More than 4.82 million Australians work for one of the more than 5000 employers with a workforce of more than 100 employees.
Those employers are required to report on several workplace gender equality markers to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), which analyses the data to create a compelling report card on where corporate Australia is at on workplace gender equality.
WGEA has just released its latest Gender Equality Scorecard based on their 2022-23 workplace census, the largest census in history.
The headline figure is that the total remuneration gender pay gap, which incorporates bonuses, overtime and additional payments in addition to base salary, is down to 21.7 per cent. Meanwhile, this year’s census will see employers having their individual gender pay gaps made public, which we have covered separately here.
Below, we have outlined some of the key figures to note from the WGEA data, released Tuesday, 28th November 2023.
Overall figures:
- The WGEA Gender Pay Gap is at 21.7 per cent in 2023, down 1.1% from 2022
- Men are nearly twice (1.9 times) more likely to be in the upper pay quartile than women, and women 1.5 times more likely to be in the lowest pay quartile than men
- 42% of managers are women
- 22% of CEOs are women
- 52% of non-managers are women
- 30% of ‘Head of Business’ are women, while women make up 37% of key management personnel and 36% of chief executives and general managers
- 30% of women work part time. Just 7% of management roles are part time
- 34% of board members are women
- 1 in 4 boards have no women, just 25% have gender-balanced boards
- 19% of employers now include data for non-binary employees, who make up 0.2% of the workforce.
- Mixed-gender industries make up 50% of the workforce for the first time
- Women make up 51% of the workforce
What are employers doing?
- 55% of employers analyse their pay gaps, but just 60% of those take action on the result of the analysis
- 45% of employers are setting targets. Of these, 57% have a target to increase the number of women in leadership positions. 42% to increase the number of women in male-dominated roles, and 42% to reduce the gender pay gap.
- 63% of employers offer employer-funded paid parental leave, with one third of these offering it universally (label and gender free)
- 14% of universally available or ‘primary carer’ paid parental leave’ is being taken by men
- 70% of employers have a policy or strategy to achieve equal remuneration. But of these, just 61% had pay objectives as part of the policy.
- 79% of employers have policies and/or strategies to support gender balance in their workforces
- 37% of employers are measuring employee performance by performance rather than presenteeism, down from 54% in 2021-22.
The industry standouts on representation
- Mining is the most male-dominated industry, at just 22% female. It is followed by construction, electricity, gas, water and waste services, and transport, postal and warehousing, all at just 26% female
- Manufacturing is just 28 per cent female
- Pubic administration and safety is 30 per cent female
- Health care and social assistance is overwhelmingly dominated by women, at 78% female
- Education and training is 65% female
Industry laggards/standards on remuneration gender pay gap
- Construction has a 28.3% total remuneration gender pay gap (all employees)
- Financial and insurance services: 26.2%
- Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services: 23.1%
- Professional, Scientific and Technical Services: 22.8%
- Transport, postal and warehousing: 20%
- Accommodation and Food services has the lowest total gap, at just 6.4%. Education and training is at 7.5%
So, what’s behind the gender pay gap?
WGEA offers several reasons in its gender equality fact sheet published today, noting that it results from social and economic factors that combine to reduce women’s earning capacity during their lifetime. Often, it stems from indirect forms of discrimination that limit women’s earning ability, including biases in progression and promotion.
Some of the factors outlined by WGEA include:
- conscious and unconscious discrimination and bias in hiring and pay decisions
- women and men working in different industries and different jobs, with female-dominated industries and jobs attracting lower wages
- lack of workplace flexibility to accommodate caring and other responsibilities, especially in senior roles high rates of part-time work for women
- women’s greater time out of the workforce for caring responsibilities impacting career progression and opportunities
- women’s disproportionate share of unpaid caring and domestic work.