Sure, it’s not a ‘right’ but the housing affordability dream does seem to favour certain segments of the population more than others. While Hinch added that his parents were in their 40s before they could afford their first home and that 22-year-olds can’t expect to buy “the two-car garage” house, you have to feel for the 22-year-old who sees prices going up by 20% in one year alone in Sydney, and wonders how they’ll ever get a hook into the market.
And you especially have to feel for the 22-year-old woman who has a number of factors riding against her when it comes to housing affordability. While she’s more likely than her male counterparts to have or be completing a university degree (and racking up another debt in the process), she’s also more likely to earn significantly less during her lifetime, including an average 16% less while working full time. If she’s able to move into senior management positions, that gender pay gap will only get bigger – with WGEA finding the pay gap for key senior management personnel now being close to six figures.
She can also expect to get increasingly busy – and therefore increasingly stressed – as she gets older, something that will increase again if she decides to ‘cohabit’ with a man (although that will at least make her chances of buying her own home better), and increase again if she goes on to have kids. According to the preliminary findings of the 2016 Australian Census, women are spending 5 to 14 hours a week on unpaid domestic work, compared with less than five hours a week for men. As Leah Ruppanner writes today, studies find that with all that added housework women then start to spend less time in paid employment, which leads to Australia now boasting one of the highest part-time rates of women in the world.
Those employment trade-offs have lifetime consequences that result in women seeing career opportunities diminished, their accumulated wealth taking a hit, and them later retiring with significantly less superannuation than men (one in three women retire with nothing).
Home ownership is not currently seen as a gender-based problem, but with the majority of those who currently retire into poverty being female, one has to wonder what the current housing affordability crisis will do to future generations of women. One also has to wonder what current proposals to allow young people to access their superannuation could also do to the future superannuation gender gap – as well as what kind of twenty-something has accumulated enough superannuation to actually secure the deposit she needs to make this a realistic proposition in the first place.
Derryn Hinch is staunchly against this proposal for young home buyers to tap their superannuation, suggesting it’s a “crazy” idea that will cost tax payers in the long run by pushing more people onto the pension. However his suggestion that young people just shift their expectations seems seriously unfair. In Sydney, a 22-year-old who’s magically able to afford a property now, will pay 20% more than he or she would have a year ago. You can understand that the idea of ‘waiting it out’ any longer may seem like a serious future risk. As for the 22-year-old who wouldn’t have a chance of saving the kind of deposit needed for buying into any Australian property market, and has few expectations of doing so in the future, you can understand their dismay.
While the Census data revealed the ‘Average Australian’ is a married 38-year-old woman with two kids, and a mortgage on a three-bedroom house, I fear the average 22-year-old woman is headed for a future that’s far less secure.