Minding The Gap

When the Albanese Government came to office in May 2022, a women working full time was earning $260 less per week, or 14.1% less than a man on average. Today, that gap has shrunk to $231 or 11.5%.

The gap is now shrinking by 1.3 percentage points on average each year, more than three times as fast as the average annual rate of decline under nearly a decade of Coalition governments of just 0.4 percent.

That means that today, a woman working full time is now $36 a week, or nearly $1,900 a year better off, than if the Coalition’s lacklustre progress had continued under this term of government.

To put it another way, on current progress the gap could close completely within nine years. But if women in Australia had to persist with the Coalition’s slow progress, they’d be waiting another 35 years.

This ACTU report also finds the gender pay gap shrinking more rapidly on every measure.

Considering the earnings of all workers – and not just those working full time – the gender pay gap is shrinking by 1.0 percentage points per year under this term of Government, compared to 0.8 percentage points under the Coalition.

Measured on an hourly basis, the gender pay gap actually worsened under the Coalition’s time in office, going from 7.0 percent to 7.2 percent. Since then it has nearly halved under this Government, shrinking to just 4 percent.

This report also examines trends in the gender pay gap across the public and private sector, industries and states.

This progress has not happened by accident. This report outlines 20 major reforms under this term of Government that have all contributed to the quicker narrowing of the gender pay gap. Key ones include:

Strong wage outcomes in the past three Annual Wage Reviews and in public sector bargaining,
where most workers covered by these arrangements are women.

• Strong wage outcomes in the past three Annual Wage Reviews and in public sector bargaining, where most workers covered by these arrangements are women.
• Progress in winning equal pay across female-dominated occupations, especially in aged care and now early childhood education and care (ECEC).
• Strong growth in women’s full-time employment and workforce participation, post-pandemic.
• Better rights supporting women to remain connected to work, including a stronger right to request flexible working arrangements, improvements to Commonwealth Paid Parental Leave, paid family and domestic violence leave, and improved childcare subsidies.
• Greater transparency about pay, including the outlawing of pay secrecy clauses in employment contracts and improvements to company gender pay gap reporting via the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).
• Improved protection from discrimination and sexual harassment at work and stronger obligations on employers to prevent and respond to such unlawful conduct.

Such progress is likely to continue as the full impact of most of these reforms is yet to be felt. But that is only if they stay.

Peter Dutton and the Coalition in opposition have opposed nearly every single one of these 20 reforms supporting fairer pay for women, and have already threatened to tear up some of them if re-elected. This includes multi-employer bargaining which is already supporting women workers across the care economy to gain significant wage increases. Working women cannot afford a Dutton Government.