'I choose to be a stay-at-home mum. The impact on my super is devastating.'

I currently have $14,000 in my superannuation account.

I'm 32 and have spent the last seven years largely unemployed, or as I like to call it "in unpaid work", while raising my kids.

The average superannuation for a woman my age is $56,943, for men it's $78,546. At this stage my options are not getting divorced, not becoming a widow or working until I drop dead.

I can hear a collective 'tut-tut' and pitiful sighs from women the world over who think I'm a grave disappointment to feminism and women's lib. I'm about to be on the receiving end of some lectures about financial literacy and some graphs that depict how much super I lose with each year out of the paid workforce. I'm the reason for the gender pay gap and the super gap. It's me, hi! I've been dragging the chain.

Watch: Superwoman is dead. Post continues after video.

The thing is, I knew the financial risk and still I persisted with the day-to-day work of raising a family. Women over 55 are the fastest growing group to experience homelessness in Australia so future financial insecurity is a real risk. Why did I do it to myself? Because it felt like an important and valuable contribution. I saw the day-to-day work of caring for my kids as a worthy contribution. I realised it was very challenging and rewarding work. The short answer, I wanted to. And I thought women were finally free to do as they pleased. I was wrong.

If we consider the opportunity costs of unpaid care work in this country at this very moment, women still don't have a real choice. Most women simply cannot afford to remain in an unpaid care role even if they want to. I feel that we have wrongly identified the choice to perform care work as the problem, like I've somehow made a mistake or been naïve by engaging in this pro-social behavior. The problem is not the choices women make in balancing paid and unpaid contributions; the problem is that society and government doesn't value their unpaid contribution. Rather than erasing the penalty of motherhood, we have gone with a strategy of erasing motherhood itself.

It's part of a broader trend within the equality discussion that treats women as the problem. It's the worst kind of cultural gaslighting. "Oh look, women are still lagging behind men in workforce participation – they should just work a bit harder, what’s wrong with them?!" Or "Oh, you're homeless now? Guess you shouldn't have had kids and looked after them yourself." Why aren't there graphs comparing men and women's unpaid care contributions plastered all over the news? Why aren't equality advocates lobbying night and day for policies that enable men to contribute more unpaid labour? Men are exactly half of the problem in this equation.

We constantly blame women for inequality instead of changing the conditions that make care work oppressive, like little support and low or no pay. We simply tell women to avoid that work. And if you don't minimise that aspect of your life then it's your own stupid fault. We threaten new mums with graphs about lost super rather than loudly and repeatedly advocating to PAY them superannuation while on parental leave. The solution to the motherhood problem? Just don't do it, or if you must, don't do it too much. 

Telling women that the only way they can protect themselves is through minimising the postpartum period is actually super disempowering and perpetuates the idea that care work is not a safe space. It promotes this idea that motherhood is a dangerous space and if you do it for too long, you'll end up homeless.

It's not that the mature age homeless mothers didn't work, women have always worked, it's just that some or all of the work they did doesn't count. Government policy treats that contribution as unnecessary and something to be avoided if an individual wants financial security and independence. We are essentially telling these financially distressed women it's their own fault for not going back to paid work sooner.

If Australian society truly valued care work and wanted to improve financial security or help reduce homelessness in women, there are a myriad of policies that we could be pushing for to lessen the financial penalties of caregiving. Extended Paid and Unpaid Parental Leave, super contributions while on leave, parental care allowances, tax concessions for single income families - all of which are in place in Nordic regions routinely lauded for their family-friendly policies. 

It seems like a massive step backwards in terms of gender equality to frame this issue as one where women must now protect themselves from future joblessness, divorce and homelessness by avoiding or minimising their unique and important care contributions. We should be valued equally for our contribution, not simply expected to assimilate into a linear, typically male, work life pattern.

Birth, breastfeeding and the raising of babies and small children are not disposable and unnecessary societal functions we can simply do without. Research is now showing full recovery from birth may take several years. The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding for 2 years and beyond. Babies and very young children can benefit from increased access to their parents in the first three years of life which is an extremely developmentally vulnerable period.

We have grossly minimised a woman's unpaid contribution in order to equalise the paid contribution. Women are now turning themselves inside out, we have become the great adaptors of society. We have taken on everything in the name of equality, and it's stressing us out and disempowering us in ways Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir could not have imagined.

It would seem a basic human right, at the very least, for parents to have genuine choice to perform these care contributions and not be penalised for it with future homelessness or massive superannuation losses. If entering a long-term unpaid caregiving role continues to be seen as 'time off', bludging or something unworthy of support then we have little chance of shifting the cultural perceptions that also undermine and devalue paid care work, such as childcare.

Listen to No Filter where Virginia Tapscott speaks to Mia Freedman on why she chose to be a stay at home mum. Post continues after podcast.

The same cultural devaluation of care work that often forces parents out of caregiving roles also drives educators out of the childcare sector. Care work still isn't treated as real work. Deep down many of us still don't really value the day-to-day tasks that care work requires.

This situation is failing parents in both paid and unpaid work. Parents working a double shift of paid work and unpaid care also experience frustration that the work they do out of hours is not valued or taken into consideration in workplace policy. The old saying "parents are expected to work like they don't have children" sums up this frustration well. Parents across the spectrum would benefit from a shift towards appropriately valuing care work. 

We can't live in a society that doesn't exist yet, but we have to start somewhere. We have to fight for policies that value women's bodies and time. We can't fix my woeful superannuation account, it's too late for me, but we sure as hell can get to work on more progressive ways to alleviate the same type of financial distress for future generations. We can stop victim blaming homeless women immediately and recognise that all mothers and all parents work.

Read more from Virginia Tapscott:

• OPINION: 'I want to be able to choose to be "mother," and only that. But society says no.'
  
• 'It chilled me.' While out running, a 10-year-old boy made a comment about my body.
• OPINION: 'I'm going to be blunt: cheap groceries are ruining the planet.'

Feature Image: Supplied.