Men earn an average of 17.53% more than women in Australia, according to the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The Bureau released updated average weekly earnings figures last week showing a weekly average of $1,252.20 for women, and $1,518.40 for men as of May this year.
This is for the trend, average weekly, full time, ordinary time earnings. It's important to be specific - this means the average of earnings that include overtime, leave-loading, bonuses and so on that have been adjusted to account for seasonal fluctuations in employment markets.
This is a gap of $266.20, the highest such amount in dollar terms since 1994, when the Bureau's digitised weekly earnings data begins.
Click here for the graph on mobile.
As a proportion of men's pay, women are currently earning 17.53% less.
Click here for the graph on mobile.
This is down slightly from the high point of 17.64% in 2009, but still much higher than the low point in 2004, where there was only a difference of 14.89% in men's and women's pay.
It's also important to look at hourly earnings when considering the gender wage gap. Using the Bureau's latest data from May 2012, men worked more hours on average, at 38.3, than women at 37.5, which would push weekly earnings up slightly. The gap between hourly pay for full-time, non-managerial employees was 9.3%.
Globally, Australia places slightly better than average. Bloomberg compiled wage gap figures for 36 countries, and Australia ranks at number 20 with 16.40% (this uses OECD median weekly figures for Australia's wage gap, so differs slightly to the data above). Better than the United States' figure of 23%, but we could learn a lot from our friends across the Tasman, as New Zealand has a much smaller gap of 7.80%.
| Rank | Country | Pay gap |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Slovenia | 0.90% |
| 2 | Poland | 4.50% |
| 3 | Italy | 5.30% |
| 4 | Malta | 7.20% |
| 5 | New Zealand | 7.80% |
| 6 | Luxembourg | 8.70% |
| 7 | Romania | 8.80% |
| 8 | Belgium | 10.20% |
| 9 | Portugal | 12.80% |
| 10 | Bulgaria | 13% |
| 11 | Iceland | 13.50% |
| 12 | Ireland | 13.90% |
| 13 | Lithuania | 14.60% |
| 14 | Sweden | 15.40% |
| 15 | Latvia | 15.50% |
| 16 | France | 15.60% |
| 17 | Norway | 15.80% |
| 18 | Denmark | 16% |
| 19 | Spain | 16.20% |
| 20 | Australia | 16.40% |
| 21 | Cyprus | 16.80% |
| 22 | Hungary | 17.60% |
| 23 | Netherlands | 17.80% |
| 24 | Switzerland | 19.10% |
| 25 | United Kingdom | 19.50% |
| 26 | Slovakia | 19.60% |
| 27 | Canada | 19.70% |
| 28 | Finland | 20.30% |
| 29 | Greece | 22% |
| 30 | Germany | 22.30% |
| 31 | United States | 23% |
| 32 | Austria | 24% |
| 33 | Czech Republic | 25.50% |
| 34 | Estonia | 27.70% |
| 35 | Japan | 28.30% |
| 36 | South Korea | 38.90% |
