Australia’s Gender Pay Gap Has Slightly Narrowed

Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) has released its annual report, and the news is both good and bad. While more Australian workplaces than ever are seeking to address pay discrepancies between male and female employees, a large gap in pay persists in every single goddamn industry and is decreasing by only a tiny amount each year.

According to the WGEA report, Australian women are paid on average $26, 527 less than men per year. In other words, despite making up half of the nation’s workforce, they earn only 77 percent of men’s average full time income. Oh, and the higher paid the position, the worse the situation gets: the salary difference rises to $93,884 in top-level management jobs.

This pay gap is trending downward, but still only slightly—decreasing by 1.6 percent since 2013. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data used by the WGEA takes into account 12,000 employers and four million employees. The pay gap is smallest for employees aged 20 years and under, and gradually increases with age—peaking in the 45 to 54 age group, when women are more likely than men to have spent time out of the workforce to care for children.

The WGEA report does not take into account race, but it's worth noting that pay gap studies around the world generally acknowledge that women of colour are paid at an even lower rate compared to men.

In an accompanying media release, director of the WGEA Libby Lyons said there was some slight cause for celebration. “The data confirms gender pay gaps in favour of men in every industry and the under-representation of women in management and leadership roles,” she said.

“At the same time, it shows employers are stepping up to the challenge in greater numbers with proactive gender equality policies. For the first time, more than 70 per cent of employers reported they have policies in place to support gender equality. There’s no question we are seeing movement in the right direction, but it’s still too slow.”

The best news to come out of the report? Awareness of the gender pay gap appears to be growing, and employers are putting policies in place to address it. Around 70 percent of employers have policies that support gender equality (up 4.5 percent since 2013), although only 27 percent of them have conducted actual pay gap analysis within their workplaces.

Read the full report (or copy and paste the link and email it to HR?) here.

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