Equal Pay Day for 2022 is today

According to the Australian Government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency, 29 August is Australia's 2022 'Equal Pay Day'. Women have had to work the past 60 days to catch up to what men earnt as of the EOFY.

Disappointingly, the gender pay gap has increased in the last 6 months by 0.3 percentage points, according to Workplace Gender Equality Agency.

Mary Wooldridge, the agency's director, stated: "Fixing the gender pay gap requires leadership and commitment."

“We are calling on employers to take immediate action to reduce the gender pay gap by conducting a pay gap audit. This will give them a clear picture of what’s driving their pay gaps and the opportunities for improvement, that will benefit their employees and their business over time.”

Alex Pusenjak, Fluent Commerce's global VP, people & culture said: "The first step to ensuring gender and pay equity in your organisation is to educate your leadership team on what it is and why it’s important, before you get to the ‘how’."

"You can waste time creating a complicated program that ultimately doesn’t see the light of day, so you have to ‘jump in’ and start somewhere. What helps you do this is to take a barometer reading of where the organisation is in relation to DEIB [diversity, equity, belonging, and inclusion] and employee engagement surveys are a great way to do this."

Mr Pusenjak suggested: "If your organisation is committed to gender equity and provides a flexible and supportive environment for men and women, seek out organisations to partner with that align with your values."

"It’s really difficult to believe that a gender pay gap still exists in 2022, but organisations have to take action. Words are not enough. The pace of change has been so slow. DEIB isn’t an ‘issue’ for the CEO or the Senior Leadership Team to ‘resolve’ — it’s everyone’s responsibility. Systems and processes have to be adopted where everyone has accountability to ensure employees are being remunerated fairly and equally, regardless of their gender, and this needs to be assessed at regular intervals to enable real change to be made.”

Jacqueline Jayne of KnowBe4 commented: "Businesses have a role to play ensuring that as well as being paid equally, women are equally represented in leadership positions, recruiters receive unconscious bias training, and there are fair policies around parental leave."

"STEM needs to become available to girls early in their school curriculum, and cyber security needs to become more accessible as a whole. The latter requires more understanding and opportunity at a grassroots level to not only level the gender playing field, but to address a rapidly growing skills gap. One thing we can do as women in the industry is to mentor young women early in their careers which makes access to the industry more inclusive and far less daunting for young women."

"Women are increasingly finding their footing in the technology sector, but there remain legacy issues that should be dealt with today to eliminate gender from every technology conversation."

In conversation with HR Leader, Kim Wiegand, founder of Julip stated: "The fact that there is a widening gap is not only disappointing, it’s devastating for the employees and employers advocating for and driving change."

She added: "The vast difference across industries shows the extent of the true gap with professional, scientific and technical services recording a gap of over 25 per cent. These organisations have a significant amount of work to rectify this gap. It astounds me that this is such a prevalent issue, particularly when women form a significant proportion of employees within these industries."

Ms Wiegand commented on the impact of the gender pay gap: "The persistent gender pay gap plays a role in family decisions about opportunities for women and impacts a woman’s ability to be independent. This is all correctable, through choice. That is employers and senior leaders choosing to correct the pay gap, consistently."

"We all have a part to play in changing this trend once and for all!" Ms Wiegand concluded. 

Fay Calderone, partner at Hall & Wilcox highlighted how important data use is. She said: "The first step for employers aiming to proactively address the pay gap is to gather the data and undertake a like for like comparison of roles and self-correct. This includes examining cultural and systemic drivers of the pay gap in their workplace."

She continued: "Starting at the beginning, there should not be a pay gap between graduates for example and their careers' trajectories should be carefully tracked to ensure one does not develop over time by ensuring we tackle issues such as 'flexism': where people are not given valuable work and in turn paid and promoted less for working flexibly. We also need to get more men taking parental leave and working flexibly. Where flexibility is offered indiscriminately, flexism and in turn the flex pay gap, is less likely to result."

Ms Calderone also stated: "We need to take a long hard look at the way work is valued in our care sectors that are dominated by women. This will be the topic of discussion at the upcoming job summit but given these sectors are also mostly government funded, this will require agreement between employees, their representatives, unions and government to start to fix this very big problem that has been highlighted and perpetuated by the pandemic. Those looking after our most vulnerable simply shouldn’t be undervalued and while this is the case, the pay gap will also persist."