Major new research has found that men are paid more than women in 98% of occupations, with female workers in Australia typically paid 70 cents for every $1 earned by their male colleague after a decade in work.
The report also showed that gender segregation in Australian workplaces was proving stubborn to shift: in about seven in 10 occupations there had been no progress on gender balance in 15 years.
The 30% average pay gap across workplaces identified in Jobs and Skills Australia’s new report stretches to nearly 40% for First Nations women.
Experts blame the persistent gender pay gap in large part on the “motherhood penalty” – the phenomenon where Australian women’s earnings drop by 55% in the five years after having their first child.
A higher likelihood of returning to part-time rather than full-time work, and missed opportunities for promotion during time away, mean that penalty is only slightly improved 10 years after giving birth.
More gender-balanced occupations tended to have more equal pay, but the research revealed these jobs were in a minority: only one in five Australian workers were in occupations with a relatively equal mix of men and women.
Ambulance officers and paramedics, dentists, and barristers were roles that had become less male-dominated, while vets and school principals had moved from gender parity to moderately higher shares of women.
But gender segregation was most acute in lower-skilled occupations, where there had been little change in the mix of men and women in a decade-and-a-half.
While no occupation showed meaningfully higher pay for women over men, the report found that occupational pay gaps widen to be at their worst among the most segregated occupations – regardless of whether they were male- or female-dominated.
Female registered nurses, for example, were paid $89,720 on average, or 21% less than the $114,420 typically paid to their male peers. That’s despite women accounting for 90% of that workforce and only working 10% fewer hours.
Even in the case of childcare – where almost the entire workforce were women – men were typically paid 14% more: $56,240, versus $48,340, according to the JSA’s analysis of Australian Taxation Office data.
Surely this is no surprise. It was totally predictable with the introduction of enterprise bargaining and the abolition of centralised wage fixing – an Australian invention which drove egalitarianism in pay rates and led to Australia sitting just behind Scandinavia vis-a-vis equal pay. The introduction of enterprise bargaining changed all that. The Australian Federation of Business and Professional Women (AFBPW) argued this in the 1990 National Wage Case before the Australian Industrial Relations Tribunal and managed to maintain centralised wage fixing for another year. However, sadly in the 1990-1991 National Wage Case the federal government and ACTU prevailed. This was – sadly for a Labor government (Hawke) and the ACTU (Kelty) – a wrong move and has led to wider and wider differences in pay rates. The WSVEs – Wage Skills Value Enquiries – run in NSW in the early 2000s did try though they were never run properly so did not succeed in ensuring that work in traditional female fields of paidwork were properly valued consistent with work in traditional male fields of paidwork. Read Wage Rage for Equal Pay – Australia’s Long Long Struggle, 2024, Palgrave Macmillan – for a history of the struggle and proposals for regaining Australia’s place as a leader in advancing women’s equal pay.