“Where the men are few, they are more highly valued”

Top tier female managers in Australian organisations earn on average $93,000, or 26.5%, less per year compared to their male counterparts, according to a new report by Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC), in collaboration with the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).

The report titled Gender Equity Insights 2017: Inside Australia’s Gender Pay Gap also revealed a measurable link between a gender-balanced leadership team and reduced gender pay gaps.

Indeed, once the management environment becomes heavily dominated by women – beyond 80 per cent, the gender pay gap among managers increases from 8% to 17%.

Report author and BCEC Principal Research Fellow Associate Professor Rebecca Cassells said the report outcomes showed the different ways women and men engaged with the workforce, and how their respective contributions are valued.

“Not only do female-dominated organisations tend to be lower paid, but this analysis shows that in workplaces with heavily female-dominated management teams there are large gender pay gaps in favour of men,” Associate Professor Cassells said.

“It seems that where the men are few, they are more highly valued.”  

WGEA Director Libby Lyons added that it was time to challenge the way we think about work.

“This report shows that regardless of the industry they choose to work in, women are worse off than men when working full-time,” Lyons said.

“The analysis is clear: gender-balanced workplaces and gender-balanced leadership teams lower the gender pay gap.

“We must address the stereotypes dictating the work women and men ‘should’ do, if Australia is to meet the social and economic challenges in the decades ahead.”

Key findings of the report include:

•    Increasing the representation of women in senior leadership positions is associated with lowering gender pay gaps.
•    Gender pay gaps for organisations with a balanced representation of women in senior leadership roles, at 10 per cent on average, are half the size of those with the least representation of women in leadership.
•    Once the management environment becomes heavily dominated by women – beyond 80 per cent, the gender pay gap among managers increases from 8 to 17 per cent.
•    The median gender pay gap among graduates is 2.9 per cent on base salary and 2.1 per cent on total remuneration.
•    Women are consistently under-represented in the highest graduate salary bands, with some 18 per cent fewer women paid over $80,000 compared to their share of the graduate workforce.
•    For part-time employees, non-managerial women out-earn men on average by 7.8 per cent, or around $4,000 a year. This pattern reverses at senior levels where part-time female managers earn on average 27.1 per cent less than their male peers.
•    Mining, Australia’s most male-dominated industry, awards the highest average pay to women. Women employed full-time in the industry earned on average $139,053 in total remuneration in 2016.
•    The gender pay gap grows with seniority, climbing to 26.5 per cent for top-tier managers, an annual difference of more than $93,000 in total remuneration.
•    Pay gaps among managers are exacerbated by the greater share of discretionary pay, including bonuses, awarded to men. For top-tier managers, nearly $40,000 of the annual difference in pay is made up