Gender pay gap data revealed: The ‘startling’ state of the media and advertising landscape
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency has published the gender gap for more than 5,000 Australian companies, with the precise state of disparity between the sexes on public display for the first time.
Each company with 100-plus employees was measured across two metrics: the median pay gap between men and women for base salaries, and the median difference for the total amount of pay – once bonuses, super, commissions, overtime, and other perks are factored in.
Across the board, the base salary pay gap was 14.5% between men and women, while the gap leaped to 19% once those executive bonuses and the like were thrown into the equation.
Below is the current state of play across the media and advertising landscape.
The headline is startling, the results are not.
Leadership diversity is one factor of many. For example, Comms vs technical roles have different salary expectations and attract very different demographics. Only way for an organisation to balance this may be to hire under qualified people in tech, or overpay one gender in comms roles to balance things out.
As for tangible policies for parental leave, parenthood is a personal choice, not a business one. Agreed that businesses should be supportive of these personal choices, but expectations need to also be set. Exiting and re-entering the workforce is disruptive and parenthood can impact flexibility and overtime. Appreciate that the quiet quitter brigade with have an alternative view, but that flexibility and unpaid overtime can be a great investment into longer term skills and career progression.
Just for clarity as it seems to be missed in the reporting:
The gender pay gap numbers reported do NOT mean men are paid more than women for doing the same role. Speaking for my agency, there is 100% parity for people doing the same roles.
This data is comparing the median salary for men and women across the entire organisation. If you can do basic maths you will understand this will be skewed if there are proportionately more women in junior roles, than in the higher paying exec roles.
For example: even if higher paying Executive team has 50:50 women to men.. but the rest of workforce is 60:40 women to men, then the median salary for women will be lower than that for men, asthere are more women in the agency. So even if for every role, men and women are paid the same, and there is 50/50 representation in the C suite, the way the data is collected and measured will show a gender pay gap as it is just comparing median salary across the whole organisation.
Would be good for WGEA to collect and measure “role pay gap”. ie for each role, how much are men paid vs women. This would be a much more interesting and relevant statistic.
@ZubyMusic “People like to talk about ‘wage gaps’,’income gaps’, and ‘wealth gaps’…
But they never talk about ‘skill gaps’, ‘effort gaps’, and ‘talent gaps’.
Dentsu. Absolutely toiletry.
So nothing’s changed then..
The new ad spin on this is “we don’t have an equal pay problem (we pay all of our lower level slaves the same terrible wage regardless of gender) … we have a gender representation problem (because most of the really high paid management are guys and we have a few high paid women but certainly not as many) so that’s the issue”
Or you can say the whopping pay gap is actually a positive thing like one founder led name on the door agency said.