Women In Tech Need To Work 64 Extra Days To Achieve Equal Pay

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Nehir Hatipoglu
By Nehir Hatipoglu



Women in the tech industry have to work even harder than the rest of Australian women to catch up with their male counterparts, new research from Diversity Council Australia reveals.

This Friday is Equal Pay Day, a date chosen by the Australian government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) to mark the additional days from the end of the financial year women would have to work to earn the same average pay as men. This year it was an additional 56 days according to new research from Diversity Council Australia.

Unfortunately, the gender pay gap for women working in tech is higher than the nation’s average, with women in tech having to work 64 extra days to earn the same average pay as men.

Despite newly released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showing the gender pay gap has narrowed by another 0.3 per cent to a national pay gap of 13 per cent, Australian workplaces still have a long way to go in achieving gender equality.

And the tech sector has even more catching up to do, with the gender pay gap sitting at 15 per cent according to the WGEA.

Gender diversity also remains a weakness for Australia’s tech sector, with just a quarter of workers in the sector identifying as women according to the Tech Council of Australia.

Women face significant barriers to entry in the tech sector, through low enrolment in VET study or through low enrolment in STEM university studies. What’s more, women are twice as likely to enter the tech sector later than men, at age 25-30 as they are before 25 due to low rates of STEM education.

The most significant barrier to women working in tech occurs in VET education and undergraduate STEM degrees, which men are seven and three times respectively more likely to undertake than women.

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