In 2025, Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) held the Economic Security and Employment Survey to strengthen our advocacy on economic security and employment for women, girls and gender-diverse people with disability. Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) undertook this survey to strengthen our advocacy on economic security and employment for women, girls and gender diverse people with disability. WWDA designed the survey to generate policy-relevant evidence in areas where national data collections do not yet fully reflect lived experience at the intersection of gender and disability.
Implications for data and policy
WWDA treats this survey as an exploratory and pilot dataset. The findings provide signals about where existing data architectures could be strengthened, particularly in relation to sampling strategies, disaggregation and indicator design. In other words, how we define the phenomena we measure and the populations we include shapes what the data is able to show.
The findings indicate:
- A need for more intentional sampling strategies, particularly to capture the experiences of women with intellectual disability, including First Nations women with intellectual disability.
- Opportunities to refine commonly used definitions, including measures of economic abuse and employment participation.
- A need for indicators that disaggregate by both gender and disability to show how inequality manifests across policy priority areas, including where women with disability experience persistently worse outcomes than women without disability.
WWDA seeks to work with research partners and data collection agencies to address these gaps and strengthen future data collection, analysis and policy impact.
The WWDA team has prepared seven (7) information packs (‘infodocs’) to present the survey’s findings, existing data, and identified gaps in data. Click the links below to access each infodoc.