Advocating for change

Currently, women in Australia are retiring with 25% less super than men. Most Australian women retire dependent on their partner or the old age pension*. 

The reasons behind this disparity are complex, so Verve is taking action to address them from different angles to help close the gap.  

Your super has power. With your voice, we have a platform to advocate for things that have a positive impact on women’s financial security and wellbeing.

It’s not enough for individual women to be able to succeed in our current unfair system. Instead, we need fairer workplace policies, support for parents and carers, and changes to superannuation to help close the lifelong wealth gap that women experience to ensure that all Australians can retire in comfort.  

As a superannuation fund that is focused on supporting thousands of women to build their retirement savings, we believe we have an important role in advocating for a fairer future. 

Verve’s advocacy is informed by the experiences of our members, who have the lived expertise to know the issues facing women. We lobby the government, and work with other women’s organisations in our community to amplify each other’s voices. 

As a fund, our role is firstly to help build the super balances of our members to give them the best possible outcome at retirement.  

But performance is not our only focus when building women’s wealth - Verve Super also invests in line with values that are as important to members as they are to us.  

We do this by combining a responsible investment approach with financial education and advocacy, taking a holistic approach to supporting women’s financial wellbeing and equality. Our mix of investment options also allows members to mix and match investment packages that align best with their values.  

We value the lived experience of our members and seek to incorporate the voice of our members into our research and advocacy, in line with members’ values. We strive for greater economic equality for all people, with a specific focus on women, young women and girls in all their diversity.  

That's why we push the government and other organisations to improve policies and procedures in areas we find could help close the gender wealth gap. We are an independent, non-partisan voice, and we collaborate with others to create change. 

Verve seeks to include an intersectional feminist lens on everything we do. We know that the women most impacted by wealth inequality are often: women of colour, First Nations women, women living with a disability, the young and the elderly. We also understand that inequality impacts LGBTIQ+ Australians in unique ways as well. Statistics based on averages often just don’t tell the full story.  

You can find out more about our areas of advocacy work below.  

Here are a few actions we’ve been taking to close the super gender gap and build a better future for women and gender-diverse people.  

An estimated 16% of women in Australia experience financial abuse at some point, which damages their economic security and retirement income.  

When the government opened a Senate inquiry into financial abuse, we made a submission and then went to Canberra to present the committee with a set of recommendations to tackle key problems.“In many cases,” Verve co-founder Christina Hobbs told the Senate, “The behaviours that constitute financial abuse will make the perpetrator more likely to receive the super of their victim – because it is the very abuse that often classifies them as being a valid beneficiary under the law. 

 “The issues we're pulling out related to domestic violence and death beneficiary payments is just highlighting how much of a rework is needed in that piece of legislation in general.” 

In early 2025, the government set aside almost $800m in funding to combat domestic and financial abuse, and pledged to close the legal loopholes that allow perpetrators of domestic abuse to access their victims’ super.  

On International Women’s Day (IWD), we support action, not the cupcakes and tea mornings approach taken by many big corporates. That’s not what the gender pay gap is about.  

In recent years, we have:  

• confronted the gender pay gap head-on by sharing the Pay Gap Pledge.  

• called on women to walk out of work in protest at 3:14pm on IWD – because that’s 78% of the way through the standard 9-5 day, representing the time at which women stop getting paid compared to a man.  

• busted a bunch of myths around the pay gap on Equal Pay Day, sharing data, resources and a free downloadable Toolkit for Change to help supporters close the pay gap. 

• highlighted the 21.7% gender pay gap in our ‘Hiring: Full-Time Woman’ campaign. This pay gap equates to $12,376 or seven weeks of work a year stolen from the average woman.  

When the government reports on the gender pay gap, it doesn’t capture data for people with intersectional identities, such as gender-diversity or ethnicity. We support a campaign by Ladies Talk Money asking people to sign an open letter to the prime minister, asking the government to start collecting this data to reveal how intersectional identities are impacted by pay gap data.  

Menopause symptoms cost women in Australia an estimated $17 billion in lost earnings and retirement savings – despite it being a natural process affecting half the population! In 2024, Verve Super made a submission to parliament to advocate for paid menopause leave.  

The government went on to improve menopausal healthcare, awareness raising and PBS listings, but paid menopause leave has yet to be mandated. We encourage other employers to make use of our menopause workplace policies, and will continue to lend our voice to calls for further legislation around this.  

*18.4% of women retire with no personal income, and a further 40.5% retire with just the Government Pension. Source: ABS Gender Indicators, 2022-23