WUNRN
AUSTRALIA - WOMEN MUST
WORK AN EXTRA 64 DAYS TO EQUAL MEN'S PAY
By Alana Schetzer - September 4,
2014
Women may be able to do it, but they
must work 64 extra days a year to achieve the same wages that men earned in the
previous financial year.
Industrial
segregation and "unconscious bias" is leading the growing gender pay
gap, the head of
WGEA director Helen
Conway said the dominance of men in top-level jobs and a culture of bosses
promoting employees they can relate to meant women faced extra hurdles to
receive equal pay.
"There is plain
discrimination, some of it is conscious and [some] unconscious. There is gender
bias in the way we make pay decisions and other ways that impact pay," she
said.
"An organisation
may pay women and men doing the same jobs the same amounts, but have an
organisation-wide gender pay gap because women are under-represented in
management, and over-represented in lower-paid roles."
September 5 is Equal
Pay Day, which represents the 64 days since the start of the new financial
year, when women's earnings match those of their male counterparts.
"Workers in
female-dominated industries tend to receive lower wages than those in
male-dominated industries, such as mining," Ms Conway said.
Recent Australian
Bureau of Statistic figures show the gender pay gap has widened to a 10-year
high. Women are now earning less than their male counterparts for the same work
since records were first collected in 1994, with an 18.2 per cent difference.
According to the ABS,
the average ordinary full-time weekly earnings for men is $1559.10 compared to
$1275.90 for women. In the past 12 months, men's average salary increased 2.9
per cent, but women realised an increase of just 1.9 per cent.
The federal
government and businesses are facing increasing pressure to address the growing
gap
Economic
Security4Women executive officer Sally Jope said getting more young women into
non-traditional industries such as trades, mining and construction was key to
helping address the growing wage gap.
"There's no
reason why women shouldn't be represented in those industries," she said.
The pay gap starts
immediately for most women. A recent report from Graduate Careers Australia
revealed the average starting salary for a female university graduate in 2013
was $51,600 compared to men's $55,000. The biggest gap is in architecture and
building, where there is a $6500 pay gap.
Women also fall
behind in superannuation, with the average retirement fund one third of what
men retire on - $37,000 compared to $110,000.
WGEA will launch a
new campaign encouraging some of
More than 4000 chief executive officers and human resource teams will be invited to take part in the program to help lift the current 18 per cent rate of gender pay audits.
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