To say women are juggling incredibly busy lives is an understatement.
Women still perform the bulk of unpaid caring and domestic work, limiting opportunities for paid work.
When women are being paid, on average it is at 17.9 per cent less than men, so they have to work longer for the same amount of pay.
The Turnbull Government has a new campaign to urge women to find time to exercise.
The Health Minister Sussan Ley launched the campaign on World Osteoporosis Day, saying mostly women suffer from this brittle bone condition, which can be reduced through regular exercise.
She also cited the statistic that women over 35 are about half as likely to participate in organised sport as men in the same age bracket.
Obviously, this presents huge health implications and it’s great that the government is aware of this gender divide in organised sport.
To solve the problem though, women need more than just encouragement to exercise.
We need to address the gender inequality that holds women back from finding the time to exercise and for other parts of life that aren’t paid work or caring.
Otherwise, women will be forced to try to keep up the day-to-day juggling act and will understandably drop the self-care ball every so often.
Essential parts of the solution include affordable childcare, flexible working hours and pay transparency.
Two years and two prime ministers into the Coalition government, we’ve heard a lot of talk about childcare funding but we haven’t seen much action.
The government has announced a childcare package but it hasn’t been legislated and it isn’t planned to start until mid 2017.
What’s worse, the government has threatened to link the childcare funding to other legislation, which would cut support for single parents.
As a result, families are still waiting for affordable, accessible childcare.
The inevitable outcome is that women, who society still expects to take on the majority of parenting responsibilities, will have less time.
Fitting in paid work around parenting in the absence of a childcare solution, means women often need flexible working hours. And this of course limits work available to you.
The Greens are pushing for legislation that would ensure employers can only refuse flexible arrangements for employees who are carers where there are serious countervailing business reasons.
However, we haven’t got the support of the big parties and the lack of flexible working hours still remains a barrier for women looking for work and men wanting to do more caring.
Even when mothers come up with a childcare and work arrangement that marries up, they still have the gender pay gap to contend with.
One way to tackle the gender pay gap is by ending the gag clauses in employment contracts that stop employees from being able to discuss their pay with one another.
We know that where pay is kept secret, the gender pay gap is even worse.
The gender pay gap is much smaller in the public sector (12.2 per cent), where workers are allowed to talk about their pay, compared to the private sector (21.3 per cent) where these gag clauses exist.
Outlawing these gag clauses is practical step we can take to lower the gender pay gap and I have a bill to achieve this in the Senate, which I’m hoping may get some support from other parties.
While gender inequality can seem like an all-encompassing problem, there are practical steps forward that the government can take right away.
Doing so can help give women what so many of us are so lacking – time.
As we all know, time outside of being a parent or a worker is precious and women deserve their fair share.