A huge step forward for gender pay gap transparency in Australia

Australia has reached a landmark moment in the battle to close the gender pay gap, one I’ve been waiting years for.

As someone who has actively campaigned for more than two decades for the measures that will be introduced in Australia — including leading campaigns in the UK that eventually saw the introduction of similar measures there — I’m delighted to be the one to help articulate why, exactly, this moment is so momentous.

Last Thursday the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill passed the Senate. It brings mandatory — I emphasise mandatory — gender pay gap reporting to Australia. Employers with 100 or more workers will be required by law to publish the size of the gender pay gap at their organisation.

Many employers have long been required to submit the size of their gender pay gap to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) but, curiously, that granular information has never made its way into the public domain. Instead, WGEA published gender pay gaps by industry composite.

As I wrote in my recent book, Leaning Out (published by Crikey late last year), the absence of this particular, employer-specific information impeded women’s ability to stick their head above the parapet, lock eyes with colleagues in their workplace, and collectively say: “What the fuck is going on here?”

The esteemed Global Institute of Women’s Leadership put it much more politely in a 2021 report entitled “Gender pay gap reporting in Australia: time for an upgrade“. After pointing out that Australia received the joint lowest ranking in its gender pay gap reporting scorecard across all countries measured, the institute concluded: “The absence of qualitative data or action plan disclosure impedes stakeholders’ ability to engage with individual employers about their gender equality activities.”

Quite. That’s what I’ve been saying for years, though admittedly not as politely.

When I moved to Australia a decade ago, I was, quite frankly, baffled that the need for this kind of transparency around gender pay gap reporting didn’t feature more prominently in the debate. And I was baffled that many seemed happy to continue with what I called the annual “best practice gender pay gap farce”.

The farce went something like this: every year WGEA would publish its “gender equality scorecard” and “employer of choice” citations, and the media would be awash in stories of employers “voluntarily” doing the right thing by — choose your own gender equality adventure — conducting gender pay audits, offering paid parental leave that didn’t differentiate between “primary” carers (usually women) and “secondary carers” (usually men). The hope was that more employers could be nudged into doing the right thing, but the reality was — and we all knew it — too many weren’t.

There remained, and still remains, a significant so-called “action gap”. Consider this: the 2021-22 data shows that while just over half of employers (54%) have conducted a pay gap analysis, 40% of those took no action as a result.

Farce indeed.

Why bother measuring the size of your gender pay gap only to take no action? And why bother getting employers to report the size of their gender pay gap when you know full well almost half are doing fuck all about it? (Sorry, not sorry, language again.)

As is often said, sunshine is the best disinfectant. The size of the “action gap”, to my mind, has long made a clear argument in favour of mandatory public reporting. Call it “naming and shaming” if you like… I’m cool with that. Public gender pay gap reporting might help narrow the “action gap”, where gently, gently nudging, asking politely, and talking about the “win, win” of gender equality has failed.

It’s well past time.

The UK introduced similar changes in 2015, eight years ago. The UK experience suggests we might have known —  eight years ago — that exclusively relying on a voluntary approach doesn’t work.

While the UK’s Equality Act 2010 included a power for governments to force companies to reveal the size of their gender pay gap, the incoming government failed to enact the provisions in the law, favouring a voluntary approach. When only five companies published their gender pay gaps of their own accord, the situation was so embarrassing that then prime minister David Cameron was forced to act and introduce mandatory reporting.

That said, I’m not naïve. I know full well that transparency alone won’t “close” the gender pay gap, despite the name of this bill. Multi-faceted action is needed across all the drivers of the gender pay gap, including the lack of affordable, accessible childcare, the undervaluing of women’s work, the disproportionate impact of caring responsibilities on women and much, much more.

And I know the situation is more urgent than ever. As an emotional Greens Senator Larissa Waters said at the second reading of the bill: “Things are not getting better … Women are getting poorer and poorer … They are living in their cars and in tents and it’s not OK.”

But now that we’re no longer distracted by farce, I believe we can — and will — get down to brass tacks and force more meaningful change. We already are.

This article was first published on Crikey.