On pay, men leave women down the mine
The pay gap between men and women in the mining sector doubled last year, with males in senior jobs earning an hourly rate 61 per cent higher than females in equivalent roles, a report released yesterday found.
The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, which represents professionals, said its 2009 remuneration and employment survey “suggested that females were particularly likely to be undervalued during difficult economic times”.
The survey results revealed that despite the downturn in resources companies, there was a median salary increase of $8000.
“The wage rises tended to be at the higher end of the spectrum where males are represented more heavily,” said the institute’s policy manager Monika Sarder. Analysis of the findings showed men’s pay rises were likely to be nearly three times greater than women’s.
A male senior manager earned $236,424, up 11.5 per cent from last year, compared to $149,319 for women at the same level, whose salaries increased just 4 per cent.
“We were also surprised that only 3 per cent of the respondents said they had been made redundant in a year which some would describe as tough for many mining companies,” Ms Sarder told BusinessDaily.
By responsibility level, where Level 1 represents recruits, the pay gap is 15.8 per cent.
At the next level, the gap drops to 8 per cent, followed by a steady widening of the discrepancy until it reaches 58 per cent at Level 5, which takes in senior managers.
The September survey of institute members received 933 responses, 14 per cent of which were women.
Ms Sarder said that her organisation had called for “someone in government to take ownership of the pay equity issue”.
“Until that happens, there is going to be very little co-ordinated action on addressing the inequity,” she said.
The report comes as a review of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) is about to be handed down.
University of Sydney Professor Marian Baird said there was an expectation that EOWA might “get more teeth”.
“Gender pay gap is going to be the workplace issue of 2010,” said Prof. Baird, who is director of the university’s Women and Work Research Group.
“We really have to ask how do we get those big differences, even though the mining industry is male dominated.
“Apart from straight out discrimination, is there a gender criteria being used to measure the value of jobs that women are in, such as human resources or marketing, even if they have the same rank as men?”
She said there was evidence that individualised bargaining, a feature in senior jobs, led to wider pay gaps.
“This way of setting pay rises also lacked transparency, and that is one of the biggest problems in this area,” Prof. Baird said.
