From 2014 to 2020, the gender pay gap in Australia’s architectural services worsened slightly, from men being paid on average 28.7% over average women’s salaries in 2014, to men being paid 29.4% over in 2020, according to figures compiled by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), meaning that on average women working in architecture must all be given a 29.4% pay rise across the board to achieve pay equality (WGEA, 2020). Over the same period, the average pay rise required to bring women up to equality with men in the adjacent class of engineering design and engineering consulting services went from 41.2% to 29.2%. In our shared umbrella division of professional, scientific and technical services industries overall it went from 38.7% to 28.2%, a relative improvement but still making it the third-worst of all such divisions. By comparison the national average pay rise required across all divisions in the WGEA dataset has fallen from 32.8% to 25.2%. Architects might once have been ahead of the curve on gender equality among our fellow professionals, but starting out at 28.7% that was never saying much. Evidently, we are a complacent lot, and have probably been deluding ourselves thinking that white-collar environments such as ours were ever leading the charge in general.
Data on pay gaps for minority genders and sexualities are much harder to come by, let alone disaggregated by profession. But in Australia we do know from a 2015 analysis of household income data that the average pay rise required to bring gay men up to equality with straight men lies between 8.7% and 22.0%, though straight women would actually require a pay rise between 0% and 14.9% to reach equality with lesbians, perhaps indicating something about the nature of gender biases in Australian workplace culture (La Nauze, 2015). A survey in the US in 2017 found a somewhat different picture, where gay men would require pay rises of 46.6% to reach equality with straight men, and lesbians would require 12.8% pay rises to reach equality with straight women (Prudential, 2017). A 2019 UK survey found LGBT+ workers overall required on average 19.0% pay rises to reach equality with their straight colleagues, and was also able to identify that transgender workers require 16.3% pay rises to reach equality with their cisgender counterparts (Chapman, 2019).
Australian architects might like to think that our industry does better than these sorts of national average LGBT+ pay gaps, but our stagnant performance on gender pay gaps suggests this may be simply more delusional thinking. To put it in perspective, indications are that professional workplaces remain toxic for both women and LGBT+ workers. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2020 inquiry into sexual harassment in Australian workplaces found that 25% of women surveyed within our division of professional, scientific and technical services had been the subject of sexual harassment in the previous five years, and that 87% of subjects in this division are unlikely to report or complain, this latter figure the second worst of all divisions (AHRC, 2020). A 2017 study by PwC found that 55% of surveyed workers in our division had observed homophobia in the workplace in the previous 12 months. The fact that 93% of LGBT+ workers are generally ‘out’ in these industries evidently does not correspond to a lack of homophobia in them (PwC, 2017). Coming out in the architecture profession is arguably to expose oneself to trauma, discrimination and loss of income, despite what we might tell ourselves.
The gender pay-gap figures published by WGEA are compiled from salary data submitted by all companies in each industry with over 100 employees. Submissions must be formally signed off by the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The WGEA does not refer precisely to the term CEO in its gender representation analyses, but it does tell us that women make up only 23.2% of the directors of architectural practices and only 2.6% of the chairs. I can find no relevant statistics for LGBT+ corporate leadership. The nature of the reporting process indicates that the overwhelmingly male (and presumably overwhelmingly straight and cis) directors are well aware of the pay gaps in their practices and have the organisational capacity to reduce them to 0% where they belong. Which makes the persistence of these pay gaps, in the words of Hannah Gadsby, “a decision”. A decision made by these directors to allow the pay gaps to sit on the books for years on end, and in many cases watch them worsen. Since after so many years of producing such reports, inaction is now tantamount to a choice – to choose to neglect, to choose to discriminate, to choose to affirm the economic supremacy of cis straight male architects.
Australian company directors are shielded from real accountability for their pay gaps by a decision made by Australia’s legislators, which in their Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 deliberately prohibited each employer’s gender pay-gap figures from being printed in the public versions of the individual company reports published by the WGEA. Contrast this with the UK where the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 require employers to publish their gender pay gap figures on Gov. UK. Type the name of your favourite large UK practice into https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/ to see for yourself.
Many of the Australian directors protected by these decisions sit on the architecture industry’s Champions of Change Coalition panel, seemingly busy trying everything but the direct step of immediate pay rises for their female and LGBT+ staff. Their well-meaning statements would look a little more like leadership if they weren’t demonstrably behind their UK counterparts even on coming clean about their pay gaps. If Australia’s architectural champions can’t offer immediate pay rises, they should at least voluntarily match the UK standard and publish their own companies’ gender pay gap figures each year. Given how many LGBT+ staff are out in our industry, it would be possible for some to estimate their LGBT+ pay gap figures as well.
If the point of leadership is to drive the pace of change, then Australian architecture is still looking for leaders who will take their foot off the brakes and accelerate us in the right direction. The most expedient way to address our profession’s stagnant pay gap performance is immediately to give all female employees the 29.4% pay rises they are entitled to, with something similar for all LGBT+ employees. That way, Australian architecture CEOs will be able to report confidently in 2021 that they are zero pay-gap employers.
Workplace Gender Equality Agency Data Explorer. All pay gap percentages in this article are expressed in terms of the pay rise required to bring the average woman or LGBT+ worker’s salary in line with their male / straight / cis counterparts, the inverse of how pay gaps are normally reported, but better reflective of how any correction to salaries would ultimately be expressed to individual workers.
La Nauze, A. (2015) ‘Sexual orientation-based wage gaps in Australia: The potential role of discrimination and personality’ The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 26(1). The ranges express the spread of findings of different analytical models explored by the author. https://doi.org/10.1177/1035304615570806
Prudential (2017) The LGBT Financial Experience, 2016-2017.
Chapman, B. (11 July 2019) ‘LGBT+ workers paid £6,700 per year less than straight workers, survey suggests’, Independent.
Australian Human Rights Commission (2020) Respect@Work: National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces.
PwC (2017) Perspectives on LGBTI+ inclusion in the workplace.
This article was originally published in What are we doing? (2021), Architecture Bulletin 78(1).