The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) this week issued a press release about the latest gender pay gap data in Australia.  Currently women’s full-time wages as a percentage of men’s full-time wages, is 85.9 per cent (1). 

For those who don’t know, the WGEA, is the federal funded agency tasked with improving gender pay equality.

But I personally have to question the effectiveness of both the organisation and the underlying legislation.

Back in November 2012, when the WGEA was founded, on average men working full time in November 2012 were paid $262 per week more than women.  In November 2018, on average men working full time, are now paid $240 a week more than women. 

So, in six years, the gap between men and women working full time has only closed by $22 a week. To me, $22 a week in six years is pathetic. 

If we are going to make a serious dent in the gender pay gap, changes need to be made to both The Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 and the funding of the WGEA. 

These changes include:

WGEA needs to expand its data collection to more organisations

Currently the WGEA only has power to ensure that non-public sector organisations of over 100 staff submit their data.  Why are public sector organisations excluded from this?

WGEA needs to more enforcement powers

WGEA only has power to ensure that non-public sector organisations of over 500 staff have a formal policy or formal strategy in place that specifically supports gender equality in the workforce.

An organisation can report significant gender pay gaps and as long as it has a policy in place to potentially close these, WGEA can do very little. 

The WGEA needs powers to force organisations that have a large gender pay gaps to commence positive action to beat those gaps.  The best way to do this would be to set a gender gap benchmark rate.  Possibly set this at 20 per cent gap between earnings of full-time workers to start with.  This benchmark can be reduced over time.

And for any organisation whose gender pay gap exceeds that benchmark, WGEA has the power to force that organisation to start taking positive action to reduce that gap.

And if after say 2 years, the organisation has not reduced their gender pay gap to below the then current benchmark, the organisation is named and shamed.  That’s right, the same way we publish a list of food outlets who have not meet food safety standards, WGEA publish a list of organisations that have not met the gender pay gap metrics. 

Smart organisations wanting to attract and retain key staff will not want to be on that list. 

WGEA needs to create industry working groups

Looking at the gender pay gap for women working full time in Australia, there are already some industries, such as the Public Administration and Safety and Retail Trade Industries where the gender pay gap is around 7 to 8 per cent.  These industries seem to have achieved a lot in closing the gender pay gap.

There are other industries where the gender pay gap for full time employed women is over 20 per cent. 

So, we don’t need to implement a national policy framework to achieve gender pay equity like the Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee recommended in its report “Gender segregation in the workplace and its impact on women’s economic equality” released in June 2017.

Instead we can get better results if the WGEA has the powers and resources to have industry working groups focusing on the biggest industries that are currently below the average gender pay gap.

This allows industry specific policy and action plans to be implemented to beat the unique challenges of the gender pay gap in that industry.

For example, the biggest employer of full-time workers currently is the construction industry.  But 94 per cent of these workers are male.  Issues here include how to get more women involved in the industry.

Another example is in the increasingly important disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).  Currently there are action plans to drive increased female participation in the STEM industries.  But these plans may be of no use, as women continue to plan to leave this industry as a result of gender biases. So instead of new training plans the issue is probably how to get women to remain in the industry.

I would recommend that the first sub committees are focused on the biggest industries where the gender pay gap is below the industry wide average such as:

Women will benefit sooner, as industry wide solutions can be delivered quicker and more effectively.   And as we learn from closing the gender pay gap in these industries, we can then apply it to other industries, as applicable.

Further Action

I have expressed my concerns with the WGEA and the legislation to the Federal Government via my most recent budget submission and other submissions.  If you want to help close the gender pay gap, maybe it is time for you to talk to your Federal member (especially in an election year) and raise these issues so we can all work together to close the gender pay gap.

(1) Australian Bureau of Statistics, 6302.0 Average Weekly Earnings, Australia,. November 2017 Issued February 2018

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