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Mind the pay gap
NTEU says higher education sector beats national average but still falls short. By Aileen Macalintal
University educated men with children can expect to earn about $ 3.3 million over their working lives, almost double the amount for women in the same category, NTEU president Jeannie Rea said. And where the gender pay gap is concerned, Victorian and Western Australian universities are the worst employers, NTEU data for 2012 shows.
“ Across the country, the gender gap stands at 8.7 per cent [ based on ] the 2012 full-time rates of men and women employed as general staff in Australian universities,” Rea said.“ This is around half the Australian industry average of over 17 per cent, but shows we still need to do more to close the gap within our higher education institutions.“ Our aim is to close the gender pay gap across the board.”
She said the NTEU was now bargaining to limit casual academic employment and
promote career development for general staff, among other issues.
“ About 35 per cent of all university staff are female general staff, so it’ s hugely important that they get a fairer deal,” she said.“ There is still marked gender segmentation in lower-paid and middlerange jobs, contributing to the overall pay gap.”
Rea said that although the number of women in senior general staff positions had almost doubled in universities during the last 15 years, only a quarter of these women are in senior positions( higher education worker Level 8 and above), whilst more than 40 per cent of male general staff are in such roles.
“ The pay gap applies as soon as women graduate from university,” Rea continued.“ ABS data reveals that the median salary for women graduates aged under 25 in 2012 was $ 50,000, compared with $ 55,000 for men. The undervaluing of women’ s work starts early and persists.”
One institution whose pay gap is among the highest in NTEU’ s data – 12.0 per cent among general staff in 2012 – is Victoria University( VU). The school’ s vice-president for people and culture, Paul Lefebvre, welcomes the opportunity to participate in discussions on the issue.
“ It prompts us, as a large employer, to examine our workforce and consider the questions that need to be asked,” Lefebvre said.“ Equally important is a specific focus on professional or general staff in the sector.
“ We think it is fair to suggest, however, that a sector pay equity gap for professional staff half that of the national average is reflective of a fair and robust set of employment practices, classification and remuneration systems in the tertiary sector.
“ We recently welcomed an increase in the percentage of general staff women represented at level 10 of the classification scale, now up to 61 per cent, and level 10-plus, now up to 41 per cent for the first time,” he said.
“ We look forward to the opportunity to undertake more comprehensive analysis of pay equity data in accordance with the new reporting requirements set out by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency and the capacity to monitor sector trends over time,” he said. Lefebvre emphasised the university’ s actions to close the gender pay gap through a number of initiatives. He said VU has been implementing a Women in Leadership program for the last 10 years and up to 250 female staff have graduated from it. In 2012, women represented the majority of the university’ s academic recruits at all academic levels.
He said the institution accepts that a pay gap exists often for systemic or structural reasons. Questions of seniority, fractional employment, breaks in service and casual employment explain part of the story, but it is also about gender stereotyping and how an organisation values the type of work undertaken.
“ We have recently introduced unconscious bias training for all managers to encourage a different level of mindfulness about how decisions are made that affect employment,” Lefebvre said.“ Getting the basic human resource management structures right is the easier part. Introducing different and strategic approaches to diversity management is the harder part of the equation.” n
10 | Issue 9 2013