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Equal Pay Day falls on 8 September this year, marking the additional time from the end of the previous financial year that women must work to earn the same as men. – Source:  Workplace Gender Equality Agency

Using Average Weekly Earnings data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics today the Agency calculates the national gender pay gap to be 16.2%, a decrease of 1.7 percentage points over the previous 12-month period.

On average, men working full-time earned $1,613.60 and women earned $1,352.50, a difference of $261.10 per week.

The decline in the gender pay gap can be explained by stronger growth in women’s average weekly earnings compared with men’s average weekly earnings. Between May 2015 and May 2016, women’s weekly earnings grew by 3.3% while men’s weekly earnings grew by 1.3%.

The national gender pay gap is a symbol of the overall position of women in the workforce, reflecting a range of factors including earnings differences between male and female-dominated industries and occupations, underrepresentation of women in senior positions, the distribution of unpaid caring responsibilities as well as discrimination and bias. It does not show ‘like-for-like’ pay gaps, that is pay rates for employees working in the same or comparable roles.

The Agency has today updated our Gender workplace statistics at a glance fact sheet. Our more detailed Gender pay gap statistics fact sheet will be updated and available on our website tomorrow.

Please note: the calculation to determine Equal Pay Day has been amended slightly this year, to better reflect the concept of additional time worked by women.

 While the gender pay gap is conventionally calculated as the difference between average male full-time earnings and female full-time earnings expressed as a percentage of male earnings, the Equal Pay Day calculation draws on the difference as a percentage of female earnings.

 This amendment makes Equal Pay Day 2016 a little later in September than Equal Pay Day 2015, although the gender pay gap has decreased.

EPD 2016

 

Source:  Workplace Gender Equality Agency