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13 Aug 2025 Campaigns
The day symbolically marks the end of the 50 additional days into the new financial year that women in Australia need to work to earn the same pay, on average, as men. This discrepancy is known as the Gender Pay Gap – the difference in average earnings between men and women across the whole workforce, not just people in the same job.
It seems simple enough – and very unfair. However, what it really means, why it’s about much more than numbers, why it is even still a thing in 2025, and what we can do to change it, can be confusing.
Here we explain why campaigning for equal pay is still essential.
In this article we are using ‘men’ and ‘women’ in a two-sided, or binary way, because that is how this particular inequality is quantified. We acknowledge these statistics leave out non-binary people, and don’t paint the full picture of other pay gaps that exist. For example, Aboriginal workers, migrant workers, and disabled workers, often experience multiple forms of discrimination and pay inequality.
A screen reading of this article takes around 5 minutes or you can listen to it here:
You may have heard different numbers and that is because there are a variety of ways to measure the Gender Pay Gap. Whatever way we look at the statistics, every set of data shows a significant gap that disadvantages women.
Just last week on 7 August, a new study released by the Australian Government’s Jobs and Skills Australia agency, New Perspectives on Old Problems: Gendered jobs, work and pay, shows that the accumulated 10-year occupational Gender Pay Gap is 30.7%.
This report provides detailed, new, intersectional data about gendered segregation and pay gaps including those experienced by First Nations and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse migrant workers. We recommend anyone wanting to find out the latest expert thinking to take a look at this groundbreaking research.
Using mandatory Gender Equality Reports from around 7500 of Australia’s largest private and non-profit employers, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) calculates the current full-time-equivalent Gender Pay Gap in Australia as 21.8%.
That means that for every $1 that men earn, women earn 78 cents. This adds up to an average difference of over $28,000 between men and women’s annual pay.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reports a national pay gap of 11.9% for full time workers. However, when considering all employees, including part-time and casual workers, the ABS Gender Pay Gap widens significantly to 30.6%.
If we zoom out and look at this as a collective issue, an aggregate of the Gender Pay Gap shows a difference in the gender share of the national wage pool of around $200 billion annually.
An income flow of this size should be seen for what it is: a major structural feature of the Australian economy with a significant effect on wealth distribution and equality.
Of course, it’s true that in Australia, equal pay for equal work is a legal requirement under legislation such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, the Fair Work Act 2009, and the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012.
However, the Gender Pay Gap is driven by rusted-on, systemic power imbalances and stereotypes in workplaces, domestic life, community institutions and public life.
There are specific factors which contribute to the Gender Pay Gap:
Amendments to various Acts since the Australian Human Rights Commission’s landmark Respect@Work Report have strengthened the responsibilities of employers to actively make workplaces fairer and safer.
As the Albanese Government has been implementing the 55 recommendations of the Respect@Work Report, there have been significant positive changes. Yet, there is still much further work to do, to address the causes of the Gender Pay Gap and the rise in sexual harassment and discrimination in Australian workplaces.
Tackling the Gender Pay Gap and other inequalities requires making changes across workplaces and communities as a collective whole.
We need to dismantle out-of-date ideas about work and care and take concerted action to reduce occupational segregation. We also need concrete policies that can help make positive change by, for instance, reducing casualisation, shortening the full-time working week, allowing employee-led flexibility, improving universal access to social services, and creating well-paid, fair and meaningful jobs for all.
This requires galvanising a sense of purpose to achieve equality and stronger rights across civil society. Gender equality and eliminating discrimination should be taken seriously with the teeth of legislated responsibilities, regulation and accountability.
For more than a century, Australian feminists and trade unionists have campaigned for equal pay. Take a look at the article and film, A Short History of Unions Taking Action for Equal Pay! produced by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) for an inspiring glimpse into how much we have won and why we must keep fighting for equality in our workplaces.
Australian unions welcomed an important equal pay decision handed down by the Fair Work Commission in April this year which recognised historic undervaluing of pay based on gender in a range of sectors.
The Australian Services Union’s current Skilled, Respected, Equal campaign is a great example of ways we can advance genuine equal pay in Australia by acknowledging the causes of the Gender Pay Gap and organising ourselves to do something about it.
The Australian Services Union (ASU) covers workers often devalued and underpaid in the social service and care sectors – workforces that primarily employ women because of the occupational segregation we have discussed.
The ASU achieved a milestone equal pay win in 2012 resulting in real wage increase of 23% – 45% over eight years. Now, unions are concerned that the Fair Work Commission’s proposed changes to the Social and Community Services Award will have unintended consequences that could disadvantage some workers and set back equal pay.
The Working Women’s Centre SA supports the ASU’s campaign to make sure that the expertise, lived experience and complexity involved in social service jobs is valued and fairly paid.
In South Australia, the ABS data shows our Gender Pay Gap as at least 9.8% for full time workers. While better than the national average, South Australia’s gap has been increasing. There are complex reasons for this, including the gender segregation of the industries in which South Australia is growing employment such as arms manufacturing, construction and health.
The South Australian Government undertook a Gender Pay Gap Taskforce which reported in November 2024.
The recommendations cover supporting small-to-medium employers to address their own workplace gender pay gaps; establishing an independent research centre to help address economic inequality; and taking targeted action to reduce the Gender Pay Gap in the public sector. Enacting these recommendations, in full, is a great start to closing our gender pay gap.
The Gender Pay Gap and women’s lifetime caring responsibilities means that women face a significant superannuation gap when they reach retirement age, with their median superannuation balance about 25% lower than men.
As the WWC SA and others have noted in submissions to the SA Government, there is an important issue for future review in the regulations of an otherwise very welcome reform to create Portable Long Service Leave in South Australia’s community and disability sector.
The exclusion of superannuation from this scheme, in a sector in which women make up nearly 75% of the workforce, will have the greatest impact on women who already face significant superannuation disadvantage.
Poverty in retirement is a major, often ignored, issue facing older women workers. Public policy needs to address this rather than contributing to widening the gender superannuation gap and women’s disadvantage.
The next six months is an opportunity for progressive change and action in South Australia.
Promoting equality, rights and fairness for women at work is intricately linked to addressing women’s economic security and our freedom to live without the threat of gendered violence.
South Australia’s Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence will be released in the coming week. We await the Royal Commission’s important recommendations and the South Australian Government’s response. Animating our positive duty to challenge violence in homes, communities, and workplaces will be important to any actions.
The SA Government has committed to new Gender Equality legislation, and this is an ideal opportunity to strengthen our State’s strong record on equality with new purposeful law reform.
We offer workplace training, advocacy and legal services for women and marginalised workers – find out more here and signup for our e-news here.
Here are the resources and organisations we refer to in this article, in order of their appearance.
