It’s been almost 50 years since the 1972 Equal Pay Decision that said Australian women had to legally get equal pay for equal work. I imagine that if we asked them what they thought the gender pay gap situation would have been like in 2019, they would have predicted it would be totally gone by now. Sadly, they would have been wrong.
The newest data about the gender pay gap in 2019 has shown that men working full time made an average of 20.8% more – or $25 679 more – than women over the last year. So yep, that’s just great.
The breakdown of the data has some pretty fun statistics, and I use the word ‘fun’ very loosely here.
The amount of women in boardroom positions has stayed the same for the last six years – fluctuating between 24% and 26%, but never higher.
Of the companies that were a part of the report, 75% said had gender equality strategies, which sounds great on paper! But only 32.2% were actually doing anything about it, by introducing gender KPIs. So that’s not as great.
And guess what? In Australia’s most female dominated industry, healthcare and social assistance, the pay gap has actually gotten worse. In 2014/15, men were being paid 14.7% more, and that has risen to 15.9%. Even in an industry that is 79% women, men are still being paid more.
Libby Lyons is the director of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the agency that put the report out.
She’s said that “We would like to see the gender pay gap drop more quickly but we need to understand that the gender pay gap, along with all the other things that we measure, is cultural change – and cultural change always takes time”.
Basically the gender pay gap isn’t going anywhere any time soon, and I haven’t even touched on the racial pay gap, disability pay gap, or LGBTIQ+ wage gap.
So much for the land of the fair go.