If you want to understand where Australia’s gender pay gap actually lives, the national average does not tell you much. An 11.2 per cent gap — the figure released this week by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency in its annual employer report covering 5.9 million Australian workers — sounds like a number that is moving in the right direction. It is, slowly.
But look at where the gap is largest and you find it concentrated in a specific place: the top end of the pay scale, where men cluster and women do not.
Nationally, men are 1.8 times more likely than women to be employed in the highest earning quartile — those roles with an average salary of $221,000 a year. Women are 1.4 times more likely than men to be in the lowest earning quartile, with an average salary of around $60,000. The gap between the top and the bottom is vast. And it is heavily gendered.
“The fact that men are nearly twice as likely as women to be in the highest paid roles and that women still dominate the lowest paid roles should offer a reality check for anyone who thinks Australia has achieved equality in the workplace,” said WGEA CEO Mary Wooldridge at the report’s release on Friday.
What the numbers say about the real gap
The national gender pay gap of 11.2 per cent, reduced by 0.9 percentage points from the previous year, measures the difference between the average total remuneration of all men and all women in the WGEA employer reporting cohort. To be clear about what this means: for every dollar a man earns across Australia, a woman earns 88.8 cents. Over a full year, the average difference in total remuneration adds up to $28,356.
But that average number masks significant variation. The mid-point of employer median total remuneration gender pay gaps is 8.0 per cent, reduced by 0.9 percentage points year-on-year. More than half of private sector employers — 50 per cent — have an average total remuneration gender pay gap above 11.2 per cent. And in the industries where the money is largest, the gaps are most stubborn.
In financial and insurance services, four in five workplaces have gender pay gaps above 11.2 per cent. Women make up 53 per cent of the workforce in that sector — a slight majority — but account for only about one third of the top 25 per cent of income earners in financial services, whose average pay sits at $323,593. Meanwhile, women make up about two thirds of the bottom 25 per cent of earners in the sector, whose average pay is around $79,380. Men dominate the top; women cluster at the bottom; the sector as a whole carries one of the most entrenched gender pay disparities in the country at 23.3 per cent on average.
Morgan Stanley Australia sits at 63.6 per cent. Evans and Partners, a wealth management firm, sits at 62.8 per cent. These are the most extreme examples in a sector where gaps are structural, persistent, and — despite mandatory reporting now in its third year — still very wide.
The CEO pay divide
The gap at the very top — the CEO level — is widening, not narrowing. Women chief executives earn an average of $83,493 less than male chief executives in base salary every year. When superannuation, bonuses, overtime and additional payments are included, that gap expands to $185,335 a year — a total remuneration gender pay gap of 26.2 per cent, which increased by 1.2 percentage points in the past year.
Women managers at all levels earn 22.8 per cent less than their male counterparts. The gap grows with seniority: the more senior the role, the larger the pay divide between men and women who hold it. This pattern — which has been documented in virtually every major economy — reflects the compounding effects of career interruptions, bias in bonus allocation, and the simple reality that the highest-paid roles in most industries are still overwhelmingly held by men.
The industries where women work — and why they pay less
Industrial gender segregation has grown for two consecutive years. More than half of the entire Australian workforce — men and women combined — is employed in an industry dominated by one gender. More than half of the women in the WGEA reporting cohort work in just three industries: Health Care and Social Assistance, Retail Trade, and Education and Training.
These are all vital, honourable sectors. They are also, relative to construction, mining and financial services, lower paying. The gender pay gap is not primarily a story about discrimination against individual women in individual workplaces — equal pay legislation has existed in Australia for decades and has been effective. It is a story about which industries society has decided to pay well and which it has not, and the degree to which those decisions correlate with which industries are predominantly female.
Radiology, pathology and specialist medical practices offer a particularly stark illustration. These are sectors where the majority of the workforce is made up of women — nurses, medical imaging technologists, laboratory scientists. The highest-paid people in those sectors are the specialist doctors. And the specialist doctors are predominantly male. The result is some of the largest and fastest-growing gender pay gaps in the country, in sectors where women make up most of the staff.
Where progress is actually happening
Not everything in the report is bleak. Fifty-five per cent of employers reduced their gender pay gap year-on-year — a majority. More employers now have a gender pay gap within WGEA’s target range of minus-5 to plus-5 per cent. Women’s representation in the upper earnings quartile increased by one percentage point over the year, with a corresponding one-percentage-point decrease in the lowest earning quartile.
The mandatory publication of employer gender pay gaps — introduced in 2024 and now in its third year — has changed behaviour at many organisations. WGEA CEO Mary Wooldridge said that publication had driven “deeper engagement from the C-Suite and Board” on gender equality issues than anything that came before it. Many employers have told the agency that the public accountability of having their gap published is what finally pushed them to take real action.
From 2026, a new legislative requirement kicks in: employers with 500 or more direct employees must now select and meet specific gender equality targets, or demonstrate measurable improvement over three years. WGEA says this is expected to accelerate gap reductions in future years, particularly among larger organisations with the resources to implement structural changes.
The bottom line for Australian women
The gender pay gap is closing. Progress is real. The trend line, across multiple years of WGEA data, points in the right direction. But the pace is slow and the distance remaining is significant.
The average Australian woman working full-time earns $28,356 less per year than the average man. Over a 40-year career, that is more than $1.1 million in missing earnings — before the compounding effect on superannuation is even considered. And at the very top of the pay scale, in the roles that define who holds economic power in this country, the gap is not just persistent. It is growing.
International Women’s Day is this Sunday. The gap will still be there on Monday.
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