# Australian women earn nearly $30,000 less than men a year, the government’s latest pay gap report finds

Nearly three-quarters of all employers in Australia have a gender pay gap that favours men, with women earning on average $28,425 less than their male counterparts in the 12 months to March 2024.

The pay gaps at nearly 8,000 employers across Australia were revealed on Tuesday by the government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, which found Australian women earned 78 cents on average for every $1 earned by men.

Across the country, 5,347 employers, or 72.2%, have a gender pay gap that favours men; 21.3% have a neutral gender pay gap, which means an average pay gap of +-5%, and 6.5% (474 employers) have a pay gap that favours women.

The findings are based on the average total remuneration, which includes bonuses, overtime and superannuation, from April 2023 to March 2024.

It is the second year this data has been published, after government legislation in 2023 allowed WGEA to release company-level salary information of employers with more than 100 employees for the first time in 2024.

WGEA reported that 56% of employers had improved their gender pay gap in 2023-24 compared to the previous reporting period.

“The rate of change has been slow,” said Mary Wooldridge, the agency’s CEO. “But we are tackling some deep-seated cultural views and perspectives, including things like gender stereotypes in relation to roles and occupations.”

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## Related: Australia’s gender pay gap explorer 2025: where does your workplace rank?

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## Attitudes are changing

Wooldridge said that there was evidence of an “anticipation effect”, with companies changing behaviour ahead of company level pay gaps being made public.

She said WGEA had seen an increase in companies doing a gender pay gap analysis and an increase in employers consulting with employees about how to change the culture, and had even heard stories of prospective employees looking up the pay gaps of companies at which they were interviewing and raising the pay gap in job interviews.

“So from our perspective,  very positive,” Wooldridge said.

### TelstraSuper

TelstraSuper, a super fund with about 300 employees, has been taking steps to change its culture around gender equality. In 2024 it introduced a new parental leave policy that offers parents 16 weeks of paid leave, regardless of their gender, and pays their full-time superannuation contributions, regardless of whether they come back full- or part-time.

### David Kelertas

David Kelertas, the manager of dev ops and support, software engineering at the fund, took five months of parental leave to care for his son Alex, now two, in Alex’s first year of life. When Kelertas returned to work, he returned part-time, working four days a week.

Kelertas said he believed attitudes were changing toward men taking leave to care for children, and that he had seen other men in the company take up parental leave.

“My boss has now taken seven months part-time paternity leave, so I think I inspired him.”

Kelertas said that working part-time and getting one day at home with Alex had been great for him as a parent, and meant he had been able to see many of his son’s first milestones.
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