Yahoo Finance Women CEOs will have to wait another 80 years for parity with men
Women in management positions will have to wait another two decades to reach equal representation with men, a new report has revealed.
And for women in CEO roles, the wait will be “glacial” – we won’t see an equal proportion of me in chief executive officer roles until the turn of the century.
The Gender Equity Insights 2019: Breaking through the Glass Ceiling report, released on Friday by Curtin University and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, found women are underpaid and under-represented in leadership positions.
While women now hold 37.5 per cent of full-time management positions – an increase of 1.6 per cent since 2014 – men continue to be paid more “at every level”.
The report found that the highest-paid 10 per cent of women make $162,000 less annually than the highest-paid men.
Women who hold low-level managerial roles earn $31,000 less than their male counterparts.
If current growth patterns continue, it will take until 2037 to see gender parity at a senior management level and 2047 at an executive level, the report found.
Female chief executives will have to wait until 2100 before achieving equal representation.
“For the top company spot of CEO, female representation is glacial and parity looks to be centuries away, with very little movement in the last five years,” the report said.
WGEA director Libby Lyons said the report proved the need for employers to take action.
“Children starting primary school this year will enter a workforce where they are likely to see gender balance at most management levels. Yet they will have to live to be almost 90 to see women reach equality at the CEO level,” she said in a statement.
“We must keep pushing hard to break down the barriers women still face in Australian workplaces.”
Among those barriers is the lack of support for working mothers. The report found the businesses which offered paid parental leave and flexible work arrangements were more likely to retain female workers.
The report takes in data from more than 11,000 employers in Australia, capturing about 4.1 million workers.
The gender pay gap for managers in every industry
At the upper managerial level, the gender pay gap is worst in the rental, hiring and real estate services industry at 35.6 per cent.
Following closely behind was the retail trade industry, with top-level women managers paid 34.9 per cent less than their male counterparts.
The pay gap is also gaping wide in the financial and insurance services sector (30.8 per cent) and the healthcare and social assistance sector (27.7 per cent).
–with AAP
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