The last thing we want to do is exclude – unless we’re excluding  publicly listed companies with all-male boards, weapons manufacturers, tobacco companies and the fossil fuel industry from our investments.  

But being a super fund founded by women for women, we’re always learning how to better include our gender diverse and non-binary community members. We’ve used the language “women+” to try and capture this spirit of inclusion, but we’ve recently learnt that might not be the best language and, in fact, might be alienating to some.

Out of sight, out of pocket

Financial education platform Ladies Talk Money ran a spectacular campaign this International Women’s Day called ‘Out of sight, out of pocket’.

The campaign highlighted the fact that Australia’s gender pay gap reporting does not capture the extent of the pay gap for women and gender-diverse people with intersecting identities.

Ladies Talk Money asked people to sign an open letter to the Prime Minister, Minister for Women and the CEO of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) requesting Australia begin collecting this intersectional data.

WGEA is the most powerful tool we have in Australia when it comes to addressing the gender pay gap. All companies of a certain size, including Verve Super’s parent company Future Group, are required to report their pay gap data to WGEA. With that data comes the ability for companies and governments to shine a light on where the pay gap is worst and make change – knowledge is power, after all!

But crucially, WGEA data totally fails to capture gender diverse and non-binary people and fails to consider the pay gap between white women and women of colour. That means the true extent of these disparities are out of sight and out of mind.

Without the information on the true extent of pay disparities for people with intersecting identities, how can companies or policy makers address those gaps?

We fully support this campaign from Ladies Talk Money, and our team members have signed the open letter calling for intersectional data collection from WGEA and other government agencies.

The pay gap isn’t the only area where intersectional data is missing though. Here at Verve Super we also are severely lacking in this area.  

Because we don’t have that information, we also don’t know what we could be doing better to serve this part of our community, which brings us back to language and to that use of “women+” – we didn’t know we could do better in this area until we had an education. 

So we are asking you, our members and community, to please consider taking this short anonymous survey.  In this survey we’re asking about gender identity, allyship and intersectional identities. If filling out a survey on these topics sounds like a lot of labour for you, we hear that and we totally respect your choice not to participate.

To those who are up for taking part in the survey, thank you so much. Your participation helps us learn and do better for our community.