EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re posting this today as PaperCut’s response to changes introduced in 2024 by Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).
WGEA promotes and improves gender equality in the Australian workplace. One way the group has done this is to publish gender equity information of all businesses (with 100 or more staff) in aggregate form. This has given a broad indication of the gap.
Effective today, WGEA is publishing each individual private Australian company’s pay gaps . We want to share our thoughts on this important Australian topic.
Gender equality is critically important to PaperCut Software as a business. Clearly, our gender pay gap is unacceptable and needs to improve. While we’ve been improving our gender pay gap, continuing to improve the experience and equity for women who are underrepresented in our business and industry has to continue to be a priority. Not only for PaperCut Software as a business but also for supporting girls and women in STEM roles in the tech, IT, software, and print industries.
PaperCut Software’s gender pay gap in Australia
The gender pay gap is different to equal pay for equal work. At PaperCut Software we look at not just the overall gender pay gap, but also conduct equal pay for equal work analysis to ensure we understand the challenges and opportunities for improvement in our business.
From a gender pay gap perspective, WGEA recommends businesses use total remuneration as the best measure of the gap. PaperCut’s median total remuneration has improved by 4.2% over the three prior reporting periods. However, it still remains in favour of men by 20.6% in the most recent reporting period. This is impacted heavily by the over-representation of men in senior roles in PaperCut Software. More specifically, currently, only 14% of Manager roles across all divisions in Australia are held by women; only 20.8% of our Technical divisions are made up of women with only 7.5% of Manager roles being held by women.
PaperCut Software develops software within the tech, software, and office print industries. These are heavily male-dominated industries and this increases the difficulty for us to recruit women into roles in our business. We also acknowledge that historically we have not promoted and retained enough women into senior positions to address this under-representation at more senior levels. This is within our control and our responsibility to improve.
We’ve conducted an analysis of equal work for equal pay in similar roles at similar levels. We are able to see some differences between men and women at some levels, with women being ahead at some levels, but there are more levels where women are behind. There can be many valid reasons for this including labour market demand; differences in experience levels; as well as different role types within a level paying different salaries which we believe to be all contributing factors. We also acknowledge that we have not done the analysis to check statistical significance yet which is important and will be completed.
Our continuing commitments
It’s important to be clear on our continued intent and commitment to improve our gender pay gap. We have established support programs for women at PaperCut, an example being our Elevate program. Leadership and our diversity working group feel that these need better executive support, as well as being linked to strategic objectives and receiving better prioritisation and resources. We need to take a more multi-faceted approach to supporting equity for women at PaperCut.
Acknowledging we have an issue with the pipeline of women for highly paid roles within our organisation as well as a historical issue with promoting and retaining women in senior roles at PaperCut Software is important. An important build on this acknowledgement, is that PaperCut Software has committed strategic prioritisation in the FY2025 year for an improved multifaceted program to engage, support and elevate women at work. We have a duty of care to also work within our communities to foster the pipeline of girls and women into tech. We have committed to programs in the K-12 education space previously, and we need to continue this work as a tech community member.
It’s important to note that we are continuing to improve in these measures. For this current year FY2024 to date, (not the reporting period) we have promoted more women than men into manager positions, with 50% of manager promotions going to women in Australia.
In FY25 we will be:
- Continuing to undertake a gender analysis in every remuneration and promotion cycle to ensure that women receive not only equitable increases but have equitable starting salaries, and equitable opportunities for promotion.
- Running unconscious bias training with a gender element for all people who are making remuneration and promotion decisions to ensure that bias is not impacting women negatively in these decisions.
- Ensuring that women are represented at interview stage (in addition to shortlist stage) for all external roles advertised to ensure that we strive to improve the gender composition within our business.
Outside of the important actions noted above, PaperCut Software continues to focus on gender equity throughout all programs and practices. This is demonstrated through our work across:
- 12 weeks paid parental leave offered to all genders
- Using external benchmarking data to drive competitive remuneration for all
- A funded and active Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging employee working group to support gender equity amongst other areas of support
- An ‘Industry Based Learning’ program aimed at giving opportunities for pre-graduates within the software industry, in which we aim for above industry average placements for women
- Continuing to run unconscious bias training for team members globally
In closing, we recognise that there are still opportunities for progress for women at PaperCut Software, and we must continue to prioritise time, and resources to advance gender equality in PaperCut Software.
