IT IS an inescapable fact that whatever gains Australia has made towards gender equality, the workforce remains a bastion of imbalance.
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The Workplace Gender Equality Agency scorecard, released late last year, shows there is still a concentration of women in lower paying jobs.
The study of 12,229 employers and almost 4 million employees reveals just 27.4 per cent of key management positions are held by women.
Breaking it down further, the survey shows that women occupy only 15.4 per cent of chief executive positions across all industries.
They are, however, grossly over-represented in the part-time work category, with 75 per cent of all non-full-time workers women.
All this equates to a pay gap whereby a woman’s average full-time total salary across all industries is some 24 per cent – or $27,254 a year – less than their male counterparts.
There are a myriad of factors, starting from the earliest years of a female’s education right through until retirement age, that contribute to this inequality.
Studies show that Australia’s highest paying jobs are generally found in the fields of business, mining and medicine.
Each of the many and varied professions within these industries have two things at their core – qualifications in science and maths.
In decades past, women basically did not have the option to study these subjects beyond the lower high school grades.
Social prejudices and curriculum constraints meant they were forced into fields designed to prepare them for lives as wives and mothers, not income earners.
While the passage of time has seen many of those barriers removed, a University of Sydney study found just 13.8 per cent of females studied one maths and one science subject in their HSC.
It is for this reason why the STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – scholarships Bendigo’s Zonta Club are offering central Victoria’s girls are so important. They will provide young women with an added incentive to forge careers in traditionally male-dominated professions.
The upshot will be greater job security, higher rates of pay and, in time, a giant step towards finally closing Australia’s shameful gender gap.
- Ross Tyson, deputy editor