Released on 27 February, the first national Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) report also notes some say their employers could do more to uphold all their employees' dignity.

The WGEA investigated about 5,000 companies, each employing more than 100 people, to determine the gender pay gap data.

Catholic workplaces consistently reported a lower gender pay gap than the 19 percent national median gender pay gap.

The WGEA defined the gender pay gap as the overall difference between women's and men's average weekly full-time equivalent earnings in an organisation.

Catholic employers

Among those the WGEA investigated were the Australian Catholic University (ACU), Caritas Australia and the Archdiocese of Sydney.

The ACU reported a median pay gap of 14.5 per cent, Caritas 13.1 per cent and the Archdiocese chancery 12.2 per cent.

Many Catholic schools, clubs, health and welfare agencies showed smaller or negligible gaps.

In an employer statement Caritas, with a workforce comprising almost 70 per cent of women in the reporting period, said factors like parental leave options contribute to its pay gap.

"While reducing the gender pay gap can be complex, it is a critical objective for Caritas Australia" a spokesperson for the Catholic charity says.

"We wholeheartedly commit to further foster an inclusive workplace where everyone has equal opportunity to thrive."

ACU recently appointed its first Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous) Kelly Humphrey.

A spokesperson says ACU's action plan to remove barriers to equity and diversity was recently awarded the Athena Swan Bronze Award. It is a national accreditation for gender equality in education.

"Analysis of salaries on a level-by-level basis shows pay is close to parity for women and men at most levels for academic and professional staff" the ACU spokesperson says.

"However, for some senior staff positions which are contract-based, a higher gender pay gap is evident."

The Archdiocese of Sydney' says it has worked hard in recent years to improve the representation of women at senior levels.

This effort has seen the first female member being included in the Archdiocese's curia - the governance body which assists the Archbishop.

It has also improved parental leave access, workplace flexibility and other entitlements for all employees, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese says.

"There has been a conscious shift towards improving our support and recognition of women, which is necessary."

The spokesperson says while there is still work to do, the archbishop is paying close interest.

He is particularly interested in finding out what is being done and what is still to be done to improve the lives of women and family lives of all who work at the archdiocese.

Abut half the employees in senior leadership roles at the chancery are women.

One says that while her situation in Australia is different from that of many women in other countries, she has always felt respected and heard, given opportunities and had her contribution valued at the chancery.

"Working for the equality of women aligns with Catholic social teaching in which the dignity of every person is upheld" she says.

Source

• Catholic Weekly

In the U.S., women are underpaid relative to white men at every education level and in most occupations, on average earning only 82 cents for every dollar a man earns.

This disparity is even greater when we consider race/ethnicity, where Black women (63 cents), Latino women (55 cents), and Native American women (66 cents) all earn even less.

The gender pay gap isn't just a problem for the U.S.

It exists in every country on earth.

Globally, there is a 37% gap between the wages of women and men.

Even in some of the most egalitarian countries such as Iceland, there remains a 24% gap in wages for similar work, and in some of the least egalitarian countries (e.g., Ethiopia, India, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Lesotho), the gap is as large as 49%.

Many explanations have been given for the gender pay gap, but a recent investigation suggests it might just be religion.

Could religion be the real culprit creating the gender pay gap?

In a recent series of studies, Drs. Traci Sitzmann (University of Colorado Denver) and Elizabeth Campbell (University of Minnesota) provide compelling evidence that the answer is yes.

They argue that tenets found in each of the worlds six major religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Folk, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism—can create norms and expectations regarding the roles of men and women that fuel the gender pay gap in cultures where religiosity (belief in religion) is high, compared to secular cultures where religiosity is low.

In their first study, they used global data from 140 countries to test this idea.

They showed that in countries where religiosity is high (e.g., Pakistan, Philippines, and Sri Lanka), women only earn 46% of what men do; in countries where religiosity is low (e.g., Estonia, Sweden, and Denmark), women earn 75% of men's wages.

An important finding was that the effect held true for all major world religions.

It doesn't matter if most believers in a country are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or adherents to a folk religion.

Evidence indicated that the wage gap is greater in countries where religion plays a major role in daily life.

In their second study, U.S. data from the 50 states mirrored this same pattern. In states with the highest levels of religiosity, women earned 74% of men's wages; in states lower in religiosity, women earned 82% of what men did.

Further, evidence revealed that the pay gap itself was narrowing faster over time in states with lower religiosity.

Based upon U.S. trends, the gender wage gap is projected to vanish in approximately 28 years in the most secular states, compared with 109 years in the most religious.

Why does religion drive the gender pay gap?

Their findings show that religiosity drives the gender wage gap through

• women being relegated to domestic roles focused on caregiving and discouraged from participating in the workforce either directly or through a lack of family-supportive policies,
• greater tolerance for the sexualization and sexual victimization of women, and
• being less likely to accept women in leadership positions.

"We've got the Pope saying, 'the door is closed, women are not allowed to be leaders in the church,'" Sitzmann said, referring to Pope Francis' 2013 statement on female priests in the Catholic Church. "That sets the stage for a very strong norm where leadership roles are reserved for men" she adds. Continue reading