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The Australian government has recently released a report with incomplete and potentially misleading information to justify its claims about a so-called gender pay gap. Now it states that it will not award contracts to companies that do not have a plan in place to achieve gender pay equity.

As I have written previously, the report is crude and misleading. All it really does is compare the median earnings paid to employees of different genders.

It does not examine the underlying reasons for the differences. Why do men and women choose different jobs? Why do they choose to work different hours? These are legitimate questions in which an agency concerned with pay equity should take an interest.

Unmeritocratic

As part of Labor’s national strategy, Senator Gallagher announced big businesses would not be awarded government contracts unless they set and meet targets to address gender inequity, including achieving gender pay parity and offering flexible working arrangements.

Not only will companies be named and shamed, but they will also have contracts denied based on inadequate data. This is social engineering writ large.

The government is free to encourage any particular group of people to join the workforce. But it should do so based on objective and reliable evidence.

A laudable objective is now being converted into a political imperative by the Albanese government.

It displays an unwillingness to accept that individuals and families make a myriad of choices, including their family-work-life balance.

We now face the ridiculous situation that a company or organisation with a majority of female workers — all of whom are paid exactly the same as male employees, as required by Australian law — still fails to meet the agency’s definition of pay equity.

Quotas vs Choice

Consider the myriad of aged and disability services that operate throughout Australia, many of which have a female CEO. They have both male and female senior executives, but the caring workforce contains many more females.

Further, these days, many services are paying above the award rates to attract workers in a tight labour market.

Yet such a service could find itself not meeting the gender pay targets! This is because of how the targets have been set by the agency, not because of any real gender pay difference.

Is the Labor government planning to penalise these services based on a spurious method of assessing equity?

The overwhelming majority of businesses seek to employ the best people for the job, regardless of gender. Amid a labour shortage — which is unlikely to diminish in the near to medium term — many businesses are desperately seeking employees, both male and female.

The business operators I speak to want competent, diligent employees, regardless of their gender.

Surely the government has better uses of its time and finances than imposing an ideological agenda on businesses that are already struggling to operate in the current climate of rising costs and taxes.

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Republished with thanks to KevinAndrews.com. Image courtesy of Karolina Grabowska.