Each March when Australia retweets purple hashtags and posts cheerful International Women’s Day messages, a truth often goes unspoken: for millions of disabled women in this country, gender equality isn’t a celebration, it’s a battleground.
International Women’s Day is meant to spotlight the unfinished work of gender equality. But too often, the experiences of women with disability are missing from that spotlight altogether. The stories we get are about corporate brunches, spotlit CEOs, and feel-good metrics, while the lived realities of disabled women remain mired in violence, exclusion, economic insecurity and political invisibility. This isn’t inspiration porn, it’s the cold, hard truth.
A Landscape of Violence and Fear
Being a woman in Australia already carries a significant risk of violence. Being a woman with disability multiplies that risk. Data from Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) 2021–22 Personal Safety Survey (PSS) shows that women with disability are more likely than women without disability to experience physical violence, sexual violence, emotional abuse, economic abuse and harassment. In the two years before survey:
- 5.8% of women with disability experienced physical violence, compared to 4.2% without disability.
- 4% experienced sexual violence, compared to 2.5%.
- 7% reported emotional abuse by a partner, compared to 4.6%.
- 14% experienced sexual harassment in the last 12 months a higher rate than women without disability.
And for too many women with psychosocial or severe disability, these figures are even higher, and the cumulative burden is devastating. Violence against women with disability isn’t an occasional annoyance. It is pervasive, systemic and often under-reported because of barriers to accessing support and fear of disbelief.
Intersecting Inequities
Disabled women are not a monolith. Intersectionality (the overlapping of aspects of social and political identity to form unique experiences) shapes outcomes in brutal, compounding ways. For First Nations women with disability, colonial violence and systemic neglect add layers of risk that plain statistics cannot capture. For women from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, language barriers and racism create further hurdles to safety and services. For trans and non-binary disabled people in Australia, discrimination in healthcare and community spaces remains entrenched.
The faux-feminist narrative that tips its hat to “women’s rights” each March too often centres the experiences of a narrow group: white, hetero-normative, non-disabled, corporate professionals. Disabled voices are either added as ornamentation or ignored altogether.
Economic Exclusion Is Gender Inequality on Steroids
When we talk about the gender pay gap, we must understand how disability acts as a significant multiplier of economic inequity.
Disabled women face:
- Lower labour force participation.
- Higher rates of underemployment.
- Barriers to career progression and leadership.
- Dependency on inadequate social supports.
- Costs of care that erode financial security.
We don’t have comprehensive national statistics that fully capture the economic disadvantage of women with disability, but the available data and lived experience point to a stark reality: gender equity reforms that ignore disability are not equity at all.
Safety Is a Feminist Issue — So Why Are Disabled Women Still in the Shadows?
Feminism rightly brands itself as a movement for safety, autonomy and justice. Yet the most vulnerable women are often left out of mainstream campaigns. This erasure isn’t benign. It has real consequences:
- Under-resourced support services that are inaccessible or unsafe.
- Emergency accommodation that doesn’t meet basic accessibility requirements.
- Law enforcement practices that don’t account for communication barriers.
- Healthcare discrimination that dismisses symptoms or denies reproductive autonomy.
- Social and Human Service systems that do not enable independence from potential abuse perpetrators.
If feminism is not a universal struggle for bodily autonomy and safety for all women, then it is incomplete.
What Would Real Change Look Like?
On International Women’s Day, let’s say what actual equity requires:
- Data that Counts and Stories that Matter We need comprehensive, gender-disaggregated data in every national system so that disabled women’s experiences are visible, measurable and actionable.
- Leadership and Representation Disabled women must have seats at decision-making tables: not as token guests, but as leaders shaping policy, budgets and services.
- Co-design and Accountability Policies that affect disabled women must be co-designed with them, especially in areas of violence prevention, economic participation, health and disability.
- Feminism that Listens, not another corporate luncheon date If International Women’s Day is more about corporate posturing than inclusive justice, it fails its own premise.
Reclaim the Narrative
Australia likes to call itself progressive, but progress is not measured by purple logos and feel-good slogans. Progress is counted in lives made safer, systems made equitable, liveable incomes, environments made accessible and biases eliminated. Disabled women are not footnotes in the story of gender equality - they are the litmus test.
This International Women’s Day, let those who champion equality look truth in the face: until disabled women are safe, economically secure, respected and represented equality in Australia is unfinished business.
Case Studies:
Ann Marie Smith was a 54-year-old woman with cerebral palsy who died in Adelaide in 2020 after prolonged and extreme neglect while receiving NDIS-funded care. She was found in a cane chair, having suffered septic shock, malnutrition, and untreated pressure sores. Her death exposed catastrophic failures across multiple systems. Despite being funded under the NDIS, no effective monitoring or safeguarding mechanism intervened in time. Miss Smith’s death forced national scrutiny, yet it also symbolises how easily women with disability (particularly those with complex disabilities, reliant on paid care) can become ‘invisible’.
Kelly Thompson was one of the Australians whose life was profoundly affected by the federal government’s unlawful “Robodebt” scheme. Living with mental health challenges and financial precarity, she received automated debt notices that caused significant distress. She later died by suicide. The Robodebt Royal Commission found the scheme to be unlawful and deeply harmful, with devastating consequences for vulnerable people, including many women with disability reliant on income support.
In February 2020, Hannah Clarke and her three children were murdered in Brisbane by her estranged husband in an act of domestic violence that shocked the nation. While public discussion focused on coercive control and policing failures, less visible in mainstream narratives was the fact that Hannah Clarke was living with endometriosis and chronic pain, a condition that had significantly affected her health, financial stability and dependence within the relationship.
Chronic illness and disability can intensify vulnerability in violent relationships by:
- Increasing economic dependence
- Limiting physical capacity to leave or relocate
- Creating reliance on a partner for transport or care
- Making women more vulnerable to coercive control framed as “support”
While Hannah Clarke’s case is not always framed explicitly through a disability lens, it highlights how women with chronic illness and disability can face compounded barriers when seeking safety — including systems that fail to recognise non-visible disability as a risk factor in domestic violence.
Sources
- Violence Against Women with Disability- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) People with disability in Australia – Violence against people with disability2022 release; updated periodically)
- Prevalence Data & Disability Demographics - Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Personal Safety Survey (PSS), Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia
Key datasets:
- ABS Personal Safety Survey (most recent release: 2021–22), ABS Disability, Ageing and Carers Survey (2018; updates pending)
- Royal Commission Findings - Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability Final Report (2023) Multiple volumes documenting systemic violence, gendered abuse, institutional failures.
- National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Gender disparities in access and outcomes discussed in: NDIS Quarterly Reports, Independent reviews and advocacy submissions
- Advocacy & Intersectionality - Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) Position statements on gender-based violence, Submissions to the Royal Commission, Intersectional analysis of disability and feminism
- Gender Pay Gap Context Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) Australia’s Gender Pay Gap statistics, Workforce participation data
- First Peoples Disability Network Reports on the experience of First Nations people with disability, Intersection of colonisation, disability and gender
