Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023. No matter which way you cut it, the gender pay gap is unacceptable—whether you take the national gender pay gap of 13.3 per cent or the more accurate 22 per cent as calculated from data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, it's wrong both morally and economically. The 13.3 per cent figure released by the Austrian Bureau of Statistics last month shows that women earn, on average, 87 cents for every $1 earned by a man. If you consider women's average weekly ordinary full-time earnings across all industries and occupations, they earn $253.50 less than men each week. Estimates indicate that at the current rate of progress it would take 26 years to close the full-time gender pay gap.

The story is predictable, and it goes like this. The gender pay gap starts when women first enter the workforce and it increases as they progress in their careers, until they retire with less superannuation than men. The super gap currently sits at 26 per cent. On average women in Goldstein have $54,000 less in super than men when they retire. If the government is serious about women having true economic equality, it has to start resolving these gaps. This is about more than equality, fairness and respect—it's about money. The gender pay gap costs our economy $51.8 billion a year in lost income. Closing this gap is also vital to strengthening Australia's economic prosperity. But first we have to understand what causes it. The gender pay gap is evidence that gender inequality remains a persistent issue in Australian society, with complex drivers both social and cultural. Gender segregation in job type, sexism, and care and family responsibilities all contribute to the uneven playing field. And all these things don't float around in their own universe; they're interconnected, deeply embedded in society and stubborn to move.

There's no escaping the fact that in Australia industries and occupations are highly gender segregated. An example of industrial segregation is the high proportion of women in health care, at around 76 per cent, and in education and training, at around 72 per cent, relative to the low proportion of women in construction, at around 13 per cent, and mining, at 19 per cent. Occupational segregation involves the underrepresentation of women in high-paying roles such as management and chief executives and overrepresentation in low-paying roles such as administration or care work. This segregation in occupation and the concurrent wage gap raises a series of questions about low-status and low-wage work and why feminised industries are innately low paid.

Women want to work and they should be able to work in their chosen field, but in many cases they're not even at the starting line, shut out by conscious and unconscious bias. Those who shout that women are underpaid based on performance or that they somehow don't want better paid jobs due to genetics are way off the mark—and, yes, these people exist. This is not some wild feminist theory, as some would like you to think; job segregation is real and it holds women back in terms of job satisfaction and finances.

Women also do a disproportionate share of unpaid work, which keeps the gender pay gap ticking along. According to the ABS, in 2020-21, women spent, on average, around 30 hours a week on unpaid care and housework, nine hours a week more than men. Care is chronically undervalued in both the home and the workplace. Put simply: it's just expected—'women's work'. I say to the women of Australia: I see you when you roll your eyes.

All these factors occur against a backdrop of Australian women being among the most educated in the world. Australian women are more likely than men to have attained a bachelor degree or higher education qualification, but what happens next? Despite making up almost 50 per cent of the labour force, women comprise only 19 per cent of chief executives and 33 per cent of board members. At the current rate, it'll take 100 years to achieve gender balance in chief executive roles.

Job segregation, gender discrimination and caring responsibilities affect women's economic security over a lifetime and make it more likely that she will earn less than a man, make it less likely that she will advance her career and make it so she accumulates less super and savings than a man and is more likely to live in poverty in retirement. Single women are especially overrepresented in the population below the poverty line.

Until now, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has been striving to close the gender pay gap without the necessary clout. Since 2014, WGEA has been facilitating the public reporting of private and Commonwealth companies or entities with 100 or more employees against six gender equality indicators. Under the Workplace Gender Equality Act, relevant employers report to the organisation in different ways. Fifty-five per cent are standalone organisations and 45 per cent are corporate groups. WGEA cannot currently publish an employer's gender pay gap at an organisational level. It's only been able to publish gender pay gaps by industry, not by individual employers. This means we're not getting the whole picture and it means employers are getting away with paying women less for the same job. This is why the closing the gender pay gap bill is important and needed.

The current approach of publishing aggregate industry gender pay gaps is not creating the transparency, accountability or insights necessary to close it fast enough. Women should not have to wait more than a quarter of a century. At the Jobs and Skills Summit in September last year, I said that women were done with being secondary and I called for this mandated gender pay gap reporting. My words were heard by women in my electorate, across the country and, perhaps, even here in parliament.

The purpose of this bill is to boost pay gap transparency and encourage actions to close gender pay gaps within organisations. It aims to do this by implementing key recommendations of the 2021 review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012—namely, publish organisation gender pay gaps to accelerate action to close them; bridge the action gap with new gender equality standards; support Respect@Work implementation to prevent and address workplace sex based harassment and discrimination; and set WGEA up for future success to support employers to drive gender equality in Australian workplaces.

Bridging the action gap is critical. As it stands currently, employers have to meet the minimum standards, which means merely having a required policy or strategy in place to report the data—that is, the act does not directly impose a requirement for employers to continue to improve beyond having the relevant policies and strategies set out in the minimum standards. This bill bridges the action gap by: requiring relevant employers of 500 or more to commit to achieve and report to WGEA on measurable, genuine targets to improve gender equality in their workplaces; to have policies or strategies which cover all six gender quality indicators; and to provide the executive summary report and industry benchmark report from WGEA to all members of their governing body. These measures that shift the thinking from minimum standards to gender equality standards will make employers more accountable for the workplace standards and culture they set. This is the systems change that we need, and this bill is a good start. I would like to see WGEA explore future opportunities to expand the coverage of the act to include employers with fewer than 100 employees; perhaps a digital solution to streamline supporting smaller organisations to opt in. Employers can play a critical role in achieving gender equality in the workplace. The UK has reported employer-level gender pay gaps since 2017 and there is clear evidence from their experience that publishing employer gender pay gaps leads to companies prioritising gender equality and a lowering of the gender pay gap.

Gender equality is good for everyone. It helps prevent violence against women and girls, and it makes our communities safer and healthier. It is a human right and it's good for the economy. Pay transparency will help achieve gender equality in the workplace. Women want to be equally represented, valued and rewarded at work. I will continue to work with the government on gender policy to elevate our women and girls, and I will on all my days in this place speak up for those who are not in the room. To our girls who are still at school, to the women juggling work and family—including single mums—to the sandwich generation, juggling care of children and older parents, to those who see their super and salaries stalled, to the older women struggling financially, this is another building block among many. I see you, and we are finally getting somewhere. I support this bill.

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