The gender pay gap: STILL a thing

Another year, another perpetual patriarchal pay gap. On March 4, the Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) released its annual pay gap data, revealing key insights about progress towards gender equality.

TL;DR: There’s been a little bit of progress. But, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, the pay gap is still a thing – and now we have ‘toxic masculinity’ to contend with.

Here are some interesting stats from Australia’s private sector, taken from WGEA’s data.

• 21.8% - current average gender pay gap

• 18.3% - current median gender pay gap

• $28,425 – how much this represents per year

• 78c – what the average woman earns for every $1 the average male earns.

• 73% - proportion of part-time workers who are women

• $116,000 – average salary (all sectors, all genders)

• 86% - primary carers taking parental leave who are women

• 68% - board members who are men

• 21.9% - CEOs who are women

Let’s get into it and see what’s going on here.

Not for doing the same job, no. That would be illegal. The gender pay gap reflects the overarching inequalities that persist in the workplace, looking across all roles and industries rather than comparing like for like. This reveals more of a systemic problem, tied to patriarchal social expectations and the devaluation of women. We’ll get into the nitty gritty in the next section, but the gender pay gap is why women build less wealth – and ultimately retire with less super.

It's not always well understood out there in the wild, so it’s important to talk about the gender pay gap during everyday conversations about equality, to dispel some of these myths.

We’re not in the business of naming and shaming - but most of Australia’s highest-paying companies also reveal the highest pay gaps. Employers where the top earners make $1m+ a year revealed shocking gender pay gaps of 40-68%. So with all that money sloshing around, why are their average female salaries so much lower?

There are lots of reasons for this, some of which are complex and seemingly difficult to solve. One of the clearest problems is that fewer of those $1m+ earners are women; in most cases, women make up less than a third of that cohort. At Verve Super, our gender diversity screens mean that we don’t invest in publicly listed companies with all-male boards.

High earnings are also boosted by overtime payments, incentives and bonuses, most of which go to men. Women are less likely to be able to work overtime because they’re more likely to be expected to do the childcare and look after their parents, in-laws, friends and house… not to mention the crushing daily mental load of remembering to buy more hummus, sign the school consent form, pay the invoices, book dentist appointments and organise birthday parties…

It also doesn’t help that very few senior roles (only 7%, in fact) accommodate part-time or flexible hours. Even men in management roles often have these requests refused. 

And a major driver of the pay gap is that men tend to dominate higher-paid industries – stuff like finance, mining and construction. Feminised industries pay less – think healthcare, education, creative arts and hospitality.

But there’s also data showing that if even when more women enter masculine industries, it drives the average pay down. When large numbers of women became designers, wages fell by 34%. When they became biologists, the average biologist pay fell by 18%. And when more men became computer programmers, wages went up.

So it’s not that ‘women’s work’ is seen as low value. It’s that women’s work is devalued because women are seen as low value. As they enter male-dominated industries, salaries drop across the sector, which obviously hurts men as well as women. It isn’t good for anybody. And it seems it’s all because of societal expectations and unconscious bias.

This needs to change.

WGEA’s data captures gender-diverse and nonbinary people on a voluntary basis only, along with age and location. It does not collect other intersectional data such as ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity or economic status. So although WGEA is a powerful tool to help Australia address gender pay gaps, it sheds little light on how intersecting identities are impacted. It does, however, recognise that different dimensions of identity can experience discrimination and create inequalities at every stage of employment, to the detriment of individuals and the organisations they work for.

We don’t know how much gender pay gaps are also driven by someone’s sexuality, gender expression or ethnicity. And we can’t change what we can’t see. So it’s important to push forward to capture intersectional data that can help us understand the relationships between pay, gender and diverse identities. We want to bring this to the forefront of pay gap conversations and dismantle identity-driven pay disparities. Last year we joined the call for better intersectional pay gap data, and you can too. 

Verve Super is part of Future Group, a family of super funds. Future Group’s gender pay gap is listed in the WGEA report with an average pay gap of 1.9% and median gap of 15.7%  (read this WGEA explainer about pay gap calculations).

This is better than the 21.8% average, and also better than the financial sector average of 22.2%, but not nearly as good as we need it to be. We’ve identified the reasons and are taking steps that are already improving this result.

We’re conscious that focusing solely on closing the gap can backfire. It can mean hiring fewer junior women, limiting progress on representation in leadership or in industries like finance and tech. Instead, institutions need to look to analysing processes, make systemic changes, and keep moving toward equity without getting distracted by short-term fluctuations.

You can read Future Group’s WGEA statement here.

So has the gender pay gap actually made any progress? Fortunately – despite toxic attitudes like Mark Zuckerberg’s line that firms should vibe ‘masculine energy’ and Peter Dutton saying that women should job-share rather than work from home – WGEA’s data suggests that things are slowly moving in the right direction. More than half of the organisations have improved their gender pay gap compared to last year, though nationally women continue to earn an average of $28,425 a year less.

The Government’s WGEA department has stated a commitment to require large businesses to set targets to reduce these gaps, although a lot depends on the coming election – Peter Dutton’s opposition coalition rejected the proposed reforms.

If you’re a keen data diver, there’s plenty to explore at WGEA Data Explorer. For the first time, WGEA has also released the average pay across different sectors for men and women – which make pretty interesting reading – and allows you to take specific deep-dives into the issues that are still holding women back financially.

As a super fund on a mission to close the retirement gap, we’re here to help drive real change. Gender pay gaps reduce women’s capacity to build wealth and increase their risk of not having enough to retire on – but more than that, they’re a symbol of enduring gender bias against women that builds on historic undervaluing of women’s work.

Gender bias is arguably the most ancient and enduring social injustice in the world. Because of that it’s not a simple thing to solve, but when women are able to fulfil their full potential and given the flexibility to thrive at work, productivity, growth and competitiveness all benefit. Solutions include challenging social narratives, raising public awareness, promoting pay equity, using flexible workplace policies and improving government legislation.

Reducing the gender pay gap has economic power – but it’s also the right thing to do. And there’s plenty we can all do to get loud about it. Check out our links below to get started.

• How to talk about the gender pay gap

• Why the gender pay gap is everyone’s business