The Gender Pay Gap: Help!

[Updated: August 2024]

In 2018 the Labour Government announced that if they win the next election they will force all organisations over 1,000 employees to publicly reveal their gender pay gap. Anyone who fails to comply will be named, shamed and excluded from government contracts. To make things more complex, companies would be forced to reveal the pay gap differences between managerial and non-managerial staff.

This focus on gender pay equality will increase scrutiny on the structure of organisations, putting HR data and analytics in the spotlight.

Fast forward to 2024 and this focus on gender pay equality remains as strong as ever, with even tighter regulations and expanded reporting requirements now in place. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) has introduced an even higher reporting standard that requires organisations to dive deeper into their data, ensuring that the gender pay gap is not just reported but thoroughly understood and acted upon.

To get into the details of this topic, the WGEA Gender Equity Report is a great source of information. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) Director, Libby Lyons, clearly states what need to be done:

“…organisational gender pay gaps do not close themselves. They must be quantified, understood, acted upon, monitored and taken responsibility for at the most senior levels of our workplaces. Ask for your organisation’s pay equity metrics and make it your business to improve them. Then keep doing it.”

Libby Lyons Director, Workplace Gender Equality Agency

 

 

Publishing gender pay gaps: A milestone in 2024

On the 27th of February 2024, WGEA published the gender pay gaps for every Australian employer with 100 or more employees. This data is available on individual employer pages on WGEA’s recently updated Data Explorer platform. The Data Explorer is a valuable resource for gaining deeper insights into gender equality and performance and outcomes, allowing for comparisons across employers and industries.

1. Quantify – Clean your data and generate a useful, visual report

The first step is to create a report that shows your gender and pay metrics. Avoid doing this in a spreadsheet. It makes the reader do all the heavy lifting in analysing the data. Instead, use an org chart to make the data accessible, visual and easy to review. An added side benefit is managers are quick to clean their HRIS data when they know it’s on show to the Senior Execs.

2. Understand – HR, Management and Senior Management

By using the familiar hierarchical org chart format, managers can easily interpret large amounts of data, identify hot spots, discuss changes and agree on actions.

3. Act upon – Balance and reorganise

Create ‘to be’ scenarios for review and approval. If you’re in an org chart / workforce modelling tool you can use real-time updates of calculations, roll-up statistics and department summaries to provide instant feedback.

4. Monitor – Ongoing HR review with Line Managers

Create a set of standard report templates you can easily populate with current data. Most workforce modelling tools automate this with a live feed from your payroll / HRIS system. Once setup, weekly HR analytics reports can be distributed company wide via an intranet or company branded PDF. Ongoing responsibility then sits with Line Managers (and is easily reviewed by HR).

5. Responsibility – Board and WGEA reports

Similar to the ongoing management reports, Board and WGEA reports are able to be easily produced using report templates and live HRIS data. With the metrics being regularly reviewed across the organisation HR and Senior Management can be confident in the data presented.