Employer secrecy around staff pay is fuelling gender pay gap, says expert

Company secrecy around staff pay is exacerbating the gender pay gap and slowing progress towards parity, the co-director of Sydney University’s women and work research group says.

Professor Marian Baird made the comments following the release of a Workplace Gender Equality Agency report on Tuesday which found women’s average full-time total remuneration across all industries and occupations is 20.8% less than men’s.

It means men take home an average of $25,679 a year more than women, representing a 0.5% percentage point drop in the gender pay gap from 2017-18.

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“There is nothing like transparency to begin closing the gender pay gap,” Baird, a professor of gender and employment relations, said. “Secrecy and caution around releasing data on pay is one of the biggest impediments to the gender pay gap, especially in non-unionised and private sector companies.”

The government agency’s report found companies are increasingly examining their payroll data for gender pay gaps (up 3.1 percentage points to 44.7% compared with the previous year), but 39.5% of employers who undertook a pay gap analysis then took no action to address it.

Non-public sector employers with 100 or more employees must submit a report of workforce data to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency annually. To produce the report findings, the agency examined this data from 4,841 employers, representing more than four million employees and more than 40% of Australia’s total labour force.

Baird said the slight drop in the gender pay gap overall could be due to a period of wage stagnation rather than entirely a result of efforts from employers to pay women fairly.

“When pay increases stagnate like they are at the moment, it usually does mean a closing of the pay gap a bit, because men aren’t moving ahead,” Baird said. “That’s good in one sense but overall more needs to be done.”

She called for a re-evaluation of the worth of roles in companies held by women.

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“We haven’t paid a lot of attention to how people are classified within their organisation and more needs to be done in that regard,” Baird said. “A lot of women may be in occupations in their organisation classified as lower paying, yet the work they do is probably very valuable.

“We need companies to re-evaluate jobs and classifications of women based on a proper job-worth analysis, rather than relying on traditional gender roles to determine the value of their work.”

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency director, Libby Lyons, said the gender pay gap in the heavily female-dominated health care and social assistance industry had “barely shifted, reflecting the historic and ongoing undervaluation of care work”.

The gender pay gap in that industry declined by just 0.2 percentage points. The occupation with the largest increase in its gender pay gap this year was community and personal services, with a 2.1 percentage point increase.

Meanwhile, Lyons said gender balance at CEO level has plateaued, with the share of female CEOs remaining unchanged from last year’s 17.1%. “Our boardroom tables still remain dominated by men,” she wrote in the foreword to the report. She added that a drop of only 0.5 percentage points in the overall pay gap compared with the year before was “slow progress by anyone’s measure”.

The data also revealed almost 50% of employers now offer paid primary carer’s leave (up 1.6 percentage points to 49.4%) – the best result in the six-year dataset. There was also an increase in paid secondary carer’s leave, up 2 percentage points to 43.8%.

Financial and insurance services remains the industry with the highest total remuneration gender pay gap, at 29.3%.