In 2017 society may have made leaps and bounds, but it still appears to be struggling with the idea men and women be paid the same amount for the same work, new figures reveal.
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The figures, included in the most recently released profile of women in NSW, found on average Australian women working full-time earn $268.90 less than men per week.
Having attended the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women at New York in March the existence of the gender pay gap is something Griffith businesswoman, Soroptimist and mother Sonia Casanova is well aware of.
Yet despite government and international organisations’ figures indicating its existence Ms Casanova says there is a simple reason behind why the issue is not firmly on the public agenda.
“In my experience I found that people actually can’t believe it [the gender pay gap] still exists,” she said on Wednesday.
“They cannot believe that in 2017 women are still being paid less for doing the same work as men.
“It is almost unfathomable.”
With even the award governed public sector battling in some places with paying women and men the same Ms Casanova said the private sector, where the UN Commission indicated this was a real issue, needed to step up to address the problem.
“In addition to the fact that this is an equal rights issue there is a lot of research to support that where there are equal numbers of men and women, where there is diversity in all of its forms, there are better decisions made,” she explained.
“There have been plenty of studies about companies with females in lead roles and they do better, not because they have the women but because they have diversity and that flows on financially.”
Moving forward Ms Casanova said many of the speakers at the UN Commission had highlighted the need to understand why this was still an issue.
“Some of the speakers I heard said that unconscious bias was a real problem and there are steps we can take to address that,” she said.
Examples given to eradicate the bias included taking names of resumes, doing blind auditions and imitating Germany’s empty chair rule.
“They have a target of 30 per cent of women directors on their board and if they can’t get that they have to leave those chairs empty,” Ms Casanova said.
“It forces the board to actively recruit women, to look harder because there are plenty of women who are happy and qualified to step into these positions but they aren’t being recruited.
“There have been numerous studies done on taking the names off of resumes before making selections, removing the gender, and it actually helps women get interviews.”
