(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

This is an edited extract from journalist Kristine Ziwica’s new book Leaning Out, available now.

In 1969, Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the doors of the Melbourne Commonwealth Building to protest the limited nature of the outcome of an equal pay case in which she was a party, along with other women from the Australasian Meat Industry Employees’ Union (AMIEU).

“No more male and female rates, one rate only” read her now-famous sign. It beggars belief, but this was quite a revolutionary idea at a time when it was perfectly legal to pay men and women differently for doing … the exact same job.

Though D’Aprano was eventually cut free by police, 10 days later she was back, this time with two friends, Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon. They chained themselves to the doors of the Arbitration Court, which had dismissed their claim to equal pay. A year later she, along with Geikie and Solomon, founded the Women’s Action Committee and the Women’s Liberation Centre, from which the Women’s Liberation Movement in Melbourne was born. The Committee sought to get women more involved in collective activism, shedding the metaphorical chains of a culture requiring them to be “ladylike” and “polite” in their quest for change, which D’Aprano had quickly recognised would never result in a revolution.

D’Aprano and her fellow activists travelled around Melbourne by public transport paying only 75% of the fares because women were only given 75% of the wage of men at the time. They did pub crawls, because women weren’t allowed to drink in bars, only in lounges. And they helped arrange the first pro-choice rally in 1975.

The case that prompted D’Aprano’s protest was brought by the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union and other workers’ groups, arguing for equal pay for all employees. But instead they got a general female award minimum wage of 85% of the male wage, in recognition of the fact that men were “breadwinners” who should be paid more because they had families to support.

In 1972, the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration revisited that decision and ruled that women and men undertaking similar work that had similar value were eligible for the same rate. And in 1973 a ruling by the Commission granted an equal minimum wage to all Australians, regardless of their sex. Finally, in 1974, the “breadwinner” component of a male wage was removed, an acknowledgement that more Australian women were providing for their families.

As Mary Gaudron, a lawyer and judge who was the first female justice of the High Court of Australia, once said, “We got equal pay once. Then we got it again. Then we got it again, and we still don’t have it.”

Today, 50 years after that ruling establishing equal pay for work of equal value, there’s still a gender pay gap in Australia of 13.8%. This means that the average Australian woman still has to work an extra 61 days a year to earn the same pay as a man. And while it fluctuates slightly up or down from year to year, the rate of change is, overall, painfully slow.

Before the pandemic, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency calculated that at the current rate of change, the gap would take until around 2050 to close. After the pandemic arrived, many experts warned that the impacts could set us back a generation or more in terms of closing the gender pay gap. And for some women in the traditionally undervalued, female-dominated caring professions, the gender pay gap, according to research from Bankwest Curtin Economics, will probably never close. Never!

That’s pretty sobering when you consider that the same research found that the gender pay gap among full-time executives could be eliminated within 10 years, and for senior managers in less than 15 years. The reasons the gender pay gap has never fully closed are complicated, and it’s important to note that it’s not exclusively due to men and women being paid differently for doing the exact same job, as D’Aprano, rightly, protested all those years ago. But they are all unjust.

This is, clearly, unfinished business. And as the pandemic has shown us just how fragile progress has been for women in the workplace, it’s a reminder to all of us to maintain focus … and rage. I fervently hope that we’ll see a new push to close the gender pay gap in 2022, the 50th anniversary of that first major milestone of progress in 1972. And I hope that — after what women have been through these past two-plus years — it will be very much in the spirit of Zelda, not Sheryl Sandberg.

There’s a beautiful thing about the gender pay gap (and, yes, I know it feels a bit wrong to say there is something “beautiful” about a figure that represents women earning, on average, $255.30 less per week than men): it’s a composite figure that represents the myriad of injustices that women experience in the workplace. These injustices range from gender and intersecting forms of race and disability discrimination, to the unequal distribution of caring responsibilities at home, to the cost of childcare, to the fact that we don’t properly value the paid and unpaid care work that women do.

What are the drivers of the gender pay gap? According to a 2019 report from the Diversity Council of Australia and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the top three drivers are gender discrimination (39%), years not working or career interruptions due to caring responsibilities (25%), and the undervaluing of women’s work that comes from what’s called industry and occupational segregation (17%). Disturbingly, the report found that gender discrimination — the single largest factor — was on the increase, as was the impact of the second biggest driver, caring responsibilities.

Why the lack of progress — indeed, the backwards slide? I suspect one factor is lean-in feminism and its giant “Hey, look over here” distraction about women’s inability to ask for more money. For example, in 2007, a book called Women Don’t Ask made a big splash, claiming that women, unlike men, don’t negotiate over pay and, as a result, they are paid less. Sandberg’s Lean In offered a similar theory.

Women should just ask for more money! Problem solved! Unfortunately, we would have to wait more than 10 years for this load of nonsense to be thoroughly debunked. A 2018 study, “Do Women Ask?”, found that women do ask just as much as men; they just don’t get what they ask for. The researchers examined 4600 Australian employees from 800 workplaces and found that “the patterns we found are consistent with the idea that women’s requests for advancement are treated differently from men’s requests. Asking does not mean getting, at least if you are female.”

What’s more, the now well-established theory of “gender backlash” also undermines the efficacy of this “solution” to pay equity. Let’s just call it the Henry Higgins theory of inclusion and diversity: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” On the one hand, lots of research shows that society tends to associate stereotypically male attributes with those of an effective leader. So, the logic follows, to succeed as a leader a woman should simply adopt stereotypically male traits, including acting more “assertively”.

But here’s the problem: research also tells us that women who do act more assertively, behaving in a stereotypically male way, are seen to be breaching feminine norms and suffer a penalty. Asking for a promotion, offering unsolicited opinions, challenging the status quo, speaking up about concerns or negotiating for that pay rise may help men get ahead, but women are labelled as “bossy” (or worse) for the exact same behaviour – and they pay a price.

In a 2008 study published in Psychological Science, men received a boost in their perceived status after expressing anger. In contrast, “women who expressed anger were consistently accorded lower status and lower wages, and were seen as less competent”. Another study showed that when men and women were equally aggressive in the workplace, women’s “perceived deserved compensation” dropped by 35%, twice as much as men’s.

Lean-in feminists took this inconvenient truth in their stride and came up with another faux solution: “gender judo”. As Joan C Williams and Rachel Dempsey co-wrote in their 2014 book What Works for Women at Work, powerful women should take feminine stereotypes that can hold women back — the selfless mother and the dutiful daughter, for example — and use them to propel themselves forward. Women could now tie themselves into knots trying to find just the right balance of sugar, spice and everything nice that men wouldn’t find threatening.

And that’s how we ended up with women on leadership-type websites offering tips like this: ‘Use a brief framing statement like: “I know it’s a risk for women to speak this assertively, but I’m going to express my opinion very directly”. Or “to adopt dominant body language and direct speech but keep messages communal” while also “simultaneously communicating competence and warmth”. Yes, this had all become very, very silly.

These convoluted “solutions” reflect the belief of some — with varying degrees of good intentions — that we should engage with the world as it is, rather than the world as we would like it to be.

But, as is ever the case — and really the point of this book — individual solutions are not going to be the answer. While one woman might be transformed from a “nice girl who doesn’t ask” to a “bold woman taking control of her career who knows her worth”, her individual success in the sense that she makes more money does nothing to tackle the broader structural drivers of the gender pay gap.

It’s time we started engaging in, and fighting for, the world as we would like it to be, and to look again at the big, bold, structural solutions that tackle the real drivers of the gender pay gap.

Fortunately for Australia, we are poised for another big, effective push to close the remaining gender pay gap, and it’s pretty clear what needs to happen now. This includes action to make childcare more affordable and accessible, parental leave equality to help level the domestic playing field for women at home, increased wages and conditions for the many women working in female-dominated caring industries such as aged care, and action to tackle the various forms of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination that drive women out of the workplace, including sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination, all the kinds discussed in this book.

But the first big necessary step is increased transparency. In 2021, the Australian branch of the Global Institute of Women’s Leadership (GIWL) and the Australian National University published a report that highlighted how Australia had lost its way in terms of gender pay transparency, Gender Pay Gap Reporting in Australia: Time for an Upgrade.

The report noted the need for a “multifaceted approach” that tackled improved parental leave, particularly for men, affordable childcare and the valuing of work stereotypically done by women. But the report also noted the critical need to increase “pay transparency” — so that employees know the size of the gender pay gap at their particular place of employment and can, presumably, feel empowered to do something about it.

The report noted that Australia compared poorly with other nations on gender equality reporting. “Australia received the joint-lowest ranking on the gender pay gap reporting scorecard across all countries studied,” concluded the study’s authors.

A particular issue identified in the report was the lack of public disclosure. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency currently publishes the size of the gender pay gap as a national and industry composite, but doesn’t publish the size of the gender pay gap at individual employers. Individual employer reporting has been the law in the UK, for example, since 2017. The GIWL study authors somewhat euphemistically described the problem as such: “the absence of qualitative data or action plan disclosure impedes stakeholders’ ability to engage with individual employers about their gender equality activities”. Let me translate that into plain English: without knowing the size of the gender pay gap at their place of employment, women can’t stick their head above the parapet, lock eyes with their colleagues and say, collectively, “What the fuck is going on here?”

The GIWL report also highlighted a lack of “intersectional data” — such as Indigenous status, disability and cultural background – which means “it is difficult to understand how gender intersects with other factors”. Translation: this makes it difficult for diverse groups of women to highlight why they have every right to be mightily pissed off about how little they make compared to white women and men.

As I said, if there’s something beautiful about the gender pay gap, it’s that it highlights the many injustices women experience in the workplace; so too it should highlight the intersecting forms of injustice experienced by women from diverse backgrounds. The fact that we still don’t collect and publish this data is likely a reflection of the dominant strain of lean-in feminism, which is indifferent to these issues.

Fortunately, and somewhat miraculously, a review into the Workplace Gender Equality Act published by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in March 2022 recommended that these reporting omissions be rectified: there should be mandatory public gender pay gap reporting for individual employers, and intersectional gender pay gap data should be collected and published. Perhaps recognising the radical implications of these changes, the Morrison government responded by saying that they were “working towards” the implementation pending “further consultation with business”. But change is afoot. The new Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to implement the recommendations of the review in full. That would be a big step towards changing workplace culture, and, along with reforms such as structural changes in childcare, parental leave reforms, and the proper valuing of women’s work, could push us that little bit further towards tackling gender inequality. And maybe we can finally consign all those negotiation tips and gender judo to the dustbin of equal pay history.