Dr. Kara McGann:

I thank the Chair. I accept absolutely what the Senator is saying but I do not think it is as simple as just being the responsibility of employers. There is a lot that employers can do and are doing in many cases. We have many employers working on everything from their recruitment and promotion practices - for example, by looking at the language used in their advertisements, training, the removal of bias from recruitment, and performance and promotion interviews - to the level of transparency around who gets opportunities to stretch and development opportunities. They are looking at their development practices and examining their data to determine where the problem areas within their organisations are. That is why I mentioned that even though the gender pay gap as a reporting tool is a very useful diagnostic tool, it is only a figure from a point in time. The decisions which brought us to that point were made by individuals, organisations and society over a long period of time. Employers alone cannot fix it. What employers can do is look at their gender pay gap figure and interrogate their data to understand where within their organisation the blockages or obstacles might be. If you are in a STEM organisation in a technology industry, for example, and you are not getting the same number of men and women coming from graduate level, the problem is not just with the employer. The employers have stepped up in that regard. They have looked at teacher internship programmes with STEM companies where people get a paid internship to immerse them in the whole area of STEM because this is a growing area where there are higher levels of pay, growth opportunity and real demand for graduates. As the same number of women is not coming through, they are not getting that access and therefore that is going to impact the gender pay gap down the track. That is why I keep referring to this being a whole-of-society approach.

I am not taking for one second from the absolute need for employers to play a key role in this regard, but without all the other pieces in that whole-of-society approach we will not get as far as we need to get. Our objective is gender balance and gender equality in the same way as the Senator is discussing, but how we get there is not solely within the ambit of the employer. The employer is the only one who has to report; I accept that and it is not a problem. However, the actual solution to it is beyond the employer alone.