Lion CEO Stuart Irvine says the company has no regrets about spending $6million to close the gender pay gap at the company.
“To hold up standards of diversity and inclusion and then tell people we know we underpaid you for the role but just bear with us while we pay you a bit less for the next four or five years – that didn’t sit well with any of us with any integrity,” he’s told the Australian Financial Review.
The company conducted a pay gap analysis last year of more than 1600 employees and the leadership team were shocked when Mercer analysis discovered the company was paying men an average 3.2% more than women.
“To be honest because of our values of meritocracy and inclusion we didn’t expect to find anything,” he said. “We were doing it more as a health check than anything else.”
The company moved quickly to close the gap by increasing pay for 950 women as well as 700 men, who had been paid slightly less than their female counterparts.
The company now has a 50:50 gender target by 2026 and conducts pay analyses every six months to ensure the pay gap remains at zero.
Irvine has become a WGEA Pay Equity Ambassador. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency is charged with promoting and improving gender equality in Australian workplaces.
A spokesman for Lion noted: “At Lion we are committed to gender pay equity. That is why we have investigated and closed the gender pay gap within our business. We’ve also made changes to our processes and conduct pay gap analysis twice a year. We encourage other organisations to do the same – to make a difference to gender equality. We do this because improving gender equality is the right thing to do for our business, our people and the community.”
Recent research from WGEA has revealed the overall gender pay gap fell only marginally in the last year, from 17.7% to 17.3% based on full-time salaries, and from 23.1% to 22.4% on total remuneration.
Most of the decline took place in male-dominated industries such as mining, construction and manufacturing, with financial and scientific services achieving the biggest improvements.
However, female-dominated sectors such as education and training increased their gap.
Libby Lyons, director of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, which compiles the scorecard, said the increases were concerning.
“To me the biggest cause of that, if you look at what happens in those two industries in particular, is they are the least likely industries to do a pay gap analysis.
“Therefore they don’t actually know what’s going on in their organisation in terms of a gender pay gap. Because they’re female-dominated, they think they don’t have a problem.”
