WGEA Equal Pay Data

Russell Fryer, Managing Director of Hutchies, said today’s report is an important measurement for Australian workplaces.

“Hutchies has one of the industry’s largest trade based teams in the industry with over 6% of female representation - three times the average. However, given that site based roles are generally higher average pay scales, and roles remain male dominated, a gap is visible in the WGEA reporting for our organisation when compared to office and administrative roles.

“Since Hutchies’ WGEA report in early 2023, we’ve proactively undertaken a complete review of how we maintain our people information, to ensure we can see anyone doing the same job, with the same level of experience, and in the same location is recognised equally. Importantly the enterprise agreements cover almost half our workforce, which are site based, and gender neutral.

“Our efforts are focused on attracting new female talent to the industry across all roles and in particular to our sites and within high skilled trades like carpentry and joinery. We will continue to lead the way in female participation at the coal face of construction.”

• WGEA Gender Pay Gap Data for Hutchies shows the Median Base Salary Gender Pay Gap is 29% and the Median Total Remuneration Gender Pay Gap 40.2%
• These rates are reflective of the data for the construction industry, which has the highest average median total salary gap of any industry at 31.8%
• For a large and diverse employer like Hutchies, the WGEA data has many contributing factors that make up any number reported – significant to this is the mix of on and off site people Hutchies employs directly (almost half of our workforce is trade based – the largest in the industry)
• 6% of our on site workforce are women on equal or better pay, are all employed under enterprise agreements that vary slightly state to state but likely have higher rates of remuneration compared to some of our office based people
• Our off site workforce includes everyone from administrative and operational roles through to hundreds of project managers, contract administrators, architects, engineers and many more, including 12.5% of women
• There are also contributing factors such as heightened recruitment markets like we’ve seen, diversity in regional location of jobs, various awards and industrial instruments, and the size and complexity of projects which all play a part in varying remuneration across the construction industry
• While the single percentages are important for benchmarking, when you consider all of these variables in context, we believe granular data will paint a more accurate picture of any pay gaps when comparing relative roles
• Hutchies will be publishing our Gender Equality Indicators (GEIs) as part of our next WGEA report in March, and these highlight our commitment to the ongoing review of remuneration each year to ensure there are no genuine pay gaps in like for like roles and experience