Australian women earn $26,000 less than men as gender pay gap progress stalls

Australian women are earning nearly $26,000 less than their male colleagues as efforts to close the gender pay gap stall.

The latest data released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency shows the pay gap remains stuck at 22.8%.

This means that for the first time, the gap in the 2021-22 financial year was the same as the year before, with women paid $0.77 for every $1 earned by men.

Seven in 10 employers have pay gaps that favour men while women continue to be under-represented in leadership.

The number of female chief executives rose from 19.4% in the previous year to 22.3%. There has been an increase of just 5% since 2014.

About one in five boards do not have any female members. Women in other senior levels of management earned almost $100,000 less over the same period.

Only two industries have more women in management than their proportion in the workforce, these include the grouping of transport, postal work and warehousing (26% managers) and mining (21% managers).