About Pay Equity What is Pay Equity?

Pay equity is about achieving equal remuneration outcomes in your workplace. It means eliminating sex discrimination from the wage-setting system by ensuring that employers use gender-neutral and gender-inclusive criteria to determine the value of job components such as skill, responsibility, qualifications and working conditions.

Equal remuneration, however, is more than just equal pay through wages – it includes discretionary pay, allowances, performances, merit and bonus payments and superannuation. The information that follows is intended to equip your organisation with knowledge and understanding of the concept of pay equity.

• Equal pay for equal work involves a direct comparison of jobs occupied by the opposite genders where the job is the same or basically the same.

• Equal pay for work of equal value involves comparing the value of jobs performed by one group of workers with that of jobs performed by another group of workers, where the jobs may be of a different nature but are comparable in other ways such as skill and responsibility. For example, comparing the value of the work of librarians with that of geologists. Equal pay for work of equal value means that rates are based on the value of the work, with the value of the work assessed free of any consideration of the sex of the workers.

Pay inequity in your workplace can be for the reasons outlined above or it can be caused by the uneven gender distribution of your workforce, in which, for example, more men occupy senior and therefore higher-paying jobs than women, and more women may work part-time or casually.

Discovering what type of pay equity problem you have is the first step. The solution will be different depending on what conclusions you arrive at.

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