$25,000 gap shows gender pay parity a distant dream

Men earn $25,679 more than women and the gap has barely narrowed in the last year.

Carly Pyle, at Viva Energy’s Geelong refinery on Monday, is benefiting from a new flexible work program. Picture: Aaron Francis

Men earn on average $25,679 more than women and the gap has barely narrowed in the past year, new figures reveal.

The 20.8 per cent gender pay gap for 2019 was just 0.5 percentage points below the 2018 figure, and pay gaps remain across every industry, occupation and manager category, Workplace Gender Equality Agency director Libby Lyons said.

“A drop of only 0.5 percentage points is slow progress by anyone’s measure,” she said on launching the agency’s 2019 gender equality scorecard.

“Overall, I’m disappointed with the scorecard. Yes, we are seeing things move in the right ­direction, but certainly not quickly enough and there’s no improvement in the percentage of women CEOs, and very little improvement in the percentage of women on boards.”

Ms Lyons noted that while ­almost 75 per cent of organisations now had a “policy or strategy” in place to promote flexible work practices, up from under 60 per cent five years ago, fewer than 6 per cent had concrete targets for engagement in flexible work and only 3 per cent had set targets for men’s engagement in flexible work.

“That bothers me. We need to see employers putting genuine targets in place and start making managers accountable for meeting those targets so that we actually do see genuine change,” she said. “Just because you’ve got a policy or strategy in place doesn’t mean you’ve solved the problem.”

GRAPHIC: Inequity in the workforce

Refinery operator Carly Pyle is part of a new flexible work program by her employer, Viva ­Energy, to bring a new culture and fresh thinking into its plant in Corio, west of Melbourne. One of 14 recent female recruits, Ms Pyle, 38, has been employed in a job-share arrangement with another female employee since July.

“It suits me so well. If I have something wrong with one of my children I can ask my job-share partner to swap a shift, and she can do the same,” she said.

Ms Pyle said the new female employees had come from many backgrounds, bringing a diverse range of skills to the workplace.

“I was previously at the Ford plant in Geelong. Others were a dental nurse, retail workers and a plumber,” she said.

The WGEA’s scorecard collates information from a dataset of four million Australian employees. Ms Lyons said the standout result was the 13.3-percentage-point increase in the number of employers with a policy or strategy on family and domestic violence, and a 9 per cent increase in employers offering paid domestic leave. But more than half of Australian employers still do not offer employer-funded paid parental leave, and there is no change in the number of female CEOs from 2018, which remains at 17.1 per cent.

“We need to make boards ­accountable for what is going on in their organisations,” Ms Lyons said. “At the moment, possibly ­because of the lack of diversity on boards, many still haven’t got with the strength. There is a business case for change, and they aren’t doing their shareholders or employees a service by failing to understand this business case. More fool them.”