Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about Equal Pay Day, which occurred on 4 September 2015. It is a day that highlights the fact that Australian women are working an extra 65 days at the end of a financial year to earn the same amount as men. It is a stark reminder that, while women in Australia are making progress in relation to gender equality, we are not there yet, and some would say we still have a long way to go.

In Australia today, the pay gap is 17.9 per cent, or $284.20 per week. Whilst this is an improvement on previous figures, and it is good to see that the gap is narrowing, it is still disappointing and, quite frankly, it is unacceptable. This profoundly affects a woman's life in many different ways. It affects her long-term economic security and it makes her more vulnerable to poverty and homelessness in later life. The gender disparity in superannuation is even higher, with women retiring with only 65 per cent of superannuation that men do. This means that a woman has to work 15 more years than a man to retire with the same income as a man.

The question is: how does this happen? The difference in pay can start as early as a woman's first job and statistics suggest it carries right through a woman's career and is exacerbated if she takes time off to have children or moves into part-time roles to care for children or family members. This is also despite women achieving strongly at school and at university. The fact is that the pay gap is complex, but it is also far too big. There are issues of workplace and other structures, workforce incentives, taxation and welfare impacts, and societal attitudes.

Addressing the pay gap will take a concerted effort on the part of the government, business and the community. Tangible and practical change can only occur in partnership. The government is currently engaged in consultation in relation to tax reform and I have been talking with Australian business leaders and owners to explore how tax reform can drive changes to our tax system, leading to more jobs for Australian women, better incentives and increased financial and economic security, both now and into the future. There is a lot of interest and goodwill to make a difference.

The government is determined to help more women get into the workforce and ensure that they receive equal pay for the work they do. We know that Australian women are now working more than ever before. The participation rate for working women aged between 15 and 64 rose to 71.5 per cent in July—the highest in Australia's history. There are 1.67 million Australian women aged 15 to 60 who are still not participating in the workforce, and we must ensure we remove the barriers that prevent these women from working. Increasing women's workforce participation by just six per cent could add $25 billion or around one per cent to Australia's GDP each year. Not only will increasing women's workforce participation improve the lives of individual women and their families but also it is essential to our future economic growth and prosperity as a country.

The government last year committed to improving women's workforce participation in Australia. We remain strongly committed to the G20 goal to reduce the gap between men and women's workforce participation by 25 per cent, by 2025. We are also focused on reducing the structural barriers that impede women's workforce participation. We are delivering a more flexible and responsive childcare system, providing more options for working families to balance working life with their caring responsibilities.

Our Jobs and Small Business package is helping small business grow and contribute to employment growth, which is important to almost 670,000 women who operate a business. Over a third of small-business operators in Australia are women. In terms of pay equity, business and government need to ask what it is we can do in our own sphere of influence that will make a difference. With the pay gap in the private sector sitting at 21.3 per cent, many employers are already looking into whether pay disparities exist within their own businesses and why.

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency performs an important function. It shines a light on pay inequity through its data collection from reporting organisations. Evidence suggests the gender pay gap narrows in companies when it is has been identified and measured. The government has streamlined this reporting, making sure that we are not burdening business with unnecessary red tape, whilst still being able to gather useful data. Data needs to be useful for industry benchmarking and to provide the information individual employers need to take action, to address workplace gender equality and pay equity concerns.

I will continue to work with the Leader of the Government in the Senate and Minister for Employment, Eric Abetz, and with business and women's sector representatives to get the reporting balance right. Additionally, the government is working towards closing the gender pay gap through various initiatives that support more women into higher paid occupations and industries. This includes improving gender diversity in leadership positions, on boards and in decision-making roles.

We know that a key reason the gender pay gap is so large in Australia is that many male-dominated industries and jobs have higher rates of pay. Male-dominated industries, like mining and electricity, gas, water and waste services, have the highest average weekly earnings. Assumptions about jobs for women and jobs for men are mirrored by attitudes at home. Men are the primary breadwinners in over three-quarters of Australian households while, on average, women do three-quarters of the total domestic labour. And 70 per cent of primary caregivers in Australia are women.

To make real headway in addressing the discrepancies between men and women, in pay and work, we must change our attitudes to paid and unpaid work. We know that many men want to take on more caring responsibilities but are trapped in a male bread-winner role. Recent reporting has only confirmed this situation further. They are more likely to request paid parental leave or flexible work arrangements than previously but have their requests denied. This is not just detrimental to men's ability to participate in care but also to women's capacity to engage in work. Most importantly, the children are also affected.

We need to allow men and women to make the choices that best suit their families, and they need to be supported in these efforts. We can also support female students to make career choices in traditionally 'male' and more highly paid careers—for example, in the STEM industries: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We can support Australian women to work in traditionally male-dominated growth industries, like advanced manufacturing, agriculture, energy and resources, medical technology and mining technology. The government is investing $12 million to improve the focus on STEM subjects in primary and secondary schools, across the country, for both girls and boys. This investment is a vital part of the Australian government's Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda. Restoring the focus on STEM subjects in our schools will ensure that young Australians are equipped with the necessary skills for the economy of the future.

We have also provided $440,000 over two years to continue the Australian Women in Resources Alliance e-mentoring program, in collaboration with the Australian Mines and Metals Association. This industry-led initiative is dedicated to helping employers attract, retain and reap the rewards of women in the workplace and ensures that women are able to reach their full potential in the mining and resources sector. None of us can work in isolation to increase women's employment or to address the gender pay gap. The government is committed to working with the private sector to realise the economic and social benefits of more women in the workforce. As the largest employer of Australian women, I look to the private sector so that they can look at how they can improve their employment opportunities for women and shine the light on pay equity. Working together, I hope—and I know—that Equal Pay Day will become the day of celebration that it should be.

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Showing the shared commitment to Equal Pay Day, I also want to talk about the fact that Friday, 4 September was Equal Pay Day in our nation. Each year—and I have spoken many times on this issue—I remind people that we do not 'celebrate' Equal Pay Day, we acknowledge it. Equal Pay Day being on 4 September is a symbolic indication that 65 days is how many days a woman had to work this year to have equal pay with a man. As Senator Cash said in her contribution, there will perhaps be a time when we will be able to celebrate Equal Pay Day on 1 July, the same day for men and women—which, indeed, would be equal pay. Senator Cash talked about things that were being done in our country. I quote and requote Justice Mary Gaudron after the 1998 case. She said:

We got equal pay once—

that was the 1975 case—

then we got it again, and then we got it again, and now we still don't have it.

Those words that Justice Gaudron spoke in 1998 are just as real today. In terms of progress, I think there has been acknowledgement of the need and there has been ongoing effort. The work done by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency continues to remind us of exactly what is happening in our nation at the moment. They put out their statistical snapshot—and many of the stats that Senator Cash quoted are in there. But one thing I wanted to point to in particular is the issue about individual companies actually developing their own strategies to look at themselves, see what is happening in their own company and bring out a gender pay gap analysis. In last year's statistics from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency—and these are on the basis of reports they get from companies in our nation with over 100 employees—based on the reporting organisations that did conduct a gender pay gap analysis, last year nearly half of the companies, or about 46 per cent of the companies, went one step further and took action in their own company to address their gender pay gap. Of these, the majority said they reviewed the remuneration outcomes of individual employees, followed by identifying the causes of the gaps. They actually looked at what was happening in their workplace and saw why women were getting less money than men. It seems really straightforward. We have talked about it since the seventies but now, in 2015, some companies have actually taken action. They looked at the decision-making processes in the companies and designed an action plan to address the causes. Based on this action, they were able to see what was happening and what they could make happen into the future to make sure we get a little bit closer than the 65 extra days a woman has to work each year to have equal pay with men.

Tonight—and I will do this again in another contribution—I want to pay credit to the work of Liz Broderick, who has just retired as our Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Liz made her final public presentation at the Press Club last week and she raised a number of issues there about genuine equality in our nation. She said:

Gender equality is not a battle of sexes, it's a battle for equality, a battle that men and women must wage side by side. The empowerment of women is about the empowerment of humanity.

That is true. And tonight I want to talk about the actions that Liz has inspired around companies taking action themselves to look at the gender pay gap, the causes of inequality in their own companies. As we can see, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has brought forward stats. But the male workplace organisation Champions of Change, which was inspired by Liz's work as Sex Discrimination Commissioner, has gone one step further. They have actually set up within their companies a commitment that there would be movements towards real equality. First of all, they had to identify that they were not there—and at the beginning of the process not all of these male champions, the leaders of large companies in Australia, truly acknowledged that there was a gap. They knew there were variations in payment and conditions but, until they actually talked with their employees and management teams to identify what was happening, they were largely unaware of the range of issues which impact on women in the workplace—and now they are putting into place real actions to make change. And that looks at hours of work, flexibility of work, work demands and the definition of 'merit' in the workplace—all those things we have talked about so often. But, really, the important aspect is that they have identified the need for change.

While people understand that there is a gap that costs women several hundred dollars each working week in terms of their take-home pay, these leaders have not said, 'It's too hard to do this, it takes too much time and there's too much red tape'—all those obstacles we hear about. Instead, they have actually shown true leadership. They have said, 'We can make a difference,' and they have worked with their workforce to ensure change occurs. That is something we are asking all employers to do. This is not somebody else's problem; this is a problem for all of us to identify in our community—that there is genuine inequality. As Justice Gaudron said, we keep on winning this equal pay acknowledgement but we just do not seem to be able to get it right. So there is a challenge in 2016. In 2015 the equal pay case has been acknowledged. In 2015 we saw the figures plummet from 18.1 per cent to 17.9 per cent. That is a cause for acknowledgement but not for celebration. For all the reasons that Senator Cash acknowledged, the challenge for us is to make a genuine commitment that we will do better—that we will not be asking what somebody else is doing about these issues, we will be implementing change in our own workplaces. That can take many different forms in the workplace, but what we must have is an acknowledgement that there will be change.

BPW Australia has acknowledged the process of Equal Pay Day for many years. They have actually said that collaboration between government and business employees is a long-term solution to closing the gap, but that women can take action now. An online pay and contract negotiation checklist, 'Know Your Value', can help secure better pay and conditions. We are encouraging women to seek out and to consider their own financial decisions, to maximise retirement incomes. We know that the long-term implications are very serious, with superannuation changes. We are going to have an inquiry in this place about women and super. This really reinforces the fact that this pay gap causes women to have significantly reduced superannuation earnings and security into the future. That means that the inequality continues.

BPW Australia says that we actually have online tools that help us to take control of our own salaries and wages. Too often there is a myth that women do not have the ability to negotiate effectively for their own pay and conditions. With support they can do so.

It is more than likely that in 12 months' time in this place many women and men will talk about Equal Pay Day 2016. I sincerely hope that it will be earlier in the year than 4 September. It would be very useful as we bring those days down closer to 1 July that we can see we are making progress. The partnerships that Senator Cash referred to in her contribution must be active, and we can do that. It is not just government that can make these changes. But government does have a role to play, and the work that is done by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, which is actually funded by government, provides the tools to employers and employees to make change in their own workplaces. So in 2016 we may even knock that Equal Pay Day back right into the middle of August, and that would be some significant change to take into the future.