Lendlease’s Steve McCann promotes gender pay equity systems

Lendlease CEO Steve McCann has urged executives to introduce internal reporting systems to tackle gender pay equity.

Lendlease chief executive Steve McCann. Picture: Britta Campion.

Lendlease chief executive Steve McCann has urged company executives to introduce internal reporting systems to ensure that men and women are paid the same for equal work.

“Gender-based pay gaps can be both common and insidious, particularly in historically male-dominated industries,” Mr ­McCann said yesterday.

“Having regular, scrutinised and actioned reporting is a game-changer.”

During the launch of a report on Closing the Gender Pay Gap by the Male Champions of Change group, Mr McCann said having real-time access to data about the relative pay of men and women employees in a company could provide information that was “hard to ignore and demands action”.

“There is no excuse for men to be paid more than women for work that has the same accountability, breadth and difficulty and for which they have comparable performance, competence and experience,” he said.

Mr McCann is among 120 business leaders who have signed up to a Male Champions of Change-backed campaign to commit to close the gender pay gap within their organisations.

The national gender pay gap — the difference between women’s and men’s average weekly full-time-equivalent earnings as expressed as a percentage of men’s earnings and calculated by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency — has hovered between 15 per cent and 19 per cent for the past two decades.

Mr McCann said Lendlease, which has almost 12,600 employees worldwide, had been ­actively working towards achieving gender pay equality in the company over the past six years.

He said this had involved using a “range of in-depth reviews, processes and communications” to tackle the issue, adding that the company had conducted an annual analysis of its remuneration policies to ensure men and women were being paid the same for the same jobs.

It had also actively monitored its businesses to look for “hot spots” where remuneration gaps could emerge, “such as the potential to import pay inequities through external hiring”.

Mr McCann said Lendlease’s program of countering the gender pay gap had also included regular employee communications about the com­pany’s review of its gender pay gap, manager training to ensure recruitment and promotion processes were fair and equitable and setting and reviewing gender-based targets quarterly for graduates, leadership programs, new hires and starting salaries.

Companies supporting the Male Champions of Change call to take action to close the gender pay gap also include AGL, ASX Limited, Dow, EY, KPMG, National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, MYOB, Australia Post, Rio Tinto, Qantas, PwC, Crown and Deloitte.

Workplace Gender Equality Agency chief executive Libby Lyons said the difference in pay between men and women was driven by factors including the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions and disparities in earnings between male and female-dominated industries and occupations.