Every Aussie Employer With Over 100 Staff Has Just Had Its Gender Pay Gap Published

The day has arrived, people. As of today (February 27), Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) has gone and published the gender pay gaps present in Australian private sector companies with 100 or more staff members.

We initially wrote about the release of this data about a month back, and as of today, you can search through the list of employers – yes, probably including your own – and review the data associated with pay gaps, the proportion of women in leadership positions, whether the company sits within a male-dominated, female-dominated or mixed gender industry and the business size.

Here, we will take a peek through some of the most interesting details to emerge from this data, as well as offer a guide to what you can expect from the WGEA Employer Gender Pay Gaps as a whole.

WGEA Employer Gender Pay Gaps data: What’s included?

In a nutshell, WGEA has collated salary and remuneration data attached to all Australian private sector companies with 100 employees or more, and has published the gender pay gaps that exist on its Data Explorer website.

The information shared has been submitted by the companies themselves, and businesses have also been invited to offer an Employer Statement to offer any context they feel is relevant to the results. These statements will be regularly updated over time.

The pay gaps shared are worked out from the median pay of women staff members compared to the median pay of male staff. It’s also worth noting WGEA has specified non-binary staff members have not been included in this reporting due to the small number of people responding under this gender identity.

Details to keep in mind:

In a press briefing ahead of the release of the WGEA Employer Gender Pay Gaps report, WGEA CEO Mary Wooldridge explained a couple of nuances to the data that are worth keeping in mind.

• She noted that if your employer has more than 100 staff members but sits under a parent company, it is ultimately the responsibility of the parent company to report the published data, so the results may be folded into one — rather than being shared by individual subsidiaries.
• In this round of data, some salaries have been excluded, like CEOs, heads of business, casual managers, and employees who have been furloughed. On CEOs, specifically, it was stated that these salaries can skew data, which is why it has been left out of this particular report.
• On the classification of pay gaps, WGEA has shared that a gap of -5 per cent or higher would be considered ‘in favour of women’ (whereby the median salary for women is 5 per cent higher than the median pay for men) and a gap of 5% (where the median male salary is 5 per cent higher than that of women) is defined as ‘in favour of men’. Any results sitting between and including -5 per cent and 5 per cent are considered neutral to WGEA, as the salaries do not significantly favour any gender.
• When discussing gender-dominated industries, these are considered to be those that have a make-up of over 60 per cent either men or women.
• Total remuneration: This term is classified by WGEA as including “base salary, superannuation, overtime, bonuses, and other additional payments for full-time, part-time and casual employees, on an annualised full-time equivalent basis”.
• Published data covers reporting from April 1, 2022, through March 31, 2023. In 2024 reporting, WGEA shares it will include pay gap averages as well.

Where can I find the WGEA Employer Gender Pay Gaps data?

You can search through the data on the WGEA data explorer page here.

Looking through the platform will allow you to search through individual companies, as well as read their provided statements (if they’ve supplied one).

What trends have emerged in the WGEA Employer Gender Pay Gaps report?

To start, WGEA shared the following on the general state of Australia’s gender pay gap:

“Nationally, the WGEA median total remuneration gender pay gap is 19%. This means, that over the course of a year, the median of what a woman is paid is $18,461 less than the median of what a man is paid.”

The following data obviously gives some additional insight into where that 19 per cent figure comes from.

Here a few insights we found particularly interesting:

• The median base salary for women sits at $68,071, compared to $79,613 for men. The median remuneration package for women, however, is $78,484, compared to $96,945 for men.
• The five industries with the highest pay gaps were: Construction (31.8% median total remuneration pay gap), Financial and Insurance Services (26.1% median total remuneration pay gap), Professional, Scientific and Technical Services (26.1% median total remuneration pay gap), Information Media and Telecommunications (24.2% median total remuneration pay gap).
• The five industries with the smallest pay gaps were: Accommodation and Food Services (1.9% median total remuneration gender pay gap), Public Administration and Safety (2.3% median total remuneration gender pay gap), Arts and Recreation Services (4.6% median total remuneration gender pay gap), Education and Training (5.2% median total remuneration gender pay gap), Administrative and Support Services (5.5 median total remuneration gender pay gap).
• WGEA reported that 8.3 per cent of employers have pay gaps that favoured women, 30.1 per cent have a neutral pay gap, and 61.6 per cent of employers have a pay gap that favours men.
• Close to 5,000 employers are included in the data, and WGEA has reported that half have a gender pay gap of under 9.1 per cent, with the remaining 50 per cent sitting above this figure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, male-dominated industries were more likely to have a larger pay gap.
• Employers with more staff (5,000+) were found to have generally smaller pay gaps.
• Employers with more women on boards, with at least one woman CEO and with more gender balance in key management positions were found to be more likely to have a neutral gender pay gap, WGEA has shared.

During a press briefing on the publishing of this data, Wooldridge shared that she feels the response to the release of this data largely sits with employers, who can take it as an opportunity to move forward. Additionally, she highlighted that it offers a powerful opportunity for prospective employees to become informed ahead of stepping into new roles.

You can read more about the publishing of gender pay gaps by WGEA here.

Lead Image Credit: WGEA/iStock