When Macquarie MP Susan Templeman found out that in the Hawkesbury, you were 50 per cent more likely to earn $1000 a week or more if you were a man, she felt it was even more important to raise the issue of the gender pay gap.
“I was shocked to learn that, that’s a big gap locally,” she said.
“The gender pay gap isn’t so noticeable when you’re young and starting out in a job, but becomes more obvious as you age.
“If you’re a woman working full time, you’ll be paid on average $700,000 less over the course of your working life, and if you have a family too, you’ll do around $400,000 of unpaid work at home. So that’s more than $1 million in underpaid or unpaid work.”
Ms Templeman was speaking after receiving a petition organised by Richmond’s Women’s Cottage which saw the first step to closing the gender pay gap is to make it more transparent by ensuring mandatory reporting of pay data. It called for the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 to be extended so that all employers with 10 or more employees in Australia have to report pay data.
“I’ll be presenting this petition to parliament, and raising the concerns of the community with the government,” Ms Templeman said, adding that the current government’s workplace changes unfairly impacted women.
“So many of their decisions hurt women most – the cuts to penalty rates, the cuts to paid parental leave and the cuts to Family Tax Benefits all have a bigger impact on women,” she said.
Women’s Cottage manager Nicolle Lewis said “women are still earning less then men in their jobs and as a community we need to stay united and do something about it”.
The Cottage is still collecting signatures for the Macquarie Pay Gap Petition. To sign, go here.
