A new report says the gender pay gap is narrowing much faster than it was under the previous government. Big pay bumps in some industries, changes that have given more power to workers, and forcing companies to publish their gap have all contributed to the change.
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00:00So, the gender pay gap is the difference between the average amount that men and women earn
00:07in Australia.
00:08It is not equal pay.
00:10Equal pay is getting paid the same for the similar or kind of comparable work between
00:15men and women.
00:16That's been the law for 50 years.
00:18The gender pay gap is the difference between average earnings of men and women, and it's
00:22affected by a broad range of factors.
00:26Things like feminised industries or industry sectors that have a lot of women in them,
00:30like aged care and early childhood education, earning less.
00:34It's due to women doing more part-time work over their lifetime, because they do tend
00:39to take on more caring responsibilities, and of course, have children.
00:42So the gap is systemic, it is a very large problem, but it is something that has been
00:47narrowing much faster in recent years.
00:50How slowly is this gap getting smaller?
00:53So the gap is, depends on how you measure it.
00:56The Australian Bureau of Statistics has a measure of full-time earnings, and they have
00:59it at 11.5%.
01:02The Government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency has a much broader and more comprehensive,
01:07I think, measure, which takes into account bonuses, part-time work, full-time work, that
01:12kind of thing.
01:13That's 21.7.
01:14Now, even under the smaller measure, essentially what it means is that today is the last day,
01:20on average, that Australian women are being paid for their work.
01:24I spoke to the person who put together the research for the report, which is the ACTU's
01:29President Michelle O'Neill, who runs the peak body of Australian unions.
01:33Here are her thoughts on the impact of that gap.
01:36If you look at the average pay between men and women, the gap is still so much that it
01:41means that effectively, from today to the end of the year, women are working for free.
01:47Because average pay in Australia still has an 11.5% pay gap between men and women.
01:53So Dan, what's holding back progress on shrinking the gender pay gap?
01:58There's a lot of things that have to happen, like a lot of complex problems.
02:00Think about our inflation issue, think about our housing problem.
02:03There's not one solution.
02:04If there was, we would have pulled that lever by now.
02:07But a lot of things have occurred.
02:09Interestingly, the research suggests that the gap has been closing at three times the
02:14rate under this Government than the last Government.
02:17Now I spoke to Susan Lee, who is the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, the Opposition.
02:23She defended the record of that Government.
02:25But the data is there.
02:26And some of the reasons that that has happened is because there's been a lot of essentially
02:30worker-friendly legislation that's been passed in the past couple of years under the Albanese
02:34Government.
02:35Things like getting rid of pay secrecy and secrecy clauses in contracts, improving the
02:41transparency where companies have to say what their gender gap is, and allowing patent bargaining,
02:47which is not just companies negotiating with their employees or with the union, but across
02:52whole sectors.
02:53And in places like aged care and early childhood education, that's led to massive one-off pay
02:59bumps in the realm of aged care, 28.5 per cent, and in early childhood, a staggered
03:0615 per cent rise over two years.
03:08These are really substantial shifts in those sectors, which are largely the work is done
03:12by women.
03:13So there's a lot going on.
03:15That gap is narrowing.
03:17But still, between 11.5 and 21.7 per cent, that's the average difference between what
03:22men and women are earning in Australia.