Why top-paying companies have a women problem

Anyone who says fixing the gender pay gap is simple is either a liar or a fool.

Australian companies have been required to pay men and women the same for performing the same work since 1969, so income discrepancies between like-for-like roles are unlikely to be a major driver of Australia’s gender pay gap.

Instead, the gap is driven by everything from discrimination and bias to the over-representation of females in part-time jobs and lower-paid industries, and the much higher likelihood that women will interrupt their careers to look after children.

In other words, the reasons for the gender pay gap are as diverse as they are contested. But some revelations in the 2023-24 data released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency on Tuesday are undeniable. First, the higher the average pay at an employer, the more likely it is to have a large gap in favour of men.

Dig into these numbers in more in detail with our piece exploring the gender pay gap in five charts.

Our lead story on this week’s pay gap report, meanwhile, looked at how the best-paid workers at some of Australia’s top companies are still overwhelmingly men earning million-dollar salaries.

Using the latest salary data from the WGEA,?The Australian Financial Review identified 24 companies at which the top 25 per cent earners were paid more than $1 million a year in 2023-24, including Goodman Group, IFM Investors, Morgan Stanley and UBS. At all but two of these companies, women make up less than a third of million-dollar pay packets.

To help readers make sense of the data on a more personal level, we also developed two interactive tools to help you gauge your own employer's performance:

This tool shows how well your workplace is performing on pay equity.

And then dig even deeper with this interactive that shows how well paid are you compared with others in your firm and industry as a whole.

At the Financial Review Business Summit this week, Macquarie chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake said women’s greater tendency to become primary carers helped explain why they accounted for just 37 per cent of the company’s top 25 per cent of earners.

Wikramanayake said Macquarie had done “a lot of work” with schools and universities to encourage more women to pursue careers in finance. But, in another sign of how difficult it can be for employers to bridge their pay gaps, she also said that trying to boost the share of women in senior positions too quickly had sometimes backfired.

“We’re not going to force females into senior roles,” she said. “I’ve seen that be counterproductive because if they’re just not ready for those roles, it’s stressful for them. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s bad messaging to other females.”

You can find our full coverage of the gender pay gap here.

Elsewhere this week, Chief Executive Women (CEW) CEO Lisa Annese tells BOSS editor Sally Patten that we risk fuelling greater opposition to workplace diversity programs by giving so much air time to their detractors. Chief executives Malcolm Jull (MarketBoomer) and Carrie Barker GAICD (The Projects*) reveal the best career advice they picked up from training in the pool with Olympic swimming legend Ian Thorpe. And Ingenia chief executive John Carfi explains why he gave up ultra-processed foods and doesn’t eat breakfast.

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Rich List

Australia’s 75 richest women now control a record $179b Tech, mining and a booming beauty sector helped fuel a 19 per cent surge in fortunes in the past year, as 11 new faces made the list.

Meet the women controlling the wealth of Australia’s richest families Family offices in Australia have traditionally been run by men but as wealth shifts to the next generation and tech fortunes change the game, more women are taking the reins.

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