YETSENGA Of all the financial inequality statistics, superannuation will likely be the last to show the right sort of trends: people need a lifetime of income to accumulate their super balance and we are still working on the gender pay gap, let alone the hours and employment gaps.

There is a gap between men and women in the type of roles they tend to take, in addition to remuneration for those roles. Any of these gaps will magnify themselves in the superannuation imbalance.

There is progress in some areas. In the ordinary time earnings data, the gender pay gap hit a record low this year – of 13 per cent. But it is still 13 per cent – and this is only the ordinary time earnings data. But some variables are moving in the right direction.

We obviously need to work much, much harder on all the drivers including remuneration in roles, hours both genders have access to and the child penalty for women – we can do a lot more to limit these. All these things will improve outcomes for the individuals concerned and, if we can get more balanced, the economy will be better off overall.

VENKATESAN Even in 2018, it was a well-known fact that women retire with less than half the superannuation balances of men. This made women over the age of 55 the fastest growing homeless cohort in Australia.

We know there are a variety of reasons why women’s superannuation balances are lower. We work sporadically, we pause to have families, we are most likely to take time off to care for dependents and, as mentioned earlier, data show that in Australia many women return to work in part-time, contracting or self-employed positions.

As Richard says, the superannuation imbalance will only be corrected gradually. Some supportive changes have already been made, for example the Your Future, Your Super reform package. This rectified challenges to super entitlement based on minimum qualification requirements – removing the requirement to earn a minimum salary or work a minimum number of hours each week.

Even though there is a lot of recent focus on sharing parental leave, the reality is women must take some time off if they want children,whether they like it or not. The Your Future, Your Super reforms also sharpened focus on parental leave policies. This is a challenge we discuss on almost every board I serve on, with the objective to make sure the workplace is a level playing field when it comes to attracting and retaining women.

It has been argued that women should be paid super during maternity leave and some companies have adopted this approach. However, it is far from universal and needs structural change.

Superannuation is not fit for purpose, even today, and how innovative we can be to increase options remains to be seen. We launched a superannuation fund in 2018, and although we reached scale we could not compete with Australia’s largest and more established superannuation funds. There is a constant battle between size and innovation.

For example, in Australia regulation supports spouses sharing their super but the superannuation funds do not make this easy to do. We may have some structural options, but there is a question mark over what exactly is prevalent and what is followed – and therefore how easy it is to execute.