The Budget and the Gender Pay Gap

If you read the Women’s Budget Statement released with all the other October 2022-23 budget papers you will find the term “gender pay gap” mentioned 47 times.

With this amount of focus, you would think that the Budget actually had some real, concrete ways to tackle this issue.

But if you read what the Government is proposing you see a large number of motherhood statements that in my view will do little, if anything, to move the needle on this issue.

Funnily enough, the Women’s Budget Statement actually hits on what I consider to be one of the largest contributors to the gender pay gap. And this is what is called in the Women’s Budget Statement “industrial segregation”.

This refers to:

The unequal distribution of women and men in certain For example the high proportion of women in what I call the caring industries, Health Care (75%) and Education and Training (73%), relative to the low proportion of women in Construction (14%);

and,

The unequal pay between different industries. According to the ABS the median weekly earnings in August 2021 was $1,057 for health care workers, $1,250 for those in education, but $1,305 in construction (a 23% premium to the median in health care).

You can see this from the image which was copied directly from the Women’s Budget Statement.

My conclusion from this is that we, as a society, seem to pay less for workers in the caring industries than we do for other industries.

So to make meaningful change to the Gender Pay Gap, we need to increase the pay rates of those in the caring industry which will proportionally impact more women than men.

Now we see in the budget, the Government tasking Fair Work to evaluate pay in the Care and Community sector to help close the gender pay gap.

Sounds like the right thing. But here is the really annoying part. Guess who is the biggest employer in the health care and education space? Governments

And who indirectly funds the bulk of the child and aged care workforce? Once again various governments.

So the politicians could make meaningful steps to close the Gender Pay Gap just by looking at the pay rates for the people they employ / subsidise. They don’t need Fair Work to make a determination, they can make the decision on pay rates. Just like every other employer who decides that they need to pay above award rates to attract and retain staff.

But instead of actually doing something to close the Gender Pay Gap, in my view the politicians keep on deflecting to business owners, with somewhat meaningless motherhood statements.

Does this mean the politicians mouth platitudes about it, but have no real intention of closing the Gender Pay Gap?

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