International Women's Day

Ms WORTLEY (Torrens) (15:49): I rise today to speak about International Women's Day, which is observed worldwide on 8 March. This year's UN women's theme—Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030—is particularly pertinent in Australia at this time, an issue I will return to in a moment. I take this opportunity to acknowledge some of the remarkable ways in which International Women's Day was observed around the world this year. Here in Australia there were many gatherings and celebrations, the largest of which continues to be the wonderful International Women's Day Breakfast in Adelaide supporting the UN Women's National Committee Australia.

I was among the nearly 3,000 people who attended this year's breakfast, along with students from across the state. The guest speaker, the Hon. Julia Gillard AC, the first woman to serve as Australia's Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister, spoke about her work through the Global Partnership for Education, supporting 65 developing countries to ensure that every girl receives a quality, basic education. Ms Gillard's work focuses on prioritising the poorest and most vulnerable people, often in conflict-affected areas. Ms Gillard said that the world was failing girls by not ensuring that enough of them were properly educated. She said about 130 million girls around the world were not attending through to secondary school, with most coming from the poorest countries.

She said only 26 per cent of low income countries had as many girls as boys in primary school, while that figure dropped to just 10 per cent at secondary level. By failing to ensure that girls get an education, Ms Gillard said, we are not only violating their human rights, we are denying our world its best possible future, because educating girls is so transformative. Girls' education is so important, not only for their empowerment but for the broader wellbeing of their families and their nations.

Further afield in India, over 30 women's groups came together to organise a march for the One Billion Rising campaign in New Delhi. Hundreds of thousands of women joined together to protest against gang violence that in recent times has been especially targeted towards women. In Iceland the government announced it would be the first in the world to compel companies to prove they offer equal pay regardless of gender, nationality or ethnicity. The government's plan, entitled the Equal Pay Standard, requires employers with more than 25 staff to ensure equal pay for work of equal value, and looks towards eradicating the gender pay gap by 2022.

In Poland, women protested outside the headquarters of the ruling right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party, demonstrating against gender discrimination and demanding reproductive rights. Related rallies, demonstrations and gatherings took place in more than 80 towns and cities across the country. Marchers gathered in Tokyo to mark the day. Despite recent attempts to raise the profile of women in the workforce, cultural gender bias keeps women chronically underemployed. Interestingly, female representation in lower houses of parliament in Japan was recently ranked 163^rd out of 193 countries. Many, many other countries marked and celebrated International Women's Day this month.

This UN day remains an important, vital catalyst and conduit for driving greater change for women and achieving gender parity. While celebrating our achievements, we must still acknowledge the challenges we face and renew our determination to work towards finding solutions that advance women's equality and full participation. While there are many gender issues that are close to my heart, there is one I would like to touch on briefly today, and that is the gender pay gap for women.

In Australia, this has fluctuated over the last 20 years between 15 and 18 per cent. In 2016, a gap of 16.2 per cent improved on the previous year's 17.9 per cent. It stunned me that in 2017 the gender pay gap still exists to this extent. On one level, we understand the gender pay gap in terms of women being paid less than men to do the same work but, when addressing the gender pay gap, we should also look at the gender work gap, which is not just confined to comparative pay. We need to continue to look at the reasons women are sometimes limited in accessing paid work and the disproportionate amount of unpaid work undertaken by women in a domestic context.