Gender Income Distribution of Top Earners

Director of the Labour-Management Studies Foundation at Macquarie University, Associate Professor Peter McGraw and consulting statistician Dr Margaret Mackisack, have recently completed the Gender Income Distribution of Top Earners analysis, which was jointly published with the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA).

They analysed data collected as part of their research for the 2006 EOWA Women in Leadership Census and examined the remuneration of the five most highly paid executives in the top 200 companies on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).

This presentation reviews the results from a variety of perpectives including the influence of women on boards. Some key finding from the study are summarised below. The analysis reveals that women hold just seven per cent of the Top Earner positions (80 positions out of 1136) compared with 93 per cent held by men.

Female Chief Financial Officers and Chief Operating Officers earn just half the wage of their male equivalents and even in human resource positions, where women are more common, the pay gap is still 43 per cent.

Women CEOs earn two thirds of the salary earned by their male counterparts. In nine out of ten industry sectors, the female median salary is less than the male median salary and there is no industry in which women are more likely to be Top Earners than men.

Even in support roles, where women are concentrated, men are more likely than women to be Top Earners. Women in support positions have less than a 50 per cent chance of being a Top Earner.

alt Download Peter's Presentation

alt Download the EOWA Report