Research backs quotas to fix pay gap

Australia is unlikely to close the gender pay gap until at least 2046 despite significant progress made over the past seven years.

That’s according to new research published this morning by Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, which purports to show the gender pay gap having narrowed from 25 per cent to 20 per cent since 2014, with most of those gains confined to the mining sector.

Companies in the female-dominated education and health care sectors, by comparison, rated lower on this measure.

Rebecca Cassells, BCEC’s deputy director, said that, while the gender pay gap for executives could be eliminated by 2036 if the average annual rate of change were to continue, workers in non-management roles could be waiting longer for the pay gap to be corrected.

Those comments were echoed by Alan Duncan, the centre’s director, who cited declining audits of the gender pay gap as leading to broader inaction across businesses.

“The managerial gender pay gap grew an extra 5.1 percentage points among those organisations that ceased regular pay gap audits but decreased by 2.2 percentage points for organisations that consistently examined how they were paying women and men,” Professor Duncan said.

“What’s more, organisations with a higher concentration of women tend to be the most apathetic.

“This is even evident when looking at board representation, where male-dominated industries are more likely to be closer to having a proportionate representation of women on boards than many female-dominated sectors."

Professor Duncan endorsed using targets to fix the issue, with the report showing organisations that set targets appointed women to board positions at almost double the rate of those that didn’t.

“The risk of complacency is that we lose the hard-earned gains in improved gender equality outcomes,” Professor Duncan said.