Gender pay gaps revealed for large Australian booksellers

Many larger Australian booksellers’ gender pay gaps are now viewable through the Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) data explorer, which was made available last week.

As reported by the Guardian, this is the first time Australia has released data reflecting gender pay gaps at almost 5000 companies. Private companies with greater than 100 employees were required to report this data. As reported by Books+Publishing last week, most large Australian publishers required to report this data reported a gap (of variable sizes) in favour of male employees, with John Wiley & Sons—which had a 20% gender pay gap in favour of women—an exception.

Among booksellers with data available, most also reported a gender pay gap in favour of men, including Booktopia, which recorded a 24.8% gap—greater than the average pay gap for all employers (19.0%). Readings was the notable exception, recording a 7.3% pay gap in favour of women, while WHSmith recorded pay at close to parity (0.3% in favour of women).

QBD CEO Nicholas Croydon told Books+Publishing that the bookselling chain will feature in the next iteration of the WGEA dataset. ‘We submitted the data to the agency this year, but there was a technical issue [on] their end to include it in the dataset,’ said Croydon.

Source: WGEA data explorer, 5 March 2024.

*Median total renumeration gender pay gap.

Category: Local news