Women Break Through The Glass Ceiling To Find Another One

Think that the gender pay gap is 16 percent? Not so fast, my friend. A new report released today dives deep into the data underlying Australia’s narrowing gender pay gap. What it reveals about women in management doesn’t make for happy reading. Here’s hoping that the boss ladies among us have already downed their morning coffees. If not, prepare to snort it out your nose.

The causes of the gender pay gap are multiple and varied (for a refresher course on this go here). There’s out-and-out discrimination, sexual harassment, differential industry salaries, and the disadvantage that flows from having children, performing broader caring roles and domestic duties, which all contribute to the problem. A primary driver, however, is that women do the bulk of low paying, insecure work in our economy, while men are more likely to hold jobs at the top.

Companies that had flexible work arrangements, particularly where those arrangements were coupled with a requirement that they be reported to the company board, had 13.6 percent more women managers. Those with employer-funded parental leave schemes of 13 weeks or more halve the number of women managers who will depart the company during that dime. And employers that take steps to provide on-site child care improve the likelihood women managers will return to work after taking parental leave by almost a fifth.

WGEA Director Libby Lyons says that “these findings reveal that if you change the working conditions available to employees, the choices women can make change too… The evidence is there, and we must keep pushing hard to break down the barriers women still face in Australian workplaces.”