In Australia, men and women who graduate in the same fields do not necessarily start on equal footing in terms of pay. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency has been reporting figures on the gender pay gap at the graduate level since 1997 and during that time there has always been some discrepancy between what female and male graduates earn. At its best, this gap was 2.5% in 2005 but it has grown since then. In 2012 the gap was almost 10%, the biggest gap in 15 years.
If men and women who graduate in the same field do not even start on equal salaries it seems unlikely that disparity will not persist over the course of their careers, which seems to be borne out in the available data.
While it’s not accurate to say a woman always earns 17.5% less than a man doing the same job, it is accurate to say women earn less than men, even in the same fields, with the same qualifications. And the 17.5% figure, high level as it is, indicates very clearly that women, on the whole, still earn substantially less than men. Gender Pay Gap- Myth or Reality
