begin with employment.

In 1966, only about 37% of women were in the labour force, compared to 84% of men. By 2024, that 37% had climbed to 63%, with almost 7 million women employed—57% of them in full-time jobs. An amazing increase, giving women the choices and independence they had previously lacked.

But our research has revealed what we are calling an employment gap. You've all heard of the gender gap, of course—the Vice-Chancellor referred to the gender pay gap. The defining element of the gender gap, be it in politics or in pay, is that it measures the differences in outcomes between men and women. The gap we have identified—the employment gap—is a gap in the outcomes between women. It is the difference in the employment rate between women who have experienced domestic violence and those who have not. In 2021, that gap was 5.3%. This is the difference between the 76.1% employment rate for women who have experienced partner violence or abuse in any form, and the 81.4% rate for women who have never experienced violence.

The gap is larger for women who have experienced economic abuse—for this group, reaching 9.4% in 2021–22. The employment gap varies among subgroups of women. For instance, for women with disability, the gap between those who have recently experienced economic abuse by a partner and those who have never experienced partner violence or abuse is 13.4%. For culturally and linguistically diverse women, the employment gap was 3.7%.

For First Nations women, we used the 2018 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey to try to calculate employment gaps. They certainly existed, but unfortunately, because of the small sample size, the results were not statistically significant. We as a sector, and indeed as a country, must urgently address this damning deficit. Further research is urgently needed.

I will come to the education gap, our second major finding, in a moment, but first I want to provide some more context for employment. We know that of the women who recently or currently are experiencing domestic violence, around 60% of them are in employment. We are talking about 704,000 women, according to the 2021–22 Personal Safety Survey, which, as you all know, is the survey run every four years on women's safety by the ABS—the Australian Bureau of Statistics—which I'll be referring to quite a lot from now on, and which I'll just simply refer to as the PSS.

There are two lessons we need to draw from this. Firstly, all of us will know, wittingly or not, someone you work with who is currently experiencing domestic violence. It could be the person you sit beside, or someone you supervise, or your boss, or the lady who serves you in the canteen, or gives you your dry cleaning. I remember being devastated to discover that a young woman who was my secretary a long while back was being attacked by her husband for the entire three years she worked for me. I never knew. Your work colleagues most likely won't talk about it either.

And now that the rates of physical violence—the kind that leaves a bruise—have declined so markedly, she is far less likely to turn up to work with a black eye. That does not mean she is not suffering in other ways. We know there are multiple forms that violence takes—financial, psychological, emotional—that don't leave a physical mark. And there is the tension and fear and anxiety about the abuse itself, and from her efforts to hide that so as not to jeopardise her job. This means she can't be constantly late, or appear anxious, or lack concentration, or have to take unexplained leave suddenly.

The 2021–22 PSS reported that 451,000 women—that's almost half a million women—have had a previous partner who tried to control them and prevent them from working or earning money. More than 30,000 women have experienced similar conduct from their current partner. So the second lesson we need to learn is that many men are using forceful tactics to try to deliberately sabotage their partner's employment.

They use such cruel and cunning tactics as hiding her car keys, or letting down the car tyres, or hiding her transport card, damaging her work clothes, refusing to mind the children so she is stranded, even getting into her phone's calendar to change her appointments—trying to make her appear unpunctual and unreliable as an employee. This is another employment consequence of domestic violence, and one that we need to be able to measure more precisely. We need to know what kind of jobs women are leaving, how long for, and how much income they are losing as a result.

Of course, women try valiantly to resist this sabotage so they can hang on to their jobs. We know that employment offers at least a degree of protection against violence, and having a workplace to go to can be a source of comfort, advice and even assistance, especially given the newly legislated 10 days of paid domestic violence leave. And of course, it provides an income.

There is not only an employment gap, but a large financial chasm between women who experience violence and those who don't. Loss of income is one of the greatest consequences of leaving a job. Our report shows that 43.9% of women who have experienced physical or sexual violence in the past five years have experienced cash flow issues in the most recent year—43.9%. Only 7.2% of women who did not experience violence had any such household issues.

But many women eventually succumb to this pressure and leave their employment. They are unlikely to broadcast their reasons for doing so, and we as a society need to be aware of the often erroneous assumptions and even prejudices we bring to the issue of why women are not working. There are, of course, many valid reasons why women choose not to join the labour market, especially when their children are young and especially if they cannot access affordable child care. But the current popularity of the "tradwife" and, in the past, the "yummy mummy", seeks to glorify women as housebound and preferring to be unemployed. Some cultures are blamed for confining women to the home. Yet how often have we considered that, in fact, many of these women might be staying at home under duress, having been forced to abandon their jobs?

Now onto education. Our other key finding in this report is of even greater concern for the long-term employment prospects of women—the existence of an education gap among young women at university. In 1982, a mere 8% of women aged 25 to 34 held a bachelor's degree or higher—8%. By 2023, this had skyrocketed to 51.6% of women of this age range holding at least a bachelor's degree, amounting to 990,000 women.

The education gap is a new and truly shocking finding—that young women who experience domestic violence fail to complete their university degrees. For young women, by the time they are 27, there is a nearly 15% gap in the rates of university degree attainment between victim-survivors and other women. Our analysis of data obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health, which surveys the same young women each year, allowed us to track the direct impact of domestic violence.

We are able to show that domestic violence causes a 5.2% decline in young women's university degree attainment in the year following the first time they report violence, and that this rises to 9.7% three years after the violence is reported. These findings on the impact of violence on university education in Australia have never been previously reported. The lifelong consequences of failing to complete their degrees are significant, with individuals holding a bachelor's degree in Australia earning 41% more annually than those with only a Year 12 qualification. In addition, these young women are likely to have accrued an indexed HECS debt without the degree that might help them pay it off, and that could affect their creditworthiness throughout their lives. And their lower earnings, of course, mean a concomitant decrease in retirement savings.

These young women's economic futures are severely compromised, and it will be extremely difficult for them to ever recover the lost opportunities. Nor can we overlook the fact of, and possible connection between, the dramatic fall in men's share of university degrees. Women are now massively outperforming men at university. In 2023, a majority—51.6%—of women between 25 and 34 had bachelor's degrees. In the same year, only 38.4% of men of the same age had obtained these degrees.

Is this a source of resentment amongst men? A further example of the worldwide backlash against feminist goals and achievements that we are witnessing everywhere—from the White House, which has banned the use of the word "gender" throughout the federal government, to the cities of Europe, where hordes of young men are congregating to brandish their masculinity. The 2021–22 PSS reports that 287,200 women have had a previous partner who controlled or tried to prevent them from studying, just as men are also trying to prevent women from working.

Increasingly essential to men's efforts to prevent women from working or studying has been the use of surveillance, especially stalking of women designed to intimidate and further control. The 2021 PSS found that 323,800 women had reported a male intimate partner had loitered or hung around outside their workplace, school or educational facility. That's 324,000 women, only two years ago. Often such stalking is accompanied by harassment using a phone or other device, which has been made easier by the advent of new apps and other technologies.

The fight for women's economic equality began more than 100 years ago with the suffragettes insisting that we must be able to vote to influence how we are governed. Since then, generations of women, including my own—the so-called second wave—have fought to end discrimination in employment and education, to enable women to have any job they want and to be paid fairly for it. We fought for women to be financially and intellectually independent, to be able to make their own choices about marriage and children and everything else.

These victories were hard fought and now we see a huge wave of resistance, often called backlash, attempting to turn back the clock and take these gains away from us. The methods being used are despicable—violence as a means of destroying women's independence. We cannot and will not tolerate this reversing the tide of history. The data we have provided in this report is ample evidence of what is being attempted and the cost entailed if they win. We hope you will use this data to join the fight to make sure they do not succeed.

Thank you.

[Applause]

I'd now like to ask Jess Hill to join me on stage. Jess, as you know, is a Walkley Award-winning journalist, advocate and public speaker who specialises in coercive control and gendered violence.

In 2019 she published her first book, "See What You Made Me Do", about the phenomenon of domestic abuse in Australia. It was awarded the 2020 Stella Prize and shortlisted for several others, and has been adapted into a television series for SBS. Recently Jess has produced an audio documentary series called "The Trap", two quarterly essays—"The Reckoning" and "Losing It", which comes out next month on March 17th—as well as a series on consent on SBS, which was called "Asking For It". Please welcome Jess. She and I are now going to discuss it.

Thank you, Anne, and thanks so much to everybody—so many friendly, known faces in the crowd. It's just an amazing opportunity to be here with you celebrating the launch of this report. I too pay my respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge Aunty Glenda Stubbs who has joined us. Thank you so much.

So it really is a privilege to be here with all of you today, launching another landmark report from Dr Anne Summers. I can still remember you calling me and telling me about the headline findings of "The Choice" when that was about to come out—that 60% of single mothers were survivors of domestic violence and 50% of them were living in poverty with their children. Honestly, it felt like it was an electrifying moment and it re-energised a campaign to restore the single parenting payment that had been butting up against brick walls for over a decade. I was very eager to call Terese Edwards very soon after you told me about this, who heads up the Single Mothers Family Council.

Anne has a unique mind, a laser-like ability to find the big headline and to communicate it with such conviction that old paradigms really have no choice but to change—like her iPad trying to hide the paragraph, it knows better. And now we have "The Cost", which gives new data to so many people who are trying to improve the lives of victim-survivors in work and in study. So, listening to you, and there were a couple of questions I was like, oh no, Anne's already covered that, but for me personally, I'm really interested in hearing more about the findings concerning university students and particularly what you're talking about universities needing to do to respond.

Because I think if our governments are determined to end violence within a single generation, you see these young women at the start of their adult lives—they need to be empowered so they don't become more vulnerable to victimisation as they grow up. So, given that we are in the university setting right now, what do you think—now they've got the code around sexual violence, there's been movement after a long amount of campaigning—what should be done around this?

Well, I think it's a very timely question, Jess, and the publication of the report is quite timely for that very reason. The long, hard campaign to get action on sexual abuse and sexual harassment and protection of students on campus, and the appointment of an ombudsman, has all just finally happened in the last little while—but it's taken years to occur. I think what was so startling about Christian's findings—I mean, she went looking for employment and found this—it was quite startling to us all and it took a bit of digesting. What we discovered from the data was that this phenomenon was happening, that these women were dropping out a year after first having experienced violence and then continuing to drop out at greater numbers the longer it went on.

We then realised that there is—I think many of us, wrongly, did not think of students as being subjected to domestic violence. We think of it as something with older women, and that's—I don't know why we think that, but I certainly thought that, and of course there's no basis for thinking that. Students cohabit with men, they're in partner relationships, and therefore they are liable to violence if it's a violent relationship and under the PSS definitions of what constitutes violence. So it makes sense, but it hadn't been pointed out to us before.

The key thing that I then discovered is that while universities offer their staff protection, including domestic violence leave and other supports, they don't offer anything to students. In the same way that all this work that's been done on sexual abuse of students has not looked at domestic violence. So everybody's been sort of guilty, if you like, of the same myopia—of thinking it doesn't happen to students, it only happens to grown-ups. But in fact, it does happen to students, the numbers are pretty horrendous and the consequences, both for the individual women but for us as a society, are terrible.

So do you think universities need to look at—would they expand the code that's been introduced, or would it be something quite separate, or is there anything that you've come to in the report?

We didn't look at the solutions so much, but obviously there has to be action taken. I think the university—the senior management at this university, once they heard about my findings, were onto it right away and they have in fact briefed the sector on it, so they're being very responsible, thanks very much, about it. I would expect that they would seek to apply, or either to include domestic violence in the overall response to harm being delivered to students or to equivalise what's happening with staff and students. I don't know—it's up to experts to come up with the best solution—but clearly we have to recognise it, that it's a phenomenon that exists; secondly, we have to offer assistance that's at least equal to what is available to staff; and thirdly, one thing we put in our recommendations is we have to consider whether or not it might be possible to make available temporary accommodation for students who need to get away.

We all know that refuges are full and can't accommodate, can't cope with the existing demand. If universities can manage the housing side of this issue, that would be very helpful. In the quarterly that's coming out, there was an unaccompanied young victim-survivor who was experiencing family violence from her mother and she actually says the accommodation she got at uni saved her because it meant she could move out. So probably also there's thinking around young victim-survivors who are experiencing family violence and have to leave the home and it's no longer fit for them to be home.

The other thing—the shadow data in this report, which you do note the actual statistics on—is all the women who are actually forced to work by freeloading perpetrators but who don't see a cent of that money or are permitted only an allowance and who are essentially having their wages stolen. I think you note in the report that 451,000 women have had a previous partner who has controlled or tried to control them from working or earning money, while 538,400 women had a previous partner who controlled or tried to control their income or assets. Can you ground that data in how that's likely to play out for these women?

I mean, we don't have any more data than we've published. One of the things about this report which is quite frustrating—I mean, it's very satisfying in the sense that we've been able to document things that we sort of knew about or suspected and we've now got actual data—but every single piece of data we produce produces about ten questions. There are so many things we don't know. One of the things that we need to know and is not available is that with women who leave their jobs, either voluntarily or having been really forced out, we don't know what jobs they were, we don't know how long they've been employed, we don't know what they were earning, so we're not able to sort of calculate the individual loss or the loss to society as we should be able to. So this is why our next project is developing a longitudinal study of the impact of domestic violence so that we can measure these things. At the moment there's no way—we've got data on employment, we've got data on wages, but they don't link, they don't talk to each other, so there's no way of knowing that. So I can't really say in any detail more than we've got with those broad numbers.

So I guess something that I found really surprising in the report—and I don't know about you, Anne, and all of the people today in the audience—but so often we don't have much of a political history of domestic violence policy because often journalists sort of don't go near it, it's like too complex or maybe for whatever reason we don't really have that many think tanks—any think tanks, actually—who see it as a serious enough area of policy to apply themselves to. So whenever I see anything about a political history, especially of the last national plan and what things moved around that perhaps we could rethink, it's always exciting.

One of the things I found really surprising is the political history of linking industrial relations to domestic violence policy and particularly that of getting these workplace leave entitlements introduced by the federal government. You write about how this idea got a huge boost under Gillard, but I must say I was really surprised that the Turnbull government, who really put gendered violence back on the political agenda after the Abbott dark ages and brought us Respect@Work, removed the workforce focus from the national plan and abolished the Safe at Work, Safe at Home project at UNSW, along with the Clearinghouse for Domestic and Family Violence Research. By this stage, as you say, countries like the Philippines and Spain had already had ten paid days of domestic violence leave since 2006.

So something I wanted to ask you is that you've been inside and outside government for decades. Does Australia's resistance to reform frustrate you?

Can I give a yes/no answer? No. That would be like a public servant. Well, Jess, you and I were on the Rapid Review Committee or whatever it was—we both served for three months on a group that was meant to develop some responses to prevention following the declaration of the Prime Minister that we had a national emergency because a larger than usual number of women had been killed in a particular period. We worked very hard on that and came up with some pretty interesting solutions, we thought. Don't really know what's happened to them—there hasn't been much publicly anyway. Let's hope things are happening behind the scenes.

But I do think—one of the things I'm looking forward to in your quarterly essay is reading the history of the national plan, but I just quickly glanced at it the other day and see that you cover that—because it does appear that we're incredibly good at setting up committees and asking questions about what should happen, but we're not very good at doing anything or following through, I guess, to the end. One of the things that struck me the other day when I read about the 75 new shelters that were going to be built in New South Wales on the new core and cluster model and how these were going to be—I think it was introduced by previous Liberal government—75 houses. They said that, then that was brought down to 49 houses, and of that, eight have been delivered. This is over three years. I mean, why? Why does this happen? There was a firm commitment to build 75 houses—they're desperately needed. What happens and why aren't we up in arms about it? I just find that so frustrating.

The same with the paid leave—I think it's a very problematic policy. It's better than nothing, and those people who have taken advantage of it say it has been helpful. But we know from our report, "The Cost", that 34% of women take leave because of domestic violence most years, and the average amount of time they spend off is 30-odd days—a month. They basically take a month off. Now, these are figures from before the legislation was introduced, so they weren't taking that leave, but obvious