THE agriculture, forestry and fishing industries have been identified as having some of the worst gender pay gaps, according to the latest Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre gender equity report.
Released last week, the report looked at gender pay gaps across more than 12,000 reporting organisations and the remuneration of more than four million Australian employees, equating to 40 per cent of all the workforce.
In the 2015-16 financial year, the average pay gap between full-time male and female employees in the agriculture, forestry and fishing industries was 21.8 per cent.
According to the report, female employees earned on average $70,808 while male employees took home $90,536.
The gap has increased since the 2014-15 financial year by almost 1pc and collectively the industries are ranked seventh, up from ninth the year before.
The worst industry in terms of gender pay gap was the finance industry where the deficit was 33.2pc for 2015-16, down from 35pc in 2014-15.
National Farmers' Federation president Fiona Simson said the report findings were "not the worst, but not great".
Rather than focusing on the pay gap she wants to see representation of women increase across the industry.
"It is more about how many women are involved in agriculture and I think the other important point that the report makes is that the more women that are involved in the industry the better the gap gets, so absolutely we need to increase representation of women," she said.
"As an industry we are incredibly diverse, we have always had women working alongside men in the paddocks whether its cattle, sheep or grains and we have diversity across ethnic groups and yet when it comes to agriculture representative groups and agribusiness boards the percentage of women drops and it's really disappointing.
"There is a lot of research that shows diversity - whether it's women, young people, ethnic groups, whatever it is - people from different walks of life can improve the value of the decision making of those organisations."
Across all industries, the pay gap on average is 23.1pc, dropping by 0.8pc from the previous year.
Mining, Australia's most male-dominated industry, awarded the highest average pay to women, who earned on average $139,053 compared to men on $165,148, a gap of 15.8pc.
The education and training industry had the lowest pay gap of 9.3pc.
Other key findings from the report included:
p Increasing the representation of women in senior leadership positions is associated with lowering gender pay gaps.
p Gender pay gaps for organisations with a balanced representation of women in senior leadership roles, at 10pc on average, are half the size of those with the least representation of women in leadership.
p Once the management environment becomes heavily dominated by women - beyond 80pc - the pay gap among managers increases from 8 to 17pc.
p Gaps among managers are exacerbated by the greater share of discretionary pay, including bonuses, awarded to men. For top-tier managers, nearly $40,000 of the annual difference in pay is made up of additional remuneration, including bonuses.
Report author and the economics centre principal research fellow Rebecca Cassells said the report outcomes were a stark indicator of the different ways women and men engaged with the workforce and how their respective contributions are valued.
"Not only do female-dominated organisations tend to be lower paid, but this analysis shows that in workplaces with heavily female-dominated management teams there are large gender pay gaps in favour of men," she said.
"It seems that where the men are few, they are more highly-valued."
Report co-author and centre director Alan Duncan said the findings presented some of the strongest empirical evidence to date that improved gender pay outcomes are driven by companies promoting greater gender equity in senior leadership roles.
"Organisations that increased the share of women in executive leadership roles by more than 10pc between 2015 and 2016 recorded a reduction in the organisation-wide gender pay gap of 3 percentage points over the course of a single year," Professor Duncan said.