A spokesperson said the coeducational school was an all-boys campus until 2006, and it had worked towards gender equity since the change.
“Being a co-educational school, it is very important to us to ensure our students have strong female role models,” the spokesperson said.
In Australia, the median base salary for a woman is 14.5 per cent or $11,542 lower than that for a man, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s latest snapshot shows.
When the total salary with bonuses, overtime, superannuation and other sales incentives are included, the wage gap grows to $18,461, or 19 per cent.
Even some boys’ schools bucked the trend. The King’s School in Sydney has a gender pay gap of 28 per cent in favour of women. Headmaster Tony George said the school has recently successfully recruited “highly competent women” and assisted staff with family responsibilities.
“It is also very important for boys to see women in leadership roles and to work under their authority, and many middle, senior and executive leadership positions at King’s are held by women,” he said.
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency says a negative pay gap below -5 per cent favoured women more than men, while a positive pay gap above 5 per cent favoured men more than women. Anything in between was considered neutral.
The private schools are among the 8 per cent of the country’s large employers with pay gaps in favour of women.
According to the agency, 30 per cent of companies on the list had neutral pay gaps, and 62 per cent had pay gaps in favour of men.
There are several ways to calculate the gender pay gap, and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s report said it was important to look at total remuneration because payments above the base salary account for more than a third of the median total pay gap.
“These additional payments – such as bonuses, overtime and sales incentives – are both more common and larger in male-dominated industries. They also tend to benefit employees in the highest-paid roles, who are more likely to be men,” the report said.
The agency’s chief executive, Mary Wooldridge, said the move to publicise company-level gender pay gaps was a significant shift.
“Employers now have that public accountability for that performance,” she said.
The data will also be able to show changes in the gender pay gap over time for those companies, Wooldridge said.
By sector, mining had the most companies that paid men more, at 95 per cent, while at the other end of the scale, in accommodation and food services, most employers (72 per cent) had neutral pay gaps.
The pay gaps were calculated by annualising pay and do not include chief executive or partner pay.
Hunter Health Care was the worst-performing company on the list, with a pay gap of 73.1 per cent in favour of men.
But the healthcare provider’s chief executive, Brenda Ryan, said that is because 57 per cent of doctors who do short after-hours GP Access shifts are men, and when those casual four-hour shifts are annualised, it skews the pay gap.
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Airlines were also poor performers on the list. Jetstar had a total remuneration pay gap of 43.7 per cent; Virgin Australia’s was 41.7 per cent, and Qantas 37 per cent.
Qantas Group’s chief people officer Catherine Walsh said the gap did not mean women were paid less than men in the same jobs but rather showed that women were significantly underrepresented in highly paid pilot and engineering roles. Walsh said this was a global problem in the industry that would take a long time to fix.
with Robyn Grace
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