What does the Gender Pay Gap data really tell us, and what can we do about it?

According to the latest Australian Government Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) report on Gender Pay Gap (released today) women currently have a 19% total remuneration pay gap with men.

For every $1 on average a man makes, women earn 78c.

Over the course of a year, that difference adds up to $26,393.

We should not be ok with this.

Under the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012, all Australian employers with 100 or more employees must report their gender equality data to WGEA annually.

As Lucy Dean aptly reports - reviewing research from numerous national and international studies on gender-pay-gap - in the The Australian Financial Review today,

"A KPMG report into gender pay in 2022, for example, found that about 36 per cent of gender pay gaps come down to biased hiring practices and promotion pathways...

According to the International Labour Organisations’ 2019 gender pay gap report, women who become mothers in Australia face a 5 per cent “motherhood gap”, while men who become fathers receive a 7.3 per cent fatherhood bonus...

Separate international studies have found a correlation between women joining certain industries, such as nursing and teaching, and the average earnings of those workforces declining..."

👉 So what is going on here, and how do we fix it?

The gender pay gap data shows that the pay gap is slowly declining over the past decade, but not quickly enough.

With this increased transparency and accountability that companies face publicly, governments, investors and employees now have greater capacity to make informed decisions on gender-pay-gap and hold companies to a higher level of accountability.

Gender-pay-gap isn't a women's problem, it's a collective challenge which will require collective prioritisation and action.

💡The time is now!

According to a HiBob survey of 2000 Aussie workers, 61 per cent of female workers would consider leaving their job if they discovered their employer had a gender pay gap, and 36 per cent of men said they would leave too.

“Pay is the foundation of the relationship between employees and employers — and if there’s a gap between genders, nothing damages that relationship more,” HiBob chief people officer Nirit Peled-Muntz says (as reported by Lucy Dean in today's AFR article).

Which organisations will fail to meet the challenge of the gender-pay-gap inequity and stand to loose the competitive advantage of female talent in the future?

Read the full report here: https://www.wgea.gov.au/pay-and-gender/gender-pay-gap-data

See how your company performs using the Data Explorer here: https://www.wgea.gov.au/data-statistics/data-explorer

#genderequity #genderpaygap #genderequality #wgeareport2024

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