The gender pay gap isn’t just about equal pay for equal work. Dr Sarah Cotton explores how key career transitions shape who progresses, who plateaus and who ultimately earns more.

By Dr Sarah Cotton

The release of the latest gender pay gap data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) has prompted a lot of reflection across Australian organisations. 

More than 10,500 employers with over 100 employees are now publicly reporting their gender pay gap performance, covering nearly 5.9 million Australian workers. The data highlights how closing the gender pay gap is not primarily about paying women and men differently for the same role. It’s also about who gets access to opportunity, progression, security, and leadership positions over time.  

In other words, gender pay gaps are shaped by experience, not just policy and by the critical transitions people navigate across their working lives 

What the WGEA data tells us   

The latest WGEA report highlights several factors shaping gender pay gaps across Australian organisations. 

• The midpoint of employer average gender pay gaps is 11.2%, with the median at 8.0% 

• 54.8% of employers reduced their average total pay gap year-on-year 

• Discretionary pay (like bonuses) continues to show the largest disparity, with a 29.7% gap in favour of men 

• Men remain over-represented in senior and higher-paid roles 

• Women continue to experience slower career progression linked to caring responsibilities and career interruptions. 

• Taken together, the data reinforces a longstanding structural dynamic. Gender pay gaps are less about individual pay decisions and more about who progresses, who is rewarded, and who occupies senior and higher paid roles over time. Discretionary pay (including bonuses and allowances) plays a significant role, reflecting not just performance, but visibility, opportunity, and access to influence. 

These patterns are rarely the result of a single decision. Instead, they emerge over time through a series of moments that shape career trajectories. 

These moments are transition points where roles, identity, expectations and support structures shift, often subtly, but with long-term consequences. 

At Transitioning Well, we think about the gender pay gap through the lens of key transitions, or ‘moments of truth’ that have the potential to derail, but also provide opportunities for significant personal and organisational growth. 

Why transitions matter in closing the gender pay gap 

Pay gaps don’t emerge from a single salary negotiation. Gaps accumulate in the spaces between roles. In the return from parental leave that quietly sidelines someone for the next promotion. In restructures that push experienced women out. In work  environments that don’t  support a women  through menopause or other health transitions. In the step into leadership that occurs without adequate support, or doesn’t occur at all.  

Transitions determine: 

• Who stays and who leaves 

• Who progresses and who plateaus 

• Who feels supported and who disengages 

• Who gains access to leadership pathways and who does not and who stays still 

WGEA’s Ages and Wages report, released late last year, also makes the cumulative toll hard to ignore. The financial cost of the gender pay gap accelerates across a woman’s lifetime, peaking in the late 50s at a difference of $53,000 a year, with a key turning point identified at age 34. What this shows is how women navigating multiple transitions often absorb the cost of systems that were not designed with their realities in mind, unless organisations intervene deliberately.  

This matters at the leadership level too. Just 22% of CEOs are women, and while 43% of managers are women, that figure drops sharply at senior levels (WGEA 2025). Supporting women through the transition into leadership, not just placing them into roles, is one of the most direct and underutilised levers available to  organisations. Sustainable change requires action that addresses how people are recruited, promoted, supported, and retained and transition through their careers. 

What organisations can do 

WGEA is clear that analysing pay gap data is only the starting point. The harder work is knowing where to act. What we see at the coalface is that the organisations making the most progress are looking beyond policies, targets and reporting frameworks. They’re examining the day-to-day experiences that shape career progression, and treating the moments of transition as the place where inclusion takes hold (and where it quietly doesn’t). 

For example, leadership transitions. Each passage through the leadership pipeline, from learning to lead to being a leader of leaders and becoming an executive or partner, requires a fundamental shift in identity, values and ways of working. What made someone successful at the previous level doesn’t automatically or always transfer. And that gap, when unacknowledged and unsupported, is where confidence can falters and capable people hesitate or step back. 

For women, this can carry additional weight. The pressures and challenges of life as a female leader by managing perceptions, navigating competing demands during periods of organisational change don’t arrive in isolation. They arrive alongside everything else: health changes, caring responsibilities for both kids and ageing parents, and in the moments where professional identity and personal life pull in different directions all at once. 

By intentionally supporting people through the key transitions that define their working lives, organisations can address some of the most persistent and preventable drivers of the gender pay gap and build workplaces where talent, not circumstance or gender, determines outcomes.