After celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD) only weeks ago (8 March), it’s the perfect time to acknowledge the landmark publication of the gender pay gap at companies and organisations around Australia with over 100 employees. It’s especially fitting given the theme of this year’s IWD — invest in women and accelerate progress.
We’ve marked IWD for more than a century, with the first held in March 1911. It’s a day of collective global activism and celebration that belongs to all those committed to forging women’s equality. As feminist, journalist and activist Gloria Steinem reportedly said, “The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist, not to any one organisation, but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.”
IWD is a significant day for women in unions, as members celebrate their campaigns that delivered fairer laws that better support women and equality in the workplace.
Unions have campaigned for equal pay and workplaces free of discrimination. Publicising the ongoing gender pay gap between male and female workers is an important tool for change.
The gender pay gap is not the same as equal pay, which is where women and men are paid the same for doing the same work or different work of equal or comparable value. This has been a legal requirement since 1969.
The gender pay gap is the difference between the average pay of women and men across organisations, industries and the workforce as a whole. It arises from social and economic factors that combine to reduce women’s earning capacity over their lifetime.
The new transparency of pay rates at nearly 5000 employers is the result of important reforms passed by the federal government in 2023. The pay gaps of companies with more than 100 employees are available online on the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) website.