Publishing employer gender pay gaps FAQ

WGEA published the gender pay gaps for private sector employers with 100 or more employees on 27 February 2024. This website page contains answers to the most frequently asked questions regarding this process.

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The Parliament passed changes to the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 in March 2023 aimed at increasing transparency on gender equality in workplaces and to further motivate employer action that accelerates progress to close the gender pay gap. This includes legislative reforms that require WGEA to publish gender pay gaps for individual employers.

Australia’s national gender pay gap is 21.7%. Although the gender pay gap is closing, progress is slow. A gender pay gap of 21.7% means that on average, women earn 78 cents for every $1 a man earns. Over a year, that adds up to a difference of $26,400.

Transparency and accountability are critical for driving change. By shining a light on gender pay gaps at an employer level, we are also arming individuals and organisations with the evidence they need to take meaningful action to accelerate closing the gender pay gap in Australian workplaces.

Employer gender pay gaps are available on WGEA’s Data Explorer, which can be accessed via WGEA’s website.

This platform allows users to see and compare gender equality outcomes for industries, industry sub-divisions, groups of employers by size and individual employers. Employees and employers can use this tool to gain deeper insights into gender equality performance and outcomes and compare results across employers and industries.

National and industry results for the gender pay gap are a useful comparison for the broader context of gender equality in Australia. But because it’s aggregating the data that’s reported to WGEA it can’t identify opportunities for improvement and action at the employer level.

Analysing the results of individual employers, against the context of their workforce composition and their actions in the workplace, will better inform employers and employees of the actions needed to address drivers of gender inequality at an employer level. Increased transparency on this information also helps policy makers, the media and the broader public hold employers to account.

Under the Act, employers with 100 or more employees are ‘relevant employers’ and are required to report to WGEA. However, the Act also allows for fluctuations in the workforce. This means that employers must continue to submit a gender equality report to WGEA until their workforce falls below 80 employees.

A ‘relevant employer’ can be a standalone company, a corporate group, or a subsidiary of a corporate group. An employer’s ABN is used to determine the number of employees.

On 27 February 2024, WGEA published gender pay gaps for private sector employers with 100 or more employees that reported to the Agency for the 2022-23 reporting period. This included:

• Base salary and total remuneration median gender pay gaps
• Gender composition per pay quartile

Most companies reporting to WGEA are single businesses. However, a proportion are corporate groups with multiple businesses. If some, or all, of a corporate group’s subsidiaries have similar gender equality policies and strategies, these employers can report to WGEA as a “submission group”. In the first round of publishing, pay gaps were published by submission group.

Nationally, the WGEA median total remuneration gender pay gap is 19%. This looks at every employee in the dataset and finds the median gender pay gap.

By publishing employer gender pay gaps, we were able to analyse gender pay gaps at the employer level. This analysis showed that:

• Almost one third of employers have a neutral gender pay gap within and including -5% and 5%.
• 62% of median employer gender pay gaps are over 5% and in favour of men. The rest (8%) are less than -5% and in favour of women.
• Across all employers, 50% have a gender pay gap of over 9.1% (the mid-point of employer gender pay gaps).
• Gender pay gaps differ widely across industry types. In female-dominated industries, the mid-point of employer gender pay gaps is 2.9%. This widens to 10% in mixed-gender industries and increases further to 15.2% in male-dominated industries.
• There is a link between having at least one woman in the CEO position and a lower employer gender pay gap. The mid-point of employer gender pay gaps for employers with at least one woman CEO is 5.4% compared to 10.9% for employers with no women CEOs.

Yes. WGEA will publish employer gender pay gaps for each reporting period, like we publish an annual Scorecard. However, we may not choose to publish gender pay gaps at the exact same time each year.

Yes. In the second round of publishing, which will use data for the 2023-24 reporting period, there will be an expansion to what is published. WGEA will publish:

• Gender pay gaps individually for all relevant employers, this includes those who submit their data as a part of a submission group
• Base salary and total remuneration average gender pay gaps, as well as base salary and total remuneration median gender pay gaps
• Gender composition and average remuneration per pay quartile

Read more about enhancements to gender pay gap publishing for the 2023-24 reporting period here.

WGEA will publish each relevant employer’s base salary and total remuneration gender pay gap, by average and by median, as well as gender composition and average remuneration per pay quartile. This will enable employers and employees to view the impact of strategies and approaches to workplace gender equality, over time.

However, what we will publish will also depend on the information reported that year and any legislative changes that have taken effect.

We will publish the aggregate results for the private sector from the 2023-24 reporting period in our annual Private Sector Gender Equality Scorecard in late 2024. We will publish the 2024 employer gender pay gaps in early 2025.

Employers will be given ample notice of the date of publication.

Yes.

Commonwealth public sector employers were required to report to WGEA for the first time in 2023. In this first round, relevant employers reported data relating to 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2022. However, WGEA will not publish employer gender pay gaps from Commonwealth public sector reporting, related to 2022 data.  

Legislation requires WGEA to publish the first Commonwealth public sector employer gender pay gaps from reporting, related to data from the period 1 January to 31 December, 2023.  This means Commonwealth public sector employer gender pay gaps will be published for the first time in early 2025. 

State and Territory public sector employers are not required to report to WGEA.

In December 2021 National Cabinet made an in-principle agreement for jurisdictions to report public sector workforce data to WGEA. WGEA continues to work with States and Territories on an approach to gender equality data collection and reporting to WGEA.

Under the Act, employers with 100 or more employees are required to report to WGEA. However, the Act allows for fluctuations in the workforce. This means employers must continue to submit a gender equality report to WGEA until their workforce falls below 80 employees.

To err on the side of caution, in February 2024 WGEA did not publish any gender pay gaps for employers with fewer than 100 employees.

Until the 2023-24 reporting period, employers voluntarily reported CEO, Head of Business and Casual Manager remuneration. Reporting this data is mandatory from 2023-24 and it will be included in remuneration calculations in the published dataset, including gender pay gaps.

This enables WGEA to publish employer gender pay gaps by average as well as median. CEO remuneration has a meaningful impact on the average gender pay gap calculation, but is insignificant for median calculations. To ensure future comparability, WGEA published the first set of employer gender pay gaps only by median.

The inclusion of CEO remuneration will be a more accurate representation of the gender pay gap as, currently, nearly 80% of CEOs in Australia are men.

WGEA uses the data provided to it by employers in the Employer Census. Employers select a snapshot date during the period of 1 April to 31 March to report on the workplace profile (gender, role, level and remuneration) of every employee.

A ‘median’ is the middle of a set of numbers.

A median gender pay gap is found by lining up the pay of every man in a business in order of smallest to largest and finding the middle number in that dataset. The same is done for the pay of women in that business. A median employer gender pay gap is the difference between the median of what a man is paid and the median of what a woman is paid within the organisation.

Unlike the average, the median is not skewed by extreme values (CEO remuneration, for example), giving us a picture of typical earnings that exist within an organisation.

The average gender pay gap is calculated by adding up the wages of all employees and dividing that number by the number of employees.

The average gender pay gap is a good measure of the collective remuneration of a group. As the average is skewed by exceptionally high or low salaries, it will show if earnings are particularly concentrated for one gender, for example, more men in higher earning positions.

We recognise that the gender pay gap is a good proxy but not a perfect measure of gender equality and the gender make up of a company fluctuates.

A gender pay gap within and including +/-5% allows for normal business fluctuations and employee movements, while signifying that an employer has a strong focus on gender equality and is taking action to show that there is gender equality in the organisation. 

This is the proportion of women and men in an organisation and the average total remuneration for each pay quartile.

Pay quartiles divide the women and men who work at an organisation into four groups, starting with the highest paid people in an organisation down to the lowest paid. We then indicate the average total remuneration per pay quartile.

Women are underrepresented in higher-paying leadership and decision-making roles in Australia and overrepresented in casual, part time and fixed-term roles, which tend to be lower paid. Publishing gender composition and average remuneration per pay quartile uncovers not only whether an employer’s gender pay gap is being driven by gender segregation at the composition level but also if it is driven by significant disparities in pay between levels. This can help identify areas of action for employers.

Quartiles are created by sorting employees based on their total remuneration from lowest to highest, dividing the employee list into equal quarters and then calculating the percentage of women and men and their average remuneration in each quarter.

WGEA calculates employer gender pay gaps based on women and men. Recognising that gender is a social and cultural concept, since the 2020-21 reporting period, WGEA has created the option for employers to report employee gender as non-binary as a voluntary data category.

The proportion of employers reporting employee gender as non-binary increased from 8.8% in 2020-21 to 19% in 2022-23. The proportion of non-binary employees in WGEA’s dataset similarly increased to 0.2% from less than 0.1% in 2020-21. These are meaningful changes, suggesting awareness of, and attention to, gender diversity in the workplace is increasing. However, the non-binary numbers remain small and reporting is voluntary so it has not been used in this analysis.

Recommendation 7.2 of the Review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act (the Review) recommended changes to enable WGEA to collect data on non-binary employees. WGEA has recently conducted consultations on this recommendation.

Yes. WGEA will provide an Executive Summary and an Industry Benchmark Report for each relevant employer (i.e. each individual employer) and the overall corporate group.

Yes. Employers can provide an Employer Statement that gives context to their gender pay gap results. The link to the Employer Statement is displayed in the WGEA Data Explorer in the ‘Employer Results’ tab alongside each employer’s gender pay gap.

Employers can upload a link at any time and WGEA will regularly update the Data Explorer. All relevant employers will have the opportunity to provide an Employer Statement.

No.

As of 22 April 2024, approximately 20% of employers have provided a correctly formatted link to an Employer Statement. The documents employers link to are the responsibility of the employer, not WGEA. WGEA is not doing a quality check of the links.

There are multiple reasons why you may not be able to find an employer’s gender pay gap, including:

• The employer may not be required to report to WGEA because:
  • It is a state or territory public sector employer; or
  • It is an employer with fewer than 100 employees that has never reported to WGEA; or
  • It is an employer with fewer than 80 employees.
• Commonwealth public sector employers with 100 or more employees are on a different reporting schedule and their gender pay gaps will be published in early 2025.
• The employer’s trading name may be different to their reporting name. Try searching by the employer’s ABN. You can find an employer’s ABN on the Australian Business Register’s ABN Lookup page (available at: https://abr.business.gov.au/).
• The employer may be non-compliant under the Act. This means the employer has 100 or more employees, but it has not reported to WGEA. Try looking for the employer on our named as non-compliant list.
• The employer may be non-compliant under the Act, but not named as non-compliant. Not every employer who has failed to comply with the Act is named. When determining whether to exercise the discretion to name an employer, WGEA considers a range of factors including: if the employer has made a reasonable attempt to comply, if the employer is a first-time reporter, the size of the employer, prior history of compliance and, any written representations from the employer.
• There are technical or data errors for an employer that have not been able to be resolved in time.
• The employer may be required to report to WGEA under the Act, but has not registered to report.

Employers that self-publish can choose the methodology and dataset they use to calculate their gender pay gap. This might be different to the approach undertaken by WGEA.

For example, an employer may choose to publish a like-for-like gap, an average gender pay gap based on base salary or total remuneration, or a median gender pay gap. They may also publish a gender pay gap that uses workforce data from a different date to the workforce data that they provided to WGEA in their Employer Census.

A gender pay gap analysis will highlight the factors that are driving a gender gap.

WGEA has developed a Gender Pay Gap Analysis Guide to help employers plan and execute a pay and composition analysis in order to identify the drivers of their gender pay gap.

1. Do a gender pay gap analysis to understand what is driving gender inequality in their workplace.
2. Develop an action plan to address the gaps they have identified. This includes consulting with employees on developing measures for success that measure employee experience between line managers and teams.
3. Set up the right team to lead and implement the plan. This should include anyone who has a role in decision-making and making sure the actions happen, including the CEO/Executive Team, HR and line managers.

WGEA’s Data Explorer tool allows users to explore information reported to WGEA in our annual Employer Census. Users can search and compare the gender equality outcomes for industries, industry sub-divisions, groups of employers by size and individual employers.

WGEA’s website also has a suite of educational resources for the public about what the gender pay gap is and how it’s calculated as well as advice for employers on taking action, including:

• Webpage on publishing employer gender pay gaps
• Explore the trends from the publication of employer gender pay gaps on WGEA’s interactive webpage
• Industry Snapshots that provide a summary of the performance of all employers in the industry against the six gender equality indicators
• Employer gender pay gap publication in the United Kingdom: A review of the literature
• Communications 10-Point Guide
• Gender Pay Gap Analysis Guide
• Gender Pay Gap Employer Statement Guide
• A Director’s guide to accelerating workplace gender equality
• Employer guidance on developing policies and strategies for the six Gender Equality Indicators
• Employer guide to improve workplace sexual harassment prevention and response