The coronavirus crisis could cause a devastating setback in the fight to achieve pay equity, advocates have warned as Australia marks Equal Pay Day.
Equal Pay Day came on 28 August this year, 59 days after the end of the financial year on 30 June.
The symbolic date marks the 59 extra days that women would need to work each year just to earn the same average wage as men.
University of Sydney Professor of Gender, Work and Employment Relations Rae Cooper said it would take some time to know exactly how coronavirus would impact the gender pay gap.
“What I would predict is that we're going to see quite a gendered impact in pay because we're seeing gendered impacts everywhere else," she told SBS News.
"COVID has made so many people lose their jobs, but the majority of those people are women.
“So, 55 per cent of the COVID-unemployed are women and we're seeing lots of other changes going on. The sectors particularly where women work in very strong numbers there are some of them that have been really profoundly affected."
Australian women and men have been legally accorded equal pay since 1969, but it is yet to be achieved 51 years later and counting.
Management consultant Rinku Razdan said that, as a migrant working in a male-dominated field, she had been forced to work harder than her colleagues to gain recognition.
"The barriers were twofold. The first was as a woman in senior management and the second was as a woman of international background," said Ms Razdan, who moved to Australia from India as a 20-year-old.
"I always felt that to succeed in any position I had to be better than others. I don't feel, from a gender equality point of view, that the same applies to men."
Workplace Gender Equality Agency director Libby Lyons told the ABC legal protections aren't working.
Rinku Razdan said that, as a migrant woman in a male-dominated industry, she felt like she had to work twice as hard. Source: SBS
"We are still finding that employers are not paying women the same as men and are not meeting their legal requirement, which is really concerning," she said.
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency has calculated that the national gender pay gap is currently 14 per cent for full-time workers.
In May this year, the average weekly ordinary full-time earnings of women across all occupations and industries was just over $1,500.
The average weekly ordinary full-time earnings of men, on the other hand, was $1,800.
Meraiah Foley, the deputy director for the Women and Work Research Group at the University of Sydney Business School, said there are a number of factors that need to be addressed to achieve pay equality.
“There is a persistent and continuing sort of undervaluation of the occupations and industries where women are concentrated. So, think nurses, education, aged care, retail for example,” she said.
“We also know a major cause of the gender pay gap is discrimination. So, even when women and men are working in the same industries, women tend to be paid less than men. And also women bear a disproportionate share of unpaid care-giving responsibilities in our society,” she added.
Public policy researchers at the Australian Institute found that between March and April, the number of women employed dropped by 5.3 per cent, while for men it fell by 3.9 per cent.
Deanne Stewart, chief executive of Australian superannuation fund First State Super, said the pandemic has seen more women access their superannuation early, in comparison to their male colleagues.
“What we're worried about is that this will then exacerbate the already existing gap between women and men with superannuation, where women retire with 47 per cent less (super) than their male counterparts. So COVID-19 and its potential impact is quite alarming,” she said.
Diversity Council Australia chief executive Lisa Annese said the diverse cultural backgrounds of Australian women was influencing the pay gap.
“When women have culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds we do know that biases get amplified, and whilst we haven't been able to quantify the pay gap - because it's data that's not currently available in the way the pay gap data is collated,” she said.
“We do know what in general biases tend to get exacerbated and outcomes are poorer for women when they have intersectional identities."
The key to eliminating gender-based pay disparity is transparency in the workplace, said Meraiah Foley from the University of Sydney.
"One thing that organisations can do that want to tackle this problem is really commit themselves to conducting pay audits internally and making the results of those audits public, to really address that there is a problem and commit to solving it,” she said.
Additional reporting by Jarni Blakkarly and Darren Mara.
