This report evaluates the economic and social value generated by YWCA’s gender-responsive housing portfolio and outlines why sustained investment in gender-responsive housing is both a social imperative and an economically efficient public policy response. The report uses Cost Benefit Analysis to provide an economic argument for the value of gender-responsive housing.
The Case for Gender-Responsive Housing
Housing systems are not gender-neutral. Women and gender-diverse people experience homelessness and housing precarity differently to men due to lower average incomes, gender pay and superannuation gaps, disproportionate caring responsibilities, and significantly higher exposure to family and domestic violence. These structural inequities shape housing pathways, increase vulnerability to homelessness, and often result in hidden homelessness, overcrowding, or unsafe living arrangements.
Intersectionality further compounds disadvantage. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, migrant and culturally diverse women, gender-diverse people and members of the LGBTQIA+SB community, women with disability, single mothers and older women face elevated risks of homelessness and discrimination. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children experience homelessness and domestic violence at higher rates than the rest of the population, with housing shortages, culturally inappropriate housing and systemic inequalities and discrimination intensifying vulnerability and limiting safe pathways out of violence.
A gender-neutral approach to housing policy risks reproducing these disparities. Gender-responsive housing, by contrast, explicitly accounts for safety, caring responsibilities, mobility patterns, financial access, and intersectional disadvantage across the housing continuum. Evidence consistently demonstrates that such approaches improve health, safety, economic participation and long-term wellbeing.
YWCA are leaders in gender-responsive housing. YWCA supported over 7,600 people across a portfolio of almost 500 safe, stable and affordable homes and 27 service delivery programs in 2024/25. The organisation applies a Women’s Housing Framework that aims to deliver housing and services that maximises resident wellbeing and health, safety and security, participation and connection and agency.
Why Cost-Benefit Analysis? Making the Economic Case Visible
When governments, funders and communities debate where to invest in housing, the conversation often centres on need: the number of people sleeping rough, the length of social housing waiting lists, and the pressure on emergency services. The moral case is real and urgent. But need alone rarely determines investment decisions. What determines decisions is whether the investment is seen to work and whether it is worth the cost.
Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is the tool that answers that question with evidence. It is the standard framework used by governments and economic agencies across Australia and internationally to evaluate whether public investments generate more benefit than they consume in resources. When applied rigorously to social housing, CBA reveals something that intuition alone cannot: housing stability is not just a social good. It is an economic one. The return to the public is measurable, substantial and consistently positive.
Findings
The evidence presented in this report demonstrates that gender-responsive housing is both socially necessary and fiscally responsible. Even under conservative assumptions, sustained investment in stable housing for women and gender-diverse people produces measurable net public value.
Housing stability reduces demand on health, justice and homelessness systems, strengthens family wellbeing, improves safety, and enhances economic participation.
Gender-responsive housing should therefore be understood not as a niche programmatic addition, but as essential social infrastructure that delivers measurable returns to government and the community while advancing gender equality and long-term social resilience.