Rattling cages on gender pay gap

The public reporting of employer-level gender pay gaps by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) heralds a new era of transparency in the relative pay of women and men in Australia’s larger businesses.

The release of organisational data attracted a lot of interest in those businesses with the highest gender pay gaps, particularly concerning the reasons why.

The median gender pay gap in Australia is 19 per cent, but with considerable variation across different industry sectors and between businesses in the same sector.

What the publication of gender equity indicators shows clearly is that most of the overall gender pay gap in a business comes from the gender balance of workers in the organisation: a greater share of men in high-paying roles, or a larger share of women in lower-paid positions.

This is confirmed by research from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre in 2022 that demonstrated how much of the national pay gap is driven by gender workforce concentrations.

Australia’s gender pay gap could reduce by a third – and Western Australia’s pay gap could be halved – if we moved to at least a 40 per cent male employment share combined with at least a 40 per cent female employment share across all industries and occupations.

But as sure as the sun rises each morning, the publication of gender pay data brings out voices of (more often than not male) dissent.

Our social media channels are often ‘illuminated’ by the opinions of men seeking to put the record straight on any claims about workplace gender inequality.

It’s about choice, say the deniers. Anything beyond this is purported to be a fallacy perpetuated by WGEA and research centres like my own.

But what drew the eye for me were the views of some business leaders that gender pay gaps are an immutable fact of life in their industry sectors.

Interestingly, these claims came mostly from resources and retail, two of the sectors with larger gender pay gaps.

For example, one line of argument put forward for the higher concentration of men in higher-paying roles in the resources or construction industries is because men are more likely to accept more challenging working conditions, and women are more likely to prefer jobs that allow them to remain with their families.

For sure, women’s career decisions are about choice, but how free is that choice?

Of course, you can’t move mines closer to where people live.

But it shouldn’t be about men accepting more challenging work conditions in return for higher earnings, any more than the notion that women prefer to do the ‘home production’ and accept being the secondary earner.

Women’s choices are more often forced by the passive stance of employers who do nothing about broadening the accessibility of roles within their businesses, or who maintain working environments that discourage women from joining the business.

The same arguments have been put forward as an excuse for the lack of women’s representation on governing boards.

It’s the absence of female board candidates that’s the issue, or the ‘fact’ that fewer women put themselves forward for promotion or appointment to boards, rather than any prevailing unconscious – or conscious – bias on the part of the business.

Claiming that inertia in workplace gender composition or female board representation is a result of women’s free choices is a great diversion tactic that seeks to let employers off the hook.

Businesses need to own their roles in breaking down traditional gender roles and societal norms that have held back women’s economic opportunities for too long.

• Professor Alan Duncan is director of the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre