Your WGEA Data Is Public. Here’s What to Do With It.
Between 1 April and 31 May, Australian employers with 100 or more employees are required to submit their gender pay gap data to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. That data is then published, not internally, but publicly, searchable by anyone. Your candidates, your current team, your clients.
If you’re in scope, your number is already out there from last year’s submission. And right now, while reporting season is open, is exactly the right time to look at it honestly.
A gender pay gap doesn’t mean what most people think
A gender pay gap doesn’t automatically mean unequal pay for equal work. In Australia, paying people differently for the same role has been unlawful since 1969.
What a pay gap does reflect is the distribution of men and women across seniority levels, the concentration of women in lower-paid roles, the impact of flexible and part-time arrangements on career progression, and the compounding effect of small and seemingly insignificant decisions made over time.
Understanding why your gap exists is the first step. Publishing a number without a narrative leaves others to draw their own conclusions.
Where the gap widens
In most organisations the gap doesn’t appear overnight. It widens at predictable moments.
When people move into management. When someone takes parental leave and returns to find the landscape has shifted. When flexible work arrangements quietly cap career progression without anyone intending them to.
These aren’t always policy failures. Sometimes they’re culture, assumption or just the way things have always been done. But they do show up in the data.
What actually moves the needle
Know your numbers properly. Not just the headline gap but where it exists, at what levels, in which teams and why. You can’t fix what you haven’t diagnosed.
Look at your rem review process. Who makes the decisions? What criteria are used? Is there any mechanism to catch and question patterns before they’re locked in? Unstructured rem reviews are one of the most consistent drivers of pay gap widening over time.
Look at what happens around parental leave. Are people coming back to the same opportunities they left, or have things quietly moved on without them?
Check your pipeline. If your senior leadership is predominantly male, the question worth asking isn’t just who’s in those roles now, but who is being developed, sponsored and considered for them next.
Be honest in your external communications. Good candidates are looking at your WGEA data. The businesses that attract the best people are the ones whose external story matches their internal reality.
Reporting season is a prompt, not a plan
Submitting your data is the compliance piece and keeps you out of trouble, out of a fine and out of the headlines. What you do with it is the culture piece.
The businesses that use this period to genuinely audit, understand and address their gap are the ones building workplaces that retain great people for the long term. That’s not just good ethics. It’s good business.
At Zest People, we work with businesses to build people practices that are fair, effective and fit for the workforce you want to build. We also support businesses with WGEA data collection and submission, so if reporting season has crept up on you, we can help with that too. Get in touch with us to start the conversation.