Alan Duncan | Equal pay just one part of conversation about gender equality in workplaces

This focus has been sharpened with the Albanese government's decision, announced at the recent jobs and skills summit, to establish a new women's economic equality taskforce.

The taskforce has been commissioned to assist the federal government in developing a national strategy to achieve gender equality.

But consensus on how far Australia needs to go to achieve gender equality is a contested space, too often dominated by debates about the extent of what are commonly termed like-for-like pay gaps.

Evidence that women and men receive the same pay for the same roles is regarded by some as sufficient to assert that gender equality has been reached.

But gender equality is about so much more than achieving equal pay.

It's about equality of access to economic opportunities, and on this score, Australia doesn't do well.

A simple example of workforce gender segregation in Australia illustrates the point vividly.

Four in five people who work in healthcare and social assistance are women, while 80 per cent of employees in the mining sector are men.

And yet miners are paid on average twice the salaries of those who work in the healthcare and social assistance sector.

The Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency maintain an ongoing partnership to better understand the causes of gender inequality in Australia, and to explore the actions that businesses and governments can take to progress women's economic equality through employment.

This year's BCEC-WGEA Gender Equity Insights report looks beyond the direct comparison of pay rates between women and men, to explore the role that gender segregation plays in contributing to Australia's overall pay gap.

The analysis compares average pay differences between women and men across state jurisdictions, taking advantage of new voluntary reporting information on employees' places of work available for the first time in the latest WGEA data collection.

States and territories vary in their industry composition, but also in the shares of women working in each industry sector, and the salaries that each sector pays.

And these factors have a material effect on the gender pay gaps in each state and territory.

Western Australia tops the league with an estimated gender pay gap in total remuneration of 32.1 per cent. Tasmania sits at the other end of the table, at 10.4 per cent.

But what would happen to Australia's gender pay gap in a more gender-balanced world?

Consider a world in which women and men each make up at least 40 per cent of workers in all industry sectors and at all occupational levels.

Our research shows that the gender pay gap in Australia could be reduced by a third, and Western Australia's pay gap would be halved, if workplaces were to achieve this level of gender balance.

And businesses have an important role to play in shifting the dial.

Gender diversity and the elimination of unconscious bias should be a continued focus in recruitment and promotion practices.

So too should be the removal of gendered barriers to progression in leadership.

Businesses should continue to promote flexible work options and expand the provision of policies that support family and care responsibilities.

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The same is true for policies that address workplace harassment and improve respect at work.

Benefits flow not just to workers, but to employers as well, because earlier research in the same Gender Equity Insights series shows that gender diversity in leadership is demonstrably better for business.

But achieving a greater gender balance in traditionally male-dominated or female-dominated industries and occupations will take us only so far in narrowing gender pay gaps across Australia.

That's because gender concentration does not in and of itself create gender pay gaps.

Rather, it is the interplay between gender concentration and pay differences between female-dominated and male-dominated industries or roles that drives the pay gap in average salaries between women and men.

This is why the national conversation on gender equality needs to embrace more fundamental ideas about how occupational roles are valued, and whether wages are representative of such value.

We need to ensure that occupations and roles more commonly undertaken by women - in education, healthcare and social assistance, childcare and residential aged care services - are remunerated in a way that better reflects their value to society.

And not just their contemporaneous benefit, but their ongoing value to society over the medium and longer term.