Most of the poor people in the world are women. In no country on earth are women economically equal to men, and Australia is no exception. Research from Acoss and the University of New South Wales last year showed that a higher share of people living in poverty in Australia are women.

The experience of living below the breadline in our very wealthy nation is a gendered one, for reasons that are complex and intertwined. As women progress through life, they encounter a series of barriers and setbacks that simply do not encumber men in the same way.

The cause of gendered poverty is structural. It is entrenched in our workplace settings, and embedded in our personal relationships. It is at play at every stage of a woman’s life, from childhood to the grave, making its mark on our education, our employment, our homes, our familial responsibilities and our retirement options.

'It's soul destroying': the stress and stigma of being a single parent on welfare Read more

At its heart is the simple fact that women do the lion’s share of caring for others. Caring is women’s work, and our society does not value women’s work.

This is a truth that applies across the world, but, as much as we like to think of Australia as the land of the fair go, there are some aspects of women’s economic inequality that are particularly acute in the Australian experience.

Let’s start with some statistics.

OECD figures show the employment rate of women in Australia aged between 25 and 54 years, at 72.5%, is in the lower third of OECD countries. For single mothers, the rate was just 50.8% in 2014, the third lowest in the OECD after Ireland and Turkey.

ABS statistics show that Australian women in the age bracket that aligns with child-bearing (25–44) are more than two and a half times as likely as men of the same age to be out of the labour force.

Even when women in Australia are in paid work, they are much more likely than men to be working part-time – almost half (45%) of women in the workforce are in part-time roles, compared with just 16% of employed men, and for mothers with children under five years of age, that rate rises to 61%, compared to just 8.4% of fathers with young children.

To a far greater extent than in most comparable nations, families in Australia are fashioned around a male breadwinner and a female primary carer in the home.

International research has demonstrated that becoming a parent has a diametrically opposed impact on the careers of men and women, with fathers enjoying an income “bonus”, earning more than men and women without children, and mothers suffering a penalty, earning less than all other workers.

A Per Capita analysis of HILDA data done for an upcoming report on the impact of care work on the gender pay gap demonstrates that the same effect is true in Australia.

This penalty is imposed through the reduced earnings caused by years of part-time work, and also because women tend to take time out of the workforce to care for children in the years where men are progressing up the career ladder. Mothers miss out on promotions and the higher income that comes with more advanced positions, and never recover their career progression.

And it is not just children that women care for: almost twice as many women (540,000) as men (230,000) are the primary carers for friends or family members with disabilities or physical and mental illness, including end-of-life care, in Australia. Many women who have interrupted their careers to have children are required to do so again to care for others.

When women with children or other caring responsibilities try to re-enter the paid workforce, our high effective marginal tax rates make it extremely difficult for them to do so. Faced with the phasing out of family tax benefits, higher tax rates as their earnings increase, and the cost of childcare, women at the lower end of the income scale often find that they will receive little or no extra income when trying to move from part-time to full-time work.

And when women with primary carer duties do re-enter the labour force, someone else must care for the children and adults they would otherwise be looking after.

Even in the paid workforce, this care remains predominantly women’s work – and it is shockingly underpaid. Care work in Australia is remunerated at minimum award rates, and is heavily dominated by women.

Research from the Melbourne Institute found that there are significant disparities in the minimum wage between Australia’s 122 awards, and the difference is largely due to the relatively low value we place on women’s work.

A childcare worker with a Certificate III qualification is paid an award rate of $21.29 per hour, compared to a metal fitter with the same level of qualification who earns the award rate of $39.47 per hour.

As a society, we value the men who build machines almost twice as much as we do the women who build our children’s minds.

This is where the gender pay gap bites. It is women at the lower end of the income scale who suffer real poverty and disadvantage as a result of reduced lifetime earning capacity due to factors related to their gender.

Too often, it is the women who have toiled in low-income jobs, often providing paid care for children and adults in their working lives, who see their retirement savings and assets eroded to the extent that they are forced to live in penury after a lifetime spent in the service of others, adding to the reprehensible statistic that the fastest growing group of homeless people in Australia are women over the age of 55.

Per Capita research with the Australian Services Union in 2017 found that women were, on average, retiring with 47% less superannuation than men.

This is the direct result of the interrupted careers, lower paid jobs and part-time work women encounter due to the low-paid and unpaid care they perform to keep society ticking over.

Poverty and ageing: 'we're swept under the carpet and pushed aside' Read more

As Jane Caro said last year, it is as though we say to these women, “thanks for spending your lives caring for others – now go and live in your car”.

The devaluing of women’s work is pervasive in our supposedly enlightened and equitable society. It shows itself in the interaction of our tax and transfer system, in the historically low pay rates in feminised industries, in the unequal distribution of unpaid domestic labour, and in the relative poverty of Australian women in old age.

It has always been so. As author Megan K Stack says in her new book Women’s Work, “…. housework is everything. It’s a ubiquitous physical demand that has hamstrung and silenced women for most of human history”.

Until we change the way we value women’s work – by paying those who care for our loved ones as well as we do those who fix our cars or build our homes; by sharing the load of unpaid domestic labour equally between men and women; by shifting our employment structures to allow men and women to spend less time in the workplace and more time caring for one another and our families – poverty will remain a highly gendered condition.

Emma Dawson is the executive director of public policy thinktank Per Capita

Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust