A new ranking of gender pay equity across all Australian universities has been developed by researchers from UQ, prompting new questions about sector policies following yesterday’s International Women’s Day.
The Australian University Gender Pay Equity Rankings, developed by UQ Education school leads Professor Robin Shields and Marnee Shay have successfully moved beyond a simplistic list, providing rankings which can be filtered by rank, most improved/ declined and number of Gender Pay Gap (GPG) actions.
The ranking draws on data recently released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, with a particular focus on the median Gender Pay Gap, which is the difference between the median (middle) man and women earner in each institution.
The Universities of Sydney, UQ and UNSW lead the list, but before you assume it’s all about the money, University of Canberra and CDU picked up places 4 and 5. The top five have a median gender pay gap ranging between 1.7 and 3.2%. At the other end of the scale, Notre Dame, the former Uni of Adelaide, CQU UNE and JCU occupy the bottom of the ranking, with a median gap of 11.5-18%.
Looking beyond the ranking, the index indicates which institutions are prioritising actions to address the gap, with Monash, La Trobe and RMIT topping the table for number of GPG actions undertaken.
Professors Shields and Shay have written about their index in Future Campus and have provided four charts which tell the tale of addressing this equity issue.
“The intention is for this ranking to motivate the same level of attention and resources that universities dedicate to other rankings,” they write.
The GPG across all sectors declined nationally from 18.3% in 2023-24 to 16.4% in 2024-25 and universities compare positively, with a GPG declining from 7.4% to 7.2% on average over the period.
“The data also point to the impact of women in leadership: universities with a woman vice-chancellor had a significantly lower median pay gap (6.4% vs 7.5%),” they write.
The Ranking make for interesting reading and should prompt a range of conversations, looking at whether sufficient initiatives are in place, and also whether they are working.