55 years: From Zelda to our lowest gender pay gap ever

On 21 October 1969, legendary union activist Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building to protest for Equal Pay.

Today in 2024, Australia’s gender pay gap is at its lowest ever at 11.5% – and closing faster too!

Zelda’s activism brought huge progress to the ongoing campaign for equality for women at work, and on the 55th anniversary of this historic day, we reflect on how far we’ve come.

The women who came before us

It’s important to remember that the efforts of working women for equal pay date back to the 1890s, with the prolific Louisa Dunkley, followed by prominent leader and advocate for union women Muriel Heagney in the 1930s.

But it wasn’t until June 1969, when the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission recognised “equal pay for equal work” in a landmark decision brought forward by the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union.

While this was a breakthrough decision, it highlighted systemic sexism by failing to apply to women in traditionally women-dominated roles, affecting less than 18% of working women.

Enter Zelda D’Aprano: public speaker, writer and union organiser for the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union, who quickly gained a reputation for her courage and willingness to call out sexism in workplaces and within the union movement itself.

Zelda felt the disappointment of this decision keenly, and she decided that she’d had enough of silence.

On 21 October 1969, Zelda went to Melbourne’s Commonwealth Building, where a number of government offices were located, and chained herself to the entrance of the building. Other women activists marched up and down with placards chanting to draw attention to Zelda’s action, and the significance of the cause.

Zelda also famously refused to pay the full price fare on the tram, instead paying 75%, representative of the gender pay gap at the time.

The work of Zelda, Muriel and Louisa, among other formidable women, laid the foundations for the 1972 case initiated by the ACTU that resulted in the commission recognising the legal right to “equal pay for work of equal value”.

A modern woman (could still be earning less than a man)

Although equal pay has now been law for decades, Australia still has a gender pay gap of 11.5% (and no, they’re not the same thing).

But the good news is: it’s at its lowest ever. And it’s been been closing at a faster rate in recent years.

In fact, it’s closing three times faster under the Albanese Government than under the previous Coalition Government.

The official measure of the Gender Pay Gap (the difference in average ordinary time earnings between men and women working on a full-time basis) is down from 14.1% when the Albanese Government came to power.

That means the gap is now closing at rate of 1.3% per year, compared to the rate of 0.4% on average, under the previous Coalition Government.

How have we made progress recently?

For the last few years we’ve finally had a government who are taking workers’ – and women’s – wages seriously. And union members have been campaigning hard in that time to win better pay.

A few bigs wins for working women have been:

• Three significant wage rises under the Fair Work Commission’s Annual Wage Reviews (women make up the majority of minimum wage and award wage workers).
• Large-scale sector-specific wages rises such as in aged care and childhood education, and the end of pay caps in the public sector.
• New work rights outlawing pay secrecy and tougher rules around employers reporting on their gender pay gap, increasing pay transparency.

Union women are closing Australia’s gender pay gap

Being a union member is the best way to protect yourself from gender pay inequality – with women who are union members earning $346 more per week than women who are not union members, on average.

Want to be part of the movement of legends like Zelda? Make the best decision of your working life: join your union.