According to data released on Monday (June 27, 2022), the majority of women do not work full-time for the majority of their working life, which prevents them from advancing to management positions and widens the pay disparity with males.
Men on average out-earn women across all working age groups.
The Wages and Ages: Mapping the Gender Pay Gap by Age data set shows that in 2021, fewer than 50% of women were working full-time in every age group. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency, a department of the federal government, has issued this. Employers in the private sector with 100 or more employees provide the data.
Males and women start to work differently around the age of 35, when men tend to work full-time and women tend to work part-time or irregularly. Women are more than twice as likely as males to work part-time and irregular hours after the age of 35.
Men over age 55 are twice as likely to be in management as women.
Of those women in management at the same age, two thirds are in lower ranks.
According to the research, men also make more money than women in the workplace across all generations.
When men and women are 55 to 64 years old, the wage disparity is the largest (31.9%). This amounts to more than $40,000 annually on average.
Millennial women in the workforce 35 and under are currently reaching management at equal rates as men. We have a generation of Australian women who are highly educated, and over the last decade have been outnumbering men in higher education enrolments and completion.
Mary Wooldridge
Even women in senior executive and CEO positions who are 55 years of age and older struggle with a significant wage disparity; on average, they make $93,000 less per year than their male counterparts.
The agency says “that in 2021 at no age were more than 50% of women working full time, yet higher paid management opportunities were almost exclusively reserved for full-time workers. In all age groups, more than 90% of managers were working full-time.”
On average, companies with more part-time managers have more women at executive levels.
WGEA director Mary Wooldridge said if the trends in the data continued, millennial women now working would earn only 70% of men’s earnings by the time they were 45.
“Millennial women in the workforce 35 and under are currently reaching management at equal rates as men,” Wooldridge said. “We have a generation of Australian women who are highly educated, and over the last decade have been outnumbering men in higher education enrolments and completion.”
“If organizations want to unlock the potential that these women can provide after the age of 35, there needs to be a shift in workplace structures surrounding them. Creative workplaces will reap the talent rewards today and in the future.”
She said “too many employers are missing a huge talent pool by not encouraging and enabling women to work additional hours or in the managerial ranks.”
She emphasized the significance of parental leave that is gender-neutral. Flexible work policies, support, and subsidies for child care.
“Leading employers are creating or redesigning roles to support part-time management and job-sharing structures,” Wooldridge said.
