Since 1969, Australian women have been legally entitled to the same pay as men for the same work, but a report released in March found that every single industry in Australia has a pay gap that favours men. On average, women earned 21.8% less than men in 2024 — approximately 78 cents to every $1.
To understand why this is still happening, we need to examine how this data is collected. Since the institution of the 2012 Workplace Gender Equality Act, any business with more than 100 employees has to report their gender equality data to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) each year. This includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments for private sector employees, as well as annualised full-time equivalent salaries of casual and part-time workers.
Ironically, the worst offender in 2024 was Sydney Ultrasound for Women, which showed an 88% gender pay gap, making the average pay of female employees just 12 cents to every $1 earned by a male employee.
So if women legally have to be paid the same amount as men for the same work, where is the pay gap coming from?
In short, women and men are not doing the same jobs, for a variety of reasons. Women are far less likely to receive promotions than men, creating a hierarchy where top-paying positions of power within an industry are held mostly by men. For instance only 19% of Australian CEOs are women, despite women being half the total workforce.
It’s easy to assume that women-led fields would escape the gender pay gap through sheer force of numbers, but fields like education (which has a gap of 11%) and healthcare (21%) repeat the same gendered hierarchy as every other industry in Australia.
Therefore, although these fields are sometimes referred to as “female-dominated” because of the number of female employees, in reality they are “dominated” by men in the higher-paying positions of power.
Even when women do achieve senior roles, the pay gap actually widens: the average gap for managerial roles is 23% (as opposed to 19% for non-managerial roles), presumably because men are more likely to receive discretionary payments such as bonuses.
“Female-dominated” fields generally pay less overall than “male-dominated” fields, for a few key reasons. The first is that work that’s seen as traditionally feminine (particularly care work, like nursing, childcare, and disability support work) is valued less than traditionally masculine work such as trades or finance. We’re left with a chicken-and-egg question here: do women just naturally go into fields that pay less, or do fields pay less when women make up the majority of employees? Place your bets now.
The answer is disappointing, but unsurprising. A 2009 study found that as the population of women in a particular workforce increased, the pay decreased. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, women made up less than half of Australian teachers. As the proportion of female teachers increased through the 1920s and overtook male teachers in the 1930s, Australian educators took pay cuts of 8.3% and 25% from successive governments. The same devaluation phenomenon has been observed in every industry that has undergone this change. Short version: work is valued less when women are the ones doing it.
The second key reason “female-dominated” fields pay less is that women are more likely than men to work part-time or casual, in large part because women still take on the majority of unpaid domestic labour, including housework and childcare. This type of labour is unpaid and underappreciated for the same reason education and nursing salaries have plummeted in the last century. When women do it, it’s viewed as less valuable.
I promise there is some good news.
We have seen an increase in the pay gap of 0.1% since last year, but this is likely because the salaries of chief executive roles were added to this year’s WGEA data for the first time. CEO roles are generally the highest-paying roles in a company and mostly held by men, so we would expect adding them to the report for the first time to widen the gender pay gap. But if we exclude CEO pay, we would actually see an improvement over the last year, from 21.7% down to 21.1%. More than half of Australian employers improved their pay gap in the last year.
It also seems that WGEA data being made public for the first time in 2023 helped motivate companies to improve their pay gaps, with more employers conducting pay gap analysis (68%) than ever before. Evidently, holding companies accountable is the first step to making actual improvements in achieving equal pay. To hold them accountable, we need to stay up to date on what the pay gap looks like in Australia, both by looking at annual data from the WGEA and Australian Bureau of Statistics. Most of all, we must listen to women when they share their experiences of workplace discrimination.
