Australia’s gender pay gap has narrowed to a record low but women continue to earn just 87 cents for every dollar of their male counterparts, with the divide barely improving in recent years.
The gap in November was 13.3%, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on Thursday.
While that’s less than the 14.1% divide six months earlier, it is a small advance on the previous low of 13.4% recorded before the Covid pandemic, said Mary Wooldridge, director of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
“This is actually returning us to where we were effectively three years ago,” Wooldridge said. “Everyone’s got work to do on this front.”
Women’s average weekly ordinary full-time earnings across all industries and occupations came in at $1,653.60. That was $253.50 less than the average of male counterparts at $1,907.10. The overall gain for adults was 3.4% from a year earlier.
Within public sector jobs, the gap was 12.5%, with males earning an average of $2,091.20 and females on $1,857.50. The private sector gap was wider, with males averaging $1,874.40 compared with women on $1,573, the ABS said.
On Wednesday the release of the December quarter wage price index showed a 3.3% increase in wages from a year earlier. By contrast, the consumer prices index for the quarter was up 7.8% from a year earlier, with the underlying inflation rate, which strips out more volatile price movements, rising 6.9%.
Wooldridge, a former Liberal minister in Victoria, said the tight labour market, with the jobless rate near half-century lows, was helping women negotiate higher wages.
“Women are in demand,” she said. “They’re having choices … [and] so they’re moving to higher pay roles.”
The pay gap varied widely across industries, with women in the professional, technical and scientific field paid 21.2% less than their male counterparts. That sector, however, also saw the biggest improvement in the past six months, with the gap closing 4.1 percentage points.
“It’s still got a long way to go,” Woolridge said, adding that efforts to boost the uptake of women in science, maths, data and technical skills would generate job opportunities across much of the economy.
“Gender pay gaps are a reflection of the way we value women’s and men’s contributions in the workforce,” she said.
“Employers who don’t make gender equality a priority will fail to attract and retain female talent, and won’t benefit from the increased productivity, innovation and profitability that flows from embracing diversity in your workforce.”
Sectors with relatively narrow pay gaps include public administration at 6% and accommodation and food services at 8.5%. The latter industry tended to be a low-paying industry for both men and women, Wooldridge said.
The second-largest gap was in the health care and social assistance sector, at 21.1%. “Men are consistently taking higher paying roles [in the industry],” she said. “And it’s women who are performing the more predominantly care-based roles that are lower paid.”
The 13.3% gap in ordinary wages masked a discrepancy of as much as 5 percentage points more when bonuses, overtime payments or superannuation were taken into account.
“Today’s gender pay gap also doesn’t include the wages of part-time or casual workers, many of whom are lower paid and also women,” Wooldridge said.
The federal parliament is scheduled to debate legislation next month that would result in the publication of gender pay gaps of the more than 10,000 employers with above 100 employees. Firms now provide such information but it is not made public.
“That’ll bring some transparency and accountability in relation to the performance on the gender pay gap at a company level,” Wooldridge said.
The UK introduced such a law six years ago and while the reduction in the gender pay gap was “not enormous in the first instance, it continues to improve each and every year so that the impact is also sustained”.
“We believe that’s a way to get away from the stalling that we’ve had in terms of progress on the gender pay gap, and regain some of that momentum,” Wooldridge said.
