The average salary for men in Campaspe is just under $60,000 a year, with the median worker earning $55,539 per annum, in stark contrast to the average and median of $43,520 and $39,886 respectively for women.
The gap has slowly been rising, with the median male salary increasing by $8365 since 2011-12 and the female equivalent rising $7913.
The gender pay gap is stark across the Goulburn Valley, with women in the Greater Shepparton and Moira council areas also earning $15,000 less.
The figures, which cover 2017-18, don’t take the split between full-time work and part-time work into account, with women making up more than two thirds of all part-time employees across the country in 2020.
They also don’t take unemployment figures into account — with the female unemployment rate at 8.1 per cent compared to 5.9 per cent for men after more than 100,000 women lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Workplace Gender Equality Agency director Libby Lyons said the pay gap in the Campaspe Shire aligned with the situation nationwide.
“The data from our agency shows there are pay gaps favouring men in every industry and every occupation across Australia,” she said.
“Even female-dominated industries such as healthcare and social assistance have a pay gap in favour of men, despite the fact 80 per cent of their workers are women.”
She said the pay gap was part of a broader cultural problem.
“For the last 100 or so years, men have been the breadwinners while women have been the traditional homemakers,” she said.
“As a result, the value of the work traditionally done by men is considered higher than the value of the work traditionally done by women.
“A car mechanic needs the same sort of educational attainment as an early childhood educator, and yet car mechanics on average earn far more — that suggests to me we value our cars more than we value our children.
“These are cultural issues around the value we as a community place on the work traditionally done by women and men.”
Other factors for the pay gap include discrimination and bias, women taking a disproportionate share of unpaid caring and domestic work, and time out of the workforce impacting on career progression.
“For every hour of unpaid care and domestic work men do in Australia today, women do an hour and 46 minutes — we simply don’t have the time in the day to dedicate to progressing our careers,” Ms Lyons said.
To address the gap, she said it was important for men and women to have equal access to flexible work and paid parental leave.
“Having different paid parental leave schemes for primary and secondary carers is nonsense — women and men are parents and we all have a responsibility to bring up our children,” she said.
“Over half of employers in our dataset don’t offer any parental leave at all.
“If men can’t work flexibly or take parental leave then it leaves their female partners with little or no choice.”
However, trends are showing the gap has reduced over the past eight years, thanks to employers taking action within their organisations.
“If every employer did a gender pay gap analysis, worked out the exact problem in their workplace and took action to remediate those problems, we wouldn’t have a gender pay gap,” Ms Lyons said.
“I just hope because of the upheaval caused by the pandemic we don’t see employers revert back to practices of old.
“We know the business case for gender equality is very clear — we have proved a causal link between an increased percentage of women in leadership roles and improved productivity, profitability and performance.”
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