Employers in Australia urged to close gender pay gap

Female employees in Australia lag behind their male counterparts when it comes to wage parity, reported the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), an Australian Government statutory agency created by the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012.

According to WGEA, female employees earned 22.8% less than male employees, with those working in finance companies suffering the largest wage gaps compared to their male co-workers. This marks the first time that progress has stalled since the government agency began to collect the data in 2013. 

“It’s very disturbing and disappointing, in terms of the progress,” said WGEA director Mary Wooldridge. “It needs to serve as a call out to all employers that we need to do better”, reported Bloomberg.

The factors that weigh on unfair compensation include discrimination, bias in hiring, having more men in senior management roles who tend to receive bigger bonuses, and a large proportion of women in lower paid education and healthcare jobs.

READ: Gender equity for women in Australia requires more action

The WGEA data drew information from employer reports from April 1 last year through to March 31 this year, covering 4,795 reporting organisations and almost 4.5 million employees.

Although Australia requires organisations hiring more than 100 employees to provide information annually, the results of individual organisations are not published.