Should we be celebrating Equal Pay Day?
Equal Pay Day, to be marked on 28 August 2019, is almost upon us and so it is timely to see what progress has been made in gender equality in pay. Should workplaces be celebrating or should they be acknowledging that it is really an [Un] Equal Pay Day?
An August 2019 report, She’s Price[d]less, prepared by KPMG, and based on the HILDA survey data, has shown little change in the gender pay gap so it is probably the latter.
Given that women’s participation in workforce has increased, although primarily in part-time employment, and educational levels of women have increased, it may have been expected that the pay gap would have begun to show real narrowing.
However, the gender pay gap is still around 14 per cent. This might not sound like a big deal but, translated into hours of work, to have achieved the same amount as men, women would have had to have worked to almost 3 months extra in just the year just gone by.
While the analysis resulting in the gender pay gap does not compare men and women in equivalent roles, but rather refers to the difference between women’s and men’s average weekly full-time base salary earnings, the ramifications are far-reaching for women e.g. less financial security for women in older age (they have 40 per cent less in superannuation savings) and the rapidly increasing rate of homelessness amongst women.
Three main factors have been found to account for the gender pay gap. The first, which accounts for 39 per cent of the difference is discrimination (in hiring, promotion, training etc). The most worrying aspect of this is that discrimination appears to have increased by 10 per cent in a 3 year period.
Other contributing factors to the pay gap include the gender segregation of industries with female dominated jobs receiving lower compensation, the disproportionate amount of time women spend in unpaid caring and domestic work and the lack of flexibility of workplaces to accommodate their needs.
What might HR practitioners do?
