Gender pay gap spills into property ownership

Yasmine Raso

Senior Journalist, Financial Newswire

7 March 2023

New data from CoreLogic’s 2023 Women & Property report has found male-only property ownership edged out female-only owned property by just 3.1 per cent, as the gender pay gap continues to delay female asset accumulation.

While men owned 29.9 per cent of dwellings analysed in the report, women owned 26.8 per cent, while property jointly-owned by both males and females was 43.4 per cent.

Eliza Owen, CoreLogic’s Head of Australian Research and report author said examining the gender differences in investment property also revealed interesting results that spoke to wider gender disparity.

“Male-only names were associated with 36.3% of investment properties, which is higher than both the share of investment properties owned by women (29.5%), and the share owned by men and women jointly (34.2%),” she said.

“There were some hot spots where women did actually own more of the investment stock analysed than men.

“These were generally the areas that women had high ownership of dwellings overall, including the North Sydney and Hornsby SA4 region, where women had ownership of almost 39% of investment properties analysed.”

Owen also said while past reports had indicated the substantial impact the gender pay gap, now at 13.3 per cent as of November 2022, had on female property ownership and asset accumulation, this year’s report showed a partly different result.

“Analysis of full-time earnings of males and females suggest it would take men around 8.3 years to save up a 20% deposit for the median value in Australia for men, compared to 9.4 years for women – and that’s based on full-time wages,” she said.

“While full-time earnings are used for the official measure of the gender pay gap in Australia, women are overrepresented in part-time employment, which tends to attract lower pay.

“Based on labour force figures as of December 2022, women accounted for 68.1% of Australians in part time employment, and 38.7% of those in full-time employment. This further contributes to the overall pay disparity between men and women, which may have implications for access to home ownership.

“Shared equity schemes are about targeting home ownership among relatively low-income households, and providing assistance to those who might not otherwise have owned a home. That’s important not just for women, but any group who is over-represented in low income households.”