Nice work helping end the pay gap Dave Hughes

DAVE Hughes is a trailblazer by taking a pay cut so co-host Kate Langbroek’s wage can be the same, but more men need to join the parity struggle, writes Wendy Tuohy.

Dave Hughes is taking a pay cut to ensure Kate Langbroek has pay parity. Picture: Ian Currie

WHEN Dave Hughes discovered live on air that he was getting paid 40 per cent more than his long term female co-host, Kate Langbroek, he was audibly shocked.

So shocked he showed how helping close a pay gap that is impacting millions of Australian women — by taking a pay cut to ensure Langbroek was given pay parity.

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When a working class guy from Warrnambool with all the Aussie lad street-cred in the world, having worked like a one-armed lumberjack to get where he is, does something like this, he is absolutely demonstrating how men step up.

Dave Hughes and Kate Langbroek. Picture: Mike Burton

Dave Hughes is a breadwinner in his family; Kate Langbroek is a breadwinner in her family (just as an aside, she puts a roof over one more head, in fact, than Hughes, as she has four kids and he has three).

Hughesy and Kate have worked their way to the top of their field by being a solid team on equal footing.

Langbroek is not the “aww, Dave, you can’t say that on air” straight-woman, she is just as much a driver of the cheeky comedy as Hughes.

They are in every way doing the same work on air, and for Hughes to acknowledge it is mad that he should be paid tens of thousands of dollars more than his on-air partner is extremely powerful not just as a decent gesture but as a symbolic one.

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Australia’s problem with paying women equally has been measured by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, that has systematically surveyed thousands of workers at 800 big Australian employers about pay for the sexes and established the veracity of the pay gap beyond doubt.

It is still the subject of denial, for reasons I cannot understand given not just the fairness issue but the fact more and more women are breadwinning or sharing the breadwinning and more and more men are, most unfortunately, vulnerable to retrenchment in a shifting economy.

Social surveys have demonstrated Australians largely still think the primary child rearing role should lie with the mother, which is perhaps one reason there appears to be an unconscious bias towards paying men more.

But women’s economic value can be seen in the results they are achieving, the targets met and exceeded, the bottom lines enhanced.

Hughesy is a trailblazer and his gesture should be acknowledged. Men who join in the struggle for gender equality should absolutely be embraced: this struggle affects families’ ability to keep heads above water in many cases.

Thanks Dave, for drawing such wide attention to this, let’s hope there's more of it.

* Stay in touch with Wendy on Twitter @wtuohy or on Facebook.