Poltics
The impacts on female employment of the authorities’s revamped stage three tax cuts continue to attract less debate than notionally extra glamorous matters such as the push for extra “tax reform”. That’s of a part with how the ongoing and significant feminisation of the workforce is routinely uncared for by the media and politicians.
By now it’s an aged yarn for Crikey readers, then again it unbiased appropriate keeps happening: the upward push and upward push and upward push, and upward push, of caring products and companies in the financial system. According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics quarterly workforce data, health and social care employment reached a fable 2.23 million staff (seasonally adjusted, nonetheless the original numbers are virtually the same) in the three months to November 2023. That was a stonking 3.9% growth in a single quarter alone, as part of 7.7% growth over the 12 months to November, and 33% — one third, no typo — in the past 5 years. All the Australian workforce has grown most fascinating 12.6% in that time.
It means 15.6% of Australians in work are in that sector. The time when one in six staff is in the field isn’t far off. And extra than three-quarters of them are female. The bulk of the additional jobs in fresh years also went to girls folk, meaning the field a bit increased its stage of feminisation to over 78%.
Nonetheless it unquestionably’s a diverse sector: health and hospitals make up about 1.28 million folks (76% female) which by itself can be the fourth-largest sector of the workforce; residential care (81% female) employs around 230,000; social care — home care and childcare — 720,000 staff, 77% of whom are female (there’s been a fresh sample-derived situation with the balance in the ABS numbers between residential care and social care, nonetheless that appears to be working itself out as the quarters tick by).
The various female-dominated sector is education and training, the place around 72% of staff are female. That hasn’t grown at the same rate as health and caring — it grew at “most fascinating” 5% by means of 2023 and now employs extra than 1.2 million folks. It’s grown 16% in the past 5 years.
This stable growth in female-dominated professions isn’t comfortable, then again it is reliable, and it’s why the percentage of girls folk in the workforce was below 47% 5 years ago nonetheless is now 47.6%. The change sounds small then again it’s a shift measured in the many plenty of of thousands of jobs. A decade ago the figure was below 46%, 20 years ago below forty five%.
The expansion in health and caring and education has particularly accelerated over the decade-plus, as this graph of the number of jobs in those sectors versus total employment reveals.
By mid-2025, fully one-quarter of all jobs in the Australian financial system is more likely to be in health, caring or education. And funnily ample, those jobs dominate the occupations that will see the largest advantages from Labor’s changes to stage three.
The reason for reciting all these figures is to hammer home unbiased appropriate how steadily and massively the workforce is changing, and why loads of the commercial debate is really about an financial system that hasn’t existed for years, if now not decades.
What passes for the “productiveness debate” barely addresses that the very theory of productiveness in education, health and caring is at odds with traditional labour productiveness measures. And trade coverage is relentlessly centered on manufacturing and attempting to re-establish a long-long past past when Australia made trains, or a future wherein we make nuclear submarines, and pump out lithium batteries because we want to be a “renewable vitality superpower”.
Caring and education products and companies rarely feature in these utopian financial dreams. They slice up extra in debate as complications to be solved, now not thrilling unusual (aged) frontiers for investment — the NDIS is blowing out, there’s now not ample access to health products and companies, our educational standards are falling because of melancholy curriculums/lefty teachers/the woke agenda/now not ample employer involvement, public sector pay rises are a disaster for the funds — and so on.
Financial debate in Australia — largely carried out by male economists and commentators (and white male economists and commentators, adore me), who have a tendency to carry far less of the caring burden in households than girls folk — is out of tune with the commercial reality of the workforce. It’s one reason why we desperately need extra female economists and commentators.
