Google offers over 999 words to describe an old woman, and they are uniformly pejorative. The top 4 are: “ distressingly ancient; squat and dumpy; dismal and lonesome; insanely suicidal.” 

Some common names for old women are: old bag, granny, biddy, crone, hag, witch, harridan, bedlam, old bat, old boiler. And if that’s not bad enough, you can also resort to descriptions such as: “withered and bitter; almost well-dressed; unnaturally lusty; crazy and uncanny; entirely uninteresting; exceptionally invaluable.” Then of course there is the word ‘ boomer’ which has become a synonym for greed, undeserving wealth and selfishness. 

In a society that values women primarily for their youthful beauty, sexual and reproductive powers, the more we age, the more our currency as women is devalued.

This devaluation is reflected in the language. The appellations for older women denote worthlessness, weakness, ugliness, helplessness and even evil. It’s also not clear at what age you become classified as an old woman.

“Throughout many periods of history in the West there has been a real worry about what you do with women who are past their childbearing years,”  says Mary Beard, Professor of Classics, Cambridge University.

What’s in a name, you may ask. The answer is – a minefield. Language reflects and reinforces prejudice and discrimination and has terrible consequences. Arguably, there is a direct link between this gendered ageism and the social crisis that Australian older women are now experiencing. It is a multi-faceted crisis that is distinctive to this demographic. It negatively affects their employment, housing, livelihood, and mental and physical health.

Older women are ending up on the dust heap of the nation’s economy. Women aged over 50 constitute the majority of unemployed and those on Jobseeker. These are women who for the most part are educated, have skills, professions and careers, and have spent decades in the workforce. And yet, the widespread ageism of employers, documented by the AHRC, now bars them from the workforce.

Nevertheless, the Government continues to impose ‘mutual obligations’ where older women are forced to keep up the debilitating charade of applying for jobs that they have no hope of getting, precisely because of gendered ageism.

Government attitudes and practices also contribute significantly to making older women the fastest growing demographic becoming homeless.The latest report on homelessness recognises that ”older low-income earners, particularly those on fixed government benefits, experience more homelessness.” It reports that at least 270,000 people aged 55+ are already homeless or at risk of homelessness, most of them older women.

In the budget earlier this year, Treasurer Jim Chalmers came the closest he has to acknowledging that older women face the barrier of discrimination. However, all he did was to increase their Jobseeker payment by only a few dollars a day, still keeping them well below the poverty line. The Treasurer and the Labour Government have yet to recognise that there is a distinctive crisis affecting tens of thousands of women in this demographic. They must recognise its scale and importance. And they must recognise that at its core lies the systemic gendered ageism that is so pervasive in both government and society.  Otherwise they will never actually address the crisis as a comprehensive package.

And this crisis is set to rapidly escalate. By 2030, one in three Australians will be over 55. The number of Australians over 65 will double in the next 40 years. The majority will be old women.

If you are an Indigenous Australian, you will most likely die 15 years earlier than a non-Indigenous Australian from a preventable disease.

The ‘gap’ in life expectancy stands at around 15 years.

Remarkably, it appears that even in official documents there are two categories of Older Australians. Look at this report by the Australian Government’s Institute of Health and Welfare. 

“ This report focuses on older Australians—generally those aged 65 and over, unless otherwise specified. For older Indigenous Australians, the age range 50 and over is used, reflecting the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and the lower proportion of Indigenous people aged 65 and over.” 

Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, in an address to the National Press Club, said that Australia is an ageing country, and “ overall, less than one third of Australians were under 25 years of age, whereas amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders almost half were under 25. 

This is disproportionate because of the significantly reduced longevity of Indigenous adults. Many of them die of preventable diseases. They often die because of dysfunctional health services to Indigenous communities, bureaucratic mismanagement or because of a lack of health services.

Successive Australian Governments have failed to close this gap. This failure remains a fundamental violation of the human rights of Indigenous peoples – the right to life. 

The Voice has the potential to mitigate this situation.

The theme of NAIDOC 2023 was ‘ For Our Elders’.  The Elders are the custodians of Indigenous heritage, culture and knowledge handed down from one generation of Elders to another. They have ensured the survival of the oldest Indigenous peoples in the world for 65,000 years. Elders are respected, honoured and listened to by the community.

The Elders know how best to protect their ageing Indigenous people. They have the knowledge to implement culturally appropriate health care, as well as the skills, the language and the community connections. We saw it happen during Covid. Patricia Turner AM, of Gudanji-Arrente heritage, as CEO of NACCO (National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation ) was at the forefront of the response to the pandemic. From the outset they immediately made protecting the Elders their priority. The measures they instituted were extremely effective and literally saved the lives of most Elders.

Pat Turner believes that “when Indigenous organisations take over the job of improving the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, it will be the end of the grim practice of monitoring failure and calling it Closing the Gap.” 

This year’s NAIDOC Week awards ceremony recognised two female Elders who have dedicated their lives to the advancement of Indigenous health, education, and community rights.

Aunty Dr Naomi Mayers OAM a Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri woman, is described as a pioneer and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for developing and leading “some of the most enduring and fundamentally profound reforms in Aboriginal and Torres Strait health”.

Aunty Dr Matilda House-Williams, a Ngambri (Kamberri) Wallabalooa (Ngunnawal) and Wiradyuri Elder, received the Female Elder of the Year NAIDOC award. She is recognised as a “ strong, kind, yet fierce Blak Matriarch, who has created a legacy by forging new pathways for First Nations Women and our Mobs more broadly “.

These are just three of the female Elders whose lifetime experience and invaluable knowledge can be channeled into the advisory body and amplified through the Voice. If Parliament and Government listen and incorporate such advice, then they can formulate more effective practical policies to drive tangible improvements for Indigenous people. 

No Australian Government is equiped to close the gap without meaningful, informed consultations with the Voice, and that means listening to the Elders.

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent TV series ‘Julia’ now streaming about Julia Child, the multi-award winning American chef. With a first-rate cast led by Sarah Lancashire as Julia and an intelligent script, the series focuses on Julia’s battle to put her cooking show on American television in 1963. From our perspective today this doesn’t appear to be a big deal. But it was. Remember, feminism didn’t really become a major movement until the late 1960s and 1970s. Before that, women were pressured not to enter the workforce if they had someone to support them, not to enter the universities and not to pursue careers. Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not get a job in a law firm.

Betty Friedan in her book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ published in 1963, captured the alienation of women of the era excluded from the workforce and confined to their homes. It lit the flame of feminism. There is a pivotal scene in this ‘Julia’ series when Julia meets Betty. It is at a gala event and Julia has just achieved recognition for the great success of  her cooking show ‘ The French Chef ‘ on public television.

Friedan berates Julia for reinforcing the traditional roles of women and forcing them to spend even more time in the kitchen cooking her complicated dishes. Julia is so struck by this argument that she decides to end her TV cooking series.

Does Friedan have a point? Well, we don’t know what the real Betty Friedan would have thought, but the Friedan character in the series does correctly identify that domesticity and cooking at the time seemed to represent the antitheses of feminism. 

But she overlooks the ground-breaking achievements of Julia who actually embodied feminism – the right of a woman to pursue her passion and ambitions, develop a profession and even reach the pinnacle of a career. 

Let’s place things in context. Television in America and elsewhere in the 60s was almost exclusively a male domain. The women who were permitted on screen were usually pretty, young, slim with perfectly sprayed hair. Julia was a 6 foot tall, large, ‘loud’ older woman, aged 51. She wanted to do a show about cooking when TV executives superciliously thought cooking was not a worthy subject for television.

Julia was very brave in charging into the local TV studio, convincing them and even paying for the entire production costs of the show – so determined was she to pursue her dream. Her talent and her personality made the show a commercial and popular success. 

In addition to being berated by Friedan, Julia also cops it in the series from a top male chef. He condescendingly tells her that as a woman she cannot aspire to be more than a cook, an amateur, and that only males can be professional chefs.

Julia didn’t have a feminist movement supporting her, but she did have a close network of female friends whom she called her   “ Confederacy of Women. An oestrogen safety net.” We all need one. 

 

One of the distinctive features of Budget 23 was that for the first time there was recognition that women aged 55+ on Jobseeker had little in savings and little chance of finding work. This was a meaningful step towards recognising that older women in the workforce face distinctive problems. However, Treasurer Jim Chalmers chose to award them only $6 p.d. extra in their Jobseeker payment. Not enough to lift them above the poverty line or out of homelessness.

These timid increases in Jobseeker are symptomatic of a failure to grasp the essential nature and magnitude of the problem. What we are seeing is the result of a lifetime of economic and social discrimination against women.

This systemic discrimination puts women onto Jobseeker. Then age discrimination keeps them there. 

Many of these women belong to the first generation in history of highly educated, older women with professions and skills. Nevertheless, as they age, tens of thousands of these women fall off the cliff into poverty and homelessness.

That’s why Jobseeker is a feminist issue and is part of a broader issue.

Holistic solution

Government needs to recognise that there is a social crisis that directly affects the present generation of older women and will most likely affect future generations of women. Government needs to formulate an holistic, targeted strategy and measures to address this crisis as rapidly escalating numbers of women continue to fall off the cliff. 

It requires a holistic solution. This is understood when it comes to improving the economic security of younger women, but not when it comes to older women. Minister for Finance and Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher is to be congratulated for measures in the Budget that will reduce the barriers to the workforce participation of younger women with children, their welfare payments and pay. 

But there were no significant measures to improve the economic security of older women by reducing the barriers to their employment. At a time when Labor is hailing the strongest jobs growth, the unemployment amongst older women is rising. 

Furthermore, it is now well known that older women are the fastest growing demographic of homeless people. But the much touted increase in rent assistance in the Budget of $31 a fortnight is ineffectual. Anglicare Australia’s 2023 survey pointed out that there are only 5 places in all Australia that someone on Jobseeker can afford to rent. Older women are  still forced to sleep in cars and tents. 

The Government’s Housing Plan is also totally inadequate as it only allocates 4,000 social housing places to be shared between domestic violence victims and older women.

Despite the Budget being in surplus, the Treasurer chose to ignore the recommendations of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee to raise Jobseeker from below poverty levels. One way to fund this increase in Jobseeker could have been to drop the Stage 3 tax cuts. This would have enabled raising Jobseeker to the level of the minimum wage ($1,625 per fortnight).  It would have cost $70b less than the Stage 3 tax cuts over the first 9 years, according to the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work.

The Government must acknowledge the nature and magnitude of this social and economic crisis and deal with it not only incrementally, but also develop a holistic strategy to address it.

The ABS recently released its latest homelessness estimates based on the census of 10 August 2021.

I believe that it is necessary to question the current accuracy of these figures regarding the numbers of older women who are homeless.

First, the ABS says that “The rate of homelessness for people aged over 55 decreased from 29 people per 10,000 in 2016 to 26 people per 10,000 in 2021.”

The census was taken prior to the 11 interest rate rises and the spiralling cost of living over the last year. We know that there has been a massive increase, not a decrease, in the numbers of older women who cannot afford to pay rent or their mortgages. 

The rapid rise over the last year in the cost of rentals has also meant that older women who constitute the majority of those on Jobseeker, are unable to afford to rent any places in the capital cities. It is a 10 year wait for public housing in some cities and in others, women cannot apply before the age of 80.

Second, the ABS acknowledges that its statistics on homelessness are a Homelessness Estimation. The ABS is to be commended on the fact that unlike the previous census, this one included a Homelessness Enumeration Strategy. 

It sought to collect more data about homeless people living in three broad situations on Census night: 

• Not in a dwelling, ( tents, sleeping rough)
• In a private dwelling but temporarily or in overcrowded conditions
• Non-private – boarding house, temporary lodging

But, I noticed that although the ABS specifies tents and sleeping rough in the ‘Not in a Dwelling’ situation, there is nothing listed to indicate that census forms were to be delivered to women sleeping in their cars. Older women forced into homelessness often choose to live in their cars rather than risk sleeping rough or in disreputable, unsafe boarding houses. It is highly unlikely that census officials could locate these women even if they were asked to do so. Nor is it likely that census forms reached the thousands of older women couch surfing. In addition, the ABS does not even have the workforce or the capability to locate women sleeping rough.

Third, the census was taken during lockdown so that the capacity of officers to deliver the forms was severely limited.

It is widely understood that older women are invisible in our society.

The fact that too many are invisible in census statistics must be urgently remedied in order to fully understand the magnitude of this social crisis engulfing them.