More than half of Australian employers have narrowed their gender pay gap but as it steadily shrinks, employers are warned scrapping workplace flexibility will impact women's earning potential.
Just one-in-five employers have an average gender pay gap in the target range of minus five per cent and plus five per cent, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency's second dataset shows.
The analysis also shows 56 per cent of employers improving their gender pay gap in the last year.
Minister for Women Katy Gallagher has meanwhile slammed a coalition proposal to ban public servants from working from home, saying the opposition didn't have "women's interests at heart".
"The opposition have no idea about how modern working families operate," she said.
"Working from home arrangements are a part of private and public sector workplaces in the modern age."
This year the agency published data collected from 7800 individual employers and 1700 corporate groups, meaning Australians working for a company that is part of a bigger corporate group can access both the group and individual employer's gender pay gap data for the first time.
In the 2023/24 results, nearly three in four (72 per cent) of all employers paid men more than women on average.
High-paying employers were the most likely to have a gender pay gap in favour of men, as well as having a larger pay gap.
More than 1100 employers fell within the target range on key measures, which agency chief executive Mary Wooldridge described as an encouraging result.
"Each employer has a unique set of circumstances that impacts the size of their gender pay gap," she said, adding there had been a "big jump" in the number of employers conducting a gender pay gap analysis.
"While there are things that are systemic to industries, there's also employers within those industries taking initiative to drive change at an employer level as well as perhaps working more collectively at an industry level," she said.
For employers that had not made progress in the past year, Ms Wooldridge said it was time to ask why.
Qantas Airways recorded a 39.2 per cent average total remuneration gender pay gap while Virgin Australia recorded a 41.7 per cent gap.
Meanwhile, Australia's largest independent real estate agency recorded a negative gender pay gap.
Little Real Estate has recorded a median remuneration gap of minus two per cent compared to the industry average of 6.3 per cent.
A negative percentage indicates that women are paid more on average than men within an organisation.
The agency had made it a priority to promote women into leadership roles, chief operating officer Rebecca Kerr said.
For many employers, the publication of gender pay gaps in the past two years had been a catalyst to assess gender-based differences in all areas of their workplace, Ms Wooldridge said.
The Parenthood chief executive Georgie Dent said it was "unacceptable" that in 2025 Australian women were making less than men for the exact same work.
"Supporting women through better paid parental leave and childcare policies is crucial to eliminating the gender pay gap and boosting the Australian economy," she said.
