HILDA 2026: What the data says about women

Last week the 2026 HILDA Statistical Report landed, and the finding that travelled was the one about qualifications. One in two working Australians feel overeducated for the job they are doing.

I went looking for what it said about women.

It is all in there. It is just scattered across six separate chapters, and nobody has put it in the same room.

Women show up as a declining health line in Chapter 2. As 87% of single parents in Chapter 3. As 81.6 hours a week of combined paid and unpaid work in Chapter 4. As the group whose university degree stopped paying what it used to in Chapter 5. As the most overeducated cohort in the country in Chapter 7. And as the people who scored lower on a financial literacy quiz in Chapter 10.

Every one of those findings is accurate. Not one of them is reported next to the others.

But the woman they describe is not six different women. She is one person, living all 6 chapters.

HILDA is a large longitudinal study, the biggest of its kind in Australia, so it matters. It is funded by the Commonwealth, it has followed the same 17,000 Australians since 2001, and more than 2,200 academic papers have been built on it. When a politician tells you what is happening to Australian families, the number usually came from here.

Which makes the two things it has never asked about rather important.

There is no women’s health content in it. Nothing on pregnancy beyond the fact of a birth. Nothing on fertility, endometriosis, PCOS, pregnancy loss, perimenopause or menopause. Twenty-four years of following the same women, and nothing on the reproductive life that half of them are living through.

And there is one question about violence. One tick box, in a list of life events, that does not ask who did it.

So the national survey that has watched Australian families form and come apart for a quarter of a century cannot tell you whether violence is why those relationships ended. It records the damage with real precision and has no field for the cause.

I wrote this paper because the compartments are an administrative convenience. They do not exist in the woman sitting across from me in my office, and they do not exist in her data either.

It runs to about sixteen pages, every figure is sourced, and it is free. If you only read two sections, read what it found about women, and what it means if you are a woman reading it.

If you work in policy, research or careers, I would genuinely like to know what you make of it. I can be reached though my contact form here.

If anything in this touches your own situation rather than a statistic, 1800RESPECT is 1800 737 732, free and confidential.