Something truly irritating – Equal Pay Day

By Kate Southam  

There is nothing like Equal Pay Day to get the blood pumping.

This year it falls on a Saturday – tomorrow in fact – and according to the official Equal Pay Day website the gender pay gap in Australia has increased from 17 per cent in 2009 to 18 per cent in 2010

Blogs on this topic get everyone pissed off. People who view pay inequity as goal not yet reached get mad all over again this time of year. And those that believe it is all just feminist propaganda because Australia has laws that prevent men and women being paid different get down right furious so lets’ get those temperatures rising.

Here are a few random facts or “facts” depending on your view:

• According to research from KPMG, in 1977 women were earning on average 88 per cent of the male average wage. In 2010 they are earning only 82 per cent of the male wage.
• Graduate Careers Australia reports that the pay gap between male and female grads has widened. In 2009 three years after the survey group graduated the females were earning $7,200 less a year than the men.
• Financial Sector Union general secretary Leon Carter says while the overall gender pay gap in Australia is 18 per cent, the gap in the finance sector is 28 per cent – the worst in the country. “The fact one of the most profitable sectors in the country has the worse pay gap in the country is criminal,” rails Carter. “If the banks can’t afford to fix this who can?”
• ME Bank CEO Jamie McPhee has given the green light for the bank to work with the FSU to carry out a gender pay audit at the bank, which employs 700 people, look at what is impacting pay inequity and then make recommendations for ways to improve the imbalance.

From blogging on this topic before I know people get really riled by certain issues one being the fact there is a law against paying men and women differently so therefore pay inequity is just feminist BS.

I don’t think McPhee is a feminist but Carter tells me he does have two daughters and is genuinely interested in a better salary future for them as well as his employees. I don’t think KPMG is a feminist organisation either or Greythorn.

Lisa Annesse of the Diversity Council of Australia told ABC radio host Fran Kelly recently that the problem was that equal pay is open to interpretation.

“Even though since 1972, after a decision by the Arbitration Commission that applied to Federal Awards and then progressed to State Awards, equal pay became enshrined in our law it still doesn’t happen because it is all about managerial interpretation of what that means and how that is applied on a day-to-day basis…”

People also argue that pay audits do not look at men and women doing the same jobs.

The Australian Institute of Management (hardly a feminist organisation) do compare like with like. Its last survey (September 2009) found the gender pay between general management roles had narrowed to 12.5 per cent – a 0.8 per cent improvement on 2008. Female CEOs earned 16.4 per cent less than blokes in the same type of roles – a two per cent improvement on the year before.

Carter says the FSU’s pay equity audits is weighted out to enable researchers to compare like with like. “We are not comparing what a teller earns with what a financial analyst makes. We are looking at two people of different gender doing the same job but getting paid differently,” he said.

Some blog posters in the past have claimed men get paid more because they just do more important jobs. This is often true. Providing access to promotions particularly to jobs with line management responsibility or access to bonuses is vital to what a man or woman earns.

One of the issues the FSU is cranky about is how banks reward short term risk taking behaviour – and those roles are more often filled by men – and undervalued the roles focused on quality of service and relationship building that are more often filled by women.

Carter says the FSU wants the Federal Government – whoever that might be – to put the banks on notice and give them a set time frame to fix gender pay inequity or prepare for legislative intervention.  

I asked Carter why he thought there were so many gender pay deniers out there.

“It’s because it’s a story only a couple of times a year, which is why we think there would be educational benefits to pick an industry – and we think it should be ours – and fix the problem and let momentum build from there,” Carter says.

“We can’t just look at this every Equal Pay Day.”

Article from CareerOne.com.au