00:00So, the gender pay gap is the difference between the average amount that men and women earn
00:07in Australia.
00:08It is not equal pay.
00:10Equal pay is getting paid the same for the similar or kind of comparable work between
00:15men and women.
00:16That's been the law for 50 years.
00:18The gender pay gap is the difference between average earnings of men and women, and it's
00:22affected by a broad range of factors.
00:26Things like feminised industries or industry sectors that have a lot of women in them,
00:30like aged care and early childhood education, earning less.
00:34It's due to women doing more part-time work over their lifetime, because they do tend
00:39to take on more caring responsibilities, and of course, have children.
00:42So the gap is systemic, it is a very large problem, but it is something that has been
00:47narrowing much faster in recent years.
00:50How slowly is this gap getting smaller?
00:53So the gap is, depends on how you measure it.
00:56The Australian Bureau of Statistics has a measure of full-time earnings, and they have
00:59it at 11.5%.
01:02The Government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency has a much broader and more comprehensive,
01:07I think, measure, which takes into account bonuses, part-time work, full-time work, that
01:12kind of thing.
01:13That's 21.7.
01:14Now, even under the smaller measure, essentially what it means is that today is the last day,
01:20on average, that Australian women are being paid for their work.
01:24I spoke to the person who put together the research for the report, which is the ACTU's
01:29President Michelle O'Neill, who runs the peak body of Australian unions.
01:33Here are her thoughts on the impact of that gap.
01:36If you look at the average pay between men and women, the gap is still so much that it
01:41means that effectively, from today to the end of the year, women are working for free.
01:47Because average pay in Australia still has an 11.5% pay gap between men and women.
01:53So Dan, what's holding back progress on shrinking the gender pay gap?
01:58There's a lot of things that have to happen, like a lot of complex problems.
02:00Think about our inflation issue, think about our housing problem.
02:03There's not one solution.
02:04If there was, we would have pulled that lever by now.
02:07But a lot of things have occurred.
02:09Interestingly, the research suggests that the gap has been closing at three times the
02:14rate under this Government than the last Government.
02:17Now I spoke to Susan Lee, who is the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, the Opposition.
02:23She defended the record of that Government.
02:25But the data is there.
02:26And some of the reasons that that has happened is because there's been a lot of essentially
02:30worker-friendly legislation that's been passed in the past couple of years under the Albanese
02:34Government.
02:35Things like getting rid of pay secrecy and secrecy clauses in contracts, improving the
02:41transparency where companies have to say what their gender gap is, and allowing patent bargaining,
02:47which is not just companies negotiating with their employees or with the union, but across
02:52whole sectors.
02:53And in places like aged care and early childhood education, that's led to massive one-off pay
02:59bumps in the realm of aged care, 28.5 per cent, and in early childhood, a staggered
03:0615 per cent rise over two years.
03:08These are really substantial shifts in those sectors, which are largely the work is done
03:12by women.
03:13So there's a lot going on.
03:15That gap is narrowing.
03:17But still, between 11.5 and 21.7 per cent, that's the average difference between what
03:22men and women are earning in Australia.
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