After the cupcakes were eaten, the memes were posted on Instagram and the International Women’s Day events were over, it’s easy to forget that March is more than International Women’s Day – it’s Women’s History Month.
Australian women are largely hidden in our history. As A Monument of One’s Own has pointed out, there are more statues of animals than women on Australia’s streets.
Nowhere is this more evident than the history of women in the workforce. We know very little about the contributions of women to our workforce and our economy.
It was 2010 before Australia had its first female Prime Minister after 109 years as a Federation.
And last year, just 14 of 200 CEOs at Australia’s top ASX-listed companies were women.
Women are missing in leadership and under-represented at all levels of management.
Just over a third of ASX200 Board directors are female and only one in 10 ASX200 Boards are chaired by women.
Despite being a majority of the workforce, women hold a minority of manager level roles and men are twice as likely to be in the top income earning bracket than women.
Until the Second World War, it was rare for women to participate in the workforce, outside of domestic serving roles.
The outbreak of war transformed the Australian workforce.
Women took on jobs in traditionally male-dominated occupations – as machinery drivers, builders, farmers and on the factory floor. Although with the understanding that they’d hand back those jobs once the men returned from war.
Between 1939 and 1943 female workforce participation increased 31 per cent as 200,000 women took on jobs that society had previously deemed too ‘challenging’ for them.
But despite taking on ‘men’s work’, women doing these same jobs were paid around two-thirds – or less – of the standard male wage.
A fight for equality led to women securing 75 per cent of the male wage in 1943.
It took 26 more years before women secured equal pay for doing exactly the same work as men.
In 1969, the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union and other workers’ groups brought a case to the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission against the Meat and Allied Trades Federation (and others) arguing for equal pay for all employees. The decision stipulated women were to be paid the same as men in instances where they were assessed as doing exactly the same work as men in traditionally male roles.
In 1972 the Commission ruled that women and men undertaking similar work that had similar value were eligible for the same rate.
But, even today, women are still not valued the same as men in the workplace. And this difference is still very commonly misunderstood.
From the early stages of their career until they retire, women in Australia experience gender inequality in the workplace.
This is represented as the gender pay gap.
The gender pay gap demonstrates that gender inequality remains a persistent and complex issue in Australian society.
Expressed as a percentage or a dollar figure, it shows the overall difference between the average earnings of women and men working in an organisation, industry, state or country.
What the gender pay gap represents is the broader story of workplace inequality, including the fact that there are more men working in higher-paid management roles and higher paying industries, that women are still more likely to take time out of the workforce – at reduced or no pay – for parent and caring responsibilities and that bias and discrimination exists in decision making about recruitment, promotions and pay.
In 2022, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency calculated the national gender pay gap to be 22.8%, with women earning, on average, $26,600 less than men.
This doesn’t mean that a female businessperson earns $26,000 less than a male businessperson doing exactly the same job, with exactly the same work history.
It means that a 40-year-old female with a commerce degree will, on average, earn significantly less than a 40-year-old man with a commerce degree because she is more likely to work at a non-manager level, while he is more likely to have gone into a management role; she is more likely to have taken time out of work for caring responsibilities; she is less likely to be promoted; and on it goes.
Equal pay for equal or comparable work is vital and companies, even today, 50 years after it became the law, still have to remain vigilant to ensure it occurs.
However, the gender pay gap is much more. It is cultural, it is social, and it is structural.
Closing the gender pay gap is important for Australia’s economic future and reflects our aspiration to be an equal and fair society for all.