Australian job where there are 100 men for every woman

Are you reading this at work? If so, look around. Don’t see any women nearby? Well, you’re probably in this occupation.

ANALYSIS

Are you reading this at work? If so, look around. See any women? No?

You might be a plumber then.

Plumber (general) is the most gender-unbalanced job category in Australia, with 150 dudes for every woman.

The latest tax statistics are out and while everyone else is looking at how much people get paid (plumbers have average total income of $95,000, before deductions), I find one of the most surprising things is how gender-skewed our jobs are.

It’s like a party of 17-year-olds. Over here we have all the boys. In the opposite corner, all the girls.

Plumbing is for blokes and, unsurprisingly, midwifery is the role most biased to people who identify as female.

The ATO rocks an old-fashioned binary gender system, they put people as either male or female. But apparently, the society we live in is pretty old-fashioned and binary too.

In Australia in 2025 truckies are gents ($86,000 in average total income) and childcare workers ($46,000) are ladies, as the next chart shows.

This chart depicts the dozen biggest jobs in Australia, the most common jobs.

Among them we see some are gender balanced, like being a high school teacher ($95,000) or a sales director ($138,000). But most are unbalanced one way or another.

Gender balance in the blokiest jobs – at the bottom is the number of workers.

But those numbers, even the truckie numbers, look fair and balanced compared to some smaller job categories.

Here’s the extremes for the boys, jobs where there is no queue for the ladies loo, because there is no ladies loo.

Construction is generally the blokiest work area.

If you notice something about those jobs, they’re mostly about building things.

We have a shortage of tradies in this country. Maybe we could solve it by getting women involved a bit?

Sure, there’s a few tradie jobs where the higher average male upper body strength might be important (like bricklaying ($77,000), although even they sometimes use a little conveyor belt these days I think?).

But there are no real reasons a woman can’t be a plumber or an electrician ($116,000).

Plumbers are mostly men in Australia. Picture: iStock

I hired a sparkie to put in a new powerpoint for me the other day (and a few other little bits and pieces).

They sent three blokes and charged me $600. The heaviest thing they had to lift was the dustpan and brush to clean up some sawdust at the end.

The average 100kg senior electrician can’t even fit in the crawl space and sends his apprentice up instead. We might get a better quality of work by having some female tradies!

If we want to build a few more homes in the next 10 years than we did in the last 10 years, having all hands on deck might help.

Construction workers on a work site in North Sydney. Picture: NewsWire/John Appleyard

Changes

So are these jobs getting more blokey or less? Turns out we can answer that by going back to data from four years prior.

As the next chart shows, even though women in these jobs are rare as hen’s teeth, they’re actually increasing. We are making some progress. But geeze, it’s a bit slow.

At this rate we could have one female carpenter for every 100 male carpenters by 2030 (carpenters make $85,000).

Midwife is the role most biased to people who identify as female. Picture: iStock

Remember that female workforce participation is rising and male participation is stable. But the person working the concrete pump ($95,000) is even more likely to be a dude than

before!

Forget farmers, they should have Concrete Pump Operator Wants A Wife.

Overall the change in female workforce participation means you’d expect to see more and more jobs with a higher share of women in them. And we do.

Although some jobs are changing faster than others. The person putting tiles on your roof these days is still probably a fella, but there’s far more female roof tilers than there were!

Can we get a glimpse of the future? What’s the workforce going to look like in 10 years?

One way to have a look is to check the gender balance of all the apprentices, which is what the next chart shows.

How does the future look? Picture: Supplied

Some of the most female apprentice roles are actually getting even more female, like apprentices in health and welfare support services ($46,000 a year for the apprentice).

But the blokiest apprentice roles are getting more female very slowly. Plumbing has a few more women and girls in apprentice roles. And about 5.5 per cent of apprentice electricians are females now. But at this rate is going to be a long time before the plumbers get any female colleagues.

Jason Murphy is an economist | @jasemurphy.bsky.social. He is the author of the book Incentivology

Originally published as Australian job where there are 100 men for every woman