WGEA CEO Mary Wooldridge on the difference between equal pay and the gender pay gap

The conversation around closing the gender pay gap has been gathering momentum, due in large part to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s latest data release from more than 5000 firms in Australia.

With the national average sitting at 22.8%, WGEA uses data from employers to learn about what’s happening to create this gap and how to improve gender equality in the workplace.

As CEO of WGEA, Mary Wooldridge is at the forefront of this change and she’s hard at work making sure that people’s understanding of what contributes to the gender pay gap in this country is crystal clear.

While the gender pay gap has been coming down over the last ten years, Wooldridge says progress has been slow and even stalled in the last two years.

“It’s really important to understand that the gender pay gap is different to equal pay. Equal pay for equal work or comparable work has been the law in this country for over 50 years,” she says.

“The gender pay gap is different. It’s that sum of the average men’s earnings and the average women’s earnings, and looking at the differential between the two”.

“Some people seek to conflate the two to say that there’s no gender pay gap, but there is,” says Wooldridge, adding that “companies need to be vigilant” every year to ensure that equal pay for equal work is maintained within their organisations.

Wooldridge shared this advice during her keynote session for Women’s Agenda’s new video app series, The Keynotes.

“No matter how you measure the gender pay gap, there’s a differential between what men and women earn,” says Wooldridge.

In WGEA’s calculations, they include part-time workers and casual workers. The agency also uses total pay rather than just base salary, which includes things like bonuses, superannuation and overtime.

“We think that reflects reality,” Wooldridge says about these calculations, noting that by analysing part-time salaries, the organisation seeks to remove the differential between men and women.

“When you look at things like ‘women choosing to work in lower paid interest industries’ or ‘women choosing to take time out of the workforce’, they are contributors to the gender pay gap, but they’re not the only contributors and the gap still exists,” says Wooldridge.

One example she gives is that in the healthcare and social assistance industry, 80% of the workforce is female. And yet, just over 40% of CEOs are women, and the gender pay gap is over 20%.

“Even in highly feminised industries, we see a gender pay gap with men taking more of those senior roles and women taking the lower paid roles,” Wooldridge says, noting that it’s also important to take stock of the lower remuneration given to traditionally female-dominated industries and the value we place on work that often involves caring responsibilities.

Flexible work is another critical part of the gender pay gap conversation as Wooldridge says “there’s real challenges about the expectation of the woman continuing to fulfil that [caregiver] role and potentially not being given the opportunities to return to the workforce in a part-time or flexible way”, such as after having children.

“And in many cases, men would like to take that role too,” she says, “but there’s still gender stereotypes”.

Understanding what needs to change to close the gender pay gap is just the beginning, and Wooldridge encourages employers to step up and do the work needed to reach equality.

Now that WGEA has released the gender pay gaps of Australian companies to the public, Wooldridge says there’s an opportunity for employers to put a plan in place “so that all people can be fairly and equally valued at work”.

This article was first published by Women’s Agenda.