Equal pay is still a pipe dream. Photo: Getty
Equal Pay Day – a day that signifies the gender pay gap between men and women was last Friday.
It got me thinking about the irony of setting aside a day for something that doesn’t actually exist.
Because, of course, there are all sorts of things that we have set aside days of the year for, like Labour Day, the King’s Birthday, Melbourne Cup Day or Anzac Day.
Then there’s the lesser-known days, such as doughnut day, burger day, pizza day, a baby boomers appreciation day, and – my personal favourite – lemon juice day.
But the glaringly obvious difference between all of these days, and Equal Pay Day, is that they represent things that have happened or exist.
Equal Pay Day, on the other hand, is just a target, and so Equal Pay Day is an aspirational reminder that the work is not yet done, and women still do not, on average, receive equal pay to men.
To this, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) says, the average woman in Australia still has to “effectively [work] an extra 56 days of the year to earn the same as the average man” and that Equal Pay Day is “a symbolic day dedicated to raising awareness of the gender pay gap”.
The gender pay gap does not represent the difference in pay that a woman might receive to that of a man doing the same job.
So, for example, it doesn’t deal with whether a woman employed as a carpenter would be paid the same as a man employed as a carpenter with the same skills and experience.
The gender pay gap, as the ACTU puts it, “is the difference between the average earnings for men and women, expressed as a percentage of men’s average earnings”.
It is a macro or workforce-wide measure of the inequity that exists between men and women at work, focusing on what the average woman earns as a percentage of the average man.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, the gender pay gap has been improving, which is to say, reducing, over the past 10 years.
In January 2015 the gender pay gap stood at 18.7 per cent of the average male income. It has narrowed to 13.3 per cent, which the ACTU says is the lowest on record.
So, although the situation has been improving, there is still a way to go before the gap is closed.
This is a problem which, as ACTU president Michele O’Neil says, is due to the reality that women “are more likely to be in casual and insecure jobs, have disproportionate caring responsibilities, and face sex discrimination and harassment in the workplace”.
Those casual and insecure jobs, such as in aged care or child care, are frequently less well paid than other jobs which are more traditionally performed by men, like those in trades and services.
Earlier this year, the government passed legislation which will enable the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) to publish gender pay gap reports provided by all private sector companies with more than 100 employees.
Although companies with more than 100 employees are already required to report on their gender pay gap each year, the changes require that data to be published from next year onwards.
The new laws will provide greater transparency about the gender pay gap, and enable businesses, regulators and the general public to get a clearer picture of where problems persist, and then make more targeted decisions about what can be done about it.
The government is also proposing to amend the Fair Work Act to make it illegal to discriminate against someone because they are a victim of family violence.
This additional protection for an issue which disproportionately affects women should also help to inch closer to pay equality.
With more work still to be done, the WGEA says “in recent years, progress on workplace gender equality has stalled”, something it seems to attribute in part to data that indicates, despite the reporting requirements, “employers are not necessarily following up with actions to address gender pay gaps”.
The changes to allow greater transparency from the WGEA, which were resisted by the previous Morrison government, will motivate workplaces to work more closely to achieve gender pay equality, and shouldn’t result in a scenario Morrison once claimed would “set one set of employees against another set of employees”.
Righto, ScoMo.
The narrowing we can already see should stand as proof that for one gender to win, the other doesn’t have to lose, and that progress is a beautiful thing.
So with debates about workplace productivity raging, let us remember that fair outcomes create incentives for people to give their best.
Hopefully, in the not-too-far-off future, we can truly celebrate Equal Pay Day as the day on the calendar that equal pay was achieved, rather than as a reminder of what it isn’t.
Scott Riches is a former union official with the Electrical Trades Union Victorian branch, and a practising employment lawyer. He is also a volunteer in the employment clinic at the Fitzroy Legal Service