Politicians, businesses, unions and key stakeholders are meeting in Canberra to try to come up with solutions to Australia's economic problems.
And a big part of the conversation so far has focused on women and their participation in the workforce.
Minister for Women and Finance Katy Gallagher told the summit on Thursday that gender pay parity was a "core economic imperative" for the country.
"If women's workforce participation matched men, we would increase GDP by 8.7 per cent or $353 billion by 2050," the minister said.
So why is the gender pay gap increasing?
Australia's gender pay gap rose in 2022 to 14.1 per cent, increasing 0.3 per cent since November 2021.
That may not seem like much, but it's part of an uptick since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Until then, the gender pay gap had been steadily declining from a 19 per cent peak in 2014.
So what does the rise mean, what's behind it, and why does it matter?
Michelle Ryan, the director of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, said gender pay gap statistics showed progress towards gender equality wasn't linear.
"Some of this might be explained by current global events, such as COVID, but this is also in line with the trends over the last decade or so," Professor Ryan said.
"Any backsliding is a worry, and even if this is to do with COVID we still need to ask ourselves why women were disproportionably hit by COVID."
A look at the labour force participation rate among men and women shows a greater drop in women's participation amid the national lockdown in 2020.
Professor Ryan said this could be due to more women taking on childcare duties as schools closed.
"The burden of supervising children schooling from home was disproportionably taken on by women," she said.
"Partly because women have always taken on more of the childcare duties, and partly because much of the work that women do can't be done from home, so women had to give up their work."
Professor Ryan said the industries in which women tended to work were also some of the most precarious and poorly paid.
"Service industries like retail, hospitality and tourism were particularly badly affected," she said.
Professor Ryan said society also tended to not value work traditionally performed by women, such as caring, teaching and nursing.
"We need to value these jobs and these skills as they are crucial to societal functioning," she said.
Regardless of industry, men earn more
Across all industries — on average, per week — men earn more than women.
The biggest pay difference is in Western Australia where, on average, men earn $2,103 per week compared with $1,631 for women.
The potential solutions
A typical reason for these disparities is that more women tend to work part time — often to care for children — and a majority (88 per cent) take parental leave to be the primary carer, demonstrating how entrenched parental roles are in our society.
Professor Ryan said Australia needed to have strong policies that pushed back against the norms of women as primary carers.
"This has positive effects further down the line, with fathers who have taken significant parental leave being more involved in child care even after leave has ended," she said.
To move towards shared parental leave, Professor Ryan said Australia could look at steps taken in Scandinavian countries, such as mandating that a certain proportion of parental leave was taken by fathers.
"They have a use it or lose it system where fathers can't just give their share of parental leave to women," she said.
Day one of the summit saw discussions around extending the federal government-funded paid parental leave scheme, as well as bringing forward the government's proposed changes to childcare subsidies.
The changes would mean families with a combined income of up to $80,000 would receive a 90 per cent childcare subsidy for their first child.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, as well as unions and advocacy groups, are keen to see the government speed up the reform process.
Business and unions also agreed on the need to extend paid parental leave from 18 to 26 weeks.
But Senator Gallagher said budget constraints meant that would be difficult.
"The Treasurer and I are also absolutely cognisant of the fact we have massive deficits and a trillion dollars of debt … I wish I could fund every good idea that had merit," she said.
