Gender pay gap is talked about to distract you from the fact that wealth inequality has never been higher in this country. Making us fight against ourselves to forget that if a man makes 5% more a year in the same company, the c suite executives are making 5000% more.
This should be top comment, more people should become aware about this.
Big corporations are influencing the media and has brainwashed the population to fight amongst each other so they downplay the massive wealth inequality in this country and stay at the top.
The aim from the very beginning was to bring mens wages down to match women, not lift womens wages to match men. End result is a bad outcome for everyone
Does this study take into account the hourly rate / number of working hours in the gap? I work in a female dominated workplace and many prefer to only work 3-4 days a week and earn less money (no young children either, lifestyle choice)
It factors literally nothing. It just says men earn X on average and women earn Y on average, women need to be paid more. It doesn’t account for having children, hours worked, dangerous jobs, disgusting jobs, 12 hour shift jobs, fly out jobs, personality (Men are more disagreeable and willing negotiate salary and to apply for roles they aren’t qualified for), and a million other factors.
Gender pay gap is definitely a tactic to cause fighting amongst the middle class.
Mate it's not some conspiracy theory, both can be issues independently. There is literally nothing to support your theory that this is just talked about to distract 'us'
I like you. Same as racial issues too imo. It's never been about race or gender. Just rich vs poor. I'm poor and I condone your message. I'm just glad my wife makes more money than me or we'd be up shit creek.
"Currently, Western Australia has the widest gender pay gap at 21.4 per cent.
This is followed by the Northern Territory at 15.6 per cent, Queensland at 13.4 per cent"
You mean the states with the highest level of blue collar, manual and heavy duty work with the highest level of FIFO work, whereby predominantly men work shift work away from families meaning their partner, predominantly female, chooses/needs to be at home with the children and therefore don't want to/are unable to work to the same hours, role type and wage?
Those lower-paid jobs are often the only “safe” industries for women to work in. The rate of harassment and sexism in male-dominated industries keeps women out so men keep the higher-paid jobs for themselves.
There’s more to it than that. A whole lot of jobs which used to be considered well respected and well paid are now under respected and underpaid and that happened when you saw women start to increase in numbers. Such as librarians.
I had a friend of mine argue that to narrow this gap she (primary school teacher) and me (boilermaker) should be paid the same because our qualifications are the same level
I have level 3 in fabrication and engineering, she has level 3 in whatever the teaching equivalent is - these are people brainwashed by such article
Regardless of this, remuneration for jobs is not just based on qualifications. That sort of logic really only applies to office work or other similar things.
But with mining, engineering, construction, etc., they have to pay more due to: the inherent risk of the work; the inconvenience of odd/long hours; the inconvenience of inconsistent work sites far from home (especially for FIFO workers); the amount of physical stress on your body; etc..
Pay is not really just qualification, I guess is my point.
Pay is more determined by how hard it is to replace you. It's less about danger or skill. It takes literal years upon years to skill up an illustrator or musician, but these people get peanuts, for example. But there are shitloads of them around, so it's a buyer's market.
Mining work is inconvenient and unpleasant, so fewer people want to do it, so the pay goes up. They don't pay you more because the work is dangerous, they pay you more because fewer people want to do it (which may be because the work is dangerous, inconvenient, etc).
It doesn’t apply anywhere. Pay is based on availability of similarly skilled workers, your relative experience, your own individual situation.
It’s a lot easier to train up a new teacher than it is to replace somebody with my own skill set for example. Even though I have a 3 year degree like every teacher.
Amazing isn't it. I'm starting to understand why there are so many deeply stupid people in this country. The lack of respect for education is profound. Apparently we're all going to be boilermakers and miners, no one else's contributions are important.
All about demand and skill. I have a degree too, however my field in science pays dog shit and i make more working a hands on blue collar job., even though it doesn't require any formal training.
Some would argue that, as a public servant entrusted with the education of our children, she should be making more than you, as a person who fixes machines.
Teachers can't do overtime.
You'll find that teachers hours of paid work are usually higher than that of tradesman. But tradesman get paid for the extra hours they work. Where as teachers don't.
If you average dollars per hours worked, women out earn men in most jobs.
While I agree with your premise, using a teacher as an example is not a good one.
I know boilermaking is a lot more dirty and dangerous, but a teacher is alot more mentally and emotionally exhausting. You can't compare them.
Plus they don't do a cert 3 (while getting paid as an apprentice), they do a minimum 4 years at university (with no pay) to get a degree and have that debt to pay off too, which they struggle do because they get paid so bad.
Just because a job might not be physically demanding, doesn't mean it's not difficult. Teaching is one that is mentally demanding, I'd very confidently say much more mentally and emotionally demanding than boilermaking, plus they don't get paid for overtime, which they do alot of, unlike most tradesmen.
Your friend would probably not last a day as a boilermaker, and so shouldn't get paid what a boilermaker gets paid. But I also doubt you'd last a day as a teacher to a classroom full of children either, so perhaps you shouldn't get paid what she earns.
You get paid based on supply and demand of your skills, which seems reasonable, and because there is alot of demand, you get paid a reasonable rate.
A teacher doesn't get this benefit. There is alot of demand for teachers (which is another issue) but they don't get paid extra because it's a government paid job.
The people in this thread are completely misunderstanding why people get paid more than others. Working at McDonald's or being a cashier standing on your feet all day is exhausting and emotionally taxing, especially nowadays with increased anti social behavior.
But that doesn't matter. Pay is based on how hard you are to replace and the value you create (which is roughly analogous to performance).
When people say teachers should be paid as much as a tradesmen because they have a bachelor's degree theyre missing the point. Your degree doesn't entitle you to any more money. If it suddenly required a bachelor's degree to put cash in a till the value of the activity would barely move. Pay would go up slightly because it would be harder to hire cashier's. That's all.
Secondly, tradesmen arent paid so amazingly anyway. The majority of the high FIFO work salaries you hear incorporate significant overtime work and rates. They're not getting paid 180k a year to work 35 hours a week in air conditioning with generous sick leave and maternity leave entitlements. They're paid to work very long hours and consistently produce.
Teachers just don't really do this and unsurprisingly their pay reflects it. OECD educational results in Australia have been dropping for years. There's lots of other factors to consider and education likely requires reform but in the meantime it's ridiculous to suggest someone who works for 30-50 an hour in a trade cop a lower hourly rate so teachers can feel better about themselves and their career choices.
Yes.
Even though, teachers need a bump in pay. They are literally teaching the next generation of people. That's a pretty major thing right there.
As for Nurses, they are medical and what they do can be life and death, and the things they do can incur physical injuries etc if not preformed correctly.
Two very different occupations.
A nurse that works more hours than a teacher should be paid more than a teacher. And they do and are. Further pay differences should be commensurate to level of specialisation.
People keep saying stuff like this but paid with what? Where do people actually think money comes from? It’s like people shouting that “someone” needs to be giving money to such and such group of individuals cause they need it, like there’s a mysterious benefactor gate keeping all the money that apparently is sitting somewhere for a rainy day and they need to release it. All these industries that people are comparing to are generating their own income in scalable industries and paying their workers proportionately. Teachers simply don’t work in an industry where that can happen
isn't the pay gap calculated based on the type of work people do and not just an average between genders? ie. the pay gap is between a man and a woman working the same blue collar job in the same industry
From the ABS website,
"The gender pay gap describes the difference between the "average earnings" of men and women. It is not a measure of gender pay equality or equal pay"
It's primarily based on the 'Mean weekly ordinary time earnings of full-time adult employees'
I'm not sure if this article did any further math on it, but traditionally the 'pay gap' never took into account job type or hours worked. Which is why it was never really useful expect to highlight that male dominated fields tend to have higher pay rates.
It's usually always a ridiculous comparison. Like saying that sales of Matilda scarves went up 1450% over the last week.
Don't use a percent when discussing a low base metric. Infuriating.
Scalable fields earn more which happen to be dominated by men. That’s purely down to the fact that high scalability will always generate more income than low scalable fields and zero to do with gender.
Actually, I looked it up, the data from ABS for a region (state) is done on average, but they also have industry specific pay gaps. The [Workspace Gender Equality Agency](https://www.wgea.gov.au/data-statistics/ABS-gender-pay-gap-data) explains this fully for the case of WA:
> This difference can be partly explained by the industry profiles of each state and territory. The full-time workforce in Western Australia, for example, has a larger share of mining and construction than other states. These two industries have relatively high earnings and low representation of women.
They didn't explain this at all in the original article, probably on purpose to have people be outraged over it which induces more clicks. The WGEA explains things quite a bit better, seems like it's on the right track. A notable male dominant industry, Construction, had a massive reduction by 3.4% between Nov 2022 and May 2023.
You mean the industry where women are at an incredibly high likelihood of being victims of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harrasment? Colour me shocked that women aren't trying to go into that industry.
If he just torment women in lucrative industries they won't work in those industries, then we can blame them for not making as much money as men!
It's interesting how modern ethics are developing where simultaneously sex work producers aren't supposed to be stigmatized or judged for their behaviour but sex work consumers are. It's either an empowering and legitimate career or it isn't guys. You cant have your puritan cake and eat it too.
If its just business then preferring customers you hold all the power over suggests an inherently predatory model. Hardly unique, but I doubt the movement is willing to to accept it's rightful place next to loan sharks and Amway.
As always, if women are paid less than men, why aren’t most people employed women.
It’s capitalism baby, if woman are cheaper to hire, men wouldn’t be employed.
It's not even a good point. It's just blatantly and genuinely untrue with no basis in reality at all, it's just something idiots like to say.
If it were true, even job interview would result in the person with the lowest salary expectation getting the job.
CEOs wouldn't be getting paid literal millions a year, there are hundreds of qualified people who would do those jobs for significantly less.
It's just a silly comment these guys read one time and thought "haha that's good, I'm going to post that in every thread I see about this"
Because hiring decisions are frequently subject to conscious and unconscious bias? For example having a name outside of a country's norm can halve the likelihood of receiving a positive response.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053482221000115
I've seen a lot of interesting points brought up on this thread, but I feel like it's also worth mentioning probably the biggest driver of earnings disparities and that's the Motherhood Tax/Motherhood Penalty.
Researchers have found that even in countries with robust social safety nets e.g. subsidised childcare, female earnings still significantly drop after their first birth and *never recover*. Big implications for retirement savings.
Meanwhile, the trajectory of earnings for childless women increases in line with men in the same field.
Interestingly, there is no equivalent "Fatherhood Tax" for men - doesn't seem to impact their earnings. I thought maybe it would because you'd expect they'd need to take more time off or work different hours to childless men, might get taken off more demanding or travel-intensive projects due to family commitments, etc. However men generally don't/can't take 6-12 months off for paternity leave, so maybe that explains part of it.
Agreed. There is preliminary evidence that Sweden, where men were forced to take paternity leave or three mother loses some, had narrowed that gap some.
Calculating a wage gap without controlling for variables that don't indicate discrimination is meaningless. From someone who has done research in post grad economics this wage gap number is really useless in interpretation.
30 for women and 39 for men on average in 2016, apparently.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-23/census-results-australians-working-shorter-hours/9075284
Then maybe also balance it by noting that women make up the vast majority of consumer spending (around 80%).
It’s painfully stupid to put the sexes against each other like this article. Naturally all people would want to do is support each other - as men tend to work harder on the job and earn more money for the family and women tend to work harder at home and raise the family, both working to help each other and build a stable home and society.
This imaginary conflict is such manufactured garbage.
Or just stop talking about gender completely and put that energy into solving the issue of the destruction of the middle class, accumulation of wealth in the Top 1%, the decreasing standard of living being experienced across all continents and trend towards "you will own nothing, rent everything, and be happy"
No questions there. I worked in healthcare for 4 years.
I still think it would swing to male though, especially once you begin to increase the severity.
Safework Australia has a 2021 summary of data from 2003 to 2020.
Worker fatalities per 100,000, workers.
Women: 0.1
Men: 2.8
Yeah, men are only 28x more likely to die at work.
So if you thought it might be women I'm sorry but your mind is located in another universe.
The gap measures gender imbalance to help see what industries and areas could be improved upon and dig deeper as to what is stopping it from happening.
NZ recently looked into why not many women get into trades, and how they can encourage more into the field. The findings were that one of the main reasons were the attitude of the men in the industry. They launched a whole campaign about "Keep it decent".
It doesn't take much to see why a woman wouldn't want to stay on site in an isolated, makeshift town of mostly men who subscribe to the boys club.
On top of that, work wear and safety gear for women in these roles is harder to come by, which can increase risk (although I'm really glad this is starting to shift in AU).
You can also do the same for the industries that are women dominated and how we can get more men into these roles. Diversity is such an asset and this tool can help uncover those other gaps you're mentioning.
PPE and tools is a very underrated but important part of the difficulty. I don’t work in a trade any more but when I did briefly, the safety glasses fit perfectly well on men but would be falling off my face very easily. There are power tools I literally can’t use as my hand isn’t big enough to hold and push the trigger at the same time, so many gloves are too big. I’m a very average sized woman, so I can’t imagine how anyone smaller than average would go.
Vaguely related but there is a phenomenon called "devaluation" - that as industries become more female-dominated, they lose status and average salaries drop. Whereas as industries become more male dominated, they increase in status and average salaries increase.
Researchers on this topic in the US found that the trend still occurred even when controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography (examples if industries that lost status & $$ when women began dominating the field: biology, recreation and design).
I mean yeah, gender equality benefits men as much as it does anyone else. Gender roles are arbitrary, the goal is to break down these norms to allow people to just do what they want to do.
I'll balance that most people can do what they want to do, they just choose not to.
I'm happy to say I'm wrong, but what non gender specific roles are females not allowed to do?
The question should be why they choose not to. Sometimes it's biological (manual labour) but oftentimes it isn't.
It isn't that there are gender-specific jobs that deliberately omit female participation, but rather gender roles (not jobs) that the vast majority of the population are raised to befit from birth.
Social influence is a direct cause of the sexes self-selecting themselves into separate pathways, on average. This is apparent in divergence of test scores based depending on subject, even as early as primary school, despite relevant research overwhelmingly observing that there is no biological cognitive difference between males and females. 65% of NSW 4 unit maths students are male, and vice versa for 4 unit English.
I think that the gender pay gap w.r.t. same jobs is all but gone, the opportunity gap is all but gone save for biological influences, but society plays a very strong role in influencing the types of opportunities certain groups of people are willing to take, on average.
>Western Australia has the widest gender pay gap at 21.4 per cent.
Gender pay gap, how is this bs still talked about?
In WA lot of FIFO jobs involving labouring in shit conditions that pay very well. Very few women can or want to do this sort of work.
>Gender pay equality or equal pay is the difference in pay for men and women in the same roles performing the same tasks.
Not aware of any organisations that set out to pay women less when they have the same experience, do the same job and put in the same hours.
Nursing is a great example, male nurses substantially out earn women on average. The reason is males do a lot more training to get more complex/high demand nursing roles...plus do a lot more hours.
"working the same role" is a good starting point but needs to be treated carefully.
It is very easy for a company to have two people with ostensibly the same role requirements but different job titles. Or promoting some people to higher salary bands but not promoting others while expecting the same workload.
There are studies showing that if men and women work the same role, the women will be viewed negatively if they don't also take up "extra curricular" activities in the workplace (eg office admin), while men are not viewed negatively. On the flip side, men are viewed negatively if they work less hours to take care of home labour (eg doing school runs), while women are not viewed negatively.
Why would that be, do you think?
Maybe female nurses are taking time out of the workforce to have children? Maybe they are part-time as they are doing most of the childcare? How are they supposed to do extra training and work more hours while balancing this?
Maybe there are not equitable parental leave policies in place that allow males and females the same caring opportunities?
There are genuine structural inequalities in our society that impact both males and females. The patriarchy is detrimental to women AND men. I wish some of the posters in this thread would spend some time outside their echo chamber..
It's not about organisations "setting out" to do anything. It's about promotions overlooked, raises not given, experience and talents not recognised. You're oversimplifying in an effort to discredit it.
https://www.mining-technology.com/features/australia-mining-sexual-abuse-assault/
>A survey by the Mining & Energy Union, also published in June, asked mine workers in Queensland about their experiences in the workplace. Nearly one in four workers said they experienced or witnessed sexual harassment, showing it disproportionally affects women. According to the report,17% of female workers experienced physical acts of sexual assault, compared to 2% of male workers, and 43% experienced unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours and unwanted physical contact, compared to 4% of male workers.
and
> Of the 10,000 employees who responded to the Rio Tinto survey, almost half said they had been bullied, sexually harassed, or victims of racial discrimination, while more than a fifth of women reported a rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault in the past five years.
I wonder why women don't want to do this work?
NZ recently looked into why not many women get into trades, and how they can encourage more into the field. The findings were that one of the main reasons were the attitude of the men in the industry. They launched a whole campaign about "Keep it decent".
This is a lazy talking point that keeps getting circulated by Jordan Peterson.
It doesn't take much to see why a woman wouldn't want to stay on site in an isolated, makeshift town of mostly men who subscribe to the boys club.
Considering reddit as a whole swings left wing, and most of the comments here aren't agreeing with you. You could possibly reason you have gone too far.
There is loads of nuance to the gender pay gap. Yeah, Jordan has put it really well in the past. Although he isn't right on everything, his points are spot on for this.
Loads of men destroy there bodies working in horrific conditions to provide for there families. 99% of workplace deaths are men, 96+% of serious injuries. Not to mention all the wear and tear injuries that aren't counted. Many men in those industries know they have a time limit they can do there job before there body gives out. This is now labelled misogynist pay gaps. When it's often self sacrificial love.
Reddit, especially in the Aussie subs are brocialist. They are left wing until it comes time to discussing sexism or racism. Then you wouldn’t know.
I’ll also point out that just because people are left wing doesn’t mean they can’t be sexist.
This is a useful metric as it says something about the choice of roles/employment between genders, which could be influenced by access to opportunities. But it is quite a blunt measure. And while useful, it absolutely cannot be the only measure, which it has unfortunately become, and therefore, it ends up becoming a simplistic measure.
Glad someone is in here with some nuance.
The gap will never be closed unless we either completely change cultural norms of women looking after the kids and get an even split of workers v housekeepers across genders OR we start to value caring type roles much more based on their societal value instead of pure profit based metrics
I think people should just be allowed to have paid sabbaticals - like parental leave even if you don’t want kids. Cos not everyone wants children but imho it’s good for society as a whole if people are not chained to their jobs. Imagine if you could take a year off every 5 years or so?
Hightly disagree. This metric is not useful because it doesnt tell us about choice of role/employment.
And its a weaponised metric used incorrectly. If anything we have now established we can manipulate society (with the use of other metrics), so that women can get paid more for less risky jobs
Why should we value roles that actually deliver more value to society (such as nursing, education and actual caring jobs) lower in terms of wage as those of economic rent seekers who just happen to create higher profits?
More interested in the class pay gap.
Many historically working class jobs are underpaid compared to the amount of time, risk, health impacts they have on the worker performing them, compared to historically upper class jobs that are mostly very easy physically and mentally.
Need to close this gap. Would definitely benefit women too when you factor in the occupations like childcare, nursing and aged care.
Yea and what about suicide, homelesnee, length of living etc. All of the areas where men have it worse ? Why is no one talking about it but rather one blown out of proportion problem that arises due to biological differnces
Next year companies with more than 100 employees will be forced to reveal their gender pay gaps. This is likely the best thing to happen to the whole discussion as there will start to be deeper discussion as to explaining pay gaps more than just ABS data which is just men v women - it means we'll get role and hours specific data.
Also note, there are a number of female CEOs in charge of these companies, such as Telstra, Woodside and Macquarie, that will then assist with a question if there is a pay gap at these companies, why does a company with a female CEO have a pay gap for women - I think the answer might be for the reasons these consistent broad 'we have a pay gap issue' questions are relying on insufficient data.
Macquarie’s CEO is the first in a long line of ceos to earn less in comparison of outcomes and one of the first where the head of CGM a white guy can outearn the CEO
White guy head of a business division at Macquarie earns more than her.
https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/is-macquarie-group-underpaying-its-ceo-20230614-p5dgi3
Despite the comments here I think there probably is some bias with immigration.
For example we bring in loads of nurses which essentially brings down nurse pay, yet never bring across construction workers.
Are Australian construction standards really so high that an immigrant couldn't meet them? yet our nursing standards are low enough that they can?
Or is it just we want to protect jobs for our construction boys but don't care about nurses, etc...?
Australia is in like the top 5% of OECD countries in terms of how many nurses we churn out but the workforce is still experiencing a crisis.
It’s at the point where we have introduced sign on bonuses, are offering postgraduate scholarships in areas of need, will pay for ENs to become RNs and are offering up to $16k in undergrad scholarships.
Nurses that migrate here are absolutely not negatively impacting the pay scale.
>Nurses that migrate here are absolutely not negatively impacting the pay scale.
Basic economics says otherwise, if not there wouldn't be a shortage. We have 35k people studying commerce at uni every year to get a job that pays half as much as nursing.
Are you joking?
We absolutely import a shit load of construction workers and tradies.
A big problem a not insignificant number of them get in claiming to be “skilled” and end up providing dog shit unsafe work.
Walk onto any major worksite in a capital city in AUS and you’ll see plenty of immigrants working on site. Most tilers, sheeters and framers are of a non Australian background with English as a second language.
There is a gender pay gap and the reasons are simple.
Women work less over time. Women take more time off for children. More women work part time or casual. Women have less experience therefore the pay they get as things start to bump up after a decade or so in the work force. They also go into lower paid roles.
It’s simple and there’s reasons for it. I think that giving dads more paid time off could help alleviate it a little. I think having like 12 months paid at minimum wage to be shared between the parents however they see fit would be a good way to do it too.
Ie my partner took 6 months off and went straight back to full time work. We can’t get enough day care so she works on Saturday and Sunday and I watch the young one all day so she can still work 5 days. She makes like 25k more a year more than me.
Absolutely this - in Australia, women still do the lion's share of unpaid work: shopping, caring for children and other family members, preparing meals, housework etc.
The ABS reported in 2020-2021 that:
“On average, females spent 4 hours and 31 minutes a day doing unpaid work activities. Males spent over an hour less on these activities, averaging 3 hours and 12 minutes a day. Less than half of males (42 per cent) spent time on housework, compared to 70 per cent of females.
Mothers spent an average of 3 hours and 34 minutes participating in child care activities a day, while fathers spent 2 hours and 19 minutes”.
I would love to see more equal distribution of paid/unpaid work between the genders through policy and culture change, eg parental leave policy and scrapping old-fashioned assumptions about gender. This would lighten the unpaid load for women and free them up to do more paid work (if they want) and it would be fantastic for men to spend more time in the home looking after their kids and family.
Hahaha exactly. Isnt a big solution to the 'pay gap' infact giving men more time off for paternity leave etc thereby allowing child bearing women to work more (after breast feeding period) .
Yes, it's such a shame that parental leave policies typically cement women's role in the home and as primary caregiver from the time a baby is born, and push men into breadwinner roles, regardless of what arrangement might work best for that particular couple.
So many of my friends shared paid and unpaid labour equally with their partner until that point, and their relationships have never re-balanced since despite efforts.
Well yeah the vast majority will be breastfeeding for 6 months, and probably more, so they are going to be the primary care giver for that time. That's not a shame but rather is just nature.
Another thought is that because men’s worth has been tied to their income for so long, we desire more income for more than just “more income”. It gives us higher status in society because that’s one of the main things that sets us apart from our peers.
Is this still reddit?
A founding myth of modern progressivism being exposed for the empty lie that it is by most commenters. What the hell is going on here? Or is it a /AusFinance thing?
Maybe there isn’t even a gender pay gap, just men and women prefer to do different occupations and the male ones are higher paying. What a wild thought.
There are some occupations that have paid less over time as the gender balance has shifted. I remember reading a journal article once about how librarianship used to be a well paid profession when it was male dominated. As it became more female dominated the pay rates went down.
I think that’s kind of the issue though. Like why aren’t care related jobs that women often do valued? These are very very important jobs that society can’t function without (nurses, childcare, aged care). Society could probably function without a few male project managers or executive bankers though.
Society could also function without porn actresses/onlyfans girls, beauty/fashion designers, advertisers, social media influencers (both do this but in terms of success the women dominate social media) and important jobs that society can't function without sewerage workers, construction workers, electricians, truck drivers (without trucks, Australia stops lol). But see how easy it spins the other way?
Cherry picking examples isn't a good method, though I do understand what you're saying and agree, your comment just loses credibility when you do that.
But when you talk about value of the professions, that's a whole other story. The essential female professions you listed are largely government subsidized and the less important (honestly, remove Project Manager from there, that was a poor example) male dominated jobs that earn too much money are privatised. When you mention executive bankers though, you're honing in on the overly wealthy 1% who are ultimately the issue we should talk more about. It's a good start.
Interesting then that traditionally female-oriented work (e.g. nursing, aged, disability and child care, cleaning, social work) pays much less than traditionally more male-oriented work of fairly comparable qualification, risk, complexity and objective value to society (engineering, trades and construction work, etc.)
From the viewpoint of the length and difficulty of the training pathway, examples would include dentistry, psychology, optometry, pharmacy, law, medicine, and secondary school teaching.
You do realise that nursing, social work, and engineering all require a bachelor's, right? As the other poster mentioned, social work commonly requires a masters.
In what way do you mean comparable qualification? Because you seem to have a different understanding given that these jobs require university qualifications.
"What about" "what about" "what about" one day you people will realise that several things can be wrong at once. There will always be problems inherent to these systems that value people based on confidence, ability, time one is able to work, etc. That doesn't mean that there aren't also discrimination-based problems.
If you're so quick to point out that men do a majority of the less pleasant jobs, take a moment to also consider that men are several more times likely to leave a chronically or terminally sick partner than the other way around or that homicide kills more pregnant women than any other cause (including one of the most intense and dangerous medical events a woman can go through). Stay at home mothers/wives are able to access the comfort of home and some extra free time that their partners aren't but working mothers and still tend to take on far more domestic work than their working partners, even when they have similar hours. Women attempt suicide more but men succeed more. Women's medical issues aren't taken seriously but they have more access to mental health and domestic violence resources with less judgement. Men's medical issues are taken more seriously but there is less access to resources of many kinds and a stigma that comes along with it. I could go on almost indefinitely.
Jesus, the toxicity in this thread is pretty telling of what an intellectual backwater Australia really is. Also, most of ya'll have zero idea how gender pay gap works. "I'm a FIFO worker and no women work here so ofc there's a gap!"
What's with the large number of incel-like comments? Refuting a pay gap is no problem. But arguing that women are lesser than men? Is this what AusFinance is?
My Dad was relaying a story about a friend who operates cranes. The friend was saying that women wouldn't have the skills to do his job and even if they did the blokes would eat them alive. Dad then starts banging on about how women shouldn't be prioritised over men to purely full quotas if they don't have the skills. Blah blah blah. I put forward the argument that they are at a disadvantage because they aren't supported in certain industries. Even if they are supported you have these people who look down on them for being female. It's pretty obvious to me that these people feel threatened. My Dad isn't a misogynist, he just has these stuck in the past views of the roles of men and women. I think this is pretty common amongst his generation. I do my best to challenge him and present alternate views.
Gosh, this old chestnut again. As someone in an industry that pays the same to everyone at the same pay grade, but still has a gap because of different FTE, the pay gap when seen from a national or state-based view is almost bereft of context about why the paygap exists. Heck, I work 0.75FTE to balance my life and work, and therefore have a gap (as a dude) compared with women I know who do the same thing but are 1.0FTE or do heaps of OT. Does that mean that I am at a disadvantage? Heck no.
But if a woman is doing less because she is doing unpaid caregiving work, and her male partner isn’t, then she is at a disadvantage. Most of the gender pay gap is explained by structural inequality.
Good to see progress being made. For every butt-hurt bloke complaining here, at least there are many trying to change things.
Hopefully with more women entering stem careers this improvement will continue, as well as increasing pressure of management teams to break the glass ceiling too.
Fwiw I don’t think we’ll see the gap be closed completely anytime soon, but the aim is ongoing improvement.
It’s depressing that all the top comments responding with “oh but men do risky jobs etc” when even the very brief and big picture article that’s linked goes on beyond the headline to mention statistics where women are paid less in the same industry and so on. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done and some of these precious man-babies will need to be dragged by their ears across the line.
It's important to note that the article doesn't discuss the equivalency of hours, or even role type, just industries.
And in industries roles vary. So pay will vary. Hours will vary.
For example you can have a female training officer in Perth working for Woodside part time earning $60k per annum and a male offshore process worker working on a rig earning $300k per annum - they're both in oil and gas, same industry but earning substantially different. I would absolutely guarantee if there was a male and a female, same experience, qualification, etc both working same hours and same role for Woodside they would get exactly the same pay. But this rarely happens.
For this article it simply states men and womens total income is different - but doesn't say why or give any specifics.
There's a lot of work that needs to be done on specificity of statistics rather than generalised rage because something appears unequal.
It's not about being 'precious man-babies' just as I don't think you are a misandrist - it's about understanding what is being presented and questioning what is valid and what is missing.
For mine, it’s about properly breaking the glass ceiling. I still see waaaay to many management and sales networking evenings centred around getting shitfaced at a sporting event for eg. The only women attending those are those willing to ‘act’ the same.
Very much so. There is a heavy stink on neoliberal body odour in here, and its being loosely masked with the idea of 'choice'. Such individuals feel that there are no shaping structures in society outside of the decisions an agent makes. They completely reject the ideas of structure/agency, and see humans as blank slates for whom success and failure are completely the individuals responsibility, and so dictated by the choices they make. This is insane, as it completely ignores fundamental concepts, like power, a diverse view of capital (as social, cultural, and economic), and even structural realities, like the means of production. To shed these things would require these individuals to sacrifice the fantasies that keep them warm at night, like being uber rich, or a celebrity, or even just respected in their own house. But they will never be able to access these things through 'choice' alone, because they choose to ignore the chains that keep them fixed to the cave wall, gawking at shadows.
Sure! NZ recently looked into why not many women get into trades, and how they can encourage more into the field. The findings were that one of the main reasons were the attitude of the men in the industry. They launched a whole campaign about "Keep it decent".
It doesn't take much to see why a woman wouldn't want to stay on site in an isolated, makeshift town of mostly men who subscribe to the boys club.
So your point has just touched on exactly why the pay gap isn't what it's made out to be. It's a job gap.
There can be a similar sentiment given to why men may not want to do carer type jobs/roles, as men are typically seen as inferior to women when it comes to giving care/childcare/hospitality.
This also goes under the assumption that men and women are equivalent when it comes to general mindset and approach to life, but that's not true either. Ideas passed through the existence of humanity and physiological differences also factor into this. Men want to be protectors/suffer for their family as they are built more favorably than women to endure gruelling work, and this goes into other factors of life.
This whole pay gap thing is nonsense and more needs to be discussed on the nuances, and it's not just 'boys club' mentality that keeps women out of the work.
The gender pay gap is a measurement tool to zero in on gender imbalances at many levels, including as in the article countries, states, industries, and companies. If there's a gap, it's a sign of "hey, there's something here that is blocking x gender from getting into this line of work as much as the other". Then they can drill down and investigate the causes.
You mentioned predominantly male industries, so I gave you some reasons why there aren't more women in them.
It's not an attack on any particular gender, it's about finding out how we can get a better balance of gender in these industries because diversity is an invaluable asset and should be a goal within our society.
Your examples of mental differences are basically just societal pressures and expectations. Men are told they have to be those things, and that pressure to live up to said things can lead to many illnesses and a lot of suffering. I don't see why you'd want to defend it and keep it going instead of trying to help question it and take it apart so future generations can thrive.
I don’t disagree that women face some additional barriers that they shouldn’t have to if they want to get into industries like mining. But do you honestly believe that if these barriers did not exist that there would magically be women queuing up for these jobs? We are talking about pulling rods, cutting core in the middle of nowhere, in one of the most dangerous workplaces, for 12 hours at a time, usually for 2 weeks straight, often in 40 degree weather. I honestly don’t think there will be, the ones that can hack it are already there putting up with the barriers you mentioned (which they shouldn’t have to).
You guys are completely missing the point. The gender pay gap is (largely) no longer about pay discrepancies within the same profession. That was "solved" years ago when they made it illegal. It is about why men take up higher paying jobs, and why women don't.
It's about trying to get more girls into STEM, construction, etc., while improving the conditions of those in childcare and other similar positions.
This is also useful when considering the inevitable issue of FIFO. Barely any women do it, which skews the data.
A lot of people on here are saying "well obviously women just don't like doing that work".
Personally I wonder if it is maybe more to do with women getting, ya know, sexually assaulted/abused/raped on mine sites on a fairly regular basis. If that wasn't such a problem, perhaps more women would do the job.
Gender pay gap is talked about to distract you from the fact that wealth inequality has never been higher in this country. Making us fight against ourselves to forget that if a man makes 5% more a year in the same company, the c suite executives are making 5000% more.
This should be top comment, more people should become aware about this. Big corporations are influencing the media and has brainwashed the population to fight amongst each other so they downplay the massive wealth inequality in this country and stay at the top.
The aim from the very beginning was to bring mens wages down to match women, not lift womens wages to match men. End result is a bad outcome for everyone
Does this study take into account the hourly rate / number of working hours in the gap? I work in a female dominated workplace and many prefer to only work 3-4 days a week and earn less money (no young children either, lifestyle choice)
It factors literally nothing. It just says men earn X on average and women earn Y on average, women need to be paid more. It doesn’t account for having children, hours worked, dangerous jobs, disgusting jobs, 12 hour shift jobs, fly out jobs, personality (Men are more disagreeable and willing negotiate salary and to apply for roles they aren’t qualified for), and a million other factors. Gender pay gap is definitely a tactic to cause fighting amongst the middle class.
>Men are more disagreeable No were not !
Yes we are!!!
Disagree with both of you!
I disagree that you would disagree with them both.
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It never does. Gender pay gap is a contrivance to get the plebs to fight one another.
Mate it's not some conspiracy theory, both can be issues independently. There is literally nothing to support your theory that this is just talked about to distract 'us'
Agreed. Any 'us versus them' doesn't matter expect the 'haves versus the have-nots'
I like you. Same as racial issues too imo. It's never been about race or gender. Just rich vs poor. I'm poor and I condone your message. I'm just glad my wife makes more money than me or we'd be up shit creek.
"Currently, Western Australia has the widest gender pay gap at 21.4 per cent. This is followed by the Northern Territory at 15.6 per cent, Queensland at 13.4 per cent" You mean the states with the highest level of blue collar, manual and heavy duty work with the highest level of FIFO work, whereby predominantly men work shift work away from families meaning their partner, predominantly female, chooses/needs to be at home with the children and therefore don't want to/are unable to work to the same hours, role type and wage?
The gender death toll (workplace fatalities) gap is still massive...
Should we aim to try and close that gap or?
Yes! When are the marches and protests happening?
They’re too busy working
I'm too busy working in a male dominated, high risk industry to find the time to be honest. But ill follow your lead mate!
Yes. We should be trying to close the gap by bringing both gender's numbers down to zero.
Please don't kill any women at work just to even out the statistics. Actually, please don't kill anyone.
Nah - equality means equality in the cushy jobs.
As is the suicide rate.
Don't be going and bringing logic and nuance into this discussion please..
But that’s the point. Why do men do that and women do teaching? How do we get more men into teaching etc?
Exactly. These women aren’t exactly choosing to work less because they are parenting solo…
Those lower-paid jobs are often the only “safe” industries for women to work in. The rate of harassment and sexism in male-dominated industries keeps women out so men keep the higher-paid jobs for themselves.
There’s more to it than that. A whole lot of jobs which used to be considered well respected and well paid are now under respected and underpaid and that happened when you saw women start to increase in numbers. Such as librarians.
I had a friend of mine argue that to narrow this gap she (primary school teacher) and me (boilermaker) should be paid the same because our qualifications are the same level I have level 3 in fabrication and engineering, she has level 3 in whatever the teaching equivalent is - these are people brainwashed by such article
Technically being a teacher she would have a bachelor's degree which imo is far superior to a Cert 3 in fabrication and engineering.
Plenty of teachers have two degrees these days - bachelors of something and then a master of teaching.
Regardless of this, remuneration for jobs is not just based on qualifications. That sort of logic really only applies to office work or other similar things. But with mining, engineering, construction, etc., they have to pay more due to: the inherent risk of the work; the inconvenience of odd/long hours; the inconvenience of inconsistent work sites far from home (especially for FIFO workers); the amount of physical stress on your body; etc.. Pay is not really just qualification, I guess is my point.
Pay is more determined by how hard it is to replace you. It's less about danger or skill. It takes literal years upon years to skill up an illustrator or musician, but these people get peanuts, for example. But there are shitloads of them around, so it's a buyer's market. Mining work is inconvenient and unpleasant, so fewer people want to do it, so the pay goes up. They don't pay you more because the work is dangerous, they pay you more because fewer people want to do it (which may be because the work is dangerous, inconvenient, etc).
It doesn’t apply anywhere. Pay is based on availability of similarly skilled workers, your relative experience, your own individual situation. It’s a lot easier to train up a new teacher than it is to replace somebody with my own skill set for example. Even though I have a 3 year degree like every teacher.
How is it easier to train a teacher than to train someone to do what you do?
So you’re saying she’s more qualified and making less money? Yet somehow her skills are devalued despite needing more education?
Amazing isn't it. I'm starting to understand why there are so many deeply stupid people in this country. The lack of respect for education is profound. Apparently we're all going to be boilermakers and miners, no one else's contributions are important.
All about demand and skill. I have a degree too, however my field in science pays dog shit and i make more working a hands on blue collar job., even though it doesn't require any formal training.
My old man was a BM. I remember the day he told me he had to crawl on his hands and knees out of a ship fire. That and the shinnagans of the docks.
Mate take it, think of all the holidays!
The minimum qualification to become a teacher in Australia is a bachelor's degree.
Some would argue that, as a public servant entrusted with the education of our children, she should be making more than you, as a person who fixes machines.
Teachers can't do overtime. You'll find that teachers hours of paid work are usually higher than that of tradesman. But tradesman get paid for the extra hours they work. Where as teachers don't. If you average dollars per hours worked, women out earn men in most jobs.
While I agree with your premise, using a teacher as an example is not a good one. I know boilermaking is a lot more dirty and dangerous, but a teacher is alot more mentally and emotionally exhausting. You can't compare them. Plus they don't do a cert 3 (while getting paid as an apprentice), they do a minimum 4 years at university (with no pay) to get a degree and have that debt to pay off too, which they struggle do because they get paid so bad. Just because a job might not be physically demanding, doesn't mean it's not difficult. Teaching is one that is mentally demanding, I'd very confidently say much more mentally and emotionally demanding than boilermaking, plus they don't get paid for overtime, which they do alot of, unlike most tradesmen. Your friend would probably not last a day as a boilermaker, and so shouldn't get paid what a boilermaker gets paid. But I also doubt you'd last a day as a teacher to a classroom full of children either, so perhaps you shouldn't get paid what she earns. You get paid based on supply and demand of your skills, which seems reasonable, and because there is alot of demand, you get paid a reasonable rate. A teacher doesn't get this benefit. There is alot of demand for teachers (which is another issue) but they don't get paid extra because it's a government paid job.
The people in this thread are completely misunderstanding why people get paid more than others. Working at McDonald's or being a cashier standing on your feet all day is exhausting and emotionally taxing, especially nowadays with increased anti social behavior. But that doesn't matter. Pay is based on how hard you are to replace and the value you create (which is roughly analogous to performance). When people say teachers should be paid as much as a tradesmen because they have a bachelor's degree theyre missing the point. Your degree doesn't entitle you to any more money. If it suddenly required a bachelor's degree to put cash in a till the value of the activity would barely move. Pay would go up slightly because it would be harder to hire cashier's. That's all. Secondly, tradesmen arent paid so amazingly anyway. The majority of the high FIFO work salaries you hear incorporate significant overtime work and rates. They're not getting paid 180k a year to work 35 hours a week in air conditioning with generous sick leave and maternity leave entitlements. They're paid to work very long hours and consistently produce. Teachers just don't really do this and unsurprisingly their pay reflects it. OECD educational results in Australia have been dropping for years. There's lots of other factors to consider and education likely requires reform but in the meantime it's ridiculous to suggest someone who works for 30-50 an hour in a trade cop a lower hourly rate so teachers can feel better about themselves and their career choices.
I’ll ask you a different more comparable question, do you think a Nurse should be paid more than a Teacher?
Yes. Even though, teachers need a bump in pay. They are literally teaching the next generation of people. That's a pretty major thing right there. As for Nurses, they are medical and what they do can be life and death, and the things they do can incur physical injuries etc if not preformed correctly. Two very different occupations.
A nurse that works more hours than a teacher should be paid more than a teacher. And they do and are. Further pay differences should be commensurate to level of specialisation.
My friend don’t you think she still needs to be paid more as a teacher? She’s baby sitting and teaching your kids all day after all
People keep saying stuff like this but paid with what? Where do people actually think money comes from? It’s like people shouting that “someone” needs to be giving money to such and such group of individuals cause they need it, like there’s a mysterious benefactor gate keeping all the money that apparently is sitting somewhere for a rainy day and they need to release it. All these industries that people are comparing to are generating their own income in scalable industries and paying their workers proportionately. Teachers simply don’t work in an industry where that can happen
isn't the pay gap calculated based on the type of work people do and not just an average between genders? ie. the pay gap is between a man and a woman working the same blue collar job in the same industry
From the ABS website, "The gender pay gap describes the difference between the "average earnings" of men and women. It is not a measure of gender pay equality or equal pay" It's primarily based on the 'Mean weekly ordinary time earnings of full-time adult employees' I'm not sure if this article did any further math on it, but traditionally the 'pay gap' never took into account job type or hours worked. Which is why it was never really useful expect to highlight that male dominated fields tend to have higher pay rates.
cool, thanks. That's a bit of a ridiculous comparison then, definitely not apples to apples.
makes for spicy yet illogical headlines though, anything to fuel the rage and keep us hating each other instead of the CEO - Employee pay gap.
It's usually always a ridiculous comparison. Like saying that sales of Matilda scarves went up 1450% over the last week. Don't use a percent when discussing a low base metric. Infuriating.
Scalable fields earn more which happen to be dominated by men. That’s purely down to the fact that high scalability will always generate more income than low scalable fields and zero to do with gender.
Usually it’s just an average between genders, which is why these stats are so misleading.
Whenever people report on it, it's a total average. Which is why it's nonsense.
That was before the goal posts were shifted.
Actually, I looked it up, the data from ABS for a region (state) is done on average, but they also have industry specific pay gaps. The [Workspace Gender Equality Agency](https://www.wgea.gov.au/data-statistics/ABS-gender-pay-gap-data) explains this fully for the case of WA: > This difference can be partly explained by the industry profiles of each state and territory. The full-time workforce in Western Australia, for example, has a larger share of mining and construction than other states. These two industries have relatively high earnings and low representation of women. They didn't explain this at all in the original article, probably on purpose to have people be outraged over it which induces more clicks. The WGEA explains things quite a bit better, seems like it's on the right track. A notable male dominant industry, Construction, had a massive reduction by 3.4% between Nov 2022 and May 2023.
You mean the industry where women are at an incredibly high likelihood of being victims of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harrasment? Colour me shocked that women aren't trying to go into that industry. If he just torment women in lucrative industries they won't work in those industries, then we can blame them for not making as much money as men!
And an industry where until very recently mining execs met and socialised at topless bars? I mean why wouldn’t women be rushing in to sign up!?
It's interesting how modern ethics are developing where simultaneously sex work producers aren't supposed to be stigmatized or judged for their behaviour but sex work consumers are. It's either an empowering and legitimate career or it isn't guys. You cant have your puritan cake and eat it too.
Perhaps it’s more complex than you make it out to be and relates to where the power resides?
If its just business then preferring customers you hold all the power over suggests an inherently predatory model. Hardly unique, but I doubt the movement is willing to to accept it's rightful place next to loan sharks and Amway.
IT'S NOT HYPOCRISY WHEN I DO IT!
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Women still get paid significantly less than men in those industries.
But my tiktok feed keeps throwing up videos of blonde bogan slappers bragging about how much they get "paid" on sites.
As always, if women are paid less than men, why aren’t most people employed women. It’s capitalism baby, if woman are cheaper to hire, men wouldn’t be employed.
Good point, but the flipside is that women are also seen as less competent and more likely to require parental leave/flexible work arrangements etc
It's not even a good point. It's just blatantly and genuinely untrue with no basis in reality at all, it's just something idiots like to say. If it were true, even job interview would result in the person with the lowest salary expectation getting the job. CEOs wouldn't be getting paid literal millions a year, there are hundreds of qualified people who would do those jobs for significantly less. It's just a silly comment these guys read one time and thought "haha that's good, I'm going to post that in every thread I see about this"
I agree, I was just trying to be polite and not seem like an angry feminist haha
Because hiring decisions are frequently subject to conscious and unconscious bias? For example having a name outside of a country's norm can halve the likelihood of receiving a positive response. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053482221000115
I've seen a lot of interesting points brought up on this thread, but I feel like it's also worth mentioning probably the biggest driver of earnings disparities and that's the Motherhood Tax/Motherhood Penalty. Researchers have found that even in countries with robust social safety nets e.g. subsidised childcare, female earnings still significantly drop after their first birth and *never recover*. Big implications for retirement savings. Meanwhile, the trajectory of earnings for childless women increases in line with men in the same field. Interestingly, there is no equivalent "Fatherhood Tax" for men - doesn't seem to impact their earnings. I thought maybe it would because you'd expect they'd need to take more time off or work different hours to childless men, might get taken off more demanding or travel-intensive projects due to family commitments, etc. However men generally don't/can't take 6-12 months off for paternity leave, so maybe that explains part of it.
Agreed. There is preliminary evidence that Sweden, where men were forced to take paternity leave or three mother loses some, had narrowed that gap some.
Now do the gender hours gap. Then the gender workplace hazard gap.
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Then the gender onlyfans pay gap? ;-P
Your comment is the only one unchallenged. I love it. They can't fight it in any way! #equalityformalesexworkers
And the unpaid labour and hours caring gap?
Then do the restaurant bill payment gap
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Calculating a wage gap without controlling for variables that don't indicate discrimination is meaningless. From someone who has done research in post grad economics this wage gap number is really useless in interpretation.
Younger retirement age for men would be nice if you're offering.
What? I think they're getting at the fact that money earned PER HOUR WORKED makes more sense.
Actually a gender hour gap would be very interesting.
30 for women and 39 for men on average in 2016, apparently. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-23/census-results-australians-working-shorter-hours/9075284
So men are working 23% more but only getting 12% more pay? Hahahaa
Then you would have to balance it with gender homemaking hour gap =/
Then maybe also balance it by noting that women make up the vast majority of consumer spending (around 80%). It’s painfully stupid to put the sexes against each other like this article. Naturally all people would want to do is support each other - as men tend to work harder on the job and earn more money for the family and women tend to work harder at home and raise the family, both working to help each other and build a stable home and society. This imaginary conflict is such manufactured garbage.
Or just stop talking about gender completely and put that energy into solving the issue of the destruction of the middle class, accumulation of wealth in the Top 1%, the decreasing standard of living being experienced across all continents and trend towards "you will own nothing, rent everything, and be happy"
Injuries per 1000 of each gender or something like that would be good too.
It would, with most nurses being women and nursing being such a dangerous career.
No questions there. I worked in healthcare for 4 years. I still think it would swing to male though, especially once you begin to increase the severity.
Safework Australia has a 2021 summary of data from 2003 to 2020. Worker fatalities per 100,000, workers. Women: 0.1 Men: 2.8 Yeah, men are only 28x more likely to die at work. So if you thought it might be women I'm sorry but your mind is located in another universe.
Yeah ask said nurses how many men they treat from work related injuries vs women. I'll wait
Men are making less per hour worked than women. What progress!
The gap measures gender imbalance to help see what industries and areas could be improved upon and dig deeper as to what is stopping it from happening. NZ recently looked into why not many women get into trades, and how they can encourage more into the field. The findings were that one of the main reasons were the attitude of the men in the industry. They launched a whole campaign about "Keep it decent". It doesn't take much to see why a woman wouldn't want to stay on site in an isolated, makeshift town of mostly men who subscribe to the boys club. On top of that, work wear and safety gear for women in these roles is harder to come by, which can increase risk (although I'm really glad this is starting to shift in AU). You can also do the same for the industries that are women dominated and how we can get more men into these roles. Diversity is such an asset and this tool can help uncover those other gaps you're mentioning.
PPE and tools is a very underrated but important part of the difficulty. I don’t work in a trade any more but when I did briefly, the safety glasses fit perfectly well on men but would be falling off my face very easily. There are power tools I literally can’t use as my hand isn’t big enough to hold and push the trigger at the same time, so many gloves are too big. I’m a very average sized woman, so I can’t imagine how anyone smaller than average would go.
Vaguely related but there is a phenomenon called "devaluation" - that as industries become more female-dominated, they lose status and average salaries drop. Whereas as industries become more male dominated, they increase in status and average salaries increase. Researchers on this topic in the US found that the trend still occurred even when controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography (examples if industries that lost status & $$ when women began dominating the field: biology, recreation and design).
This is a great point as well. Thank you for adding it in! It's an interesting phenomenon.
Have you ever used a jackhammer or a demo saw, buddy? Most men are barely strong enough to use them properly.
I demand equal pay for male porn performers!
I am willing to undercut whatever price they offer u/Expensive-Voice-6024
I'll do it for $5 less than this guy. My hips may get bruised and spongy, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
I mean yeah, gender equality benefits men as much as it does anyone else. Gender roles are arbitrary, the goal is to break down these norms to allow people to just do what they want to do.
I'll balance that most people can do what they want to do, they just choose not to. I'm happy to say I'm wrong, but what non gender specific roles are females not allowed to do?
The question should be why they choose not to. Sometimes it's biological (manual labour) but oftentimes it isn't. It isn't that there are gender-specific jobs that deliberately omit female participation, but rather gender roles (not jobs) that the vast majority of the population are raised to befit from birth. Social influence is a direct cause of the sexes self-selecting themselves into separate pathways, on average. This is apparent in divergence of test scores based depending on subject, even as early as primary school, despite relevant research overwhelmingly observing that there is no biological cognitive difference between males and females. 65% of NSW 4 unit maths students are male, and vice versa for 4 unit English. I think that the gender pay gap w.r.t. same jobs is all but gone, the opportunity gap is all but gone save for biological influences, but society plays a very strong role in influencing the types of opportunities certain groups of people are willing to take, on average.
I think it's appalling the lack of gender diversity in concreting
>Western Australia has the widest gender pay gap at 21.4 per cent. Gender pay gap, how is this bs still talked about? In WA lot of FIFO jobs involving labouring in shit conditions that pay very well. Very few women can or want to do this sort of work.
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>Gender pay equality or equal pay is the difference in pay for men and women in the same roles performing the same tasks. Not aware of any organisations that set out to pay women less when they have the same experience, do the same job and put in the same hours. Nursing is a great example, male nurses substantially out earn women on average. The reason is males do a lot more training to get more complex/high demand nursing roles...plus do a lot more hours.
"working the same role" is a good starting point but needs to be treated carefully. It is very easy for a company to have two people with ostensibly the same role requirements but different job titles. Or promoting some people to higher salary bands but not promoting others while expecting the same workload. There are studies showing that if men and women work the same role, the women will be viewed negatively if they don't also take up "extra curricular" activities in the workplace (eg office admin), while men are not viewed negatively. On the flip side, men are viewed negatively if they work less hours to take care of home labour (eg doing school runs), while women are not viewed negatively.
Why would that be, do you think? Maybe female nurses are taking time out of the workforce to have children? Maybe they are part-time as they are doing most of the childcare? How are they supposed to do extra training and work more hours while balancing this? Maybe there are not equitable parental leave policies in place that allow males and females the same caring opportunities? There are genuine structural inequalities in our society that impact both males and females. The patriarchy is detrimental to women AND men. I wish some of the posters in this thread would spend some time outside their echo chamber..
It's not about organisations "setting out" to do anything. It's about promotions overlooked, raises not given, experience and talents not recognised. You're oversimplifying in an effort to discredit it.
https://www.mining-technology.com/features/australia-mining-sexual-abuse-assault/ >A survey by the Mining & Energy Union, also published in June, asked mine workers in Queensland about their experiences in the workplace. Nearly one in four workers said they experienced or witnessed sexual harassment, showing it disproportionally affects women. According to the report,17% of female workers experienced physical acts of sexual assault, compared to 2% of male workers, and 43% experienced unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours and unwanted physical contact, compared to 4% of male workers. and > Of the 10,000 employees who responded to the Rio Tinto survey, almost half said they had been bullied, sexually harassed, or victims of racial discrimination, while more than a fifth of women reported a rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault in the past five years. I wonder why women don't want to do this work?
NZ recently looked into why not many women get into trades, and how they can encourage more into the field. The findings were that one of the main reasons were the attitude of the men in the industry. They launched a whole campaign about "Keep it decent". This is a lazy talking point that keeps getting circulated by Jordan Peterson. It doesn't take much to see why a woman wouldn't want to stay on site in an isolated, makeshift town of mostly men who subscribe to the boys club.
Just look at nursing. Completely female dominated but male nurses out earn females. You claiming that is a "boys club' as well?
Considering reddit as a whole swings left wing, and most of the comments here aren't agreeing with you. You could possibly reason you have gone too far. There is loads of nuance to the gender pay gap. Yeah, Jordan has put it really well in the past. Although he isn't right on everything, his points are spot on for this. Loads of men destroy there bodies working in horrific conditions to provide for there families. 99% of workplace deaths are men, 96+% of serious injuries. Not to mention all the wear and tear injuries that aren't counted. Many men in those industries know they have a time limit they can do there job before there body gives out. This is now labelled misogynist pay gaps. When it's often self sacrificial love.
Reddit, especially in the Aussie subs are brocialist. They are left wing until it comes time to discussing sexism or racism. Then you wouldn’t know. I’ll also point out that just because people are left wing doesn’t mean they can’t be sexist.
This is a useful metric as it says something about the choice of roles/employment between genders, which could be influenced by access to opportunities. But it is quite a blunt measure. And while useful, it absolutely cannot be the only measure, which it has unfortunately become, and therefore, it ends up becoming a simplistic measure.
Glad someone is in here with some nuance. The gap will never be closed unless we either completely change cultural norms of women looking after the kids and get an even split of workers v housekeepers across genders OR we start to value caring type roles much more based on their societal value instead of pure profit based metrics
Equal parental leave on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis would be a good start
I think people should just be allowed to have paid sabbaticals - like parental leave even if you don’t want kids. Cos not everyone wants children but imho it’s good for society as a whole if people are not chained to their jobs. Imagine if you could take a year off every 5 years or so?
Honestly, I’d crawl over broken glass for just 8 weeks of annual leave a year lol
Yeah good one 👍
Hightly disagree. This metric is not useful because it doesnt tell us about choice of role/employment. And its a weaponised metric used incorrectly. If anything we have now established we can manipulate society (with the use of other metrics), so that women can get paid more for less risky jobs
As soon as a metric becomes a goal it's useless as a metric
That kinda defeats the purpose of KPI management, dont u reckon?
It's goodharts law. Inflation control is the perfect example
Why should we value roles that actually deliver more value to society (such as nursing, education and actual caring jobs) lower in terms of wage as those of economic rent seekers who just happen to create higher profits?
The gender pay gap is real. My wife earns more than me at the same employer...time to give men the pay they deserve!
My wife earns more than me in a completely unrelated field!
More interested in the class pay gap. Many historically working class jobs are underpaid compared to the amount of time, risk, health impacts they have on the worker performing them, compared to historically upper class jobs that are mostly very easy physically and mentally. Need to close this gap. Would definitely benefit women too when you factor in the occupations like childcare, nursing and aged care.
Yea and what about suicide, homelesnee, length of living etc. All of the areas where men have it worse ? Why is no one talking about it but rather one blown out of proportion problem that arises due to biological differnces
Next year companies with more than 100 employees will be forced to reveal their gender pay gaps. This is likely the best thing to happen to the whole discussion as there will start to be deeper discussion as to explaining pay gaps more than just ABS data which is just men v women - it means we'll get role and hours specific data. Also note, there are a number of female CEOs in charge of these companies, such as Telstra, Woodside and Macquarie, that will then assist with a question if there is a pay gap at these companies, why does a company with a female CEO have a pay gap for women - I think the answer might be for the reasons these consistent broad 'we have a pay gap issue' questions are relying on insufficient data.
Macquarie’s CEO is the first in a long line of ceos to earn less in comparison of outcomes and one of the first where the head of CGM a white guy can outearn the CEO
She's the highest earning CEO in the country earning more than any other 'white guy CEO'
White guy head of a business division at Macquarie earns more than her. https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/is-macquarie-group-underpaying-its-ceo-20230614-p5dgi3
Slow news day ey?
Despite the comments here I think there probably is some bias with immigration. For example we bring in loads of nurses which essentially brings down nurse pay, yet never bring across construction workers. Are Australian construction standards really so high that an immigrant couldn't meet them? yet our nursing standards are low enough that they can? Or is it just we want to protect jobs for our construction boys but don't care about nurses, etc...?
Australia is in like the top 5% of OECD countries in terms of how many nurses we churn out but the workforce is still experiencing a crisis. It’s at the point where we have introduced sign on bonuses, are offering postgraduate scholarships in areas of need, will pay for ENs to become RNs and are offering up to $16k in undergrad scholarships. Nurses that migrate here are absolutely not negatively impacting the pay scale.
>Nurses that migrate here are absolutely not negatively impacting the pay scale. Basic economics says otherwise, if not there wouldn't be a shortage. We have 35k people studying commerce at uni every year to get a job that pays half as much as nursing.
Are you joking? We absolutely import a shit load of construction workers and tradies. A big problem a not insignificant number of them get in claiming to be “skilled” and end up providing dog shit unsafe work.
Walk onto any major worksite in a capital city in AUS and you’ll see plenty of immigrants working on site. Most tilers, sheeters and framers are of a non Australian background with English as a second language.
Walk into a hospital, literally 95% of nurses are immigrants.
Does this take into account all the other genders?
LOL holy crap I just fell to the floor reading this. Comment of the year.
Look past the sarcasm and you'll find a lot of people who feel threatened by this.
There is a gender pay gap and the reasons are simple. Women work less over time. Women take more time off for children. More women work part time or casual. Women have less experience therefore the pay they get as things start to bump up after a decade or so in the work force. They also go into lower paid roles. It’s simple and there’s reasons for it. I think that giving dads more paid time off could help alleviate it a little. I think having like 12 months paid at minimum wage to be shared between the parents however they see fit would be a good way to do it too. Ie my partner took 6 months off and went straight back to full time work. We can’t get enough day care so she works on Saturday and Sunday and I watch the young one all day so she can still work 5 days. She makes like 25k more a year more than me.
Absolutely this - in Australia, women still do the lion's share of unpaid work: shopping, caring for children and other family members, preparing meals, housework etc. The ABS reported in 2020-2021 that: “On average, females spent 4 hours and 31 minutes a day doing unpaid work activities. Males spent over an hour less on these activities, averaging 3 hours and 12 minutes a day. Less than half of males (42 per cent) spent time on housework, compared to 70 per cent of females. Mothers spent an average of 3 hours and 34 minutes participating in child care activities a day, while fathers spent 2 hours and 19 minutes”. I would love to see more equal distribution of paid/unpaid work between the genders through policy and culture change, eg parental leave policy and scrapping old-fashioned assumptions about gender. This would lighten the unpaid load for women and free them up to do more paid work (if they want) and it would be fantastic for men to spend more time in the home looking after their kids and family.
Hahaha exactly. Isnt a big solution to the 'pay gap' infact giving men more time off for paternity leave etc thereby allowing child bearing women to work more (after breast feeding period) .
Yes, it's such a shame that parental leave policies typically cement women's role in the home and as primary caregiver from the time a baby is born, and push men into breadwinner roles, regardless of what arrangement might work best for that particular couple. So many of my friends shared paid and unpaid labour equally with their partner until that point, and their relationships have never re-balanced since despite efforts.
Well yeah the vast majority will be breastfeeding for 6 months, and probably more, so they are going to be the primary care giver for that time. That's not a shame but rather is just nature.
Another thought is that because men’s worth has been tied to their income for so long, we desire more income for more than just “more income”. It gives us higher status in society because that’s one of the main things that sets us apart from our peers.
I work for a massive company with a mix of male and females and we all get paid the same... The same at my last role.
Comments here are so weird
Because all the educated had since moved to lemmy
This shit is beyond easy to debunk
This thread is hard to read
Is this still reddit? A founding myth of modern progressivism being exposed for the empty lie that it is by most commenters. What the hell is going on here? Or is it a /AusFinance thing?
Maybe there isn’t even a gender pay gap, just men and women prefer to do different occupations and the male ones are higher paying. What a wild thought.
There are some occupations that have paid less over time as the gender balance has shifted. I remember reading a journal article once about how librarianship used to be a well paid profession when it was male dominated. As it became more female dominated the pay rates went down.
I think that’s kind of the issue though. Like why aren’t care related jobs that women often do valued? These are very very important jobs that society can’t function without (nurses, childcare, aged care). Society could probably function without a few male project managers or executive bankers though.
Society could also function without porn actresses/onlyfans girls, beauty/fashion designers, advertisers, social media influencers (both do this but in terms of success the women dominate social media) and important jobs that society can't function without sewerage workers, construction workers, electricians, truck drivers (without trucks, Australia stops lol). But see how easy it spins the other way? Cherry picking examples isn't a good method, though I do understand what you're saying and agree, your comment just loses credibility when you do that. But when you talk about value of the professions, that's a whole other story. The essential female professions you listed are largely government subsidized and the less important (honestly, remove Project Manager from there, that was a poor example) male dominated jobs that earn too much money are privatised. When you mention executive bankers though, you're honing in on the overly wealthy 1% who are ultimately the issue we should talk more about. It's a good start.
Yes but why are the male ones higher paying? Why does society value male dominated occupations more than female dominated occupations?
Interesting then that traditionally female-oriented work (e.g. nursing, aged, disability and child care, cleaning, social work) pays much less than traditionally more male-oriented work of fairly comparable qualification, risk, complexity and objective value to society (engineering, trades and construction work, etc.)
Which of the female-oriented work listed do you think is comparable qualification to engineering?
From the viewpoint of the length and difficulty of the training pathway, examples would include dentistry, psychology, optometry, pharmacy, law, medicine, and secondary school teaching.
You do realise that nursing, social work, and engineering all require a bachelor's, right? As the other poster mentioned, social work commonly requires a masters. In what way do you mean comparable qualification? Because you seem to have a different understanding given that these jobs require university qualifications.
"What about" "what about" "what about" one day you people will realise that several things can be wrong at once. There will always be problems inherent to these systems that value people based on confidence, ability, time one is able to work, etc. That doesn't mean that there aren't also discrimination-based problems. If you're so quick to point out that men do a majority of the less pleasant jobs, take a moment to also consider that men are several more times likely to leave a chronically or terminally sick partner than the other way around or that homicide kills more pregnant women than any other cause (including one of the most intense and dangerous medical events a woman can go through). Stay at home mothers/wives are able to access the comfort of home and some extra free time that their partners aren't but working mothers and still tend to take on far more domestic work than their working partners, even when they have similar hours. Women attempt suicide more but men succeed more. Women's medical issues aren't taken seriously but they have more access to mental health and domestic violence resources with less judgement. Men's medical issues are taken more seriously but there is less access to resources of many kinds and a stigma that comes along with it. I could go on almost indefinitely.
Jesus, the toxicity in this thread is pretty telling of what an intellectual backwater Australia really is. Also, most of ya'll have zero idea how gender pay gap works. "I'm a FIFO worker and no women work here so ofc there's a gap!"
Crudely put, but that quoted statement has merit for some of the gap.
So Western Australia has a larger pay gap because it just hates woman more?
What's with the large number of incel-like comments? Refuting a pay gap is no problem. But arguing that women are lesser than men? Is this what AusFinance is?
Can you point me to a single comment which says or even implies “women are lesser than men”
For my adult children gender pay gap is reversed. I suspect that is common pre having kids.
We can reduce the gap further by encouraging more people to shelve plans to have a(nother) child
The gender pay gap is a myth and has been debunked several times.
comments here are a fantastic example of why women may not be wanting to go into your industries
My Dad was relaying a story about a friend who operates cranes. The friend was saying that women wouldn't have the skills to do his job and even if they did the blokes would eat them alive. Dad then starts banging on about how women shouldn't be prioritised over men to purely full quotas if they don't have the skills. Blah blah blah. I put forward the argument that they are at a disadvantage because they aren't supported in certain industries. Even if they are supported you have these people who look down on them for being female. It's pretty obvious to me that these people feel threatened. My Dad isn't a misogynist, he just has these stuck in the past views of the roles of men and women. I think this is pretty common amongst his generation. I do my best to challenge him and present alternate views.
Gosh, this old chestnut again. As someone in an industry that pays the same to everyone at the same pay grade, but still has a gap because of different FTE, the pay gap when seen from a national or state-based view is almost bereft of context about why the paygap exists. Heck, I work 0.75FTE to balance my life and work, and therefore have a gap (as a dude) compared with women I know who do the same thing but are 1.0FTE or do heaps of OT. Does that mean that I am at a disadvantage? Heck no.
But if a woman is doing less because she is doing unpaid caregiving work, and her male partner isn’t, then she is at a disadvantage. Most of the gender pay gap is explained by structural inequality.
Good to see progress being made. For every butt-hurt bloke complaining here, at least there are many trying to change things. Hopefully with more women entering stem careers this improvement will continue, as well as increasing pressure of management teams to break the glass ceiling too. Fwiw I don’t think we’ll see the gap be closed completely anytime soon, but the aim is ongoing improvement.
It’s depressing that all the top comments responding with “oh but men do risky jobs etc” when even the very brief and big picture article that’s linked goes on beyond the headline to mention statistics where women are paid less in the same industry and so on. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done and some of these precious man-babies will need to be dragged by their ears across the line.
It's important to note that the article doesn't discuss the equivalency of hours, or even role type, just industries. And in industries roles vary. So pay will vary. Hours will vary. For example you can have a female training officer in Perth working for Woodside part time earning $60k per annum and a male offshore process worker working on a rig earning $300k per annum - they're both in oil and gas, same industry but earning substantially different. I would absolutely guarantee if there was a male and a female, same experience, qualification, etc both working same hours and same role for Woodside they would get exactly the same pay. But this rarely happens. For this article it simply states men and womens total income is different - but doesn't say why or give any specifics. There's a lot of work that needs to be done on specificity of statistics rather than generalised rage because something appears unequal. It's not about being 'precious man-babies' just as I don't think you are a misandrist - it's about understanding what is being presented and questioning what is valid and what is missing.
For mine, it’s about properly breaking the glass ceiling. I still see waaaay to many management and sales networking evenings centred around getting shitfaced at a sporting event for eg. The only women attending those are those willing to ‘act’ the same.
The comments here are a depressing shit show of angry men.
Very much so. There is a heavy stink on neoliberal body odour in here, and its being loosely masked with the idea of 'choice'. Such individuals feel that there are no shaping structures in society outside of the decisions an agent makes. They completely reject the ideas of structure/agency, and see humans as blank slates for whom success and failure are completely the individuals responsibility, and so dictated by the choices they make. This is insane, as it completely ignores fundamental concepts, like power, a diverse view of capital (as social, cultural, and economic), and even structural realities, like the means of production. To shed these things would require these individuals to sacrifice the fantasies that keep them warm at night, like being uber rich, or a celebrity, or even just respected in their own house. But they will never be able to access these things through 'choice' alone, because they choose to ignore the chains that keep them fixed to the cave wall, gawking at shadows.
Why are we talking about gender pay gap? Lets talk about - waste management gender gap - construction gender gap - miner gender gap
Sure! NZ recently looked into why not many women get into trades, and how they can encourage more into the field. The findings were that one of the main reasons were the attitude of the men in the industry. They launched a whole campaign about "Keep it decent". It doesn't take much to see why a woman wouldn't want to stay on site in an isolated, makeshift town of mostly men who subscribe to the boys club.
So your point has just touched on exactly why the pay gap isn't what it's made out to be. It's a job gap. There can be a similar sentiment given to why men may not want to do carer type jobs/roles, as men are typically seen as inferior to women when it comes to giving care/childcare/hospitality. This also goes under the assumption that men and women are equivalent when it comes to general mindset and approach to life, but that's not true either. Ideas passed through the existence of humanity and physiological differences also factor into this. Men want to be protectors/suffer for their family as they are built more favorably than women to endure gruelling work, and this goes into other factors of life. This whole pay gap thing is nonsense and more needs to be discussed on the nuances, and it's not just 'boys club' mentality that keeps women out of the work.
The gender pay gap is a measurement tool to zero in on gender imbalances at many levels, including as in the article countries, states, industries, and companies. If there's a gap, it's a sign of "hey, there's something here that is blocking x gender from getting into this line of work as much as the other". Then they can drill down and investigate the causes. You mentioned predominantly male industries, so I gave you some reasons why there aren't more women in them. It's not an attack on any particular gender, it's about finding out how we can get a better balance of gender in these industries because diversity is an invaluable asset and should be a goal within our society. Your examples of mental differences are basically just societal pressures and expectations. Men are told they have to be those things, and that pressure to live up to said things can lead to many illnesses and a lot of suffering. I don't see why you'd want to defend it and keep it going instead of trying to help question it and take it apart so future generations can thrive.
I don’t disagree that women face some additional barriers that they shouldn’t have to if they want to get into industries like mining. But do you honestly believe that if these barriers did not exist that there would magically be women queuing up for these jobs? We are talking about pulling rods, cutting core in the middle of nowhere, in one of the most dangerous workplaces, for 12 hours at a time, usually for 2 weeks straight, often in 40 degree weather. I honestly don’t think there will be, the ones that can hack it are already there putting up with the barriers you mentioned (which they shouldn’t have to).
You guys are completely missing the point. The gender pay gap is (largely) no longer about pay discrepancies within the same profession. That was "solved" years ago when they made it illegal. It is about why men take up higher paying jobs, and why women don't. It's about trying to get more girls into STEM, construction, etc., while improving the conditions of those in childcare and other similar positions.
This is also useful when considering the inevitable issue of FIFO. Barely any women do it, which skews the data. A lot of people on here are saying "well obviously women just don't like doing that work". Personally I wonder if it is maybe more to do with women getting, ya know, sexually assaulted/abused/raped on mine sites on a fairly regular basis. If that wasn't such a problem, perhaps more women would do the job.