A lift in the proportion of women in management and in the upper pay quartiles has closed the gender pay gap by 1.1 percentage points to 21.7% in 2023.
This is according to annual research by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), which found that the average annual pay difference between men and women has now narrowed by $1,322, but a gap of $26,393 remains.
For the retail industry in particular, the gender pay gap is 13.7%, a year-on-year slip of 0.1%, with the median gender pay gap for retail at 7.1%.
Australian Retailers Association (ARA) CEO Paul Zahra welcomed the overall decline in the gender pay gap, but said more needs to be done for women leaders in the retail industry.
“In retail, women are thriving in management and heads of business roles, however we are lagging in achieving real growth in women CEOs and only just staying steady in board representation,” Zahra said.
According to WGEA, 14% of CEOs in retail are women. This is below the national average of 22%. It is also despite retail having the third-highest proportion of women, at 56%.
Retail also has the largest gap between the proportion of women in the industry and women CEOs, at minus 42%.
However, the proportion of female managers in retail (49%) is higher than the national average of 42%. The proportion of women on boards in retail (19.6%) is also higher than the national average (18.8%), while the proportion of women appointed as heads of business in retail is 41.6%, over 10 percentage points higher than the national average of 30.2%.
Zahra said the proportion of women holding senior leadership roles in retail is not good enough.
“Women are fundamental to the success of our industry as women contribute around 75% of discretionary spending and make up 56.4% of the retail workforce,” Zahra said.
“As Australia’s largest private employer, the retail industry has such an important role to play in bringing about genuine societal change.”
“As we enter the powerful world of artificial intelligence driven recruitment, it’s critical that privacy and ethics are strongly built into these new systems. We must use these new technology tools for good and rather than repeating recruitment biases we instead embed opportunities into these platforms to improve equality.”
Meanwhile, the proportion of employers universally offering paid employer-funded parental leave in retail is the lowest across all industries at just 9%. WGEA cited the higher proportion of casual workers for this.
For primary carers in retail, this is at 22%.
Speaking on the overall results, WGEA CEO Mary Wooldridge said that while they are slow, there is momentum for change in Australian workplaces.
“Increased discussion and debate around gender equality, a tight labour market and impending legislative reform have helped drive action on workplace gender equality over the last year,” Wooldridge said.
“We see an increase in the proportion of women in management and at the upper pay quartiles, and we also see the proportion of women being promoted and appointed at manager level is higher than the proportion of women managers overall. As this trend continues, we can expect to see the gender pay gap continue to fall.”
Wooldridge said this is promising as it signals that employers are increasingly prioritising gender equality as a core business measure.
“However, what we are seeing is that women working in full-time roles have opportunities to progress into higher-paying management roles and contribute to reducing the gender pay gap, but deviations from the norm are not being supported in the same way,” Wooldridge said.
“The management opportunities for part-time employees are negligible; the number of men taking paid primary carer parental leave has barely shifted; and the number of women in CEO roles and on boards has stagnated.
“If we want real change, we need employers to take bold action. We need employers to look across the drivers of gender inequality and be imaginative in their solutions.”
“Publishing gender pay gaps requires employers to understand their unique challenges, develop a purpose-built approach to gender equality and then take intentional and sustained action.