How Long Will We Wait for Financial Equality?
Digitally printed domestic linen, embroidery thread, steel pegs
“Makes me want to cry. So little advancement, just more empty promises...”
What does it mean to wait for “society” to deliver gender equality for women?
In WA, women have had the right to vote for one hundred years. In NSW, women were protesting for equal pay from 1958. In 2021, the Financy Women’s Index showed it would take 101 years more before Australian men share their financial advantage with women to achieve financial equality.
Each quarter the Financy Women’s Index (FWX) tracks economic equality across seven areas that are vital to the rise of Australian women:
unpaid work
fields of education
employment
underemployment
the gender pay gap
women on boards
the superannuation gender gap
Is it fair that a girl born in 2018 will not experience financial equality in her lifetime? How do we explain to her that she lives in a society that is content to wait until her great, great, grandmother is born? How will she understand her own economic rights to rise in her own country?
“Powerful, confronting yet hopeful”
Design
In this piece, I’m interested in the viewer having a visceral sense of what it means to wait for “society” to deliver gender equality. It is a large, landscape canvas — 7m long and 1.5m high. It represents a scale of 250 years, starting with an appliqued image of the first instance of a photographed mainstream protest for financial equality in Australia in 1958. On the scale, it shows the stages of a woman’s life starting in 2021 and her development, as a child and as a woman. The figures are cut-outs, joined together like a sequence of paper dolls. Each sequence is overlaid to show how a new life starts when the woman has a child.
The panel shows how many more generations of working women will have to live their whole lives in conditions of inequality before one woman is born and can live her whole life in financial equality.
The end of the panel is left hanging to represent the uncertain end to this experience. The work is hung with 25 stainless steel pegs, representing the ongoing unpaid household labour by women that enables and sustains men’s financial advantage in the economy.
Materials
The main images are digitally printed on furnishing linen. They are embellished with rows of stitching to highlight to the key figures and dates.