Is the home stretch to pay parity the hardest? It’s starting to look that way.
Australia has become the latest country to make individual companies reveal their gender wage gaps. Firms with more than 100 employees will have to report the difference between what men and women earn as part of new equality legislation adopted by the federal parliament. The government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency currently publishes aggregate pay gaps by industry.
This is good news. It joins a growing number of nations endeavoring to improve transparency in the hope it will accelerate pay parity. The law is long overdue Down Under, where the pay gap is one of the widest in the world. Last year, women, on average, earned 22.8% less than men as progress stalled during the pandemic. The nation ranks 43rd on the Global Gender Pay Gap Index, which is topped by Iceland, Finland, Norway and New Zealand.
