“Gender equality is a longer-term driver of competitiveness and equity that is even more important in an era of increasingly globalised economies. No country can afford to fall behind because it is failing to enable women and men to participate equally in the economy and society.”  World Bank

Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

The Australian Government’s Gender Workplace Equality Agency released some interesting statistics in August 2016 in downloadable pdf format. Anyone who thinks that a gender gap doesn’t exist in Australia really needs to read the summary here.

The gender pay gap is the difference between women’s and men’s average weekly full-time equivalent earnings, expressed as a percentage of men’s earnings. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (Agency) calculates the national gender pay gap using Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) Full-Time Adult Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings (AWOTE) Trend data from the Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) survey (cat. no. 6302.0). The national gender pay gap is currently 16.2% and has hovered between 15% and 19% for the past two decades.