Every month, Australia congratulates itself on having a “strong” labour market. Headlines celebrate low unemployment, politicians boast about economic resilience, and the public is reassured that anyone who wants a job can simply walk into one. But this version of the story leaves out the women who have been quietly locked out of work.
Anglicare Australia’s Jobs Availability Snapshot, out this week, reveals a reality that cuts sharply against the rhetoric. Older women are now the fastest-growing group on JobSeeker, ageing into a job market that has almost no place for them. The Snapshot shows that for every entry-level job advertised, there are 39 people on JobSeeker competing for it. Among those, 25 are people with barriers to work – the very people who rely on entry-level jobs because other roles are out of reach. That group is overwhelmingly made up of the women our policies fail most: older women, single mothers, women with disabilities, and women returning to work after years of unpaid care.
These results are the culmination of decades of inequality, with women’s careers interrupted by caring responsibilities, years spent working part-time, lower superannuation balances, the chronic undervaluing of feminised industries, and discriminatory hiring practices that push older women aside as though experience has suddenly become a liability.
Our findings also show the long shadow cast by one of the most damaging policy choices of the past decade. The choice in 2013 to cut single mothers off from the Parenting Payment meant that thousands of women were forced onto JobSeeker, the lowest payment in the system, at the exact stage of life when their caring load was highest. Those women are older now. Some spent years cycling in and out of insecure work, juggling school hours, caring for children with additional needs, or escaping violence. Many are now in their fifties and sixties, expected to survive on a payment that was never designed to support them.
That history matters because we are now watching the consequences play out in real time. Older women becoming the fastest-growing group on JobSeeker; the group experiencing the longest periods of unemployment; the group with the fewest pathways back into secure work. They are the women who carried families, communities, and entire care systems on their backs. And now, in later life, they are paying the price for a labour market and policy environment that did not value that contribution.
The national conversation treats JobSeeker recipients as if they are all the same, as if unemployment is a simple matter of effort. But there is nothing simple about a woman in her sixties trying to re-enter a job market that discards older workers. There is nothing simple about a single mother overseeing homework at the kitchen table while being breached for missing a 9am appointment on the other side of town. There is nothing simple about searching for a job when caring for an ageing parent. And there is nothing simple about rebuilding a life after family violence while living on a payment so low it keeps women in poverty.
We will not change these outcomes by pretending the labour market is fairer than it is. We will not solve long-term unemployment by telling women to “upskill” when the entry-level jobs they need no longer exist. And we will not improve women’s economic security by maintaining the myth that the system works if only women try harder.
Australia can do better than this. We can restore and strengthen Parenting Payment so single mothers are not pushed into poverty. We can raise the rate of JobSeeker so women are not searching for work from a position of deprivation. We can overhaul employment services so they help, rather than punish. And we can invest in the jobs women can actually access — in care, education, health, and community services, where demand is soaring and women’s experience is desperately needed.
The truth is simple: older women are not failing to get into the job market. The job market is failing them. Unless we confront that reality honestly, the fastest-growing face of poverty in Australia will continue to be a woman over 50 who did everything that was asked of them, only to find themselves abandoned by a system that was never built for them in the first place.