WGEA says flexible management could narrow Australia's gender pay gap

Only 13.2% of employers design management roles for part-time work

The federal Workplace Gender Equality Agency warned Tuesday that rigid management structures are driving women out of senior roles and widening the country’s gender pay gap, where women earn $0.79 for every dollar a man earns on average.

Joint research by WGEA and Curtin University, released Tuesday, found that women were reaching senior positions but leaving them more often than their male colleagues. Women in management roles resigned at a rate of 13.8%, compared with 12% for men, according to the report’s analysis of WGEA data covering 5.4 million employees.

Men were also slightly more likely to be promoted to management than women in the 2024-25 data set, the report found, though full-time women were promoted more often than men overall. The combined effect was a workforce in which women remained under-represented at the highest-paying levels: women accounted for just one in five board chairs or chief executives of Australian companies.

WGEA’s chief executive, Christine Castley, said uneven caring responsibilities combined with a lack of flexible work options had prevented women from staying in senior positions. “There is very much an embedded idea that management roles can never be part-time, and probably what flows from that is most flexible arrangements don’t apply to management roles,” Castley said.

The report drew on the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to track what happens after women have children. Most women still either stop working or shift to part-time work after the birth of their first child, the analysis found.

Leadership gaps appeared even in industries where women made up the bulk of the workforce. In the health care and social assistance sector, women made up three-quarters of workers but only about half of CEO positions.

Castley said employers could make management more flexible by allowing grandparents to access carer’s leave, rostering around school drop-off and pickup times, and adopting co-CEO arrangements at the top. “We’re seeing increasingly the use of – even at the CEO level – co-CEOs, who are essentially job sharing a role,” she said.

The report found that just 13.2% of organizations designed management roles for part-time work. Those that did saw markedly higher promotion rates for female part-time non-managers, and employers with flexible work strategies tended to employ more women at every level of senior management.

Care responsibilities continued to fall disproportionately on women. Women accounted for 80% of primary-carer parental leave takers in 2024-25 and were more likely than men to quit their jobs while on parental leave. One-third of employers did not fund additional paid parental leave, the report found. Dr Silvia Salazar, a report co-author, said parents sharing care responsibility would also play a role. “Employers cannot determine how care is divided at home, but they can help make sure that becoming a parent does not mean stepping off the path to career progression,” Salazar said.

The findings landed against a backdrop of growing political resistance to gender-equality policies. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has said the gender pay gap is due to women taking time off but employers should not have to pay for parental leave. Castley said the agency was releasing objective data in the face of growing scepticism, including among Australian youth. “Certainly many people who have worked in this space have a bit of a sense that the conversation’s moved a few steps backwards from where it was,” Castley said. “We have made really good progress over the last 40 years or so in this context, but now there is a narrative that seems to be pulling that progress backwards, at least in a narrative sense,” she said.