The gender pay gap is the demonstrable, statistical gap that exists between the amount of money men take home from work as opposed to what women take home. Spoiler alert: women take home less. The data proves it. What is also proved merely by mentioning the words “gender pay gap” on the internet is how desperately averse some people are to hard data.

To monitor and address the gendered pay discrepancy, the government last year passed legislation obliging companies with over a hundred workers to publish their pay data so that any gendered patterns could be made transparent. The first report from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) containing the data appeared yesterday. Screaming gender conniptions from people heavily invested in maintaining reductive stereotypes of women appeared shortly thereafter.

Let’s start with facts before we examine the holus-bolus, pissy hissyfitting, shall we?

The WGEA’s report found Australia’s average gender pay gap based on total remuneration at 21.7%, which means women earn 78c to the male dollar. This calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments, and considers annualised full-time equivalent salaries of casual and part-time workers. The report recognises that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Survey of Average Weekly Earnings identifies a gender pay gap of 12%, with the clarification that the ABS dataset excludes overtime, bonuses and additional payments as well as the salaries of part-time and........

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