This submission focuses on unpaid care work done by women: women account for 8 out of 10 carers in Australia, and all accounts indicate that caregiving has greater impacts on women’s financially status, social well-being and physical and mental health.

We draw attention to two large scale, comprehensive studies of caregiving that provide detailed information on the impacts of caregiving on women’s workforce participation, and on their mental and physical health.

1. The Victorian Carers Program (VCP), a well designed longitudinal study of 1000 women carers, across the full age range and across all disabilities among the people they cared for. The project was funded by VicHealth and carried out through the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne by a multi-disciplinary research team and ran from 1991-1997. The findings of the project are reported in Schofield, Bloch, Herrman, Murphy, Nankervis and Singh, Family Caregivers: Disability, illness and ageing, published by Allen and Unwin.

2. The Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) carried out a survey of just on 1000 recipients of Carer Allowance and/or Carer Payment, reported in Edwards, Higgins, Gray, Zmijewski and Kingston, The nature and impact of caring for family members with a disability in Australia, AIFA, 2008. AIFS reports significant increases in take-up of Carer Payment and the Carer Allowance since the early 1990s, in part due to changes in eligibility and efforts of the Commonwealth Government through Centrelink and other agencies involved in assessment of care needs. The profile of carers and other information in this report thus gives a robust picture of the situation of the majority of

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