The impacts on female employment of the government’s revamped stage three tax cuts continue to attract less debate than notionally more glamorous subjects such as the push for more “tax reform”. That’s of a piece with how the ongoing and significant feminisation of the workforce is routinely overlooked by the media and politicians.
By now it’s an old story for Crikey readers, but it just keeps happening: the rise and rise and rise, and rise, of caring services in the economy. According to the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics quarterly workforce data, health and social care employment reached a record 2.23 million workers (seasonally adjusted, but the original numbers are virtually the same) in the three months to November 2023. That was a stonking 3.9% growth in one quarter alone, as part of 7.7% growth over the 12 months to November, and 33% — one third, no typo — in the past five years. The entire Australian workforce has grown only 12.6% in that time.
It means 15.6% of Australians in work are in that sector. The time when one in six workers is in the sector isn’t far off. And more than three-quarters of them are female. The bulk of the additional jobs in recent years also went to women, meaning the sector slightly increased its level of feminisation to over 78%.
But it’s a diverse sector: health and hospitals make up about 1.28 million people (76% female) which by itself would be the fourth-biggest sector of the workforce; residential care (81% female) employs around 230,000; social care — home care and childcare — 720,000 workers, 77% of whom are female (there’s been a recent sample-derived problem with the balance in the ABS numbers between residential care and social care, but that appears to be working itself out as the quarters tick by).
The other female-dominated sector is education and training, where around 72% of workers are female. That hasn’t grown at the same rate as health and caring — it grew at “only” 5% through 2023 and now employs more than 1.2 million people. It’s grown 16% in the past five years.
This strong growth in female-dominated professions isn’t smooth, but it is reliable, and it’s why the proportion of women in the workforce was below 47% five years ago but is now 47.6%. The change sounds small but it’s a shift measured in the many hundreds of thousands of jobs. A decade ago the figure was below 46%, 20 years ago below 45%.
The growth in health and caring and education has particularly accelerated over the decade-plus, as this graph of the number of jobs in those sectors versus total employment shows.
By mid-2025, fully one-quarter of all jobs in the Australian economy is likely to be in health, caring or education. And funnily enough, those jobs dominate the occupations that will see the biggest benefits from Labor’s changes to stage three.
The reason for reciting all these figures is to hammer home just how steadily and massively the workforce is changing, and why so much of the economic debate is really about an economy that hasn’t existed for years, if not decades.
What passes for the “productivity debate” barely addresses that the very concept of productivity in education, health and caring is at odds with traditional labour productivity measures. And industry policy is relentlessly focused on manufacturing and trying to re-establish a long-gone past when Australia made trains, or a future in which we make nuclear submarines, and pump out lithium batteries because we want to be a “renewable energy superpower”.
Caring and education services rarely feature in these utopian economic dreams. They crop up more in debate as problems to be solved, not exciting new (old) frontiers for investment — the NDIS is blowing out, there’s not enough access to health services, our educational standards are falling because of poor curriculums/lefty teachers/the woke agenda/not enough employer involvement, public sector pay rises are a disaster for the budget — and so on.
Economic debate in Australia — mostly conducted by male economists and commentators (and white male economists and commentators, like me), who tend to carry far less of the caring burden in households than women — is out of tune with the economic reality of the workforce. It’s one reason why we desperately need more female economists and commentators.
And consider that at the same time employment in these sectors has grown so rapidly, there remains chronic teacher shortages and many unfilled positions in hospitals and healthcare.
It’s great you’re discussing this huge shift and the ramifications of it and what it is says about the workings and structure of our society and where we need to invest and what’s good policy for Australia over the next 20-30 years.
The need is obviously huge in these sectors and with it come employment opportunities. But we still need to broaden our economy in products and services we can export as we reduce our reliance on mining fossil fuels. What is the Vision for the Australian economy in 2050 post mining boom ?
“Caring and education services rarely feature in these utopian economic dreams. They crop up more in debate as problems to be solved, not exciting new (old) frontiers for investment” . First the caring: A lot of the problem is that investors have seen it as an exciting area for investment, so the profit motive is put in front of providing a good service. Child care and aged care should never be for profit.
As the birth rate is down to around 1.6-1.7 per woman in Australia at the moment, childcare is not going to become a bigger problem. Of course aged care is. It cries out for automation. The hard yakka of bathing, toileting and feeding the frail elderly lends itself to automation, so the number of staff needed to do it can be reduced. There is no incentive to automate at the moment because wages are so low. Restricting the use of migrants to do age care would push wages up and help incentivise automation.
Then to education. When I was young, teachers made as much or more than tradies. Now the reverse is the case. What happened? Some sort of parity has to be restored. Furthermore, teaching was a dead set doddle. Now everyone I know in the profession works 50+ hours a week and, after they do marking and lesson prep on the weekend, are too exhausted to do anything else. Again, what happened?
I stand to be corrected, but as an observer it seems lessons should be standardised. Why on earth should you have to prep to teach year 8 algebra or geography? And bring back discipline for the kids. If they don’t do homework or are rude to teachers, they get detention. Ban all communication with the teacher outside of school hours. Recalcitrant “difficult parents” should be dealt with by a special section of the education department with resort to legal action if necessary.
I’m not an economist, but that’s my two cents worth.
homework is problematic, especially if those teachers then go home to their own kids and spend their evenings helping their kids with their homework.
It’s as much a burden on parents as it is a task or stress on students. Add to that, if a child is from an unstable home environment, or has poorly educated parents, if they haven’t already understood the concept in whatever homework they’ve been given, chances are they’ll either not do it, or do it badly and learn nothing but frustration.
Sure, high achievers will always do well with homework, they’re usually conscientious about such things, but for those who struggle with some subjects are often left to flounder because over-worked teachers don’t have time to rehash past lessons, or explain it in a way that the student understands. And homework for homework’s sake is the worst reason to have homework, if it’s just about giving homework.
I can’t speak about aged care. I’ve had bad experiences when my father and my mother were alive and in aged care. When it’s a ‘for profit’ organisation and the decor is beautifully fancy or ‘perfect’, you can pretty much work out where the profits are going. Lovely decor might be wonderful to work and live with, but it can be deceptive and doesn’t necessarily reflect quality of care.
My only question would be on automating feeding of the frail. They are frail and as we heard in the royal commission, sometimes food is left on the tray for the elderly person to eat but they are unable to eat on their own and when the tray is collected, it’s just assumed the person wasn’t hungry. But how would you implement automation? Aged care residents, the very frail, or those with advancing stages of dementia, often turn their heads away, or may have difficulty swallowing. And they are, as you said, ‘frail’. It doesn’t take much to bruise them, tear their already thin, papery skin, or even break a bone. It would never be able to be fully automated. There would have to be at least one staff on hand and even with the equipment now available, sometimes it takes more than one staff member.
I think aged care needs to be more nuanced. Why do all the residents need to be fed at the same time of day? Why do those due for bathing all need to be done before mid-morning? Patients with appointments within or outside the home can be prioritised for these but I’m sure others would rather not eat too early in the day or evening. Sadly it currently seems to be all managed around staffing and costs rather than the care of those they’re there to provide service for in the first place.
Yes Andi, as far as education goes, I’m obviously suggesting a utilitarian system that does the greatest good for the greatest number. Adjusting for kids fromn less fortunate homes needs to be part of a bigger social policy. I don’t think it should be the problem of teachers on the ground.
And yes, feeding the frail in an automated system might be pie in the sky. But an automated system is infinitely patient and doesn’t judge, so if a patient decides they’re hungry at 3am, it should be possible to feed them. I don’t know if it still happens, but historically there had been a practice of slapping down a plate of food at 5.00pm and them collecting it at 6.00pm, regardless of whether or not has been touched. I hope that has changed. Yes, papery skin, easy bruising exacerbated by blood thinners in many cases, brittle bones, multiple conditions, multiple drugs, and where and how individuals feel pain make every case different. One size does not fit all. I’m just saying it is an area where there could be big cost savings by automation, and that would both improve care and facilitate the staff being paid more.
I don’t think this is what economists in the profession, or the PC or similar are saying about the care sector.
Instead they make is clear that health, education and others are important and valuable, but more effort could be made in improving processes where it is sensible (such as data sharing) and encouraging diffusion of best practice care. There is not use in hero worshiping these sectors, we’ve all had bad doctors and nurses, so the advice is precisely not to treat is as a “numbers problem”.
The PC also makes it clear that the rest of the economy needs to take up the slack and improve productivity, which is sensible in order pay for improving social services. Unless the ambition is to become the world’s aged care facility, we need to become more than just hospitals and migrant training centres.
It would help to read the work of actual economists, not the political commentariat masquerading as such.
A good and important article . I particularly like and agree with the final paragraph.
Those are all good points, but isn’t the real problem that caring is entirely a consumer of money (most of it Government money)? Yes, the sector is growing, and yes, as a result the nature of the workforce is changing, but isn’t the growth basically a problem? The more it grows, the more taxes have to be raised to pay for it. Of course some of the taxes be people who are carers, but isn’t that essentially recycling taxes previously paid? Maybe it’s good that there are more women in the workforce, but isn’t the growth in the cost of healthcare a real problem?