When Bonnie Jackson-French went on maternity leave at the beginning of March, she was surprised to open her payslip and find a column missing.
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"I realised, 'hang on a minute, my super hasn't been paid'," she said. "That's when I started looking into why that was."
Ms Jackson-French, from Kooringal, has launched a petition calling on the federal government to ensure Australians are paid their super contributions while on parental leave from their employer.
She said because mothers make up an overwhelming majority of people taking parental leave, the exclusion of superannuation from maternity leave payments directly discriminates against mothers and leaves women worse off in retirement than their male counterparts.
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"That means that they can't enjoy themselves in the same way that we all hope we will be able to when we retire because they don't have that financial backing that their male counterparts do have," she said.
Industry Super Australia estimates about 1.6 million women have lost $1.86 billion in superannuation since the Commonwealth Parental Leave Pay scheme began in June 2011.
ISA advocacy director Georgia Brumby said including super payments in the Commonwealth scheme would have a "modest but vital" impact on women's future retirement savings.
"Unless the major parties act, the savings of millions of working mothers will continue to go backwards, forcing them to pay a big future price for taking time out of the paid workforce to raise a family," she said.
Outside of the taxpayer-funded scheme, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency found about 49 per cent of larger employers pay super to employees on parental leave.
The federal government has not followed its own retirement income review's recommendation that paying super to mothers on parental leave would be an important step towards improving gender equity in retirement.
On average, women retire with 24 per cent less superannuation than their male counterparts.
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