Jobs, work and pay in Australia remain highly gendered, driving significant gender-based economic inequality. This challenge is especially pronounced in the service and creative sectors, which employ more than 3 million Australians and include several shortage occupations with strong gender imbalances.
Achieving gender-based economic equality requires not only improving gender balance in jobs, work and pay, but also addressing the factors that lead to these imbalances, such as education and training choices and pathways.
Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) has released the first in a three-part series on Gender Economic Equality. Paper 1 – New Perspectives on Old Problems – Gendered Jobs, Work and Pay examines how gender shapes Australia’s labour market across more than 600 occupations.
The paper addresses key evidence gaps in intersectional pay gap data, introduces the new Gender Segregation Intensity Scale, and provides fresh insights into how gender inequity continues to affect jobs, pay and work in Australia.
SaCSA was pleased to contribute to this study earlier in May 2025 and recognises its findings as vital to workforce planning and industry stewardship across our sectors.
Key Findings from the Paper
- In 2021, only 21% of Australian workforce worked in gender-balanced occupations.
- As of 2020-21, the accumulated 10-year occupational gender pay gap was 31%, higher than the single year point-in-time gender pay gap of 26% in 2022-23.
- Males out-earn females in 98% of the 688 occupations analysed.
- More than 100 occupations have a pay gap above 25%, with almost 30 occupations exceeding 35%.
- Gender pay gaps widen with age, peaking at 30% among workers aged 40-54 years. The ‘motherhood penalty’ is evident, with females aged 25-39 years old seeing the worst subsequent economic outcomes.
- First Nations females face the largest pay gaps in Australia, earning 35% less on average compared to the total males in Australia.
Gender Pay Gap in the Service and Creative Sectors
How is the gender-based pay gap measured?
The gender pay gap is the difference between female and male incomes, expressed as a proportion of male incomes. For example, if females in an occupation earn a median income of $800 a week, and males earn a median income of $1,000 a week, the median gender pay gap for this occupation would be 20%.
Pay Gap across the Arts, Personal Services, Retail, Tourism and Hospitality Sectors
The gender pay gap ranges from 3% to 34% across the occupations in our sectors. By comparison, JSA reports the ‘typical’ occupational pay gap at 17%, with more than half of the occupations in our sectors exceeding this benchmark.
Where the gaps are largest
The widest gap (34%) was among Visual Arts and Crafts Professionals (Arts), followed by Recreation Officers (Arts) and Pharmacy Technicians (Retail) at 30%. All three are moderately or highly female dominated occupations.
In Hospitality, two of the largest and fastest-growing occupations, Chefs and Cooks, recorded pay gaps of 15% and 17% respectively. Both occupations remain in persistent shortage and have high CALD representation (60% for Chefs and 47% for Cooks). In particular, the 17% pay gap in Cooks is noteworthy as it is an occupation with males and females working similar hours each week. Kitchenhands, another fast-growing occupation, has a 15% pay gap despite females working longer hours on average. This is an occupation that becomes increasingly female dominated as workers age.
“Marginalisation of your identity can stack up against you. At my previous workplace, many of us were immigrants and we were all paid badly, and did not know, nor were encouraged, about unionisation. As an immigrant on a working visa, I’m conscious of how much space I take up and how much I press for the accommodations I need to survive comfortably.”
– Male LGBTQIA+ focus group participant, Chef
In Retail, Sales Assistants and Retail Managers, two of the largest employing occupations in Australia, have pay gaps of over 20%. While males work longer hours in these occupations (16% and 13% more respectively), the pay disparities remain significant. Sales Demonstrators, a highly female dominated occupation, recorded a pay gap of 29%.
In Arts, gender-balanced jobs such as Photographers and Photographic Developers and Printers have a pay gap of over 25%. Art Teachers (Private Tuition), a highly female dominated occupation, recorded a 19% pay gap despite a small difference in hours worked between males and females.
How SaCSA is Responding
SaCSA will continue to apply a diversity and inclusion lens to our workforce planning and related projects, to better understand and respond to these challenges. For example, our work on customer aggression and drink spiking has shown that female workers in our sectors are more likely to experience unsafe working conditions at work, and these working conditions lead to issues with attraction and retention of staff.
Explore the Data Further: Dashboards and Upcoming Papers
In addition to the paper, you can explore changing levels of occupational gender segregation over time and across different cohorts of workers including First Nations and CALD workers in the JSA Gender Segregation Intensity Scale Occupational Dashboard. You can explore the gender pay gaps in over 680 occupations in this Occupational Gender Pay Gap Dashboard.
JSA will publish two more papers in September 2025, with a focus on gendered skills, training pathways and outcomes (Paper 2), as well as policy implications and recommendations to accelerate progress towards gender economic equality (Paper 3).
[1] The Gender Segregation Intensity Scale (GSIS) measures four different categories of segregation: gender balanced (<60%), moderately female or male dominated (between 60-75%), highly female or male dominated (between 75-90%) and almost completely female or male dominated (>=90%).
[2] Jobs and Skills Australia, Paper 1 – New Perspectives on Old Problems – Gendered Jobs, Work and Pay (2025).