Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the first woman to represent the electorate of Dunkley, named after the formidable Louisa Dunkley, a campaigner and advocate for equal pay, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak on women's equality in the workforce. We know that in Australia the gender pay gap is at a stubborn 14 per cent. Why does such a pay gap exist? It's a combination of a number of factors. One is gender patterns in industries of employment. We know that even in female dominated organisations and industries women earn about $15,000 a year less than their male colleagues. The second element is the concentration of men in senior roles. Men absolutely dominate senior roles. Female CEOs are only 37.6 per cent of all CEOs in female dominated industries, and in male dominated industries it's a paltry 6.3 per cent of CEOs who are female. We also know the third factor in the gender pay gap is a persistence of biases and barriers to women's career progression. For example, we know that women over 55 are often seen as losing their value in the workplace. Men who are about 55 and over have the greatest chance of becoming a CEO. Women who are over 55 have the same chance of becoming a CEO as a 24-year-old male.

Dr Leonora Risse from RMIT and the Harvard Kennedy School has written a terrific article in the BroadAgenda setting out some of the issues for the gender pay gap because of the COVID pandemic. She has argued that the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women means that we need to have a dashboard of multiple indicators to give us a full picture of the widening gaps between men's and women's workforce outcomes. In addition to the gender pay gap, we should look at the employment gap. As a result of the pandemic, there are 715,000 fewer jobs for women than men. We should look at the gap in the number of hours worked. Three months into the pandemic, 9.4 per cent of employed women were working zero hours. We should also look at the unemployment rate gap. It is still rising for women—it's gone beyond that of men—and is at 7½ per cent.

Dr Risse has also argued that we should look at the workforce participation gap. In May it had plunged for women to below 58 per cent, the lowest since 2007. In the blink of an eye, we've gone backwards 13 years. We should look at the caring and the cleaning gap. Women before the pandemic did more unpaid work in the household than men. It's now gone from 3½ hours more a week to five hours more a week. And we should look at the stress and safety gap. Women are more likely to be the frontline workers—the health, the aged-care, the teachers and the early education workers. What has this government—

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What has this government focused on for stimulation to get us out of the COVID period and the recession? Predominantly, investment in infrastructure and construction. While, in themselves, they are good ways of stimulating the economy, they certainly aren't industries that are benefiting women in the workplace. About 12 per cent of the construction industry are women, and there is no plan to increase that from the federal government. I'd like to shout out to women in construction, who are pushing hard for support for women to take up apprenticeships and work in the construction industry.

What else has this government done? The first and so far the only industry to lose JobKeeper is child care—early education and child care—comprised predominantly of women workers, and the early access superannuation scheme hurts women. Women, on average, have 40 per cent less superannuation than men on retirement as it is, without having to draw down on their superannuation early to get through the pandemic. Research says that women are accessing their superannuation early just to pay for basics to get through this current time because they are so badly affected.

We know that it's going to be a hard road ahead to get gender equality in the workplace, but there are solutions. As Dr Risse said, we can disaggregate statistics by gender to make it clear. We can have more women involved in developing policy. Governments can lead by example and employ more women. We can have companies being more transparent in their plans to close their gender pay gap and have women in leadership. We can have paternity leave for men.

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