The Talk: Wage Discrimination in Australia

In 2018, shadow treasurer Chris Bowen brought the wage gap between Australian men and women to light in a speech to the Women’s Economics Network. Bowen noted that over the past twenty years, little has been done to close the gender gap. While women’s education has steadily increased  over the past two decades, the gap between women and men’s pay has hovered between 15 and 19 per cent, and  remains stagnant at 16%. RMIT ABC Fact Check investigated this, and found Chris Bowen’s claim to be correct.

From the outset of this project, our group decided that our main goal was to dispell some of the many misconceptions surrounding the wage gap. While the issue is talked about often, many people have a huge misunderstanding about what the gap actually entails.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that the wage gap refers to male and female individuals being paid different wages for the exact same jobs, which is incorrect. Rather, the wage gap refers to Australia’s gendered workforce, wherein female-dominated roles are paid vastly different wages to male-dominated careers. This is an issue that has remained constant throughout the past two decades, despite women’s education rising at a steady rate.

To tackle these misconceptions, we presented our project in the form of a talk show. We had a male and female co-host discuss the issue, with the male counterpart arguing against the notion of a wage gap with some of the popular arguments against it. The role of the female co-host was to debunk these misconceptions and arguments with facts and statistics about the wage gap, many of them sourced from the RMIT ABC Fact Check.

The idea is to create an engaging, easily understandable video that will educate our audience while also entertaining them. As this is a controversial subject, we hope that our video will be informative but also still fun to watch.

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