Australian women will effectively turn up to their jobs and work for “free” for the rest of the year because of the gender pay gap.
“On the latest figures, women are working for free for 42 days,” the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) said on Wednesday following the release of its 2024 Minding the Gap report.
Australia’s gender pay gap has narrowed further, helped by wage bumps in the aged care sector in which four out of five workers are women. But women are still earning 78c for every dollar men make.
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The average total remuneration gender pay gap is 21.8 per cent, down 0.6 percentage points compared to 2023.
ACTU said that if current progress is not slowed or stalled, the gender pay gap could be completely closed in nine years.
But added that under the “previous slow rate of progress under the Coalition” the average full-time working woman in Australia would be a further $1,900 a year worse off than they are now.
The gap would also take another 35 years to close, it said.
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency looks at the difference between the average rates of pay of women and men across the workforce. It’s not about measuring whether workers are paid equally for the same role, which is a legal requirement.
Naming and shaming individual companies is also proving effective at pushing employers to root out the causes of their pay gaps and act on them.
The 2023-24 scorecard captured a 13 per cent jump in the proportion of employers embarking on a gender pay gap analysis.
Publicly publishing pay gaps of individual employers, which started earlier this year, was driving action, Workplace Gender Equality Agency chief executive Mary Wooldridge said.
“That’s been really positive,” she said.
“We haven’t yet seen that flow through to big shifts in composition or pay, but that’s the exact work that needs to be done.”
Parental leave and leadership levels
Paid parental leave and other policies aimed at improving equity across caring responsibilities are some of the ways employers can chip away at their pay gaps.
The proportion of employers offering paid parental was higher compared to the year before, as well as the rate of men taking primary carer leave.
Fresh insights into the leadership level were less promising.
Thanks to legislative change, the agency was able to include gender pay gaps across chief executive officers, heads of business and casual managers for the first time.
The pay gap across heads of business and chief executives was higher than lower level managerial roles, with the average female CEO paid, on average, $158,632 less total remuneration than men.
Representation of women on boards remained stubbornly low and even worse in male-dominated industries.
“The fact that one in four governing bodies still don’t have any women on them at all, is amazing in this day and age, when we know the evidence base tells us that having a diversity of perspectives around the board leads to better decision-making and better profitability and better productivity,” Wooldridge said.