The Gender Pay Gap by Job in Australia

Quick answer: Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) tracks the gender pay gap inside 688 individual Australian occupations, not just across the whole workforce. The typical gap, comparing median annual earnings for men and women doing the same job, is around 16.8%. Men out-earn women in 98% of those 688 occupations. The widest gaps sit in specialist medicine, male-dominated trades and finance, including Finance Manager (43.0%) and Financial Dealer (39.3%). Only four occupations show women out-earning men: Project Builder, Earthmoving Plant Operator, Welfare Centre Manager and ICT Systems Test Engineer. This is a different number to the 21.1% gap you've probably seen in the news, which is WGEA's employer-level figure. Both are real. They measure different things.

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Two different gaps, two different jobs to do

Most people have heard one gender pay gap number: 21.1%, the figure the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) published in its Gender Equality Scorecard for 2024-25 on 27 November 2025. It's a genuine, well-sourced number, drawn from payroll data reported by more than 8,200 employers covering 5.4 million Australian workers. For every dollar a man earns at those employers, a woman earns 78.9 cents, on average, a gap worth $28,356 a year.

But that number describes employers, not jobs. It's calculated across an entire workforce at a company, mixing every role from receptionist to CEO. A business can post a large gap simply because its highest-paid roles skew male and its lowest-paid roles skew female, even if a man and a woman doing the identical job are paid identically. WGEA only requires employers with 100 or more staff to report, so small and medium businesses aren't in that number at all.

JSA asks a narrower, more useful question for anyone weighing up a career move: what's the gap within a specific occupation, regardless of which employer someone works for? Its Occupational Gender Pay Gap Dashboard, part of the Gender Economic Equality Study published on 7 August 2025, compares median annual earnings for men and women in the same six-digit ANZSCO occupation, using linked ABS administrative data covering the whole labour market, not just large employers. It does this for 688 occupations, from Chief Executive to Kitchenhand.

Read side by side, the two numbers tell a fuller story than either does alone. Australia's whole-of-workforce, point-in-time gap was 25.7% in 2022-23, per JSA. Once you compare people doing the same job, that typical gap drops to around 16.8%. The gap between those two figures, roughly 9 percentage points, is what occupational segregation costs on its own: women concentrated in lower-paying jobs before anyone's individual pay packet is even compared.

Where the gap is widest

At the top of JSA's list, the largest gaps cluster in three places: specialist medicine, male-dominated trades, and finance.

Pathologists show a 74.0% gap (women earn a median $71,700 a year against $275,590 for men) and Diagnostic and Interventional Radiologists show 66.4%. JSA flags that pay gaps in small, highly specialised occupations like these should be read with some caution, since sample sizes are smaller and results can be skewed by things like part-time locum work or seniority mix. Take them as directional rather than exact.

The more reliable, larger-sample gaps sit in trades and finance. Fibrous Plasterers show a 50.4% gap, Electrical Linesworkers 46.3%, and Helicopter Pilots 44.6%, all almost completely male-dominated occupations where hours worked also differ. But the finance examples matter more for anyone weighing a corporate destination role, because they're not explained away by extreme gender skew. Finance Manager, an occupation JSA classifies as gender balanced, still carries a 43.0% pay gap (women earn a median $84,590, men $148,440). Financial Dealers show 39.3%. These are white-collar, professional, mixed-gender jobs, and the gap is still nearly double the occupational average.

Across the full dataset, more than 100 occupations have a gap above 25%, and almost 30 exceed 35%.

Where the gap is narrowest, and the jobs that run the other way

Out of 688 occupations, only four show women earning more than men on median annual pay: Project Builders (women earn 12.0% more), Earthmoving Plant Operators (6.2% more), Welfare Centre Managers (0.5% more) and ICT Systems Test Engineers (0.5% more). Project Builder and Earthmoving Plant Operator are almost completely male-dominated occupations, where the small number of women in them tend to be concentrated at senior or specialist levels, which pulls the median up. Welfare Centre Manager is moderately female-dominated and ICT Systems Test Engineer is gender balanced, so their near-even medians reflect an ordinary pay pattern rather than a skewed, small sample.

More instructive for most readers are the occupations with genuinely small gaps in ordinary, mixed-gender jobs. Personal Assistant, an almost completely female-dominated occupation, has a gap of just 3.6%. Water Inspector sits at 2.8%, Interpreter at 3.4%, Radio Presenter at 2.6%. Train Driver, a highly male-dominated occupation, comes in at 4.3%. These aren't outliers driven by tiny sample sizes; they're jobs where men and women doing the same work are, roughly, paid the same.

Why segregation drives most of it

The reason the workforce-wide gap (25.7%) runs so far ahead of the typical occupational gap (16.8%) comes down to one structural fact: Australian jobs are still deeply gender-segregated, and feminised jobs have historically been paid less than masculinised ones for comparable skill and responsibility.

JSA's Paper 1 introduces a Gender Segregation Intensity Scale to track this, sorting occupations into gender balanced (under 60% of one gender), moderately dominated (60 to 75%), highly dominated (75 to 90%) and almost completely dominated (90% or more). By that measure, only 21% of the Australian workforce, roughly one in five workers, sat in a gender-balanced occupation as of the 2021 Census. Around 70% of occupations held the same segregation intensity between 2006 and 2021, which means the sorting of men and women into different jobs has barely shifted in fifteen years.

That sorting has a pay consequence. Skills built around caring, coordination and service work, disproportionately done by women, have tended to be valued and paid less than skills built around physical labour or technical trades, disproportionately done by men, even when the underlying complexity is comparable. JSA's own analysis points to this pattern directly: pay for the same feminised roles, like cooks and administrators, is lower in a heavily feminised sector like aged care than for equivalent roles in a masculinised sector like mining.

The gap also compounds over time. JSA's 10-year accumulated gender pay gap, tracking cumulative earnings from 2010-11 to 2020-21, was 30.7%, notably higher than the single-year snapshot of 25.7% in 2022-23. That's the "motherhood penalty" showing up in the data: career breaks, reduced hours and part-time work after having children widen the gap further than any single year's pay slip suggests, and the effect is worst for women aged 25 to 39. The gap peaks at 29.6% for workers aged 40 to 54. First Nations women face the steepest version of this pattern, with a 10-year accumulated gap of 38.1%.

What this means if you're choosing a destination role

If you're mapping out a move into a new field, the occupation-level number is the one worth checking before you commit, because it varies more within a job family than you might expect.

Take contact centre and customer service work, relevant if you're weighing a move toward customer success salaries in Australia. Call or Contact Centre Operator carries a 9.0% gap. Call or Contact Centre Team Leader sits at 7.4%. Move up to Customer Service Manager and it widens to 16.9%. In general admin roles, General Clerk sits at 18.6% and Data Entry Operator at 18.1%, both meaningfully wider than Personal Assistant's 3.6%, despite all four being highly or almost completely female-dominated occupations. Insurance work shows the same spread: Insurance Consultant at 20.8%, Insurance Agent at 24.1%, and Insurance Broker at 31.9%, three closely related roles with very different gaps.

The practical takeaway is that "similar sounding job" doesn't mean "similar pay gap." Two destination roles that look interchangeable on a job board can carry a ten-point difference in how evenly they pay men and women. Before you commit to a training pathway or a job title, it's worth checking where that specific occupation sits, not just the industry it belongs to. The same goes for demand; check jobs in shortage in Australia alongside the pay gap data so you're weighing demand and pay equity together, not one without the other. And if AI exposure is also part of your decision, our full list of at-risk jobs in Australia covers the same occupations from that angle.

None of this tells you what you, personally, will be paid in a given role. It tells you the pattern the job itself carries, before you've even walked in the door. Combined with a clear-eyed look at your own transferable skills, that's a far better starting point than a job title and a guess. Our career change pathways walk through how to map what you already have against roles with a track record worth moving into.

FAQ

What is the gender pay gap by occupation in Australia? It's the difference in median pay between men and women working in the same job, rather than across a whole company or the whole economy. Jobs and Skills Australia tracks this for 688 occupations. The typical gap is around 16.8%, though it ranges from a 74.0% gap in Pathologists down to occupations where women out-earn men, like Project Builders.

Is the gender pay gap different by job or by employer? Yes, and they're measured differently. WGEA's well-known 21.1% figure (2024-25) is calculated across all roles at individual employers with 100 or more staff. JSA's occupational gap compares people doing the identical job across the whole labour market. Both are accurate; they answer different questions about where the gap comes from.

Which Australian job has the biggest gender pay gap? Among JSA's 688 tracked occupations, Pathologist has the widest gap at 74.0%, followed by Diagnostic and Interventional Radiologist at 66.4%. JSA notes these small, specialised occupations should be read cautiously, since sample sizes are limited. Among larger, more reliable samples, Fibrous Plasterer (50.4%) and Finance Manager (43.0%) rank among the widest, using JSA's median annual earnings data updated March 2026.

Are there any jobs where women earn more than men in Australia? Yes, but only four out of 688 occupations JSA tracks: Project Builders (12.0% more), Earthmoving Plant Operators (6.2% more), Welfare Centre Managers (0.5% more) and ICT Systems Test Engineers (0.5% more). Men out-earn women in the remaining 98% of occupations analysed. Two of the four are almost completely male-dominated trades, so the small group of women in them skew toward senior, higher-paid roles.

Why is there a gender pay gap even within the same job? Some of it reflects hours worked, seniority and part-time patterns that differ by gender within an occupation. JSA's data also shows the gap compounds over a career, with a 10-year accumulated gap of 30.7% against a single-year gap of 25.7%, driven largely by career breaks and reduced hours after having children.

Check your own occupation. Take the free Career Change Check to see three realistic next moves people from your kind of work have made.

Sources

Jobs and Skills Australia, Occupational Gender Pay Gap Dashboard (Table 1: Occupational Gender Pay Dashboard), Gender Economic Equality Study, data updated March 2026. jobsandskills.gov.au/research/studies/gender-economic-equality-study/occupational-gender-pay-gap
Jobs and Skills Australia, New Perspectives on Old Problems: Gendered Jobs, Work and Pay (Gender Economic Equality Study, Paper 1), 7 August 2025. jobsandskills.gov.au/publications/new-perspectives-old-problems-gendered-jobs-work-and-pay
Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), Australia's Gender Equality Scorecard 2024-25, media release "Broad employer action drives drop in gender pay gap for 2025," 27 November 2025. wgea.gov.au/newsroom/media-release-2025-gender-pay-gap-scorecard-report

For the full list of official data sources we cite across this site, see our sources page.

*This article draws on the Gender Economic Equality Study, Jobs and Skills Australia, © Commonwealth of Australia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), and on published WGEA employer data. Occupational figures reflect median annual earnings for 2022-23 from JSA's Occupational Gender Pay Gap Dashboard (data updated March 2026); employer-level figures ref