Australia’s progress on closing the gender pay gap has stalled.
Across the 2021-22 financial year, women earned $26,596 less than men on average, according to the latest annual data released this morning by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).
It means Australia’s gender pay gap is stuck at 22.8% — the same as last year. Just one in four boards has gender balance, with men twice as likely to be in the top income bracket as women. The number of women who are CEOs, however, has increased to 22.3%, up 2.9% since last year.
Companies aren’t acting on the gender pay gap either. While 54% of employers conducted a gender pay gap analysis, 40% didn’t act on the findings.
Australia recently passed legislation banning pay secrecy clauses. Research from the UK, US, Canada and Denmark all saw a decline in the gender pay gap following pay transparency rules. In the US, women’s wages increased by up to 12% following the new laws, while in Canada the gender pay gap was slashed by up to 40% in some instances.
University of Melbourne professor in human resource management Michelle Brown told Crikey while it was a good first step, more needed to be done to address inequities. Social taboos, she added, still played a role.
“One of the big challenges now is encouraging people to talk about pay and realising that having other people’s pay information can be really helpful in making decisions about your own life,” she said.
“You want to be able to do all of your research, collect lots of information, then make decisions about whether you’ve been paid fairly, whether you should stay or go for a promotion.”
Last month New York City implemented legislation requiring companies to list salary ranges in job applications. Brown is calling for Australia to introduce similar legislation.
“Having pay ranges is really significant [in reducing the gender pay gap] because it means two employees start on the same salary band,” she said, rather than basing pay on the person’s previous salary, perpetuating historic pay gaps.
Transparency doesn’t solve everything either, Brown said. She’s currently researching what happens when employees challenge pay decisions, finding that in many cases, the company argues it’s the employee’s performance impacting their pay, not gender. With the current workforce and skills shortage in Australia, Brown said, employees with a reputation or unequal pay could struggle to find staff.
WGEA Director Mary Wooldridge echoed these sentiments, saying the “failure to improve” should serve as a “clarion call” for employers.
“At a time when Australia is experiencing a critical skills and labour shortage, WGEA’s annual Employer Census shows that too many employers have failed to step up on gender equality leaving many women no better off than they were 12 months ago,” she said.
“If you’re not making progress on these things, your employees will realise there are others who are.”
I am constantly confused by these articles about gender pay scales and this supposedly novel solution to advertise jobs with the salary range included. In the thirty years I was a full time employee of public service departments and various Australian universities, all the jobs at every level were advertised with the pay range. The more problematic experiences I had related to special project positions that were advertised at a particular level, and once I agreed to take on the role, the decision was made that I could do the project at my usual pay rate. Which I didn’t feel safe to dispute and I did enjoy what was a very challenging position. The other problematic area, particularly for women and people of colour (I am both) is the way in which promotions are denied for flimsy reasons or where the”goalposts” suddenly change. I only ever had two promotions in all of the thirty years, although I applied for many and was astonished at the various dubious explanations given as to why I wasn’t even shortlisted, despite exceeding the basic selection criteria. So it’s probably both simpler and more complicated in why women might still lag in the salary stakes compared with men. And as someone has already commented, there is also a pay gap affecting those who are not anglo Australians. We possibly also might want to consider the more individualistic and competitive mentality that is advocated as a way for women to receive better pay, which says a lot about values and ethics in workplaces.
We have the data, so we know. How about some ethnic pay gap data? Inequities? Don’t make me laugh.
Changing the law to allow people to discuss salary will make little difference. Reticence to talk about salary is because it is inappropriate, it’s social convention. I can’t imagine a young person asking a colleague how much they are paid.
What would make a difference is publishing information about salaries. Not individually, say the range and average. For large firms there is usually some sort of classification.
Information in the salaries of similar workers is the only method that works to achieve parity. It addresses ethnic and age gaps too.
Think the public services are generally transparent, but the private sector is different on salary and pay transparency. However, on the latter it does not make much sense apart from encouraging cosy relationships between management and favoured employees, but the palpable anger and stress that comes when learning that others are paid more in a workplace can be debilitating for morale.
Go the Finnish route. Publish everyone’s key stats.
https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/finnish-tax-administration/data-security-and-information-access/public-information-on-taxes/public-information-on-individual-income-taxes/
It could go even further – the Japanese media publish the year’s top private taxpayers who consider it an honour.
Australians want the world to believe that ours is a egalitarian society. So how can one reconcile this ‘supposed’ value with research that shows women’s pay on average is approximately 23% less than men.
Such a situation indicates how important or unimportant this issue is to both mainstream society and especially to those who currently benefit from the existing situation of inequality – white middle class males.
The persistence of the current gender pay gap is a reflection of a societal failure to make gender equality a ‘real’ social justice objective. For example, Sweden and its Nordic neighbours have for years been actively pursuing gender equality though activism and government policies that actually carry weight. The Swedes have reduced the gender gap to 10.7% (2018)
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Even more disturbing are figures showing the even large gender and class gap in the distribution of income profits (capital income) from investments such as shares, property, stocks, and bonds among others. A distribution that is heavily favoured toward men and women with high levels of disposable incomes – a clear case where the inequalities due to gender and class re-enforce each other.