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By the time they retire, women typically have about less superannuation than men.

This can amount to more than when wages and super are combined over their lifetime.

The gendered super gap has narrowed over the last few decades, as women have joined the workforce in increasing numbers and the superannuation system has matured.

But progress is too slow. If we keep tracking as we are, we can't expect parity until . So why is the gap so persistent?

Making super compulsory

For most of the 20th century, Australia's retirement income system produced more equal outcomes because the age pension is not linked to a person's lifetime earnings.

But the introduction of in 1992 linked lifetime earnings and retirement income.

The gender super gap arises because women and men have different patterns of paid work and earning over their lifetimes. Women have average weekly earnings than men. This is due to :

• women are much more likely to have unpaid care responsibilities. As a result, they take career breaks, work fewer hours, or work in jobs incommensurate with their skills
• discrimination, bias and lack of workplace flexibility mean better pay and career outcomes for men and fewer opportunities for people to combine work and career with care responsibilities
• occupational segregation means women are concentrated in female-dominated industries, which tend to attract lower wages than male-dominated ones.

Over a lifetime, these factors limit women's capacity to earn and to accumulate super.

On average, a woman in full-time permanent employment accumulates superannuation per year than a man in an equivalent role. That amounts to A$1,540 less per year. This annual shortfall compounds over time, resulting in a wide gender super gap by the time women retire.

How does this work in practice?

The interruptions to work caused by providing unpaid care reduces people's opportunities for accumulating superannuation. For example, having a child leads to substantial reductions in mothers' workforce participation and earnings. Women's earnings by an average of 55% in the first five years after entry into parenthood.

In contrast, research suggests men's earnings are , or even , after they become parents. So parenthood has a much greater impact on a mother's super than a father's." One suggests having a child reduces a woman's superannuation balance at age 60 by about $50,000 and a man's by $5,000.

It's not just parenthood. Australians provide care for an aging relative or person with a disability or chronic illness. Women do most of this unpaid care. Unpaid caregivers reduce their working hours, withdraw from work, or put their careers on hold. Among primary caregivers are in paid work.

According to a , on average, by age 67, primary caregivers have lost $392,500 in lifetime earnings and $175,000 in super.

Some older workers, especially women, also care for their grandchildren. More than a of grandparents of a child aged 13 or under provide care for the child in a typical week, usually while the parents work.

In a study, 70% of grandparents, mostly grandmothers, providing regular childcare reported they adjusted their work to accommodate it. One in three reported it had negative impacts on their financial security as they aged.

These factors compound over a lifetime. Many Australians provide care for multiple family members simultaneously, or at different times throughout their lives.

Women in employment are more likely to be in lower paid positions, and lower paid industries and occupations. Employees in feminized industries such as community services (including paid care workers) and retail have among the median super balances, less than half of those of managers and professionals.

What is the solution?

The gender super gap reflects deep inequalities in the distribution of work, incomes and care responsibilities between women and men across their lives. How do we fix it?

Policy and public debate has focused on boosting women's workforce participation. More women in work, means higher incomes and more savings, reducing the gender super gap, right?

Yes, up to a point, and rates of are increasing.

But we also know in Australia, we have a for some family care of young children, and for care of adults with disability and older people in the . This means many parents and caregivers will continue to have at least some interruptions to paid work, reducing their super contributions.

We also know when women are encouraged to enter paid work, care responsibilities are often "redistributed" to other women. When mothers enter or re-enter paid work it's often grandmothers who step in, frequently reducing their incomes and super. For care of aging , it is often non-working female siblings that step in.

As the savings potential of one group of women increases, the savings potential of another decreases.

Where care can't be redistributed to other women within the family, it is redistributed to paid early childhood education and care, disability support, and aged care services. All of these services are dominated by women. As a highly feminized industry, the caring roles are , so those doing the care, while paid, are themselves limited to save enough super.

Boosting women's workforce participation is an important step. But another is to pay super contributions to parents during the time they are off work providing childcare, as agreed by the federal government.

But we need an for other kinds of unpaid caregivers.

Even so, as long as care continues to circulate between different groups of women—older women, low-paid women—and as long as care isn't valued for the large social and economic contribution it makes, the gender super gap will persist.

To close the persistent gender gap, we need to go further, encouraging greater men's involvement in care, and providing better recognition and remuneration of unpaid and paid care.

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