How we got here: The background story of Australia’s first gender pay gap report
The inaugural report into the differences between what men and women are earning in Australia has been criticised as much as it has been praised for taking the first steps to eradicate financial inequality. So, how did we get here?
Comparisons to an Andrew Tate recruitment drive, bipartisan praise and corporate spinners performing more pirouettes than the Australian Ballet – the first report into the gender pay gap landed with a thud this week.
The report compiled and authored by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has been years in the making and is the result of years of support and suggestions from both the former Coalition government and Albanese administration.
The WGEA, a government organisation, published the gender pay gaps of almost 5000 private companies on Tuesday, a requirement for businesses with more than 100 employees which was legislated to pressure employers to reduce the salary disparity between men and women.
Legislation was passed and implemented last year following a review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act that began in 2021.
It all started with a review into the Workplace Gender Equality Act.
The review was an initiative of the Coalition government that commenced in 2021 and in the 2022 Women’s Budget Statement, former minister for women Marise Payne and the Morrison government, allocated more than $18.5m over four years to the WGEA and funded the review in order to cement its recommendations in law.
That was on top of an additional $6m for the agency to work to eradicate workplace sexual harassment.
In March 2022 the review was released. It found Australia’s gender pay gap was not closing at a fast enough rate.
As it turned out that in 2023, Australia’s national gender pay gap was 13.3 per cent and the average weekly full-time earnings of a woman in Australia were $253.50 lower per week than the equivalent for men.
That review also looked into the machinery and ability of the WGEA to help improve equality in workforces and “achieve the objectives of the Act”.
The result after looking under the hood was 10 recommendations to speed up the gap closure while also trying to reduce the reporting burden on businesses.
Four of those recommendations were implemented straight away, including moves to publish organisations’ gender pay gaps and set up the WGEA to not demonise, but support, employers to drive equality via new “gender equality standards”.
The amendments to the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 were passed by federal parliament in March 2023.
“On current projections it will take another 26 years to close the gender pay gap. Women have waited long enough for the pay gap to close – this government will not let them wait another quarter of a century,” Women’s Minister Katy Gallagher said at the time.
There are many caveats to this first report and many blind spots and omissions.
The inaugural report, which is really just an Excel spreadsheet that lists the median base and total remuneration packages of all male and female staff, does not include the salaries of chief executives, bonuses of equity partners in financial firms, and it converts casual and part-time rates to full-time earnings.
It also focuses solely on the private sector.
Public service excluded
The public service was omitted from the data harvest this time around, to the chagrin of many opposition politicians and corporate workers alike.
Especially given this report was published at the same time that federal public servants won generous new working from home rights. Almost 70 per cent of the Commonwealth public sector’s 170,000-strong workforce now gained access to enjoy the rights, which include no formal cap on the number of working from home days each week and a “bias towards approving requests”.
Opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume said the report “shines a light” but it “has its flaws”.
From this first round of data, the WGEA claims the gap between what men and women earn has jumped to 19 per cent when bonuses, overtime and allowances are factored in.
“Right now, this data does have its problems. Is it entirely useless? There are some things that we can learn from this data. One of the things that struck me was some of those companies … make a big deal every year on International Women’s Day … and yet they perhaps haven’t looked in their own backyard,” Senator Hume said.
Nationals senator Matt Canavan was more scathing and compared the employer census to “annual Andrew Tate recruitment drives.” “Young men in particular, feel like they are now being discriminated against and that’s why they’re coming to watch the likes of Andrew Tate in droves,” Senator Canavan said, referring to the alleged rapist and human trafficker.
Senior Liberals told The Australian Senator Canavan’s comments had sparked frustration in the Coalition, which is trying to win back female voters.
The Liberals’ deputy leader – and the most senior Liberal woman in the country – Sussan Ley said her party was “working hard to demonstrate to the women who didn’t support us at the last election that we are a different party, that we have their needs, and their aspirations front and centre”.
“This data forms an important baseline and will be something that is measured year on year and I’m going to call out, not by name, not by identity today, but I will start to call out the organisations in the main that are not doing what they can to keep the gender pay gap reducing,” Ms Ley said.
Senator Canavan criticised the value of the data being collected, arguing that it failed to account for the differences between full-time and part-time workers.
“The whole thing should be scrapped. But if we want to collect serious data, that would break down things like full-time and part-time work, give the job to the experts. The WGEA has an agenda. It is not an independent body. Give this job to the experts at the Australian Bureau of Statistics,” Senator Canavan The Australian said.
The ABS already collates national gender pay gap information via a survey of average weekly earnings, which suggests the base salary gender pay gap is actually 13 per cent.
The gender pay gaps are different because of the way “pay” is measured in the two vastly different datasets.
This WGEA report looks at “annualised full time equivalent salaries of casual and part time workers”. Author and WGEA chief executive Mary Wooldridge said it now set a benchmark on employers’ progress and was privately pushing for further amendments to the Act to make reporting more transparent, in time for the next set of figures in 12 months time.
However expect more news about the issue of financial equality to be back in the headlines as buried in Senator Gallagher’s first women’s budget statement was the news that: “Commonwealth public sector employer gender pay gaps are due to be published in late 2024 or early 2025.
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