A report released today called Women’s Voices says that Australia’s tax system makes women’s decisions about their workforce participation unnecessarily complex.

The report comes from the Equality Rights Alliance, Economic Security for Women, and the National Foundation for Australian Women and examines how the tax system influences women’s decisions on work-force participation.

You can download the report and read more on this issue here.

Eva Cox in Crikey

The ABS has again produced data that shows women are lagging badly behind men in one of the pillars of our retirement income. This is because our highly subsidised superannuation system is based on pre-retirement earnings. Over their lifetime and because they take on particular types of jobs, women earn less than men. The reasons are complex but basically come down to the time spent in paid work versus unpaid care and the still unequal pay for many jobs identified as mainly female. Fair Work Australia acknowledges this in the ASU equal pay case but can’t really fix it…. Read more here

Listen in to Life Matters tomorrow to hear Eva speak about this issue.

Following the release of the Equality Rights Alliance‘s report on women’s experiences of Income Management in the Northern Territory, Emma Davidson, one of the researchers, has written about the women that gave their voice to the report.

The Gillard government has announced the appointment of Penny Williams as the new Global Ambassador for Women and Girls. WEL welcomes the appointment and believes this is a great step forward towards Australia working collaboratively with other nations to reduce discrimination against women and girls around the world.

WEL is concerned, however, the the post is not a full time position, when the job would certainly warrant full time attention. This is hopefully something that can be looked at now that the position has been created.

See the government media release here.

If you missed it, it is worth checking out last night’s Q and A which featured Germain Greer and Melinda Tankard Reist. The program included a discussion around the gendered nature of criticism currently being directed at Julia Gillard.

Members of WEL have expressed concerned that there is an increasing tendency towards criticism of our Prime Minister that relates to her gender and expectations of women rather than to her policy agenda which may, in fact, merit criticism.

We should be proud to have a female Prime Minister. Where she deserves criticism, it should be given, but let’s keep gender out of it.