Nearly three-quarters of all employers in Australia have a gender pay gap that favours men, with women earning on average $28,425 less than their male counterparts in the 12 months to March 2024.
The pay gaps at nearly 8,000 employers across Australia were revealed on Tuesday by the government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, which found Australian women earned 78 cents on average for every $1 earned by men.
Across the country, 5,347 employers, or 72.2%, have a gender pay gap that favours men; 21.3% have a neutral gender pay gap, which means an average pay gap of +-5%, and 6.5% (474 employers) have a pay gap that favours women.
The findings are based on the average total remuneration, which includes bonuses, overtime and superannuation, from April 2023 to March 2024.
It is the second year this data has been published, after government legislation in 2023 allowed WGEA to release company-level salary information of employers with more than 100 employees for the first time in 2024.
WGEA reported that 56% of employers had improved their gender pay gap in 2023-24 compared to the previous reporting period.
“The rate of change has been slow,” said Mary Wooldridge, the agency’s CEO. “But we are tackling some deep-seated cultural views and perspectives, including things like gender stereotypes in relation to roles and occupations.”
The gender pay gap does not refer to paying men and women differently for the same job, which has been illegal since 1969; it is the difference in the average pay of men and women by an employer, and could reflect things such as:
Men holding more senior or more technical roles in a company.
Cultural expectations that caring responsibilities will fall to women, which may limit their opportunities in the workplace.
Companies not allowing senior roles to be held by people working part-time, with women making up the majority of part-time employees.
Men having their requests to work part-time, or take parental leave, refused.
Industries traditionally dominated by women being valued and paid less than industries dominated by men.
Ninety-five companies had a pay gap of more than 50%, meaning the average pay for men at these companies was more than double the average pay for women.
The largest three average pay gaps were at Sydney Ultrasound for Women (78.6%), Rdns HomeCare (75.1%) and Adelaide Cardiology (74.6%), all companies with almost entirely female workforces, but with their male employees concentrated in higher paid positions.
Wooldridge said: “When it’s very significantly women who are employed in an organisation, the men are often employed in senior roles.”
Other well-known companies with significant pay gaps in favour of men included the Brisbane Broncos Rugby League Club (74.3%), Forever New Clothing (58.5%) Morgan Stanley Australia (57.7%), South Sydney District Rugby League Football Club (54.1%), Rex Airlines (53.9%), Hancock Prospecting (51.15%) and Radio 2GB Sydney (51.1%).
Guardian Australia (listed in the data as GNM Australia) has a pay gap of 3.5% in favour of women.
Where pay gaps are highest
Every single industry had a pay gap in favour of men, but pay gaps were highest in male-dominated industries such as construction (25.3%) and financial and insurance services (22.2%). However, both of these sectors saw their pay gaps come down from last year – with a reduction of 6.5% in the pay gap in construction and 3.9% in financial services.
The best-paid industry to work in was mining, with an average pay package of $195,000 and a pay gap of 19.8% (which increased from 15.1% last year).
The higher a company’s average remuneration, the more likely it was to have a gender pay gap that favours men; 92% of all employers that have an average pay packet of $150,000 or more have pay gaps that favour men.
Attitudes are changing
Wooldridge said that there was evidence of an “anticipation effect”, with companies changing behaviour ahead of company level pay gaps being made public.
She said WGEA had seen an increase in companies doing a gender pay gap analysis and an increase in employers consulting with employees about how to change the culture, and had even heard stories of prospective employees looking up the pay gaps of companies at which they were interviewing and raising the pay gap in job interviews.
“So from our perspective, [that’s] very positive,” Wooldridge said.
TelstraSuper, a super fund with about 300 employees, has been taking steps to change its culture around gender equality. In 2024 it introduced a new parental leave policy that offers parents 16 weeks of paid leave, regardless of their gender, and pays their full-time superannuation contributions, regardless of whether they come back full- or part-time.
David Kelertas, the manager of dev ops and support, software engineering at the fund, took five months of parental leave to care for his son Alex, now two, in Alex’s first year of life. When Kelertas returned to work, he returned part-time, working four days a week.
Kalertas said he believed attitudes were changing toward men taking leave to care for children, and that he had seen other men in the company take up parental leave.
“My boss has now taken seven months part-time paternity leave, so I think I inspired him.”
Kalertas said that working part-time and getting one day at home with Alex had been great for him as a parent, and meant he had been able to see many of his son’s first milestones.
