Why you should immediately find the nearest bloke and ask him for $298.10.

It’s 2015, why are Australian women still earning nearly $300 less than men each and every week?

The Australian gender pay gap has reached a record high, according to new data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday.

The gap stretched to 18.8 per cent in November 2014, the largest it’s been since records began in 1994 and an increase of 1.4% from the previous year.

The data shows that a man working full-time in Australia will earn $1,587.40 a week on average, whereas a woman working full time earns $1289.30 — that’s a weekly difference of $298.10.

“It is a long-term, persistent problem,” says Dr Carla Harris, Research Executive Manager at The Workplace Gender Equality Agency, who warns the implications for women can be severe.

“If they are not accessing the same earning potential, women are twice as likely to live in poverty when they are older than are men,” Dr Harris says. “We need to start doing whatever we can to halt it and reverse it.”

 Not peeved enough? 13 Things that will happen before we get equal pay in Australia.

Even so, the Abbott Government announced on Wednesday that it plans to water down changes to gender reporting requirements for organisations, which were passed under Julia Gillard and due to take effect in April.

“Many found the reporting regime overly complex and time consuming and are not confident if will help them to improve gender equality,” Senator Eric Abetz said of the decision.

Employers will no longer have to report on CEO salaries, the pay of casual managers, the components of total remunerations, the numbers of job applications and interviews and requests and approvals for extended parental leave.

But according to Dr Harris more data, not less, is crucial in ensuring the gap doesn’t continue to widen and many businesses aren’t aware even that women and men continue to be valued and remunerated differently.

“What we urge is to carefully inspect the conscious and unconscious biases that we hold to see why we remunerate men and women differently,” she says, suggesting that a good starting point for businesses is conducting payroll analysis.

“What you actually find when you sit down and analyse your numbers is you’ll find there are gender pay gaps.

“Until you are willing to do that you really don’t have starting point. That’s a very good starting point.”

The national gender pay gap figure reflects overall differences in earnings between women and men across the board.

Read more: Christopher Pyne believes that most women study nursing and teaching. This is not a joke.

Dr Harris says it is important to remember that “it is not a like-for-like analysis” and doesn’t mean that women are earning 18.8% less than men in the same role.

Conditions for women are actually improving in many industries, she says, though some remain worse than others.

The Financial and Insurance Services industry had the highest gender pay gap (29.6%), followed by Health Care and Social Assistance (29.1%) and Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services (28.7%).

“Why are we still seeing no shift is very difficult to explain, but until we can get some traction around it we can’t let it go,”
Dr Harris says.