The Cost of Domestic Violence
A report into domestic violence and it's cost on women's employment & education
The data we use in this report enables us, for the first time, to quantify the financial impact of domestic violence on Australian women. We show that despite the significant growth in women’s employment in recent decades, domestic violence continues to have a large and ongoing negative impact on women’s ability to participate in the workplace.
We reveal new evidence that just as there is an ‘employment gap’ – as the employment rate for women who have survived domestic violence is lower than for women who have never experienced such violence – there is also an ‘education gap’. Among young women, the rates of university attainment decline among women who experience domestic violence.
Source: ABS Customised Data, Personal Safety Survey 2021-22, Table 9.
The employment rates of victim-survivors are lower compared to those women who have never experienced violence.
In 2021–22, women who experienced partner violence or abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, economic) in the last five years were less likely to be employed (76.1 per cent) than women who had never experienced this violence or abuse (81.4 per cent). This represents an employment gap of 5.3 percentage points.
The employment gap is larger for women who experienced economic abuse, amounting to 9.4 percentage points in 2021–22. This is perhaps because economic abuse has the most direct impact on whether women can work.
Women who have experienced domestic violence are less likely to attain a university degree compared to those who have not. For the two cohorts of women that we have data about (those born in 1973-1978 and in 1989-1995), this gap widens as women go through their 20s. By age 25, the difference in university attainment reaches 15% for both cohorts.
The education gap is calculated by subtracting the percentage of women with a university degree who report experiencing partner violence from the percentage of women with a university degree who never report experiencing partner violence (i.e. the difference in rates of university degree attainment between these two groups). Education gaps are calculated for each age and birth cohort, separately. Data are not available for both birth cohorts at all ages since the survey was not always undertaken annually (which is also why age 26 is not available)
Source Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health
Download the customised dataset from the 2021-22 Personal Safety Survey.
We are not able to share the data we use from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health as this data is comprised of individualised information that cannot be shared for privacy reasons. A detailed description of our use of this data can be accessed below.
More detailed descriptions of the methodologies used in this paper are described in the attached papers.
Anne is currently a Professor of Domestic and Family Violence at the University of Technology of Sydney Business School. She has been awarded substantial funding by the Paul Ramsay Foundation and UTS to continue her innovative data-based research into domestic violence in Australia. Her report, The Choice: Violence or Poverty (2022), used previously unpublished ABS data to reveal the far greater prevalence of domestic violence than was previously known, and especially the shockingly high incidence among women who have become single mothers as a result. The report influenced the federal government to make changes in the 2023 federal budget to the payment system for single mothers, enabling these mothers to remain on the Parenting Payment until their youngest child reaches the age of 14.
Previously, Anne has advised Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, run the Office of the Status of Women, been Canberra Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review newspaper, been editor-in-chief of America’s leading feminist magazine Ms., editor of Good Weekend, chair of the Board of Greenpeace International and a Trustee of the Powerhouse Museum. She was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia for her services to journalism and to women in 1989; had her image on a postage stamp as an Australian Legend in 2011 and in 2017 was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.
