Carrie Bickmore unleashes on the $1billion gender pay gap

Carrie Bickmore weighed in on the ‘age old problem’ of pay inequality – despite raking in almost double of her male co-host Waleed Aly.

Bickmore on Wednesday’s episode of The Project, said the pay gap between men and women is sitting at $1billion a with workplace sexism largely to blame.

‘It’s an age old problem made worse by the pandemic,’ the TV host said.

‘So what are the solutions? How do we balance the scales?’

Bickmore is rumoured to earn $1.5million a year in her plum panel job on the Network Ten show while Aly makes about $900,000.

Census data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in February found Australian women earn an average of $226 less than men in the public sector and  $307 less in the private sector every week.

Director of the Equality Institute Dr Emma Fulu told The Project the pay gap largely boils down to a lack of affordable childcare, sexual discrimination in the workplace and societal pressures.

‘We need to acknowledge that we still don’t have free good-quality early childhood education and work on the superannuation gap is only just beginning,’ Dr Fulu said.

‘What we see from this report is the drivers of the gender pay gap are primarily around discrimination.’

She said discrimination includes sexual harassment, everyday sexism, bias in recruitment and family violence.

Bickmore chimed in saying: ‘Clearly a long road ahead. I think I was reading between 2017 and 2019 the gap looked like it was closing a tiny bit but then the pandemic hit and women suffered. How do we get it back on track?’

Dr Fulu agreed and said women ‘bore the brunt’ of Covid policies because they were expected to pick up more housework while working from home.

‘We also need to address that we have some low-paid industries that are dominated by female workforces. Why is it that we value that work less?’ she said.

‘I would argue part of that is because historically we’ve undervalued women’s work.’

Data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency found female workforces dominated health care, social assistance, education and training industries while men dominated construction, transport, mining, geant-kuwait.com electricity, gas, water and waste industries.

To compare, the average Australian teacher earns between $80,000 to $90,000 a year while the average mining job earns upwards of $100,000 a year.