Australia Post has closed its Gender Pay Gap

Australia Post has closed its Gender Pay Gap

Christine Holgate
Australia Post had done what few large employers have ever managed to achieve: close its workforce gender pay gap.

That means full-time working women at the employer of more than 30,000 people are on average earning the same amount as full-time working men.

However, Australia Post’s first female CEO, Christine Holgate, will earn significantly less than her male predecessor, Ahmed Fahour, who came under heavy criticism prior to his resignation earlier this year for his hefty total remuneration package.

Australia Post’s pay gap was eliminated after narrowing to just 1.4% in 2016, well below the current national average of 15.3%.

Acting managing director Christine Corbett announced the zero gender pay gap while opening a #CelebratingWomen event at the organisation’s Melbourne headquarters on Monday night.

She noted that as women continued to make-up the majority of its customer base, it made sense to focus on female staff development.

In a statement this morning, Corbett said the achievement comes following seven and a half years of focussing on improving the representation of women across all levels of leadership, while also addressing unconscious bias. She added that more than 400 women have participated in career development programs in the past 12 months alone.

Australia Post’s board is also about to go majority female, with five out of nine members female, including Holly Kramer in the deputy chair position. The major employer has revealed women now account for 37.5% of all management staff, up from 36.4% 12 months ago.

It other stats made public today, women now account for 17.7% of all deliver managers, up from 14.4% in 2016, as well as 53.6% of all postal managers, up from 51%.

Upon releasing Australia’s Post’s Gender Action Plan in 2015, Ahmed Fahour  recalled his first day in the role of managing director and CEO back in 2010, when he spoke at a gathering of 250 of the most senior managers in the business and was taken aback by the fact the audience was overwhelmingly male. “Right there and then, in front of that group, I made a commitment to promote more women into Australia Post’s leadership team.”

 

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