Dozens of Australian companies have gender pay gaps of more than 50%, according to landmark data released for the first time by the government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
The individual gender pay gaps at nearly 5,000 businesses across Australia – every private company with 100 employees or more – were published on Tuesday with the explicit aim of attempting to reduce the gender pay gap.
The data paints a stark picture, with some of the country’s biggest and most recognisable employers posting gender pay gaps of 30-40% in favour of male employees.
The publication of this data comes after the government passed the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) bill 2023. Nationally, the gender pay gap sits at 19%, meaning that over the course of a year, the median that a woman is paid is $18,461 less than the median of what a man is paid.
“The absolute objective of doing this is to create momentum to close the gender pay gap,” Mary Wooldridge, the chief executive of WGEA, said.
“The evidence has shown overseas that [publishing individual company pay gaps] is a catalyst for action to be taken … It’s not a silver bullet. It’s not going to close overnight, but we expect reductions.”
More than 3,000 employers, or 61.6% of the total, had a gender pay gap that favoured men. Meanwhile, 30.1% (1,493 employers) had a neutral gender pay gap – defined as a gap of 5% or lower – and just 412 employers, or 8.3% of the total, had a pay gap that favoured women. The Guardian (listed in the data as GNM Australia) reported a pay gap of 2.5%.
The pay gaps are based on the median remuneration for men and women in each business – that is, the middle value when the pay of male or female employees within a company is listed from lowest to highest.
“It’s really important that it’s known that it’s not about equal pay,” Wooldridge said. “So equal pay [for equal work] has been the law in Australia for over 50 years. The gender pay gap is more than that, because it looks at, in this case, the median remuneration … If you have a lot of men who are highly paid and a lot of women who are in the lower paid areas, then the gender pay gap will reflect that by showing the differential between the two.”
Thirty-eight companies had gender pay gaps in favour of men of 50% or more.
The largest of these pay gaps was at Hunter Primary Care, a health services provider in the Newcastle region of NSW with a pay gap of 73.1%. The company said the pay gap was due to the fact that it had a large number of highly paid male GPs who worked an average of one four-hour shift a month. Their salaries were annualised by WGEA as part of calculating the gap, but when these employees were removed from the dataset, the gap came down considerably.
WGEA said it was important to include the annualised salaries of casual and part-time employees, because women make up a large proportion of this workforce.
There were 27 companies with gender pay gaps of 50% or more in favour of women. These were largely concentrated in the healthcare and social assistance sectors. Of the 27 companies with the largest pro-women pay gaps, 18 were disability support organisations.
Airlines tended to have very significant pay gaps. Alliance Airlines had a pay gap of 50.2%, Jetstar’s was 43.7%, Virgin Australia Airlines sat at 41.7%, Cathay Pacific had 39.5% and Qantas had a pay gap of 37%.
A Qantas spokesperson said the pay gap “does not mean women are paid less than men to do the same jobs at Qantas and Jetstar, but shows there is a significant underrepresentation of women in highly paid roles like pilots and engineers across airlines globally”. The company is “working hard to encourage more women into pilot and engineering roles” but that due to the years of training required “improving the gender balance of these workgroups will take time”, the spokesperson said.
A Virgin Australia spokesperson echoed this, saying its pay gap was driven by the fact “we have a larger proportion of men occupying higher paying roles, such as pilots and aircraft engineering roles”. Virgin is “focused on improving the demographic profile of key roles across our organisation over time”, the spokesperson said. The other airlines did not respond to requests for comment.
Banks scored badly. Out of more than 30 banks, none had a neutral gender pay gap, or a pay gap that favoured women. Eight banks had a median pay gap of more than 30%.
The big four banks all paid men significantly more than women, based on median pay packages. Commonwealth Bank had the highest pay gap at 29.9%, followed by Westpac (28.5%), ANZ with 23.1%, and NAB at 18.8%.
Spokespeople for CBA and Westpac said their pay gaps were reflective of the makeup of the workforce, with higher numbers of women working in lower-paid areas of the business such as contact centres, operations and retail branches. Both banks said they were working to reduce the pay gap.
NAB said it had made “solid progress” regarding pay equity and representation but acknowledged there was more work to do. ANZ said the company had “a strong focus on the gender pay gap. In the last two years our gender pay gap has improved five percentage points from 28.1% to 23.1%”, but acknowledged it had to do more.
Sally Curtis, a lecturer at the research school of management at ANU, said when you look at other countries that have introduced similar legislation requiring employers to publish their pay gaps – including the UK, Denmark and Canada – gender pay gaps have come down.
Curtis said there are many reasons that addressing the gender pay gap is so crucial.
“It’s not good for individual women but it’s also not good for society … There’s a moral reason for doing this. The gender pay gap is an indicator of who has power in society. [It’s] about fairness and treating people of all genders fairly, in terms of power distribution in society, and valuing the work that everybody does.”
Research conducted by KPMG found that women bearing the brunt of caring responsibilities for children and older family members caused about one-third of the gender pay gap.
Women are far more likely to take time out of work after having children and are far more likely to work part-time than men – 30% of women, compared to 11% of men. But employer data showed that that in 2022-23, only 7% of managers are employed part-time, which means part-time workers face a “promotion cliff”.
According to KPMG, gender discrimination accounted for 36% of the cause of the pay gap.
“There can be conscious or unconscious discrimination in hiring and pay decisions,” said Natasha Bradshaw, a senior associate at the Grattan Institute. “We also know that women are less likely to negotiate for higher pay or to strongly advocate for themselves or play up their achievements to go for a promotion. Often, that’s because of the, often correct, perception that they’ll face backlash for doing that.”
The other main driver of the pay gap was industrial and occupational segregation, which sees women over-represented in lower paid industries, according to KPMG.
This was reflected in the pay gap data released on Tuesday. While every single industry had a pay gap in favour of men, the largest pay gaps tended to be in the highest paid industries. For example, construction had a pay gap of 31.8% (meaning the median paid to men was $38,562 more than that paid to women); financial and insurance services had a gap of 26.1% ($36,537); and professional, scientific and technical services had a gap of 26.1% or ($34,600).
The smallest gaps were in some of the lowest paid industries – accommodation and food services (1.9% or $1,122); public administration and safety (2.3% or $1,638); and arts and recreation services (4.6% or $3,493).
“What we need to reduce the gender pay gap is a strong commitment across society – government, from businesses, from the community, from the education sector,” Bradshaw said.
Wooldridge said that while the factors that lead to gender pay gaps at companies are often society-wide and complex, companies can still do more to shrink the pay gap.
“I always think there’s things that employees can do and creative employers are doing it. You know whether it’s pilots, or manufacturing or mining, we hear great stories of employers going into schools and recruiting, or supporting scholarships. So you can be passive and say, ‘well, we get what we get’, or you can be proactive and try and shift that by moving earlier in the pipeline.”
