Australia's superannuation funds manage billions of dollars of investments, and some are using their influence to push companies to close the gender pay gap. Recently released figures show some big companies are paying men twice as much as women on average and those figures are now likely to be used by super funds to decide where to invest.
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TVTranscript
00:00 I think it actually could be a game changer if superannuation funds take it seriously.
00:06 So superannuation funds actually have trillions of dollars under investment in Australia and
00:11 globally so they're really significant market players in the whole investment landscape.
00:17 So if they're starting to make decisions about performance on gender pay gap but also some
00:21 of the drivers of gender pay gap, that could really make a change and it could really push
00:26 some behaviour of some of the companies that they're choosing to invest in, not invest
00:30 in or that they're managing.
00:31 So I think it could be quite significant.
00:33 And so these figures have been released in some other countries around the world in previous
00:38 years and is there evidence that it has had quite a noted effect?
00:43 Yeah I've got to say we don't have fabulous figures globally that would drive gender lens
00:48 investing but it certainly is a real innovation in the market and institutional investors
00:53 are really seeking out really good data to be able to drive their decisions.
00:58 Where big institutional investors have tried to intervene in practices in organisations
01:06 that they're seeking to invest in or that they manage, we can see change around things
01:10 such as women on boards, the existence of different policies in organisations, things
01:16 like access to leave, like paid parental leave and a range of other indicators like the gender
01:20 pay gap for example.
01:21 So we need more data.
01:23 I think this release of this company level data is very good.
01:28 We probably need some more data to get some really finely grained insight into what's
01:32 going on in companies.
01:33 But yeah it can drive some very significant changes.
01:36 Yeah, considering the sheer amount of money that these funds have, what's the potential
01:40 for it to have an impact?
01:42 Well it depends on how seriously the funds take this strategy along.
01:47 It is an innovative strategy at the moment but a lot of the particularly industry superfunds
01:51 are really quite interested in seeing the extent to which the companies they're investing
01:55 in align with their strategy.
01:57 Many of the superfunds are quite interested in issues that reflect the working lives of
02:01 their members.
02:02 If you have a highly feminised labour force, say for example you have a health sector for
02:07 example where the majority of people who pay into a fund might be women, it sort of doesn't
02:12 make sense that that fund would then invest in areas where in companies that don't reflect
02:18 the interests and the needs of workers who might be paying into those funds.
02:23 Is there evidence that the Australian funds have had an effect in other areas like in
02:26 environment?
02:27 Yeah, so we talk about ESG and the E is environment and the S is social.
02:33 We certainly have seen more movement around the environmental sort of data and so companies
02:37 look at, investors look at things like carbon footprint, whether there are issues around
02:43 community engagement or disasters when they're thinking about whether they invest to look
02:48 at both what the capacity of the organisation is but also to look at risk.
02:53 So I think that has seen some change and we've seen some real demands from institutional
02:57 investors around some of those things.
02:59 If that moves to be as mainstream in the S part and the gender part of the social part
03:05 of ESG, I think it could have similar impacts, yes.
03:09 What did you think of the results of this survey when it was released, I think it was
03:12 just in the last couple of weeks, for the first time on individual companies showing
03:16 the gender pay gap?
03:17 Because it was just the one percentage number for each company?
03:22 Okay, so companies have always reported their data to the agency, the public sector agency
03:28 that collects the data but we've never as the public been able to see how does this
03:32 organisation fit in their market and look at a finely grained level of what they report
03:38 is both the base level of pay and the gap there but also the total pay so that will
03:43 include things like bonus.
03:45 So some of the results were kind of shocking but in line with what we know from ABS data
03:51 and previous workplace gender equality agency data.
03:54 Really worthwhile?
03:55 Absolutely worthwhile and I'm a great believer that sunlight is a great cleanser and if we're
03:59 collecting this data why wouldn't we use it, I guess an academic would say that but
04:03 if we're collecting data why not use it to drive decision making and have some precise
04:07 action that could actually address some of the challenges that we're facing.
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