Mind the gap: how bad is the gender pay disparity? And what causes it?

How bad is the gender pay gap? In answer, I give you this: data that shows men make more money than women. It comes from the ATO’s taxation statistics for 2020-21. But beware. At the same time, this data leaves lots of space for people who want to claim that everything is totally fine.

The following chart shows all the jobs in Australia, arrayed from most male-dominated to most female-dominated. Did you know there are almost 100 male electricians for every female electrician? And almost 100 female midwives for every male? Men make up a slightly greater share of the workforce, so there are more blue (male-dominated) professions than female ones.

On the vertical axis is average pay in that profession. What this chart shows is that male-dominated professions make more on average, while the worst-paid jobs (often part-time and casual) are female-dominated.

The pay effect is, interestingly, not most pronounced in the most male-dominated professions. The sweet spot looks to be professions such as mining engineering, where men outnumber women more like 5:1.

The red line is best thought of as a visual guide to the pattern in the data, not a definitive causal model. It uses locally estimated scatterplot smoothing, a type of moving regression that helps illustrate the relationship between variables. (It has a higher margin of error out at the edges where there’s less data to average.)

I told you so!

This chart has something for everyone. Whether you want to affirm or deny the merits of the gender pay gap, you can point at this and shout: “See!”

Haters will argue that much of the gender pay gap doesn’t come from women being paid less for the same work, it comes from sorting into job categories, and that this chart is proof women choose lower-paying jobs and part-time jobs.

Believers will argue there’s a reason we pay midwives less than electricians, and it isn’t that their work is less valuable. Society devalues women’s work, and this chart is proof of that.

My view is this chart can’t prove reasons, but it is proof of how powerful gender norms can be. There’s no reason a woman can’t be an electrician — it’s not a job that requires enormous body strength or those marginal few centimetres of height.

And the reasons often put forward for why men aren’t nurses — it’s gross, etc — don’t explain why men are so keen to be plumbers. It certainly seems that, somehow, we channel boys into one group of jobs and girls into another.

Where does that start? How do kids absorb these lessons? I’m not sure, but when I go online to buy kids’ clothes, they sure look different.

You can’t buy a T-shirt with a digger or a dinosaur on it in the girls’ section. You can’t buy a unicorn shirt in the boys’ section. To me that suggests that at least some of the difference between genders is cultural. We manufacture it by putting different expectations on our kids and showing them different norms.

In the kids’ section, the one cartoon that crosses gender lines seems to be Bluey, and that might be part of its success in our modern environment. Bluey is a girl, but you don’t necessarily realise that straight away. That’s very much deliberate, I think, and in the show’s second season there’s even an episode where they make a joke of it, with a relative forgetting she’s is a girl.

Bluey is a relatively new show and although it doesn’t dispense with gender roles entirely — Bluey’s dad watches cricket and works the barbecue; mum works part-time, etc — it also breaks them down, especially when it comes to parenting roles.

The blurring of gender roles is something we see in the data. If you look at this as an animation, you see the rising tide of wages, but you also see that the more extreme gender sorting is reducing. The dots angle in over time, as fewer professions can sustain a ratio of 100:1.

Another way to look at the same data is in the following chart. It shows each frame of the above animation as a dot. The message I hope to convey is that on average, the lines slope in, suggesting that over time, as pay rises, most jobs are becoming more diverse.

There is one interesting exception: the high-paid line bending to the right, at the top right quadrant. The only female-dominated profession with average pay of more than $100,000 a year: human resource managers, a role that is increasingly female.  

It’s interesting that the gatekeeper role of HR manager has become female-coded. Hopefully that helps sort out some of the inequities in the workforce over time. But so will the increasing presence of women in work: female workforce participation should hopefully bend more and more roles towards equal representation.

Do you know how much your fellow employees are paid? Would you ever ask? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.