Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Marielle Smith for her question and for the incredible job she does on behalf of the people of South Australia and when it comes to gender equality and advocating for policies that support gender equality. I would also like to acknowledge Ms Mary Wooldridge in the chamber today and her team from WGEA for the hard work that they've done to get us to this point today. I would like to acknowledge the effort that has gone into raising awareness and publicity of this important release today.

WGEA first published national gender pay gap data in 2014, and it is fitting that, 10 years later, we've reached the point of publishing employer-level data. Publishing the gender pay gaps of big employers was a commitment we took to the last election, as Senator Smith outlined. We brought that reform to the parliament a year ago, and now today we're taking the crucial step towards fairness in Australian workplaces. This is an Australian first, and there are a lot of takeaways from the data released today. We can see a median gender pay gap of 19 per cent when it comes to total remuneration, and that's equivalent to over $18,000 per year. Thirty per cent of Australian employers have a gender pay gap of within five per cent of zero, which is very promising, but around two-thirds of employers, just over 60 per cent, have a gender pay gap above that, which means the majority of Australian workplaces have work to do to close their gender pay gap.

In every industry in Australia, the median of what a woman is paid is less than the median of what a man is paid. By exposing these pay gaps, sharing this data and shining some light on it, we're giving power to both employees and employers to drive real change.