The hidden, forgotten cost of workplace gender inequality

Financial compensation is only part of the gender gap experience, and the fix lies beyond exercising compliance, according to one senior leader.

Ahead of International Equal Pay Day on 18 September, HR Leader spoke to National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) chief executive Cathryn Greville to examine the seemingly minor factors that combine and compound the challenge of unequal pay.

According to Greville, financial inequality is often headlined as an unequal salary figure, but there is often much more behind it.

“It’s built from smaller things that don’t get tracked, including informal decisions about who gets visibility, who gets stretch opportunities, and how someone is treated day-to-day. A pay audit will audit pay gaps, but not necessarily the accumulation of small moments that lead to the pay gap in the first place,” Greville said.

“There’s a lot happening underneath someone’s salary that doesn’t get recognised.”

In this way, gender inequality is tied to attraction and retention of female employees – something that is especially weak in the construction sector.

Greville explained that this phenomenon is driven by small and often cumulative actions. According to NAWIC research, almost 90 per cent of women in the construction industry have experienced microaggressions, such as being talked over, having their ideas dismissed, or being excluded from decisions.

Microaggressions can also include financial inequalities – Greville reflected on the experience of one survey respondent who allegedly received $75,000 less than a male colleague in the same role.

“That’s not always a deliberate decision by a business; it’s often what happens when nobody’s tracking the cumulative effect of small, biased decisions over the years.”

In the same way, women in the sector often deal with the repercussions of a lack of consideration – such as ill-fitting uniforms that can hamper productivity and pose additional safety risks – as well as the higher-profile instances of inequality that stem from pregnancy and caregiving when policies are only concerned with legal compliance, rather than the lived reality.

Greville furthered that pregnancy and return-to-work structures remain one of the biggest drivers of women leaving not only their workplaces, but the industry at large. She explained that parental leave and return-to-work policies do not have the same effect for women and men, whether because of the identification of a primary and secondary caregiver, limited flexibility that would impact women far more, and deficiencies in returning to work programs.

In this way, “two people can use the same policy and come out on completely different career paths”.

“That’s not equal, it’s just delayed inequity,” Greville said.

She said the effects of these inequalities compound over time, impacting not only the individual, but the organisation, and sector at large.

“In any workplace, when people experience microaggressions or inequitable treatment over years, it stops being just a pay issue and starts affecting confidence, wellbeing and how long people stay in their careers.”

“We’re already losing around 110,000 people from construction every year, and every experienced woman who leaves because the culture didn’t work for her is a permanent loss of capability we can’t get back.”

Greville urged employers to look at the experience of their employees, rather than the theory of compliance. Regarding returning to work, she said the most important factor is ensuring people return to the same role they left, supporting them with a genuine return-to-work place to ensure this, and building flexibility into site-based roles to allow trade or professional workers to continue as such.

“When it comes to promotion pathways, an immediate opportunity lies in keeping people active in that year’s cycle rather than deferring them to the next.”

“Having a senior sponsor advocate for someone’s next opportunity while they’re away makes a tangible difference, and it’s worth tracking over time to see how people who’ve taken leave are actually progressing against their peers.

“Poor culture and behaviour can have a negative and lasting impact on someone’s perception of what they can achieve in their own career, and lead to people questioning their skills, their knowledge, even their right to be in the role, despite nothing about their competence having changed.”

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