10 easy steps to massage your gender pay gap

“Your gender pay gap could have an impact on your recruitment, retention and reputation,” WGEA warns in a linked “10 point communications guide”. If companies want to “mitigate concerns”, they need to get on the front foot, or risk allowing “the media and commentators to control the narrative”.

They should start by “developing tailored resources to support communications”, the guide says.

This should include “talking points for leadership” should they get any pointy questions on “the why” of the gender pay gap, and similar training for spokespeople.

Companies should also find case studies that “showcase” their efforts to address gender equality and have benefited from these policies, according to the 10-point plan. They could then roll out profiles of these staffers, it says, perhaps via video.

Business leaders responsible for implementing diversity could also be profiled. As this duty typically falls within female-dominated human resources divisions, these profiles, like those of the women who showcase these policies, would presumably be of women.

So, again, the labour of solving a problem that is not caused by them and directly disadvantages them would fall on to women.

It’s just like how on International Women’s Day, corporations roll out cupcakes, cookies and flowers, typically organised by their female-heavy HR and communications teams.

Enjoy this cupcake iced in the colour of the suffragette movement, they say, just don’t ask us about our gender pay gap. (Though now, if you do, you can watch this short inspirational video with some talking points on how we are fixing the problem and a motivational profile of a woman we have hired. WGEA told us you’d like it.)

Full transparency

We aren’t disputing that a well-executed communications strategy is important for businesses – just ask Brad Banducci.

But we question why WGEA – an already overstretched taxpayer-funded organisation with a legislated objective to “promote and improve gender equality in employment and the workplace” – produced it.

We also question why, on a day that should be celebrated as a new frontier in transparency over workplace equality in Australia, it removed data from their system showing, in absolute terms, the gender breakdown of all roles and staff movements at their organisations.

Percentage breakdowns replaced these figures but, again, why reduce transparency instead of promote it? Perhaps this is WGEA’s way of promoting STEM to women.

Talking points and pretty videos do not improve gender equality or close the pay gap, and nor does attempting to media manage your own staff to lessen their outrage about data that disadvantages them.

You know what does? Full transparency, targeted responses to lessening causes of that gap, and letting some of that outrage to develop so bosses are forced to act.

Maybe we just got the wrong talking points on the benefits of WGEA’s communications guide.