The gender pay gap is the demonstrable, statistical gap that exists between the amount of money men take home from work as opposed to what women take home. Spoiler alert: women take home less. The data proves it. What is also proved merely by mentioning the words “gender pay gap” on the internet is how desperately averse some people are to hard data.
To monitor and address the gendered pay discrepancy, the government last year passed legislation obliging companies with over a hundred workers to publish their pay data so that any gendered patterns could be made transparent. The first report from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) containing the data appeared yesterday. Screaming gender conniptions from people heavily invested in maintaining reductive stereotypes of women appeared shortly thereafter.
Let’s start with facts before we examine the holus-bolus, pissy hissyfitting, shall we?
The WGEA’s report found Australia’s average gender pay gap based on total remuneration at 21.7%, which means women earn 78c to the male dollar. This calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments, and considers annualised full-time equivalent salaries of casual and part-time workers. The report recognises that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Survey of Average Weekly Earnings identifies a gender pay gap of 12%, with the clarification that the ABS dataset excludes overtime, bonuses and additional payments as well as the salaries of part-time and casual workers. Given that the target range is -5% and +5%, even those conservative figures are not good. Key takeaways of the report are that while 30% of employers have a median gender pay gap between the target range of -5% and +5%, half of the reporting employers have a gender pay gap of over 9.1%. A staggering 62% of the businesses surveyed have a gender pay gap bigger than 5%, and in favour of men.
What does this mean? It means that women experience the negative end of an unfair, gendered power differential that provides an overwhelming majority of men with more options, more purchasing power in the economy and more authority.
This structuralises – I dunno – an inequality that just might provide the material framework for some shocking social problems.
Ranting, entitled sexist nonsense, for example.
Unrelated, the report was “useless data!” according to rightwing, backbench opposition hollerer, Matt Canavan. According to Canavan, the real social problem isn’t structural inequality, it’s discussing the facts about structural inequality. It apparently “breeds resentment and division” in some men to be reminded of women’s comparative disadvantage. Canavan continued on his conspicuously facts-unburdened theme claiming “the gender pay report is now the annual Andrew Tate recruitment drive”. He’s referring to the YouTube-famous misogynist now in home detention in Romania on charges of human trafficking and rape (which he denies) – so listen up, feminists! If you don’t stay quiet, there’ll be more boys flocking to rape-charged influencers, and it will all be on you!
It does make one wonder why Canavan’s own party voted for Labor’s legislation when it passed parliament unanimously last year, but logical consistency is as outre with the modern hard right as data and evidence. For the latter, Canavan substitutes bellowed insistence. For the former, Janet Albrechtsen delivers reliability; her column on the WGEA report was, reliably, awful. “The data does not compare men and women doing the same job in a company” was not the “killer” scoop she seemed to think, given that a.) WGEA’s analysis is one that compares economic and industrial power and b.) that information is explicitly stated in their report. To Albrechtsen, it was “temerity” and “wickedness” to hold corporate moral paragons such as, uh, Qantas, Virgin Australia, Telstra, Woodside and Santos to account for their role in structural disadvantage. Also, the WGEA data was “hollow, inaccurate tosh”.
Did I mention – the data was directly supplied by the companies?
A lawyer friend once told me that when virtue’s on your side, argue for virtue; when facts are on your side, argue for facts … but when neither virtue or the facts are on your side, bang your shoe on a table and yell like hell. I can only imagine he’s now advising merchant banks on PR strategy because yesterday sure saw a hootenanny of shoe-banging going on. The AFR had flunkies from Morgan Stanley and Melior Investment Strategy claiming that pay gaps existed because men – unlike them ladies – didn’t like spending so much time with their kids. There needed to be a “cultural shift” claimed a spokesperson in an industry with pay gaps that are eye-popping without, it seemed, ever realising you could screen out guys like that in the recruitment process and – amazing – not hire them.
If there was a consistency to how corporations responded to the gendered discrepancies revealed in the public release of their own data, it was – from Google to mining companies – the belief that, somehow, the discrepancy was not their fault. “We compensate Googlers based on what they do, not who they are” was some staggering chutzpah from a company that manages a gap of 14.9%. So whose fault is it then, fellas?
You’re not saying it’s women’s fault, are you?
That would suggest that employers internalise persistent sexist stereotypes that deny women authority, don’t value their labour, overburden them with care responsibilities and culturally position them as subordinate. Their choices affirms women’s structural disadvantage in the workplace, which then re-affirms the sexist stereotypes outside of it.
And maybe, just maybe, we should do something about it.
If ever there was a reason to keep publishing the WGEA data, that’s it.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
