When you’re young and ready to start your first professional job, you don’t spend much time thinking about the gender pay gap.
You don’t think about it because at that age you don’t believe it could possibly exist – at least not without the contributing factors of career breaks and family responsibilities that happen later on. And not given the amount of optimism you have at that stage in your career knowing there’s nothing the opposite sex can do that you can’t.
The latest report from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, based on data by Graduate Careers Australia, has blown that optimism out of the water.
The report found that the gender pay gap between male and female university graduates more than doubled in 2012, and currently stands at $5000 per annum. The median full-time starting salary of a male graduate is $55,000 (up from $52,000 in 2011) compared to $50,000 for their female counterparts (no change since 2011).
Think of it this way: at graduation, the boys are handed a $5000 cheque with their rolled up degrees, as well as a note to return every year to receive their incremental gender bonus. The girls, dressed identically, are simply offered the word “congratulations!” while handed their scroll.
Congratulations indeed. Born a woman, you now have the honour of paying for that fact, every day, for the rest of your working lives. When you retire, you’ll be greeted with yet another consequence of your gender: superannuation that’s less than two thirds the size of what men retire with.
When starting out, an extra $5000 can go a long way. It could be the difference between leaving home or not, living a little closer to the office, attending Friday night drinks, taking a trip at the end of the year, choosing what you want to eat for lunch.
But more importantly it’s an amount attached to your overall salary: a figure that, as much as it shouldn’t, tells many women what they’re worth.
The gap is not a consequence of men choosing better-paying professions than women, given the report found serious gender pay differences in specific occupations. In architecture and building, men starting out will earn an average $9000 more than women, in dentistry it’s $14,400, and in law, $4300. Women were found to earn slightly more than men in seven of the 23 occupation categories analysed (including science and engineering where we know women typically encounter a massive pay gap later on), while just three categories were found to be equal: education, humanities and medicine.
The fact there are gender gaps in these occupations for graduates is a curious one, given the factors that have been traditionally been used to account for our national 17% gender pay gap.
There are no career breaks, and typically few family responsibilities that can be used to explain it. There’s not even at the ridiculous notion that women are not as ambitious as men, or are earning less than men because they haven’t asked for what they deserve during all those salary talks over the years.
No, there’s none of that. This is workplace inequality, a taste of what will continue for these women long into their working lives.
Start saving, ladies.