How media, supermarkets and banks compare on gender pay gap

The Guardian

04-03-2025

Which Australian radio station pays men twice as much as women? Which bank has a pay gap nearly double the national average? And which large supermarket chain pays the best?*
The answers to these questions – and many more – have been laid bare after the government's Women's Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) published its second annual report of company-level gender pay gaps this week.
The report, which reveals the pay gaps and gender compositions at nearly 8,000 Australian companies, allowed Australians to peek behind the financial curtain of their own and other employers.
Nationally, the average gender pay gap is 22%, meaning Australian women earned 78c on average for every $1 earned by men, or $28,425 less than their male counterparts in the 12 months to March 2024.
In 2025, for the first time, WGEA also published the average pay at each individual company, as well as the average pay per quartile of the workforce, allowing people to see the average salaries at their own – and rival – companies.
In publishing the average remuneration at each company, a sad truth was revealed – the higher the average pay packet at a company, the larger their pay gap favouring men tended to be.
Across the country, 5,347 employers, or 72.2%, have a gender pay gap that favours men; 21.3% have a neutral gender pay gap, which means an average pay gap of +-5%, and 6.5% (474 employers) have a pay gap that favours women.
In the media space, three companies had achieved pay equality: Guardian Australia (referred to in the data as GNM Australia), with a gap of 3.5% favouring women, Australian Associated Press (with a pay gap of 0.5% favouring men) and News Life Media, which is part of News Ltd and has titles such as GQ, Donna Hay, Vogue Australia and news.com.au (with a pay gap of 2.5%).
The largest pay gap was at Radio 2GB Sydney at 51.1% in favour of men.
2GB also had the second highest average total remuneration of any news media company, at $149,000. The highest average pay was at Fairfax Media Publications, at $152,000.
WGEA's calcuation of average total remuneration included salary, superannuation, bonuses, overtime and any extra payments.
The average pay number may also be higher in this reporting than in reality, due to the inclusion of casual employees in the figures. Casual and part-time employees have their rates annualised and converted to full-time equivalent earnings.
All supermarkets had relatively low gender pay gaps, in line with the national picture which found that the largest companies tended to have smallest difference between men and women.
The outlier among the large supermarkets (with 500 employees or more) was 7-Eleven, which had average total remuneration package of $169,000 and the highest gender pay gap of 15.3%.
Woolworths supermarket, with more than 162,000 employees across the country, has the next highest gender pay gap of the large supermarkets in the country – at 10.7%.
After 7-Eleven, Aldi stores paid the best, with average total remuneration of $90,000, nearly double that of Ritchies Stores ($48,000).
Of the large banks – with 1,000 employees or more – Macquarie Bank was the outlier, with a considerably higher total remuneration than the others ($227,000) and a gender pay gap of 41.8%.
The big four banks had average total pay of around $160,000 a year and pay gaps of around 20%.
Across all industries, the company with the highest average salary was real estate company Goodman Ltd, with an average across the company of $766,000. It had an average gender pay gap of 66.4%. At Goodman Ltd, the average earned by the highest paid 25% of employees was $2.381m.
The next highest average remuneration packages in the country were at financial services companies Optiver Pty. Limited ($693k) and Canaccord Genuity (Australia) Limited ($672k). Both of these companies had very high gender pay gaps favouring men, at 63.6% and 68.5% respectively.
*2GB Radio Sydney; Macquarie Bank; Aldi