Women frequently undervalue their worth when it comes to life insurance. That was one of the key points made during the life insurance session at CALI’s recent Wild For Life 2025 Conference.
A panel comprising Deanne Stewart, CEO, Aware Super, Ruby Leahy Gatfield, Head of Policy and Program Impact at Future Women, Rebecca Huntley, CALI Research Lead, and Trish Gregory, Financial Adviser with Hayes & Co Insurance Services, shared a range of insights covering women at work, in super, and in the life insurance space.
Under the session theme of Better Serving Women, Stewart said two-thirds of Aware Super’s 1.2 million members are female, and that looking at the data there’s no difference in the superfund balances of men and women until women reach their late 20s. Then they start to “…irreversibly fall behind their male counterparts”, according to Stewart.
This, she said, is due to women having children, in many cases only able to work part-time, not getting promoted, and “…the gap just gets bigger from there”.
“You get to the endpoint where people are about to retire and there’s a 25% difference in funds between men and women. And that makes it very problematic in retirement.”
Women aged 50 and over are the fastest growing cohort of homeless people
Women aged 50 and over are the fastest growing cohort of homeless people, attendees were told.
However, it’s often thanks to super that women have life insurance at all, said Stewart.
“Women on the whole are underinsured, but the power of super is that insurance is defaulted,” she said, adding “It’s a really an accessible and affordable way for many women to get insurance. So what we see in the data is about 68% of women are insured.”
Gregory said insurance tends to be a low-trust, low-interest environment:
“You pay it because you have to,” she said. “Life insurance is purchased begrudgingly.”
However, it seems , according to Gregory, that most people can be helped to understand the value of life insurance.
She noted “The conversations we have tend to be with people after something has happened to someone they know, something could have happened to them, or there’s been a major life event.
“We find people are happy to buy insurance if they understand how it fits with their values. They really just like things to be explained clearly so they can do their own personal trade-off.
“Then it doesn’t really feel like a ‘sell’. It just seems like they are making a conscious decision to make their life better.”
Huntley related the advice she received from a financial adviser when she first sought advice 17 years ago.
…women always devalue their contribution
“He told me women always devalue their contribution,” she said (see also: Women Lack Confidence That Life Insurance is for Them…). “He tells husbands to imagine everything their partners do, and then imagine how much it would cost to pay somebody else to do that.”
What can be done to help women when it comes to life insurance? Audience members were advised to talk to their daughters about insurance and involve them in the family finances.
